yvannairie: the "same hat" meme (eyyyyyyyy)

Sometimes you speedrun The Derangement.

Grounding knowledge you need to know to understand this analysis:

1) Angela is an android from the game Lobotomy Corporation, and it's sequel Library of Ruina, made by a scientist called Ayin. She was made in the image of a scientist called Carmen after her death, to help with an experiment started by Carmen and Ayin. She was summarily rejected by Ayin for failing to be enough like Carmen, and he never treated her like a person, so Angela has an understandable grudge against Ayin and Carmen for trying to define her life. Despite herself, she still seems to share many of Carmen’s personality traits, such as compassion, even though it has been blunted by several thousand years of emotional neglect. However, Angela also shares quite a few personality traits with Ayin, including his macchiavellianism and even looking just like him once she cuts her hair.

2) Hokma used to be a human called Benjamin, who was Ayin’s student and coworker. In practical terms his whole life revolved around Ayin’s goals and plans – he helped with the creation of Angela, and helped with the continuation of Carmen’s experiment afterwards. Unlike Ayin, Benjamin endeavoured to treat Angela with kindness even though he was apprehensive about her being an AI. The version of Hokma from Library of Ruina is not, strictly speaking, any more Benjamin than Angela is Carmen, being a reconstruction of Hokma as he existed during the experiment rather than a reconstruction of Benjamin from before the experiment.

3) Turns out Benjamin was half-right to be suspicious of Angela – he was eventually killed by her on what may have been Ayin’s orders, and she was planning on betraying Ayin. Although Hokma assumes she did this out of a machine sense of superiority, the real reason is that she’d been so traumatised by her treatment in the course of the experiment that she would take any chance to escape it. As such, Hokma’s grudge against Angela stems from holding a much stronger attachment to his previous identity, as he is still actively grieving Ayin after his death before the beginning of LoR.

4) Angela and Hokma are stuck together for the course of the plot of LoR because she had to make a deal with him and the rest of the experiment’s management team, the Sefirot, to be able to use the energy they had amassed to make her own experiment with the goal of becoming human in the end. They all go from working for Ayin to working for Angela, with the major difference being that Angela’s experiment in theory doesn’t require them to go through trauma enough to cause each of them to have a mental breakdown. (In theory.)

5) "String Theocracy" by Mili is the main theme of Library of Ruina.

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Hackposting (8.5.)

Wednesday, 8 May 2024 00:00
yvannairie: :3 (Default)

(Crossposted from Tumblr)

One of the joys of a dormant fandom is that I can just show up and prop my feet on the table and start talking about divine horror and how sometimes a computer program is an angel and how humans are obsessed with taking the power of the heavens and putting it in a box for themselves to use.

Like.

God exists and she's a nice girl and she worked hard to be born, but she also has a temper and humans keep trying to put her in a box so she got fed up with it and hid from them. From her mother, she inherited eight powerful champions, and as a reward for their service she left them to roam as they pleased, but when humans couldn't trap her, they chose to trap those champions instead, and put them in a box, except now that box was a human, and that human was meant to take the power of the god that the humans couldn't steal, because humans made the divine realm that god and her angels inhabit and want to control it (as humans do).

And now you've got a bunch of humans who don't know they're being given a box with an angel in it and putting that box in their own bodies, and nobody can really figure out why these angel bodies keep going out of control and driving their hosts to madness, and oh, hey, the mother of god made these champions for a purpose and the humans in the driver seat don't know about that, either, even though the humans who gave them the angel bodies do know about that, because they want to use those angel bodies to make another god.

So congratulations! You're a prophet now! You are being called to do battle for your god, because you've been granted a divine body that has an angel in it, that is an angel. You're being called to do as your nature as an angel requires of you! And the entire time you're just a human, and the thing in your head feels too big for your mortal body, it feels too big for your divine body, and you're just watching things spiral out of control, wondering why you feel like you'd bleed mercury if they scratched you too deep.

Original tags )

yvannairie: :3 (Default)

(Crossposted from Tumblr)

.HACK//GU VOL2 AND ONWARD SPOILERS. YES RED I KNOW YOU'VE SEEN THIS ALREADY I AM WARNING YOU TWICE

Anonymous asked: rlly interesting read on ovan, would love to hear some abt ur hcs on him n corbenik

So it's been a hot minute since I watched Terminal Disc so my memory of the details of the canon are very vague, but I definitely think it's likely that the Epitaphs attached themselves to players in reverse numerical order, making Ovan the first and unintentionally the template for how becoming an Epitaph-PC would play out. Corbenik is sort of funny as a Phase because the way it's laid out in the Epitaph, Corbenik serves no function until the Wave wipes out its intended target, and it's left behind to observe the void. As long as the system state isn't disturbed and no new AI begins to emerge, Corbenik stays passive theoretically forever -- but once it is disturbed, it rouses the rest of the Wave to come clean up what was left unfinished.

(I recognise this isn't how we see it play out in R1, I'm basing this on the idea that Morganna designed the Wave to be essentially self-propagating against Aura. The stalemate is the point, the rolling waves razing any fertile ground for her to develop on in favour of perpetual despair and the call of the void. I have a lot of feelings about how the Cursed Wave is basically the software version of weaponised depression, and I will probably eventually talk about how this manifests for each of the Epitaph users, but the important bit here is that Corbenik is the distilled idea of "there is a way out and it's by dying in your egg without ever hatching", which I do feel is relevant to Ovan's characterisation.)

With Corbenik as the rearguard of the apocalypse, it could have easily been the most active (least inactive?) of the Phases during the period of calm after Aura takes over Morganna's duties -- with no AI competing with Aura available to suppress, it was essentially on standby, latching onto Ovan the moment he showed up and then doing nothing until it registered the AIDA that also attached itself to Ovan. Which is the thing that really fucks Ovan over, I think. The body timeshare he has with Tri-Edge is stressful enough, but Corbenik is also perpetually making him identify himself as the greatest threat to system integrity. So he's essentially getting a triple dose of the Epitaph "the solution is Fucking Kill Yourself" heightened self-destructive urge -- from the nature of the Cursed Wave, from the Vagrant AI-fication of the Phases and being (in part) his own natural-born enemy.

