#I've only just downloaded the game to rewatch & gif

[zetterbabe]

😛 (05.10.24)

[kinaesthetiqueer]

You've more or less single-handedly altered my entire perception of Nora as a character, and I mean that in the best way possible, making me enjoy her so much more every time I rewatch RWBY (which I gotta do again at some point, but that's neither here nor there)

However! This leads to my question :3 I noticed you had a few fics about her, and that she's also a very present character in your brain space, I kinda wanna know more about Satya Vaswani (which I now know her name is!!! Which is so cool!!!) and specifically your thoughts about her, what about her appeals to you, basically sharing as much as you want to!

I had a mild overwatch phase some years ago, so I know some Basic lore, but I always love learning and hearing about people's favorite characters :3

Oki thank you byeeee!~

aksnskajdhskanjs WONDERFUL QUESTION AND THANK YOU THIS TOOK DAYS TO WRITE BUT IT WAS NICE TO BE REASSURED THAT I DO STILL LOVE HER (AND HER GIRLFRIENDS, BY PROXY).

quick psa below for anyone who follows me for overwatch; otherwise, you can skip to the blue text & read more for sym gushing

im gonna preface this by saying my knowledge of overwatch ends in about mid to late 2019, which is right around the time i finally and miserably acknowledged that i could no longer play sym in the game because i could not adjust to sym 3.0. (for context, when blizz announced her 3.0 rework in 2018, i crawled under my desk and cried; there are pictures). while i also played rein and lucio, my real joy was playing sym and once i could no longer do that, i basically stopped playing. i'm not good at fps. there's a lot going on. i scream a lot. i cannot aim. overwatch remains my first and only fps. i just couldn't handle letting my friends down as a bad support-turned-dps as i cannot aim (even though they insisted i did not let them down) plus eventually a lot of other folks stopped playing, i got busy, blizzard continued to suck ass, etc. sym 3.0 was a personal death knell for my SI in overwatch

SO the last thing i read was the bastet short story and the last new chara i cared about was baptiste. i got soured on the fandom and the shipping base and crawled out of it into a perfectly happy ot3 isolation bubble. i say all this NOT to sound unhappy about this question, but to set up for the single boundary that i MUST enforce when it comes to overwatch:

i do not want to know anything about ovw post 2019!

this may sound harsh but i don't care about overwatch lore anymore!this is simply to prevent my brain from just absolutely self-imploding. i have a clear and complete outline for the take to the skies series and i only care about that series (and the demons/witch au) and a few other things that ive written; i do not want to corrupt that. i've heard whispers about sym lore updates and im simply not engaging with that. i don't need to know nor do i want to! thank you, good night! i'm content to willingly live in denial.

you see, my satya "symmetra" vaswani lives safe and sound in my brain. blizz can't touch her.

satya vaswani, also known as symmetra to her teammates and also her enemies, is a character near and dear to my heart! i knew nothing about her until i stumbled upon the fact that she was intentionally written as autistic. this was at a time in my life where i had recently discovered i was too, in a fun (not) series of events, and so i latched on immediately, not to mention when i started playing her, i found a niche and became a rather successful sym (which to me means being helpful, getting kills, STAYING ON THE FUCKING POINT, and not getting in the way). i don't remember what my hours ended up being on her but im pretty sure it was well over 100 and since the servers are gone??? i'll never know? im not downloading ovw 2 to find out. it's probably on my old blog. GAH. im not here to be be salty about blizz.

SATYA.

satya, much like nora, is a side[ish] character that i have taken every scrap of canon lore and extrapolated to the stratosphere. i acknowledge that i have surpassed canon and inserted my own, especially when it comes to her childhood.

that being said

here's canon:

After she was identified as one of the few capable of becoming a light-bending architech, young Satya Vaswani was plucked from extreme poverty and placed in the care of Vishkar's architech academy, never to return home. Isolated and lonely in her new life, Satya immersed herself in her education and training. She quickly grasped the applications of the technology and was one of the top students in her class. Satya approached hard-light manipulation differently than her peers, with their more procedural, mechanical constructions, instead weaving her constructs in the motions of the traditional dance of her homeland.

and then i, to recap practical ghosts to some extent, made it worse. she was singled out for a scholarship by the vishkar academies who intentionally sought out young kids with high compatibility with hard light tech. she has an older brother aditya and a younger brother krishna and her mom karishma. her father died when she was three; she is, at the time of pick up, eight.

