stunt_muppet

But it's the only time I really get to make posts anymore, so 2 a.m. it is.

1. Is it really Doctor Who Season 5 finale time? Already? You have got to be joking. Have I really fallen that far behind?

Three or four uninterrupted hours of computer/TV time, over a couple of days, so I can catch up with the season and actually comment on people's spoilery posts, that's really all I ask. Maybe when Dad gets back from traveling my belated Father's Day "present" will be the entirety of Season 5. Which we will watch right then.

2. Speaking of Doctor Who, while appreciate having kind and hands-off mods, there comes a point when someone has clearly not read the comm rules and should probably be at least notified that they're not following them. For instance, if they post Tenth Doctor/Simm!Master and Eleven/Amy in who_otp , a comm specifically set aside for pairings that, you know, aren't already getting seven or eight new fics a day. Like Tenth Doctor/Simm!Master, for instance! And even if Eleven/Amy isn't specifically on the list of disallowed pairings, I'm pretty sure that given how much of it there is that it's not within the spirit of the comm to post it there.

This is an incredibly petty complaint, I know, but reading comm rules is such a basic thing and it annoys me so when people just don't bother because - I don't even know why, it's not like an adult-rated Ten/Simm or Eleven/Amy fic is going to be hurting for readers exactly.

Okay, that's enough whining out of me for today.

3. There have been many, many announcements regarding Portal 2! It's really happening! The dev team is actually taking steps to make sure it isn't a retread of Portal! They've promised not to overplay the cake meme! There's whole new physics sets to manipulate! I just. It took me ages and ages to even get the hang of Portal, but it really is one of the most amazing games I've ever played, and I want so badly for Portal to break the Sequel Curse and turn out an actually good sequel that transcends its roots as a moneymaking exercise and becomes an organic expansion of the first installment, I want so much for it to be more Portal in the best sense of the word. Please oh please oh please let it be good. *crosses fingers*

That said, I have to say I'm looking forward almost as much to Yahtzee's review of Portal 2. Fervent love for Portal + categorical hatred of sequels and franchise properties = certain hilarity.

4. In my spare moments I have continued rummaging about through my old CDs and have discovered yet more of the old anime soundtrack downloads that I used to play on endless loops! There are songs on there I haven't heard in five, six years but that I'd always wanted to seek out again, and now I have them all to myself. *snuggles* I never had much fondness for Fushigi Yugi as a series, but darn if the theme song wasn't pretty, and I'm so happy that I can play it whenever I want again.

5. So among the many Big Huge Transformers Fic Things I've been contemplating is a story about Elita's team during the four million years that the robots that G1 follows were unconscious - about their missions, about staying hidden and surviving and all the harrowing escapades and daring heroics they must have got up to over all that time. And since Arcee tends to get lumped in with the Female Autobots and there's not a lot of fic out there of Arcee, I figured, sure, why not include her.

But there are some issues with writing G1 Arcee - similar issues, really, to writing any G1 character without a lot of screentime, in that her cartoon personality is basically "the girl one" - maternal and protective of Daniel, reasonably good in combat, needing to be rescued a couple of times. Not much to work with, especially if she's got no one in particular to be protective over when she's back on Cybertron.

With some of the other G1 characters, one can turn to the comics for additional threads of characterization, or, at least, behavior. However, Arcee is something of the butt monkey of the franchise in that in every single continuity she's in, something horrible happens to her (which also generally comes across as obnoxiously sexist), and that very often leaves her completely removed from her G1 characterization and as such is not really suitable for writing Arcee under conditions in which she's not insane, mindwiped, or...well, it's usually insane. So, how do I write her?

The one thought I had was leaving some vestiges of G1 Crazy!cee in there, so at least I had some guidance as to how to write her, but since IDW Arcee makes me rage I wasn't crazy about going along with that characterization, especially since it's rooted in Furman's dictum that there are no female robots and given that I write about the female Autobots with some frequency that dictum has no place in my fic.

But one common thread in the various Arcees was a certain illness-at-ease with being a woman among men – whether because she’s not supposed to be female as with IDW Arcee or because the other bots don’t take her seriously as with Marvel Arcee (speaking of misogyny, ugh). Granted, that’s interpreting it rather liberally, not to mention its’ borrowing a mite too heavily from the awful, awful Marvel!Arcee origin and the Japanese interpretation of Arcee, and Beast Wars Arcee never demonstrates this problem at all, unless you want to interpret it even more liberally and say that regarding herself as “different” (by thinking she had premonitions) is an extension of that. But this whole thing about difference is dipping probably too much into human gender theory already, anyway, I’ll stop now.

But if I do decide to leave that thread in there, I think it could potentially allow me to write an Arcee with something to prove, an Arcee who is convinced that all anyone sees of her is her pink exterior and is particularly fierce and devoted to combat as a way of earning respect and regard. It’d give me a direction for her character, at least.

A more off-the-wall and self-indulgent interpretation of it would be that this Arcee might actively cultivate the impression among her male colleagues that she’s not right in the processor. In order to be taken seriously in her own mind, she fights hard and fights dirty, and people tend to be wary of you when you get too violent even in combat. She realizes that this significantly cuts down on the remarks about her being a girl or being pink, so she never actually denies any rumors about her having violent/destructive impulses, or being programmed to kill, or anything like that. I don’t want to have her “act crazy” because that gets ablist, but I like the idea of her wanting to be taken seriously so badly that she plays up the idea of being a pink ball of violence. (Which also explains why, in this fanon-continuity, the comic-verse Springer (who’s basically part of a robotic Delta Force) finds her attractive. Well, it’s a better reason than “because she’s a girl”.)