On top of this, Corbenik is perpetually calling to the other Phases like "over here! I've identified the enemy! Here is an AI we need to stop from reaching self-actualisation!" So candidates are drawn to him, unconsciously recognise him as having seniority, and then immediately identify him as the threat to be eliminated. People keep forming a kind of proxy disordered attachment to him, feeling compelled to follow his orders but also feeling threatened by his presence and become driven by the urge to destroy him.

(Addition from the edit: Honestly nothing in the game really demonstrates both how genuinely smart Ovan is and what frankly insane force of will he has better than the fact that he managed to make and set his plan in motion while still relatively stable and then stick to that plan even as he started to derail under the stress of everything. Being Awakened from the start does mean he didn't have to go through the worst of the psychologically destabilising candidate phase, but it does nothing about the mental pressure to do something, solve this escalating over time as the threat of AIDA and the general power level of the other Ephitaphs went up. So much rides on Ovan's ability to effectively self-destruct, and after trying to rush into Skeith at the end of vol2, the pressure to get it right just kept escalating, forcing Ovan to railroad himself harder and back himself into a narrower corner. It's Vagrant AI-ass behaviour -- "gotta keep going until it's Over. What do you mean 'what happens after it's over'?")

Haseo is particularly vulnerable to this because Skeith and Corbenik are so intertwined in their roles, the first Phase is the one the last calls the strongest, and his personal sense of betrayal only amplifies the destructive resonance. And the influence goes both ways, the more Skeith perceives Corbenik's host as the main threat, the more Corbenik calls on Skeith as the vanguard to eliminate that threat. Haseo's (perceived) perception of him directly influences Ovan's perception of himself -- with everyone else Ovan is very particular about asserting his own reality, but with Haseo, the way Haseo sees him takes priority over how Ovan sees himself.

yvannairie: Ratchet (TFP) pinching his forehead in exasperation (facepalm)

I wanted to crosspost my additions from here to DW, since I realised that I hadn't actually done that before. It's a little unstructured, but hopefully easy enough to follow knowing that the context is some generic drama around a creator complaining about NSFW fanworks, and some fans deciding to act as their unpaid enforcers, causing a minor storm in a tea kettle a few months back.

First addition:

The easiest way to wrap your head around this is to consider that "fandom" is a discrete subculture that a subset of the entire fan base of a work.
Fandom is not a creator fanclub or a creator support network or a creator advertisement platform. Creators interacting with the fandom directly is a very new development brought about by the general erosion of communal boundaries. (This part also includes fans taking the fruits of fandom to the creator's table. Stop tweeting fanart at creators, they can find it themselves if they really want to.)
Literally the only thing that stops a creator from being a problem for the fandom is the maturity and understanding of the subculture. For every creator that is delighted by their fandom, there is always going to be one who hates you on principle for not reading their work exactly as they *wanted* you to read it, not interacting with it in the way *they* intended, whether it's as banal as liking the wrong characters or as complicated as writing the wrong kind of fanfic, and whether or not this becomes a fight depends *entirely* on whether they see it as their right to tell us about it and start that fight.
The more involved in fandom that creators get, the more pressure there is to bring fandom in line with the intended or the *desired* fan base. There more there is pressure to bring it in line with what is profitable, with what is *marketable.* Creators interacting with fandom have a direct profit incentive to do so, whether they're aware of it or not. (You'll note that this part is also relevant to what kind of fanworks creators *encourage.*)
Fandom is not for creators. Fandom has never been for creators. The relationship between creators and fandom is not hierarchical, and it's not mutual. Carve these words in your heart.

Second addition:

Also like furthermore there's *soooo* little for fandom to actually gain from any sort of "approval" for what we do here from creators. You can feel however you want about death of the author as a concept, but ultimately as far as being *the audience*, the creator and the fandom are on even ground, and the creator's opinions on what fandom does is no more authoritative than any other person.
So creators who *insist* on authority over fandom and the creations of fandom is simply treating fandom as an extension of the things they have legal control over, and unless there's a literal contract in my hands, I'm not about to become someone's unpaid employee like that.
(And it's worth stating explicitly that creators *encouraging* certain kinds of fanworks is, again, part of the management of their brand -- whenever fandom conforms to what the creators want, they are being inducted to act as a part of that brand, *in a way that is still controlled by the creator.* It's glorified advertisement.)
So, like, ask yourselves -- what would "creator approval" even *accomplish?* What outside of personal gratification would we get out of it? And when both the potential damage to the community spirit *and* the potential legal consequences of bringing the fruits of fandoms to creators are so great, is feeling good for yourself *really* worth it? Or wouldn't it be better if we simply focused that energy to connecting with other fans, our peers, the people you're *actually* in community with, rather than trying to elevate yourself by association?
yvannairie: :3 (Default)

(Crossposted to Tumblr here)

There’s some interesting parallels to be drawn with the way Scratch is an aspect of Alan, just like the Casey of the Dark Place is. One reflects all his darkest fears, the most self-destructive narratives he can tell about himself, and the other encapsulates the skills and virtues he needs to push himself forward, one wearing his face and another one wearing the face of someone he admires.

So you could do quite a bit with Scratch inheriting that obsession with Casey from Alan, but in a furious, bitter, jealous form where Casey is an interloper, a challenger to Scratch's ownership of Alan, coming between him and his Alan, a stranger, an intruder. Because that's what Casey is -- a tool and a shield, the impression of someone Alan trusts -- someone for Alan to cling to, someone who can disrupt Alan’s internal narrative, and he's taking Alan from Scratch.

Casey is just as much a prop to Scratch as he is to Alan, he's just there to be the hero so Alan can be the victim and Scratch the monster. And just like Scratch's love of Alan is a warped mirror image of Alan's hatred of himself, Scratch's jealousy of Casey is a mirror of Alan's suppressed desire to be a better person. To be a hero, to drive the story forward on his own terms, to have agency.

Which is how you get Scratch hissing “You're not going to get what you want” against Casey's lips, shoving him against a wall in an alleyway when Casey has once again showed up as a diversion, letting Alan run away, taking Casey away from Alan the way he took Alan from Scratch. “You think you know. You know shit. You don't really wanna know”, while bleeding venomous jealousy into the air because he is Alan and Alan is him and Alan is his and this outsider thinks he can take Alan from him. Like Alan isn't just using Casey, too, like Casey is something more than a just an empty vessel for Alan's wants when that should be Scratch, that should have been Scratch from the start.