she's taken away to the fledgling vishkar town of utopaea where she atends the prestigious vishkar dawn academy boarding school. fairly quickly she takes to HL. it just makes sense to her and she loves it! never mind that she's without her support net for the first time ever. higher up staff order her teachers to excuse her 'problematic' behaviour because they don't wan to damage the prodigy in the making. her mother fights to have satya come home regularly and succeeds in making sure she gets to visit. the higher up staff even court these wishes, hoping that karishma will see the good in vishkar's training and ABA therapy but satya's mom sees her daughter's personality changes and misery and the way she talks about her autism now, the bullying she receives from both adults and students, the way she only seems to focus on architecture. she doesn't like it one bit. and after four years of this back and forth fight between vishkar execs and karishma over the 'budding jewel' of vishkar, karishma finally finds another school closer to home and begins to make moves to take satya out of vishkar academy at the end of the school year.

in response, vishkar ensures that satya has no family left to go home to. they also make sure that not only it looks like an accident but a specific architectural failure that galvanizes satya's single track minded drive to make the world a better place in which no one ever loses their family to a building collapse again. she becomes a ward of vishkar through a series of legal dominos vishkar had in place; she's only twelve. she never finds out that vishkar is the one who killed her family (except for in this little riff i did on twitter that may or may not load). ALSO funny that i named it indomitable, bc i didn't know what rwby was when i wrote that XD. anyways i have all my tweets downloaded but it's not that important.

practical ghosts is a fun narrative because it's told completely outside of satya through documents about her (with the exception of three little chapters at the end, only one of which is from her POV) it's my fave of my satya vent fics. PG is in line with on the run from tomorrow and thursday's daughter's genre of 'no one asked me to go this deep with canon plausible backstory but i did anyway!'

satya NOW though. she comes to the watchpoint, essentially surrendering her vishkar insider info in return for asylum, and proceeds to have the meltdown of a lifetime the second no eyes are on her. she throws herself into discovering how much of her life is a lie (her first comic, where she begins wondering, inspires much of this, as it obvs happens before; while i have read her 2020 comic, i don't use it at all except to smile because it did not contradict my HCs or if it did i ignored it; i was made vaguely aware against my will that she has history with LW but again, i don't care)

she's sassy, she's deadpan, she's devoted, she's practical. she loves dance and cooking and all forms of gymnastics, skating, and ribbon arts. she'll take you to task for doing stupid shit and explain how you should fix it in the same breath. she's ruthless when it comes to making other's take care of themselves. she's harder on herself than anyone else dares to be. she likes birds. she likes making new ways to stim that aren't obvious. she has reclaimed her arm and her relationship with it. she's done an absolutely stellar job of reinventing herself in the wake of everything she's done and been involved with. she's taken all of vishkar's tech and made it better and more accessible. she prefers rebuilding missions more than combat ones. she loves drinking tea with ana. mei was her first human friend outside of vishkar; athena was her first friend at the watchpoint. her and lucio actually get along fine eventually. she is fearlessly devoted to those she loves. she's an early riser and early sleeper. she still cries sometimes when she allows herself to stim unhindered. she is a huge fucking demiace lesbian. she doesn't give a fuck about gender. she wears heels so she can discretely toe-walk and dresses because they're easy to move in. she can and will talk your ear off about her special interests but only if she loves you.

NONE OF THIS IS CANON

last i checked in canon, and based on voicelines, satya hasn't even LEFT vishkar. she's just doubting. she's still there under their thumb and i mean sure yeah that's fine but that was the great of overwatch HUGE sandbox, no plot, WOMEN, and oh my gods an autistic woman of color with the most wonderful voice and voice actor ever (hi ms bhimani i hope you're having a LOVELY day)

i took to sym because i wanted a more hopeful future for myself and i am awaaaaaaaare ive projected on her very hard but i gotta admit the fact that i turn 28 (her age) this year might have actually just made me grin like an idiot because oh my god i could NOT imagine that when i first got into overwatch in early 2017. jesus fuck i was twenty, i could barely see past my own nose. i REMEMBER tho, being like heeheehoohoo one day i'll be satya's age that'll be wild. complete hypothetical. ANYWAYS

i don't think im really answering the question here.

haven't even got to my favorite fuckin head canon. i SCREAAAAAAMED SO LOUD when i realized this. fuckiing rip to my friends bc i was in game and i was playing with a skin i had just unlocked and i noticed something incredible-

satya has a prosthetic left arm. she has two skins though where she looks more like she's wearing a school uniform. i think they're called architech and utopaea? but hey. hey. hey you know what she doesn't have in those skins?

her prosthetic.

