#Legacy of the machine

[masterisabelle]

Does anyone ever just lose it and make a self indulgent au where axis was entrusted with Chujin’s legacy instead of ceroba and goes batshit insane

Thinking of throwing kanako into the mix

[luvlian]

making lunch plans 🍰

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[jesncin]

Not to push my luck and talk about Johnstantine and King Shark again, but I just want to discuss how,,,sad it is that these characters get treated so differently by fandom and how their legacy has been deeply unkind to non-white characters.

Johnstantine has a fantastic, well-written run that portrays a dimensional character with palpable humanity. It's to the point fans treat John like a real person that shouldn't be joked about because "he matters to people! He survived the AIDS crisis!" (while conveniently leaving out characters like Ray Monde or Davey) even when he is a fictional character at the end of the day. I'm not a fan of modern bi-jokes galore flandarized DC!John either and I recognize Vertigo!John's historical importance as a queer character, but I don't like fandom's attempt to moralize liking him "the correct way" by acting like he's a real person. Some of yall talk about him like he's Kevin Conroy or Howard Ashman or Freddie Mercury and that's odd. Like yes it would be distasteful to write those real people into flandarized characters and ships, but John isn't real. He is at the mercy of whatever writer writes him, for better or worse.

Ultimately John is a fictional character, and that's okay- you can have preferences on how he's written over decades without moralizing your tastes. I don't get this "he's flandarized into ships with cartoon characters" sentiment like what do you mean? John himself has been a cartoon character as often as Zatanna has been. If a ship like JohnZee isn't one of these flandarized fandom ships, then what are you talking about? Nanaue? The usual punching bag to the "Johnstantine is being flandarized" discourse, right?

And that's when I get sad. Because Nanaue doesn't get to have a well-written debut story the way John did. No, King Shark is from Superboy 94, a run that largely takes place in Hawai'i. With a deeply racist and orientalist depiction of Hawaiian characters and myth. Nanaue is appropriated nearly whole cloth from Hawaiian mythology and has since then been mostly brought back as a "big idiot brute" joke character often divorced from his indigenous roots. I've been told countless times that people didn't know King Shark is a native character. He doesn't get the dignity of characters like the Monkey Prince get to have under Gene Yang's pen. We're lucky if DC even remembers that part of him.

And yes I recognize that myth!Nanaue and DC!Nanaue are entirely different figures. But it's disingenuous to see how this character was adapted from native religion with his name and backstory attached, then portrayed as a "thuggish buffoon"- to be a neutral adaptation without racist or ableist connotations.

I look at these new preview pages for Supergirl and it's depressing. We now have "Princess Shark" a Sharknado joke villain who Supergirl just dunks into the ocean and flies off as the story centers a white girl. I wonder if they'll even bother giving Princess Shark a Hawaiian name. They sure didn't bother giving her native clothes. The optics would've been weird, so whitewashing King Shark's native roots is clearly the better option.

There's all this talk of dignity to fictional white guy Johnstantine (a character made by white guys based on Sting, a white guy). When, the irony is, if there is any character more based in reality when it comes to the Johnstantine x King Shark ship, it's Nanaue. He's the one who has basis in real Hawaiian beliefs, mythology, religion, and history. I get that DC's treating Nanaue as a joke most of the time, and it's wishful thinking to believe the white dominant fandom would do better- but at least I want us to think about it.

Hawaiian culture and history are victims to cultural genocide from violent colonization. Adapting a character from their myth is not a neutral act. Ignoring that history and whitewashing it is not a neutral act. If we recognize that John is a politically important character as a punk from the 80s-90s during the height of the AIDS crisis, then can we even give a fraction of that energy to non-white characters? Even when they're not well written? Just because DC doesn't respect these myths, doesn't mean you should too.

[keri-mcberry]

Classic, heheh ✨

I wanted to try something a little different with my comic layout. I actually like how it turned out! 😄

THANK YOU SO MUCH BTW 😭💕 If Lyla lived in more modern times, she would definitely be into video games! This was a fun idea!!

[drakomachina]