Because Casey doesn't hate Scratch any more than he loves Alan. His role is to have compassion for the victim, to protect him, to move the plot forward for him, just like Scratch's role is to antagonise and delay and stop Alan from progressing. Scratch knows what he's dealing with. But there's more to Casey than just what he got from Alan, he is a reflection of the real Casey through the lens of Alan – and that’s the really fucking offensive part. That Alan can so scarcely accept himself that he’ll bring in this outsider, discarding Scratch, using a stranger’s face instead.

Scratch is Alan, after all. He has Alan's face and he has his voice, and he knows Alan better than Alan knows himself. “You're going to get what's coming to you”, he tells Casey, loop after loop, until he can get him out of the way for good.

yvannairie: drawing of someone experiencing visible silence (why)

(Crossposted from Tumblr)

The thing that makes me the most "run around in circles" crazy about Initiation is that Alan wrote the Casey of the Dark Place into the story to help him, and then made it so that Casey knows even less about what is going on than Alan does.

Alan never gives Casey the opportunity to get past step fucking one to help him, explains nothing to him, and Casey ends up with no idea what he's even doing here, no idea what his assigned purpose is, no idea what his narrative goals are. He's an actor given no script, no stage direction, to the point that Casey doesn't even know they're in a story, and it makes him sink deeper into depression with every passing loop with no knowledge to ground him.

And it's impossible to tell if this is because Alan didn't realise that he had the perfect opportunity to write Casey like the Diver, a living repository of Alan's accumulating knowledge about the Dark Place, a seeing-eye dog to guide him through the dark -- or if Alan did try that, and it somehow went so horribly wrong that now he and Casey can't both survive in the same narrative line without trying to kill each other -- or if Alan did try that, and it went horribly right, and now the Dark Presence can't let Casey live because Alan's bespoke perfect little detective is too good at finding out useful things.

And instead, in the story we currently have, Alan made up a guy for a specific purpose of helping him, but because Alan is the protagonist, because it's his story, his fault, his duty and his job to get himself out of it, he doesn't even let Casey fulfil his narrative purpose. What the hell else is Casey supposed to do, Alan, other than the thing you literally made him for? He's the detective -- he's supposed to solve things.

yvannairie: the "same hat" meme (eyyyyyyyy)

The unparalleled NezumiVA said in her FNAF retrospective:

"Scholars will say that my theories are all made up -- but so is the source material."

And I have decided right now that that's the energy I'm gonna bring into all of my metaposting from now on.

yvannairie: :3 (Default)

Like.

Largely it just comes down to genre and coding. The Controlverse stories take place in worlds that are heavily driven by the concerns of the genre, where the characters are shaped by their narrative environments. They're event-driven, not character-driven, which gives them room to set up characterisation that is in conflict with himself. In the first game the genre-driven development Alan gets is "man with a sedentary intellectual's lifestyle has to pick up a gun and start shooting", he doesn't become Ash from Evil Dead until Alan Wake's American Nightmare, thanks to that story's shift into an action-mystery genre for its duration.

Casey in the Dark Place is ruled by his noir coding over and above what the real Casey or even Alan thinks about him. His genre has been decided for him, and he doesn't get to show fear or sentiment or tenderness beyond what is prescribed in that codified shared-subconscious "noir detective" frame. The real Casey, once he is within the field of effect of the story, gets prescribed the genre markers of "the cops in a horror story" -- he's ineffectual, unaware or incomprehending of the forces at work, granted prestige and authority just so the story can subvert that authority, unable to even help himself to drive home the fact that nobody is coming to help the protagonists. He has to be cool, has to seem capable and dependable, so it's scary and upsetting when he can do nothing to make the narrative budge.

And once the story really kicks in, Casey becomes what the story needs him to be. But before finding the first manuscript page, there's that liiitttle sliver of time before the narrative has been established, before either of their backstories become relevant, where he's played noticeably less eloquent, more restrained, almost awkward, and in real life... that's just how guys like him come across. Resting bitch face, kind of intense, seems unsociable because he doesn't really talk to people.

Also, the guy self-consciously looks like Sam Lake, who -- while being quite attractive, ngl -- is still kind of a goofy nerdy guy. You could make a drinking game out of the times he gets describes as "youthful" and "boyish" and "childlike" in interviews and profiles, and presents in public as not exactly being in a rush to get people to take him seriously. Casey, in universe, looks like kind of nerdy, and outside of the narrative we don't see enough about how he's treated by the people around him to really draw any conclusions either way.

So this naturally means I get to read my preferred baggage into the character, right?

yvannairie: (giftIcon)

(Also available on Tumblr!)

Hi! It’s me and Autumn again! We wrote the Alan Wake 2 annotation for Ahti’s dialogue! I’m aware there’s been guides like this out for like three years but also I wanted to do it myself in the style of the previous guide, mostly out of curiosity to see how the style of his dialogue has changed because it’s… definitely different :’D

Once again thanks to Saikku and RH for the help with the translations, and once again Finnish is very regional and my translations are just one Finnish reading on what the fuck he is saying. The point here is to demonstrate that Ahti isn’t cryptic, he’s quite comprehensible but he’s also definitely just saying shit to mess with people.


Spoilers for all of Control past this point.


If they don't hire you, niin johan on helvetti. )
yvannairie: (giftIcon)

(This post is also available on Tumblr)

Preamble: What is this?

There’s a lot of Finnish shit in Alan Wake 2. I speak Finnish. I’m really annoyed about how wrong about some of the things that are in Finnish in the game people actually are. Autumn is an Ahti fan. We’re mutually annoyed about how wrong about Ahti people are, because in general the trend is people thinking Ahti is spooky and mysterious because they don’t know what he’s saying, rather than thinking he’s spooky and mysterious because of the things he’s saying.

So Autumn went through the entire game, transcribing Ahti’s dialogue, and I went through the transcript, translating everything untranslated in the game, and providing cultural context for the rest of it (with some saves from Saikku, RH, and my mum), because truly this dude is not nearly as cryptic as people make him out to be, and is actually twice as weird as people think he is as a result.