It helps that, if the Wiki is anything to go by, the one Arcee who doesn’t have something terrible happen to her (Energon Arcee) is a spitfire who runs over her enemies with a train. So if I start writing something-to-prove Arcee and that turns out too out-there or unbelievable, I can always just tweak her a little more in Energon!Arcee’s direction and leave it at that. Yeah, I’d like her to be a little more wild than she is in G1, what about it?

So. Um. Yeah, thoughts, ideas, good fic with Arcee that you think characterizes her well or does something interesting with her without specifically following IDW characterization?


6. So, reportedly, Shockwave is going to be the main villain in Transformers 3. I am very concerned about this, of course. If the villain of this movie has no face, how is Optimus supposed to take it at the end? You have to think about these things, Bay, there’s an internet meme at stake here.

Also there is talk that there will be less focus on the robots in the third movie. I would point out that Beast Wars had no human characters at all and still managed to be entertaining, but hey, that’s why they don’t hire me to make movies, I guess.

Also War for Cybertron apparently has already been released and Slipstream really is in it, eeeee. I don’t care if she isn’t in the main game mode, there she is! This game shall be mine even if I have to babysit more four-year-olds for it, I swear it will.


7. Speaking of Big Huge Transformers Fic Ideas, a while back while I was still in school I browsed through the Wild Mass Guessing page for TFA , and I came across the theory that Sari “knows stuff” in Season 3 is not because her processor/brain is upgraded but because she can somehow hear the voice of Primus (yes, I know Word of Isenberg is that Primus and Unicron aren’t involved in the Animated Universe, but I’ve never been one to let the producers’ interpretations ruin a good theory). There’s another theory/projection in there as well, that Blackarachnia will use the organic creatures on whatever world she ended up on as further techno-organic experiments, thus working at least some of the Beast Wars/Machines cast into the Animated universe.

After doing a little bit of reading on Beast Machines, I figure there’s a way to piece those two theories/projections together. The idea of a techno-organic Cybertron at the end of Beast Machines gave me the idea of Sari’s connection to Primus/Cybertron somehow being dependant on her techno-organic nature, specifically her status as a techno-organic from “birth”, rather than a completely organic being with incorporated robotic parts or a robot with added organic components (as Blackarachnia and Waspinator are). In fact, that might be why the AllSpark (assuming that it’s somehow connected to Primus/Cybertron or is a manifestation of the will or consciousness thereof) seeks her out or connects with her when she arrives – the planet needs her if it’s going to…well, do something (the WMG page suggested defend Cybertron from the Animated-verse Unicron). But the Cybertron we’re shown in Animated is not only completely technological but organophobic, and anyway G1-verse Cybertron didn’t become techno-organic until years after the G1 series, and thus in the “future”. How to incorporate that?

Perhaps, when Blackarachnia and Waspinator transwarped away from Dinobot Island, they did travel back in time as is somewhat nonsensically implied by the end of “Predacons Rising” (nonsensical because there’s really no room in the Animated timeline for Beast Wars-type activities to happen), but not to ancient Earth – instead, they’re back on ancient Cybertron, a Cybertron that is either organic or whose mechanical aspects are subsumed by the overgrowth of organic life.

Isolated and increasingly desperate, Blackarachnia continues her experiments with the local organic wildlife, converting them into techno-organic Transformers much like herself, in an effort to either learn to change them back into being completely mechanical or, since she can’t be in a healthy psychological place at this juncture, to create something like herself, inflict that status on others so she won’t be a “freak” anymore. And, as happens with mad science in stories like these, some of her creations escape her and decide they don’t want to be experiments anymore, which is where we get the rough analogue to Maximals and Predacons – the ‘Maximals’ in this universe would be those of her creations who were rebelling against her, whereas the ‘Predacons’ would be those who were still under her control or who were loyal to her on their own. Waspinator, too bent on revenge and violent to join the Maximals but too hateful of Blackarachnia to side with the Predacons.

And from there whatever other Beast Wars analogues you want happen – I had the cracked-out idea that Blackarachnia might end up creating robots that resembled her two best friends before her transformation, thus providing an explanation for Animated-verse Optimus Primal (as well as a Sentinel Primal, which intrigues me), but Blackarachnia becomes sort of the main antagonist of this universe in lieu of a Megatron, and eventually the result is the same as in the end of Beast Machines - a fight culminating in the reformatting of Cybertron back into its optimal techno-organic state – or making it techno-organic in the first place, idk. Of course, given that the Animated Cybertron is still quite mechanical, one must assume that over subsequent generations or a given span of time, the Transformers living on it simply forgot or didn’t want to accept their planet’s partly-organic nature and basically paved over it, resulting in the mechanical planet we see. Which also explains why Cybertron/Primus needs a techno-organic being to help activate it, or use it, I don’t really know where I’m going with this okay.

I really, really like the idea behind this, but there’s no way I’ll have the time or plot-writing capacity to actually write it, um, ever, so, call it a plot bunny up for adoption by whoever wants it.


And now, per usual, I have lots of other things to say (including my Monday babysitting adventures) but am up far too late and must go to bed before I waste half the next day sleeping. Night, flist.