SO. my second saddest and most favorite headcanon is that as an 18th birthday gift, when satya technically became an adult and thus could leave vishkar, vishkar offered her a choice. to quote 'nothing here to run from':

Just shy of her Academy graduation ceremony, an offer was made to officially cement her place in the Vishkar Corporation. “We only offer to the best and the brightest, Satya,” Sanjay had said, grasping her left hand in his right. “Wouldn’t you love to be the perfect architech, ready to change the world at a moment’s notice?” By the time she was eighteen, Symmetra only had room for perfection.

BECAUSE YEAH

i heavily headcanon vishkar to be just as bad as talon, since they are heavily intertwined. i would not put it past them.

so yeah, heavy heavy heavy disclaimer that i love satya 'symmetra' vaswani a normal amount but due to the inherent need to extrapolate a million things from a game that initially had three rubber bands and a paper clip worth of lore for her, i humbly recognize that the version of her that i love does only live in my head. and im okay with that!!!! but i love her canon self too, otherwise i would have never gone so feral about her to write over like 100k of her being loved, growing, living and learning!!!!!!!!!!!!!! gods i need to write her again.

also she has the best skins in the fucking gaaaaaaame she's so pretty and i am GAY

[katriniac]

Not sure if y'all caught Cybird's Insta-live last night (they archived it so you can rewatch if you want), but Hiroto leaked the news of which Revo route is next:

Dalim.

That's right, one of the new guys.

Not Blanc, who was the VERY FIRST PERSON YOU MEET.

Not Blanc, who is the last character in the "Act 1" set to get a route before the 3 new LIs were introduced.

I feel like ranting.

Is that okay?

I hope that's okay.

I don't usually carry my venting to social media or anywhere public.

But ... maybe my filter and/or inhibitions are weakened right now because of poor sleep and stress. So here we are, airing grievances on Tumblr like a teenager.

Blanc is my favorite character in Ikemen Revolution.

I will not turn this post into a fangirling session about him. Suffice it to say ever since I first downloaded the game and read the prologue, Blanc has been the person whose route I have been looking forward to the most.

I have been waiting with trepidation for a new route announcement ever since Harr's route came out because that meant only Blanc was left. But I had a bad feeling about it. I knew it'd be the moment when we see whether they will release someone new before Blanc.

And they did.

This is ... disappointing.

☹️

Consider for a moment:

It would be as if IkeVamp had released Vlad before Comte, or IkeSen had released Motonari before Sasuke.

If they did that, you'd be shocked, right?

Someone new from the second act is getting released before the "tutorial boy", the first kind face MC sees in the prologue, the one who is responsible for bringing her to another world.

Why are they breaking precedent?

Ughhhhhh

😑

I really was hoping for Blanc to be next. But at this rate, since he's keeping the big secret about Levi, we most likely won't get his route until all the sequels have been released.

*marks her 2026 calendar for Blanc's route*

I've been waiting since summer of 2018 for him. Four years. What's another four? 😅🥲🙃🥺

*quietly throws a tantrum*

I should be happy they are releasing new routes in Revo, because that means they are still invested in the game's success and continuation. You know what I'm talking about. It's been starting to feel like the Midnight Cinderella situation all over again, isn't it? 👀 Just little hints. But I'm pretty sure there's someone reading this, thinking "Yeah, whew! It's a relief to see they are putting out new content still. I was getting worried..."

I should be happy for Dalim fans.

I should be excited to read new lore about the world, and see more of the inner workings and secrets of the Magic Tower.

But I'm salty instead.

I wanted Blanc.

I want my glasses-wearing hard-working absent-minded charming and intelligent long-suffering lonely immortal.

I want to comfort him and romance him and help him stop feeling sad and alone.

He deserves his happy ending. He's waited so long for it.

Okay, maybe this post ended up having some fangirling after all. My poor bunny is always last in the elections, and he doesn’t deserve it! 😭