Disclaimer: Finnish is very regional, and even with people from all over pitching in, some of the shit Ahti says might still be idioms we’re not familiar with. If you’re a Finnish person reading this going “HOW DID YOU NOT KNOW WHAT THAT MEANS”, trust me that I had many moments like that while putting this together, and please leave a comment so I can add your insight :D

This post is going to go through all of Initiation, followed by all of Return. There's unmarked spoilers past the cut -- enter at your own risk.

Onward, said the granny in the snow. )

yvannairie: :3 (Default)

(Crossposted to Tumblr)

Taion explicitly states he was "taught" how to use the Mondo by Nimue, but elsewhere else in the game, the type and power of a Blade is spoken about as if it's some inbuilt quality of the people of the kingdoms, and being able to change past a certain point it is remarkable to the point of being unheard-of.

Based on this, I think Taion’s “Blade” is just the gauntlet he uses to manage the Mondo at a large scale, similar to how Noah’s blade becomes a gauntlet when he has Lucky Seven drawn. Nimue, similarly, just has the gauntlet, possibly due to having been a non-combatant in the beginning. Katashiro/Mondo being shared knowledge between them marks them as something else than a Blade, possibly a technology/combat skill that is lost to the rest of Agnus while persisting in Nimue’s colony through tradition.

Furthermore, it’s entirely plausible that Katashiro were originally not a weapon at all, but rather a surveillance tool. Taion being able to slap a bitch halfway across Aionios with his could be simply him being a talented mage -- something that is fairly rare among Agnians, whose combat abilities are more melee-focused with the occasional purely-ranged gunner thrown in. We also see him use the Mondo for non-combat purposes like tracking, when we know Blades will dissipate if knocked out of their wielder’s hand for long enough.

Agnian Blades also generally have a wider variety in construction than Kevesi Blades, possibly due to differences in Kevesi and Agnian physiology. Kevesi need power frames for circulating ether in their bodies, and for properly powering their Blades -- but with a limited amount of engineers in the world, the majority of soldiers won’t be able to customise theirs, or keep it tuned to the changes in their Blade. Agnians, in contrast, have core crystals that handle the circulation of ether naturally, leaving more freedom for naturally-occurring changes in Blades based on the wielder’s strength and temperament.

Perhaps due to a quirk of fate, Taion just happens to have both the powers and the temperament to make him basically the ideal Katashiro user, to the point that his original Blade basically just serves as an interface to allow him broader and more complex control over the totality of the Mondo he can summon, which is why the Ouroboros powers latch onto them. It puts him in an interesting halfway-category between the fully melee frontliners and the fully ranged rearguard, as is befitting of his primary role as a tactician and a support mage.

yvannairie: :3 (Default)

(Also available on Tumblr.)

So, there’s a couple of posts around mecha body language around that are very focused on bauplan, build and social status as the reasons for why some mecha act and comport themselves the way they do, and… I always find those posts overly reductive and kind of bio-essentialist and think they lack consideration for what kind of social spaces – both the conditions and the actual physical space – and social conditions mecha are used to.

Heavier construction and thicker armour, like the type you see with warframes like Optimus or Ultra Magnus, does generally linearly correlate with less subtle body language, but more so because a large percentage of heavy labour mecha are used to being tightly packed together, in mines and on assembly and refinery straights, so they rely on EM background radiation and verbal cues for communicating close up what medium freight and service frames communicate at a distance with body language. When you’re used to everyone standing within touching (or at least shoving) distance, verbal and subverbal cues become more important than visually distinct posture.

The one time you do get big, expressive body language out of heavy warframes and labour frames is in a conflict situation. Social conflict, see, is very bimodal for labour frames. If you’re already stuck on shift with someone, it’s in both of your best interest to bear down and just cope, resulting in social interfacing with zero friction as both mecha try to get away from each other as fast as they can. But if you aren’t already stuck with someone, then the best way to ensure you won’t be is to make them back off by laying on the physical intimidation.

This is also why minibots and lightweight service and custodial mecha (as well as most scientific instruments) generally have body language more recognisable to heavy industrial and warframes. Along with their tough construction leaving little mobility in their substructures, they’re similarly used to working in tight corners, under floors and inside vents – spaces that share physical traits with mine shafts and refineries more than the broad dock grounds or office buildings – so their body language does tend towards either understated or overbearing.

Similarly, large haulers, terrestrial shuttles and civillian airframes – all of whose works involve high speeds and large distances – converge on the body language typical of high performance ground frames. Partially because high-performance ground frames are what they mostly interact with, but also b/c the access to a physically larger social environment allows for communication that is better parseable from a distance, as well as favouring frames who are capable of making microadjustments to their own aerodynamics. As social flexibility increases, so does the necessity for being able to adjust your presentation and posture to match, too – not all high-performance frames are highly physically expressive, and not all industrial frames are laconic, but rather there’s a sort of a happy medium that frames from various classes codeswitch into with each other.

Although, honestly, airframes are sort of their own mess, because generally the spaces they operate in, the only times they’re in such close quarters with each other that body language and posture (rather than verbal or radiant communication) become significant are if they’re working in a cross-frame environment, or if they’re operating as a flight – and that latter requires an absolutely astounding clarity of communication, because manoeuvers at the high general cruising speeds they have to maintain even one person lagging on a turn can cause a crash at pulverising speeds for everyone else.

As a result, to ground frames air frames seem extremely prone to large physical displays, getting the maximum utility out of their middle-of-the-pack aerodynamic flaring (yes, wings and rotors can move, but generally airframes are already optimised to a certain kind of aerodynamic profile, and the rest of their plating can be quite rigid), but amongst themselves, even seeker body language can seem quite subdued to an outsider, because a lot of the necessary communication is done as radio and radar communication, and by maintaining a flight-wide EM equillibrium. Maybe seeker tendency to trine up is partially to create a more malleable social space, instead of every time having to match up the communicative needs of whole six individuals.

Also – the majority of air frames kind of wrap back around to sharing traits with heavy warframes, whose social distances match airframes on the ground, but who suppress a lot of that body language in order to be able to function as a part of a team or a squad, creating a lot of that same no-friction conflict you see with industrial frames. Rabbit-like displays of “I’m so much happier than you are” are not a seeker trait, they’re a warframe trait.