brief ssatw loreposting : episode 1, wyverian biology

wyverians have a digitigrade stance, meaning they walk on their toes with their soles + heel lifted off the ground. their gait differs drastically to this - they take longer strides and have exceptionally confident footwork. this stance is an evolutionary holdover from ancient times, wherein wyverians lived almost exclusively in high altitudes. that stance made traversal of rough terrain easier. they lean forwards notably, and use their long, stiff tail as a counterbalance to further aid in mobility. while a wyverian's tail is vital to their locomotion, it also serves as a fat repository during seasons of famine. a wyverian's tail is an excellent indicator of their general health - the thicker and more "shiny" it is, the more healthy an individual. wyverians are adorned with a thick covering of scales! mostly, a wyverian's scales fall along their spine, across the shoulders, and on their legs. their legs and tails are the only limbs that have full integument, the rest of their bodies see a partial scale cover. a wyverian's scales are very important for a multitude of reasons! mostly protection, but they also help regulate heat. wyverian's scales aren't just surface level, they have an underlying osteoderm beneath the epidermal scale spot. this means that a wyverian can't really "lose" a scale without damaging the underlying tissue, like some other reptiles can. they still shed though, but they simply shed the outer keratin payer of the epidermal scale. this tends not to come off in a single "shed" like snakes, it rather comes off in flaky "patches". a wyverian's scales are also an indicator of their general health - the smoother and shinier their scales are, the better their health. prolonged stress may cause a wyverian's outer scale layer to become more matte and prone to breakage. most wyverians have the thickest scales around the pelvis region and along the topside of the tail. the scales along the dorsal region of the tail are notable for having limited mobility, the muscles on the tail can contract and "raise" those specific scales slightly. most of the time, this is an involuntary action, caused by extreme stress or surprise. a wyverian's scale color is normally determined by their environment and parentage. typically they take on darker, more earthy tones, but as of late lots of variation has been seen, as well as some emerging patterns! wyverians also tend to have keratin based horns!! these are a bit more uncommon in younger wyverians, who tend to only have little "nubs", but older wyverians might have longer sets of horns.

similar to some types of reptiles, wyverians never really stop growing. they age incredibly slowly, but this is a persistent and constant process that occurs throughout a wyverian's hundreds of years of life. this is the main reason why wyverians have such diversity in how they appear. generally, the first sign of a wyverian aging is an increase in height, followed by a very sudden decrease in height once they reach elder age. generally, the shorter and more "stout" a wyverian is, the older they are. this is easily seen with maolo and zellard in MHS2 - zellard is in his 500s, while maolo is reaching into his 800s-early 900s. zellard is pretty much the equivalent of a human being around 50-60, maolo is equivalent to his 80s. wyverian age is a REALLY fickle thing and is just, not easily equatable to human ages, because the way they age and how it affects them is so inherently different. wyverians are hard to find an average lifespan for because. theocratically, they could go on forever. their bodies tend to give out on them before they could reach that 1000 year mark.

[dustbon]

Well... yes

Besides the obvious makeover, Winter is now a super rare, showstopping, never seen before snow deity-like witch. Something really cool if you're living in Siberia or somewhere like that, because summer in Komorebi... eh, it can kind of kill us. Her. You understand me.

[huntress-the-wolf]

my rinzler cat hoodie

i actually finished it a while ago but forgot to post it

[what-bot]

I rewatched Tron Legacy and for some reason I remembered the portal as opening and closing on its own once a cycle, but apparently that’s not what happens?

The movie implies that it opens when a User comes in, closes after 8 ‘hours’, then NEVER opens again? It just…closes forever until he returns from outside?

And Kevin’s plan in that event seems to have been to page Alan and be like “yeah so I borrowed your wife’s portal into the digital world and made my own universe, and I got too into building a new city with the program homies so I was late getting out and the portal like closed on me and now I’m trapped in my computer forever unless someone logs in and releases me. Can you come pick me up”

Yeah that sounds like him

Tron in the flashback telling him “I don’t like when you cut it this close” gave me secondhand stress after realising it

[d00dleybear]

Aster went to the festival of snow! She met Yamachan, had some fun in the snow, and defeated a vending machine!

[masterisabelle]

More of him, I called the evil axis au “Legacy of the machine”

[lord-squiggletits]

I think the key component to my personal reading of post-Delphi Pharma is that he's trying to be a horrible person on purpose. Not "on purpose" in the way that people have free will to exercise their own choices, but in that Pharma's "mad doctor" persona is a performance he puts on to deliberately embrace how much everyone else hates him. Basically, if people already think you're a "bad Autobot" and a horrible doctor who just kills his patients for fun, why try to prove otherwise to people who have already made up their minds about you? Just fully embrace the fact that people see you as an asshole. Don't try to change their minds. Don't plead for their forgiveness or understanding. Just stop caring. If you're going to be remembered as a monster, you might as well be a memorable monster, and eke as much pleasure and hedonism as you can out of it before karma catches up to you and you inevitably crash and burn.

I mean, I guess you could just go the route of "Oh, Pharma was always a fucked up creepy guy and Delphi was just him taking the mask off," but I really don't like that interpretation because, for one, it feels really wrong to take a character like Pharma becoming evil under duress and going, "Oh well clearly he did the things he did because he was evil all along," as if somehow Pharma breaking under blackmail/torture/threat of horrible death was a sign of him having poor moral character. As opposed to, you know, suffering under the very real threat of horrible death for himself and everyone he cares about while being manipulated by a guy who specializes in psychological torture.

The second reason is that it just doesn't make sense to write Pharma as having been evil all along. I mean...

