#bc everyone's been monitoring the progress even more obsessively than i have

[inkwingart]

We're funded! Imagine, if you will, a very happy shiba inu doing excited tippy taps. That's me right now. I know that without everyone on tumblr who's been eagerly awaiting and supporting this project, it never could have happened.

But we still have 27 days to go so it's time for stretch goals! As you all know by now, stickers are up first at $4k and will be a freebie for all physical reward tier backers. If you want to see them happen, spread the word! I'll be sharing the finished designs for the $5k and $7k stretch goals soon as well, so follow the project on Kickstarter if you want to be notified.

[yan-lorkai]

Hi!! I loved your hcs of the Octotrio with a yuu that seems to only have a talent in art. I related to it a lot because sometimes I feel like I’m not good at anything else other than drawing.

I was wondering if you could do the same prompt with Riddle, Ace, Deuce, Cater, Leona, Malleus & the Scarabia boys please? If that’s too many you can just do Leona, Malleus, & Scarabia. Thank you 😊

.⁠｡⁠*⁠♡ A/N: I guess everyone has one of those episodes, huh? I've been writing for more than 8 years now and sometimes I get hit by the "aa but I'm only good at writing, I should totally try something" and then I try something new and hate it bcs I really love to write and nothing can compare lmao. Anyway, I hope you like this darling, I did all the characters requested too btw ~

.⁠｡⁠*⁠♡ Ace would be playful and encouraging, but his competitive nature would lead him to manipulate situations to keep you close. He’d play little tricks to make sure you stay dependent on him, offering "helpful" critiques that subtly undermine your confidence in anything but your art. His lighthearted facade would hide a deeper need to be the center of your attention, he is your muse, the one you use to practice, the who inspires you, making sure that you see him as the only one who truly understands and supports you, all while ensuring you don't realize how he’s subtly sabotaging any other talents you might want to try to explore, for he fears you will not want to spend more time with him anymore if that was the case.

.⁠｡⁠*⁠♡ Cater would use his social media prowess to make you art the talk of the school, ensuring your work — and by extension, his support — is always in the spotlight. However, his validation would come with a price, as he subtly isolates you from others, creating an environment where you feel your art is only appreciated by him and his curated audience. Cater’s charming persona would hide his darker intentions, as he manipulates your into believing that your worth is tied to the art you create under his influence, all while keeping you emotionally dependent on his constant praise. You're already good at other things, so surely you don't need to have another hobby, right?

.⁠｡⁠*⁠♡ Deuce, unlike Ace, would be fiercely protective of your artistic talent. He’d encourage your art with an almost desperate intensity, pushing you to try different brushes and pens, different scenarios and things, but he'd also pressure you to stay focused on what your good at, ensuring you don’t waste time on things you never tried before. His possessiveness would manifest in his need to be your protector, to the point where he'd become intimidating towards anyone who tries to steer you away from your art, that does not apply to yourself, while he think your drawings / paintings are very beautiful, he would not force you to make it more if you're having an episode where you doubt your skills and think you are good only on the art field. If you want to explore new things, Deuce will be by your side the entire time.

.⁠｡⁠*⁠♡ Riddle would be intensely supportive yet controlling, pushing you to perfect your craft while ensuring you don't stray too far from his strict rules, even more if you are already his lover. His obsession with your success would become borderline suffocating, as he constantly monitors your progress and enforces discipline to keep you on the right path, nurturing your already beautiful talent. To Riddle, your art is flawless, it's personal and have a touch of you in every drawing, be it digital or traditional. When you come to tell him about your doubts, about how you're only good at art, Riddle promptly sooth you with gentle words, albeit he is a little awkward while talking. He offer to teach you about whatever you want to learn but be prepared because he is somewhat a strict teacher.

.⁠｡⁠*⁠♡ Leona would admire your dedication to your art, and he would ask questions about it too, learning as much as your interest as possible. However, his possessiveness would be almost primal, keeping you close under the guise of protection, ensuring you don’t waste time on anything — or anyone — else. Leona would be dismissive of your attempts to explore other talents, reinforcing that your art is the only thing that matters. His control would be subtle yet overpowering, as he ensures your world revolves around him and your art, leaving you with little room for anything else.

.⁠｡⁠*⁠♡ Malleus would shower you with endless admiration, captivated by your artistic talent, even more if you were influenced by an artistic movement. He'll notice all the little details, the subtle way the traces converge, how the color scheme is perfect, the way the shadows and the light reflect. He is your number 1 fan, so supportive of you. However, his intense fascination would drag you into his lonely world, where your art becomes your only outlet and he is your audience - though he has your drawings framed and hung on the walls of the castles, so everyone can look at it and admire. Malleus may not understand your struggles and why would you want to pursue another hobby, but he can arrange anything you may want to try at least once, from singing and dancing to sewing and knitting, even the art of potion making, archery or fencing. He just know you're going to find something you like as much as your art, and if you are happy so is he.

.⁠｡⁠*⁠♡ Jamil would secretly nurture your talent, subtly guiding your creativity while undermining any attempts you make to excel elsewhere, he sees your art as something free and with many meanings - it makes him relaxed in some sort of way and Jamil wants to be a little greedy here, he wants you to continue creating more pieces, always keeping you under his watchful eye as you started drawing / painting. There's just something so intimate, so calming about it he can't wrap his head around. He loves watching you creating your art, feeling is guard lowering just a little. If you ever approach him with your doubts, Jamil take you to the kitchen so he can teach you a few things about cooking. It's a different kind of art but when all is said and done, it's just as good as when you're creating and make you feeling accomplished.