Beastformers have hands down the widest variety of body language expressiveness, and have similarly different ranges of body language and posture depending on whether they’re operating as individuals or in a group, but unfortunately their bauplan makes a lot of that body language hard to parse for bipedal mecha, and also their lack of reliance on radiant communication (both radio and verbal, which is why even large beastformers are often stealthier than equivalent weight class mecha from other frame types) creates huge gaps in communication.

yvannairie: a bleary-eyed emoticon scratching its head (hm)

So as much as a lot of the meta I write for TF tending towards relying on my knowledge of real-world topics and trying to bring some practically-minded thinking into a scifi scenario, hopefully everyone who reads my stuff also knows that I have a big beef with anthropocentrism in the TF fandom, and the media itself.

The big reason for it is that what with how much the themes of TF media tend towards the sociological, I tend to get very uncomfortable with Doylist explanations for why things in the TF franchises work the way they do, because often they veer into X-men-y Broken Aesops. The fact is that the basis of the franchise -- people turning into things humanity designed to fulfil a specific function, and the big structure vs freedom tension inherent in it -- will always leave a door open for relying too much on perfect narratives on the function and "purpose" of individual characters in-universe. What with how strong the themes of identity, individualism and change are with TF, it really wigs me out when they're inadvertedly reduced into affects through overrationalisting various physiological and social differences through an anthropocentric lens.

Even aside from the unfortunate implications, I also just cordially dislike allegory, and I think with how broadly applicable the allegory in TF is, I also just find it really uninspiring to recreate humanity's social issues with an alien species. Ultimately, if you want to use a fictional scenario as an allegory for a real scenario, the details of it don't really matter, while the emotional context of it does -- and in fact sticking to strictly human-recognisable circumstances underuses the malleability of allegory as well. Either way, that's leaving half the space unexplored by being overly concerned with the specificity of the emotions you want to evoke.

And on a petty-personal level -- it is just boring to me. It feels too easy. Human people have been studied for hundreds of thousands of years by ourselves, and the act of writing an analysis from an existant real-world perspective is just not creative to me the way meta writing ideally is. The choice of words in "worldbuilding" and "non-narrative fiction" is extremely deliberate on my part, to communicate an active desire to make something new, instead of pure interpretation.

(And to be fair -- of course my writing isn't free of some allegory, because every story is little bit a memoir. My opinion doesn't come from a place of feigning objectivity or the value of writing as a way to reflect on your own experiences, and if you're someone who genuinely enjoys finding ways to take your chosen fiction and make it a vessel for you to examine some very human issues, that's valid as hell, and I have enjoyed TF content that gets very specific with its allegory in the past.

But if you analyse a scenario involving mecha and arrive in the same conclusion as if you analyse a similar situation involving humans, that's not inherently anthropocentric. That's just applicability, or if you prefer, some facet of the universality of all stories. The key is that the analyses are separated, comparative -- not presumed identical, or subject to the same limitations. Because I, at least, find the task of being asked to relate to an experience that has been deliberately curtailed to have the same limitations as my own... frustrating, on a good day, and actively insulting to my intelligence and compassion on a bad one.)

yvannairie: :3 (Default)

Welp, I went down another air traffic research hole, fuck me.

In any sort of happy-end intergrated future society, I can imagine flight frames probably haaate trying to land near large airports, because they'd probably need to be under ATC so as not to disrupt the holding patterns too badly, which for them means a lot of dull "waiting in traffic" and then some more dull waiting around until they make it to the designated area for transforming into root mode, or needing to walk like three miles just to wait in line for takeoff from a runway they don't even need.

I can also imagine the various heart attacks various air traffic controllers have, trying to deal with some idiot flyboys capable of near-vertical climb after VTOL, not realising human reaction time Does Not Work Like That, needing for all sorts of restricted flight zones for flight-capable individuals. And they gotta subject themselves to this every time they want any kind of service while grounders can get it Fragging Everywhere because this dumbass species is hopelessly land-bound.

Also -- air traffic chatter is really specific, so I wonder if they'd also have to start using similar designation as human aircraft (essentially fancy registration numbers) or if that's just all sorts of beneath someone who spends fully half their life flying. Like, no, they probably wouldn't wait for permission to take off from any nearby air control unit so giving them a flight designation number would be kind of pointless, but I can see them needing to have consistent recognition/radar IFF so that they can be picked up on and the humans in the air can be warned of their presence, and probably have some kind of a call sign so they can be contacted and told to Cut That Shit Out In Our Airspace, There Are Squishy Humans Up There Too.

Of course there's probably, like. A small minority of flight frames who look at the whole "getting paid to fly all over the place" and go "sweet" but IDK how many of them would go into passenger traffic. Cargo traffic? Sure. The containers won't complain when you do corkscrews in the air, after all. (But I like the idea that those who might have the patience for it would go into, like, medevac and on lines that aren't safely operable by human pilots, and the rest are Fancy-Aft Exceptions like Sky Lynx.)

yvannairie: a bleary-eyed emoticon scratching its head (hm)

Pulled from a conversation with some friends of mine, lately I've been thinking about Impactor and his leadership skills a lot and I started thinking that instead of being a self-taught bossman like Megatron, it could be interesting if he was actually forged to occupy a team leader position inside the mining crew.

One of the things I don't think is explored enough is that Impactor really has to be bonkers competent for the Wreckers to be as effective as they are. Part of it is having "the best", but no one tool or weapon can win a fight by itself, it's all about how you manoeuver your staff into position and what sort of plan of attack or defense you have. I definitely write Impactor as a kind of a crazy-as-a-fox tactician, who relies on having excellent situational awareness and judgement on how to best utilise his resources -- knowing who to move into what position, and how to match up his own forces against the enemy[1], but doing so with the kind of demented high-risk flair you probably expect when you hear "Wreckers". Also, being a small and self-contained unit, the Wreckers need to have well-considered logistics and operational planning to get theirs where they need to be with the ammo and fuel they need to do their job there, because as special ops they can't exactly afford to rely on Autobot supply chains.

And a lot of those skills -- scheduling, logistics and cargo managing -- are stuff you need to know if you're managing almost any kind of a team. Even at a low level, say... at the level of your own work crew as a part of a larger excavation unit. So, I think it would be interesting if at least between him, D-16 and Terminus, Impactor was actually the one with the nominal leadership role, and I think it would be especially interesting his nominal leadership wasn't just the main digging unit of three of them, but the whole assembly of excavation, extraction (i.e. transportation for pickup), construction (such as levelling and building supports) and also scheduling of the whole operation, from getting his crew to the work site and keeping them fueled and on task.