Occam's Razor says that the best argument is the one with the simplest explanation. Doesn't it make way more sense to take Pharma's appearances in flashbacks, his friendship with Ratchet, his stunning medical accomplishments, and the few we see of him speaking kindly/sympathetically (or in the least charitable interpretation, at least professionally) towards his patients and conclude "This guy was just a normal person, if exceptionally talented." Taking all of these flashback appearances at face value and assuming Pharma was being genuine/honest is a way simpler and more logical explanation than trying to argue that Pharma for the past 4 million years was just faking being a good doctor/person. I mean, it's possible within the realm of headcanon, but the fact is Pharma's appearances in the story are so brief that there simply wasn't room in the story for there to be some sort of secret conspiracy/hidden manipulation behind why Pharma acted the way he did in the past.

I just can't help but look at things like Pharma's friendship with Ratchet (himself a good person and usually a fine judge of character) and the fact that even post-Delphi, pretty much every single mention of Pharma comes with some mention of "He was a good doctor for most of his life" or "He was making major headways in research [before he started killing patients]" which implies that even the Autobots themselves see Pharma's villainy as a recent turn in his life compared to how for "most of his life" he "used to be" a good doctor.

And although Pharma doesn't know this, we as the readers (and even other characters like Rung) know about Aequitas technology and the fact that it actually works, so... if Pharma really was an unrepentant murderer, why couldn't he get through the forcefield too? The Aequitas forcefield doesn't require that a person be completely morally pure and free of wrongdoing or else how could Tyrest get through, just that they feel a sense of inner peace and lack feelings of guilt. Pharma has murdered and tortured people by this point, and put on quite a campy and theatrical show of how much he sees it as a fun game, so why then can he not get through?

It circles back to my headcanon at the start of this post that the "mad doctor" persona is just that-- a persona. Delphi/post-Delphi Pharma's laughing madman personality is just so far removed from every flashback we saw of him and everything we can infer based on how other people see/saw him before that, to me, the mad doctor act is (at least in large part, if not fully) a persona that Pharma puts on to put his villainy in the forefront.

To avoid an overly simplistic/ableist take, I don't think Tarn tortured Pharma into turning crazy. To me, it's more like the constant pressure of death by horrific torture, the feeling of martyrdom as Pharma kept secret that he was the only one standing between Delphi and annihilation, the physical isolation of Messatine as well as the emotional separation from Ratchet, being forced to violate his medical oaths (pretty much the only thing Pharma's entire life has been about), etc. All of that combined traumatized Pharma to the point that the only way he could avoid cracking was to just stop caring about all of it. Because at least then, even if he's still murdering patients to save Delphi from a group of sadistic freaks, Pharma doesn't have to feel guilty and sick about doing it. As opposed to the alternatives, which were probably either going off the deep end and killing himself to escape, or confessing to what he did and getting jailed for it.

In that light, Pharma becoming a mad doctor makes sense. It avoids the bad writing tropes of "oh this character who was good his entire life was actually just evil and really good at hiding it" as well as "oh he got tortured and went crazy that's why he's so random and silly and killing people, he's crazy" and instead frames Pharma's evil as something he was forced into, to the point where in order to avoid a full psychological breakdown and keep defending Delphi, he just had to stop caring about the sanctity of life or about what other people might think of him.

Then, of course, the actual Delphi episode happens, and Pharma's own lifelong best friend Ratchet basically spits in his face and sees him as nothing more than a crazy murderer who went rogue from being a good Autobot. Then Pharma gets his hands cut off and left to die on Messatine. At that point, Pharma has not only been mentally/emotionally broken into losing his feelings of compassion, he's received the message loud and clear: He is alone. Everyone hates him. Not even his own best friend likes him any more. No one even cared enough about him to check if he actually died or not. He will only ever be remembered as a doctor who went insane and killed his patients.

So in the light of 1. Having all of your redeeming qualities be squeezed out of you one by one for the sake of survival and 2. Having your reputation and all of your positive relationships be destroyed and 3. People only know/care about you as "that doctor who became evil and killed his patients" rather than the millions of years of good service that came before.

What else is there to do but internalize the fact that you'll forever be seen as a monster and a freak, and embrace it? People already see you as a murderer for that blackmail deal you did, so why not become an actual murderer and just start killing people on a whim? People already see you as an irredeemable monster who puts a stain on the Autobot name, so why beg for their forgiveness when you could just shun them back? You've already become a murderer, a traitor, and a horrible doctor, so what's a few more evil acts added to the pile? It's not like anyone will ever forgive you or love you ever again.

Why care? Why try to hold on to your principles of compassion, kindness, medical ethics, when an entire lifetime of being a good person did nothing to save you from blackmail and then abandonment? Why put yourself through the emotional agony of feeling lonely, guilty, miserable, when you could just... stop caring, and not hurt any more?

[oomslouis]

tron viktor anyone ??

[drakomachina]

been working on some mhs2 stuff in the background.. here’s the official logo for hawke’s main story/my mhs2 canon!!!! i make logos for every story/worldbuilding project i dev, and the SSATW + eternal legacies canon is no exception … look at my graphic design boy

[masterisabelle]

Me when I overdesign for an au that started out as a joke

She and axis are exes btw