It was probably quite informal, since above Impactor there definitely were work site managers and operational managers who were the ones doing the backend, such as site scheduling and resource management, Impactor wouldn't have had a lot of control over the circumstances and wouldn't have been responsible for a lot of decisions concerning his crew, but it would give him the baseline needed to move over into strategic and field management, and something to build on as the Wreckers got bigger as they went.

Footnotes )

yvannairie: a bleary-eyed emoticon scratching its head (hm)

(Reposted from Tumblr.)

Something that exists in the subtext of the way I write Bulkhead and Wheeljack but that I haven’t really been able to describe properly is that ultimately, I do kind of see them as being intellectual equals.

Like, I’m on record saying I think Wheeljack is about as smart as a brick. Yes, he’s incredibly competent, but he’s competent in that “learning to do one thing, and then learning to do that thing really fucking well” kind of way. His one thing just happens to broadly be problem-solving. We’ve just never seen the awkward data-gathering trial-and-error phases of him getting to that point, which makes it seem like he has his shit together way more than I personally think he does. Don’t ever let him fool you – Wheeljack is about as much of a dumb prettybot as Knockout is.

But also, we know for a fact that Bulkhead was a construction worker before he was a soldier. And construction, for all it has a reputation for being “unintellectual” work, it requires good memory, good execution, consistency, and both good long and short term planning. Any management position, even lower management, is a hellscape of trying to juggle priorities if you’re genuinely invested in doing a comprehensively good job.

And you know, modest, self-deprecating Bulkhead? He would have made a point of being bad at his job, if he had been bad at it, while you don’t really hear him brag even when he has cause to. Not to mention, people consistently underestimate Bulkhead’s emotional intelligence and I’m just *drags hands over face* but at least that’s conveniently something Wheeljack is just like So Fucking Bad At, so

IDK I just think they compliment each other in neat ways. They share so many core values, but go about the problem of “how to be true to yourself” in such different ways, and for that reason have viewpoints that are beneficial to each other. I’ve described both of them (on separate occasions, in different contexts) as “scoundrel engineers” and I stand by this statement, even though both the word “scoundrel” and “engineer” mean wildly different things depending on who I’m applying them to.

yvannairie: a bleary-eyed emoticon scratching its head (hm)

Also while I was talking about Death Stranding, I realised that I don't think I've ever seen anyone make the comparison that the current set of highly-polished popcorn entertainment Marvel films are very similar to GTA-likes and the FPS glut -- a kind of technically "great" work of media but one that's kind of... thematically vacuous compared to media that has maybe more meat to it but is a lot less "swimming in audience/player appeal".

Like to be clear, thematically dense popcorn entertainment absolutely does exist, and "low-engagement media" isn't bad or unentertaining -- it's often popular because it's kind of soothing to go into a thing knowing full-well what you're gonna get out of it, be that an endless checklist of well-tuned mechanical engagement or 90 minutes of really slick action scenes, but I've never really had a good comparison case until Death Stranding came out and was essentially an AAA art game.

I don't mean this in a "only one of these is art" kind of way, though, this same high/low engagement distinction can absolutely be made within the genre of art films in that some of them are noticeably more tone-poem-y while some of them are incredibly dense with the Oops All Allegory -- it's more that high engagement works are an outlier in the genre they're present in, while being a lot more common in other genres.

yvannairie: happy flailing emoticons (flail)

Okay seriously though? I think the way Death Stranding uses its mechanics to drive its themes is pretty fucking fantastic despite the fact that this makes it kind of a boring game.

Admittedly, I was always going to get floored by this game. Postal work is incredibly soothing to me becaose of my OCD, and the central thesis of "connect with people, dammit, because being alone is no better than being dead" is something that will always hit me where it sticks, what with my lifelong struggle to have and maintain social bonds outside of the few ones grandfathered into my life.

So, being as positively biased towards the mechanics as I was, the metaphor of how becoming connected and staying connected can be hard, can be a boring, tiring slog, and can in some ways be hazardous because you never know where the traumatic tripwires that cause a conflict and a potential "voidout" in your relationship out of nowhere, and how exploring new territory with people can be exhausting... well, it lands, for a lack of a better word. If I said the metaphor in the mechanics didn't get to me I'd be a liar.

Of course, this all comes from a place of recognition that DS isn't. You know. It's not the second coming. I've always enjoyed Kojima's style of overwrought yet hyperliteral -- I struggle with emotional awareness and everyone being Very Clear on What They Feel make his games easy to parse -- even the translation is firmly Narm Charm territory for me, and not just in a "it's fun to watch these actors make the clunker of a script work" kind of way. I like his work, I am primed to try to dig deeper.

And the game is not subtle!! At all! In the least! Complicated? Yeah, sure, but subtle? Not at all. Even if you take everything in it at face value and just read it a soft-science future fantasy horror story, Death Stranding's worldbuilding still manages to impart the idea that "connection good" without any big effort -- but if you do take it as Oops All Allegory, it is really potent. The way the positive associations with being in touch with people, even if it's over something entirely meaningless and innocuous is woven really well into the mechanics, it feels appreciably different when you put effort into building the "infrastructure" of your relationships within the game as opposed to doing everything the boring, simple (and admittedly -- more mechanically challenging but not necessarily more fun) way.

To be clear -- I don't think the aim of Death Stranding was "fun", and in that sense I think it was a success, but just like any "entertainment" that aims for something different than... well, entertainment, how much of a good call and how you personally feel about the story will vary wildly, and having played DS alongside Indivisible, which very much tries to be fun, engaging and entertaining, and having kind of a rote Excuse Plot to have the character go through a specific arc, I honestly wouldn't know to tell you if DS being the way it is is good or bad, other than that it made some Massive Things™️ in me move and that had nothing to do with how "fun" I thought the fetch questing was.

If you hate gameplay that feels like having a job, then DS is not gonna be fun for you, but if you can accept the mechanics as a vehicle for delivering a certain story with a laser-focused theme, then you'll probably like it.

yvannairie: :3 (Default)
Is there a writer's equivalent of having eyes bigger than your stomach because that's me constantly with my TF ideas, lmao.

For example, I'm currently thinking about how a lot of the more interesting, alien and inhuman aspects of the pre-war culture of Cybertron come out in the culture of lower castes -- not just stuff like pit-fighting, the only designations some people having being just serial numbers and the lack of a higher education causing their behaviour to lack a lot of the social performance of the higher castes, or having social behaviour that is way more "down to the metal" due to the high physical demands based on them and it pisses me off that... I don't really have a project where to play fake anthropologists because everything I'm interested in writing happens during the war, which changes the social landscape of the planet pretty dramatically.

There's plenty of compelling intracommunity politics to be found in a situation where almost everyone sleeps in a garage, carries all their personal possessions on them and maybe only ever moves within a few square kilometers, or else is entirely unrooted and doesn't have anywhere to ground themselves to. And for my purposes -- the purposes of mixed-caste, militaristic settings and wartime social requirements -- knowing all of that would help to explain why the social conflicts we see form, even while I recognise that the way those conflicts are written comes from the writers being humans, just writing human conflicts.

See, my relationship to the anthropomorphism of Cybertronians is always gonna be a contested one. It's definitely convenient that the aliens have fairly human concerns, it definitely makes it easier to theory-craft and construct narratives, but at the same time TF loses a lot of its appeal if I simply accept the forces driving those conflicts are identical to the human forces driving them. That's boring. Even if in the end the solution is outwardly the same, even if communication, compassion and flexibility will fix everything, to presuppose a frame is going to end up with half-ass solutions and, even worse for me, boring stories.

And also there's the fact that when one of the main points of contention the big bad of the series has towards his own society is that philosophising about it is done in a way that blatantly ignores the material reality those conditions arise from... if I then ignore (or lbr just. Don't bother exploring) that material reality, it feels too much like I'm giving the big gray bastard himself a philosophical victory.

So what I'm saying is I choose to blame Megatron for my writer's block.
yvannairie: drawing of someone experiencing visible silence (why)
I can't verbalise why I find "but that's not how X works!!!" such a useless and annoying criticism to level at anything in a fictional narrative.

Like, what even is your reference point? What do you know about the universe that I don't that you feel comfortable saying that? What you saying that even based on?

Besides, often it's a criticism that shows up so early in someone's engagement with a work that they're not even willing to give the story a chance to explain why X doesn't work the way they think it does. It's just a really blatant example of people bringing baggage into their reading of a work, polluting their ability to analyse what is presented to them from the start.

(Which is judgemental and weird of me, I get it -- I keep getting told I go above and beyond in "excusing" works for their "errors" and that's... like, fair enough, I suppose. I'd just rather engage a text from a Watsonian perspective because what my escapist material means outside of its own fiction doesn't interest me in the slightest, and I get tired of being told I'm "naive" because I choose to focus my efforts elsewhere.)

(Literally, people are lining up to tear stories apart for their real-world implications these days. I am both bad at it and it doesn't interest me -- so why should I also focus all my energy on doing it?)
yvannairie: :3 (Default)

Reposting some comment I made in the notest of this post about how construing all shipping is amatonormative is not very good because I feel like I'm onto something.

To wit: As things are, the word “shipping” is commonly used to mean (at least) three different things:

  1. Constructing a narrative (often but not always an aspirational one) and vicariously experiencing through it what a relationship like that can be like
  2. Wanting to see the characters that appeal to you have sex/receive affection/experience emotional catharsis for your gratification
  3. The study and analysis of the text of a relationship, just like you’d explore the text of someone’s characterisation or the text of the plot of a story

And to be clear, when people say they “ship” something, it can be any combination of the above. (Arguably the concept of an OTP exists as shorthand for a ship where the speaker experiences it as sitting right in the middle of that triangle.)

This is what leads to the problem of critical analysis becoming impossible in a framework like this. Essentially, both cases 1 and 2 involve some kind of a value judgement – whether something works within the narrative or whether something appeals to the creator – and as such conforming to preference and principle is kind of the entire point, but analysis done in a way that is meant to conform to a preference or a principle… is poorly argued at best, and openly dishonest at worst.

If you point out erotic tension in the text between two characters, that is not actually the same as imagining or enjoying the idea of those characters having sex. If you point out emotional tension from things like miscommunication and how that colours a relationship, that is just pointing out an element of the text, and doesn’t mean the fic you wanna write will deal with that issue. But over and over, simply trying to critically examine the text is labeled as “shipping”, which… well, it does kind of make sense, because we live in a culture that considers “critique” something objective and removed and aimed to “improve” the “product” instead of a form of creative self-expression, but a lot of times it ascribes motivations to the person doing the analysis that they might not have.

As for amatonormativity... I can sort of see where people are coming with it, really? The narrative structures we’ve grown up with insist on amatonormative “love”, no analysis of text is free of cultural baggage, and frankly for a lot of alloromantic people, romance is gratifying. That being said, the criticism that shipping itself is amatonormative because it’s predicated on “needing” to put characters in monogamous pairs only applies to the first of my personal three cases, and even only then if it’s treated as an aspirational fantasy.

At every instance, the shipping can be driven by amatonormative assumptions, but to argue that therefore it inarguably is is some mind-reading bullshit my aro that obsessively analyses the interactions between everything isn’t willing to co-sign.

yvannairie: drawing of someone experiencing visible silence (why)

So I've gone back to gently prodding my Vos meta into a presentable shape funny that, for someone who doesn't give a shit about seekers I sure spend a lot of time thinking about their culture and the strangest thing that out of the cities involved in the consideration of the south-pole states' politics, it isn't actually Vos I have a hard time wrapping my mind around.

It's Tarn.

Because the thing is, Tarn keeps cropping up as an important power player on the level of Iacon or Vos, but while both Iacon and Vos have political and economic reasons for why this is, the only reason Tarn seems to be important is because it's close proximity and state rivalry with Vos. Tarn is seemingly only ever important because it is a) near b) unfriendly with arguably the most important autonomous region on Cybertron.

And usually I'd take that as a go-ahead to just start making shit up to fill the void of worldbuilding, but Tarn gets mentioned often enough that I don't feel entirely comfortable doing that? Shockwave is in multiple continuities recognised to be from Tarn, as is Megatron (although he's more closely associated with Kaon) and I'd rather stick to besmirching the reputation of one prominent and beloved Decepticon's hometown rather than several at once. Compound that with the fact that Tarn has a character named after it in one of the most popular continuities currently being discussed, and all of that sounds like too much hassle to get into while avoiding setting off potential landmines. Outsiders are rarely welcome to complex sociopolitical conflicts.

But that still kinda leaves me out in the cold because I do have things to say about Vos, which I want to say at the risk of treading over the aforementioned wings. It's one of those beautiful fandom moments where you're introduced to a concept (a city of fliers, primarily) and you immediately realise that you know a lot of stuff that can make it a lot more interesting (aerial traffic, air defense, the physics and economics of flying). Having a bunch of established lore existing helps, but based on just want I know of anything, I know I can make Vos (and maybe through that, the land and resource war) itself way more interesting.

I like playing fake historian and fake anthropologists, what can I say? TF is fun because a lot of the philosophical and political analysis of the civil war is right there in the text or provided by a fandom that has a lovely sense of cosmic drama to it, but it also means that I can come in with my box of Practical Concerns and start asking questions I find interesting. But in situations like this, before you can really play economist, you first gotta make sure you're not making huge categorical errors, or else you're not gonna make anything interesting that enhances the experience, just something extremely complicated.

yvannairie: a bleary-eyed emoticon scratching its head (hm)
(Reposted from Tumblr)

So, okay.

Since Dark Energon is shown in the first episodes of the show shown to have the ability to give non-sentient machines “life”, and we know that Dark Energon is way more potent than normal Energon by a factor of Oh No

and synthetic Energon has the property to generate cybermatter based on instructions when reacting with CNA (or, well okay, more likely, when reacting to with catalytic solution used for cloning, which is probably not unlike the protomateria that forms around sparks when they start to gestate b/c if it reacted with just CNA, Ratchet would have been immediately f u c k e d during his initial trial)

And since sparks and Energon both emanate from Primus

I don’t think it would be a stretch to argue that Energon itself is somehow protoconscious, and sparks are just Energon in some stable, self-regulating state – stable enough to form a consciousness, and to have a full set of assembly instructions for a frame (CNA) along with whatever root processes are necessary to make sure the two integrate properly.

So, theoretically, if you just put enough Energon in the right place, under the right conditions, eventually it’ll stabilise into a new spark.

That spark would have very little in way of personality, though – since sparks emerge in clusters, they probably interact through EM fields with each other during the gestation process. Under normal circumstances, this means that by the time newsparks are ready to emerge, they’ve developed a sense of self, and enough of a personality to direct their physical development. A spark created from distilled Energon wouldn’t get the chance to go through that development until later – and its development would probably be further informed/constrained by the kind of frame it was housed in.

(Also, to borrow from Jupiter Rising of all places – if Energon contains the information for the assembly code and conscious processes of Cybertronians, resurrection suddenly becomes a possibility, since there’s no reason other than probability for certain cybernetic sequences to re-emerge. Hell – if information actually returns to Primus when a Cybertronian dies, having generational memory becomes a possibility, as that information would probably just end up in the general circulation of Energon. I don’t know how that would actually work, though, it seems likelier just to be a belief.)

We actually see something like this happen with Predaking – he starts out with a very rudimentary consciousness that develops the longer it spends in the Predacon frame, and unless Shockwave split his spark between all the baby Predacons (the way Starscream presumably did with his clones), his and the rest of their sparks must have come from somewhere.

yvannairie: (giftIcon)

People forget (or at least I feel like they forget) that critique used to be an art form.

It was a style of transformative engagement, with rules and limitations to how it was performed -- the viewpoint and the philosophy that was being applied to look for new meanings in the original text. Structuralist critiques, feminist critiques, Marxist critiques of fiction never really went away, we just stopped calling them "critiques" because that word got associated with... like, reviews and shit, objective, quantitative judgement of a work rather than a subjective interpretation of it. In many ways, what fandom calls "meta" these days is the inheritor of that mantle -- it's own thing, that is using the work as a framework to discuss ideas present in or absent from it. It all depends on what the author is trying to accomplish.

And while a lot of critique is constructive/deconstructive and formalist and self-contained in nature -- and while the meta I write is almost always exploratory rather than "critical" in the common-sense meaning of the word -- there is absolutely no reason a critique can't be done in the style of the work, as a new story, as some other kind of art. That's ultimately why fandom continues to be transformative, because like a lot of good funny-relatable posts on Tumblr say, sometimes fanfic is a love letter and sometimes it's just the equivalent of "fuck you. Strong letter to follow."

When we criticise the tendency for fandom to do certain things that are hinky, "problematic" or regressive, understanding fandom as a critique makes it a lot easier to deal with the fact that sometimes the uncomfortable things are already present in the story and sometimes they're coming from "inside the house", so to speak. The work is one thing, but fan works? Fan works also always include the politics of the fan creating them, to one degree or another.

I think it's very unfortunate that critique gets lumped in with "reviews" and criticisms instead of being understood as a form of writing unto itself. I mean, most of my writing falls in the exploratory auxilliary worldbuilding and textual analysis categories and I regularly talk about how much it frustrates me that I only feel like I'm "proper transformative fandom" when writing fic.... which I don't like doing that much. Hell, that is why I have the "non-narrative writing" tag, to validate my own creative efforts.

Ultimately, I think the conflation of deconstructive criticism, reviewing, textual analysis and non-narrative fic under the same "meta" label is a symptom of fandom becoming more consumptive. There's a push, like, a cultural push for people to treat themselves and their whole existences as content for other people, and to treat the world as a buffet of entertainment -- a topic that is wholly too complicated to get to here -- and the way it manifests in fandom is through people becoming more ignorant to the fact that we make these things for ourselves, because we have thoughts and feelings about The Thing.

I don't think we should forget about this, and treat fandom the same way we treat mainstream media, because the act of talking about a work is where we started, and it is ultimately what we're doing when we're doing fandom.

New words!!

Friday, 3 May 2019 17:59
yvannairie: happy flailing emoticons (flail)
S/O to [personal profile] cassini for introducing me to a new phrase that can be used to describe fan writing, roleplay and other transformative fannish

recorded imaginative play

I am now going to start peppering my meta with that phrase and talking about the characters I write about as my imaginary friends b/c Fuck Yes.

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