.⁠｡⁠*⁠♡ Kalim would be so overwhelmingly supportive and enthusiastic about it, showering you with gifts and opportunities to nurture your artistic talent, buying everything you may need to create your art, a new software? Sure, no problem, he brought the most expensive one too. A few new pencils and pens? Right away. You need more frames and paints? It will be here in a couple of hours. However, his naivety mixed with possessiveness would lead to unintentional control over your life, as he tries to keep you happy and close by his side. Kalim’s well-meaning gestures would create a gilded cage, where your art flourishes but your freedom is slowly stripped away. He would be oblivious to the suffocating effect of his love, believing that as long as you're happy creating art with him, nothing else matters, leaving you feeling trapped and not knowing how to communicate with him. He have done so much for you already!

[derangedhyena-zoids]

You know what there doesn't seem to be a preponderance of on Zi?

Kids.

fair warning: this is a goddamn mess of a horseshitpost about history, population and reproduction dynamics, and chucklefucking about character genetics that I have unfortunately have actually spent time thinking about because my brain literally doesn't accept "idle" as a state. 

this probably gets a little weird and also contains mention of sensitive topic (tagged) so please be aware of that

Ok so

Compared to say, the society pictured in Fuzors (which doesn't comply with the xCentury-verse sufficiently and thus gets ignored by me), NC0 seems equally prosperous but a lot more resource-strained. Not "at that time" but simply as a way of life.

Nobody thinks of themselves as resource-poor, but nothing is terribly robust except in the largest cities (eg the modern day rebuilds of the old capitals, Guygalos and New (Helic) City.)

This isn't a secret. It's more or less been the case for the entirety of humans' colonization of the planet. That's why locale self-sufficiency is so important and why there's huge stretches of nothing everywhere. You simply cannot live wherever you want. The environment is fucking hostile and You Will Die.

So first off, let's be real: when you first colonize a planet and want to establish yourselves there, there's going to be rules/procedures in place regarding reproduction to make sure nobody ends up genetically representing too much of the population. It'd take a bit to get to the point of non-directed (and/or non test-tube) reproduction even being allowed.

Basically, space humans colonizing alien planets gonna have hella birth control tech available. There are no "oops" offspring. I'm inclined to think it's actually something that's been modified on a very base level (read: likely genetic modification, is heritable) level, that would require outside intervention of some kind (eg chemical) to make reproduction possible.

The point of "safe to naturally mingle" would likely correspond with the eventual, initial tech-dip as the stores of things from initial arrival were finally depleted (because it was probably planned out that way), and tech that was arrived with started to go offline permanently.

They'd have to be settling into what they could do and make with the resources available on Zi, meaning that avoiding uncontrolled population growth was still a huge priority, because the let's-successfully-establish-civilization mindset would still be thoroughly ingrained at that point.

There'd be hundreds of years of "danger zone" population levels where large adverse events could've easily wiped them all out if they weren't mindful. But, they were, and humans colonized Zi successfully (...again), good job, hooray

The overarching society-level birth control was well-codified in the various cultural groups that arose. But these inclinations did change over time as larger and more friction-prone groups formed (read: the Empire, over time, became large and in charge, discontent developed and huge chunks of people kept trying to detach. Eventually the Republic cropped up. You need more people to be a bigger thing.)

Any desire to handle the population with kid-gloves all but went out the window as the first conflicts started and people were killed. These conflicts eventually escalated into the long-standing wars between the Empire and Republic, and restrictions on reproduction basically went away. (+depending on who was in charge things may have even Yikes'd in the other direction)

(just a canon-fyi I'm not following the Battle Story in the slightest, I'm only trying to make the xCentury anime(s) function. Zoids' various canons are like Transformers' canons - A MESS)

Before these wars started happening, not much besides the occasional natural disaster, accident, or simply old age killed anyone. People can live a long time on Zi! Much longer than usual.

Why? Because a lot of human common human pathogens from Earth simply *wouldn't exist* there (space humans are gonna be really careful to not tote that shit around), so there's only really lifestyle-related issues, latent or new-mutation genetic problems, and any micro-organisms on Zi that mutated sufficiently to be able to affect people. (which is not really a stretch if we're going by the thought that Zoidians were long-evolved humans. The Zoidians were there a LOT longer than humans have been)

so. modern day. I have NC0 a few hundred years after CC/GF. As a whole I think the human race on Zi is relatively young, but a lot of the oldest information (like "exactly when we fucking got here") was lost in Imperial/Republican wars.

Those went on for hundreds of years themselves, enough to establish mass Zoid manufacture as The Way Of Things(tm) and otherwise entrench what became the norms for human society there. (I STRONGLY suspect there's still a lot of residual Imperial/Republican tension in places/families and that Backdraft was founded by, for lack of a better word, Imperial sympathizers with a longstanding grudge against a unified GF-run government *coughhh Alteil cough* but... I digress)

Humans are at a perfectly serviceable population. I actually hesitate to put a number on it because I don't know what # value would properly represent "a sustainable amount of people on a barren planet with very limited resources" but it'd be a sizable population (I'd guesstimate tens of millions). I imagine the GF, being the unquestionably-global governing body*, is relatively authoritarian as far as the core population and major cities go. They obviously can't tightly police the whole planet, but they can certainly keep an eye on it.    

This doesn't mean it's a dystopia or that the GF is evil or that it's anything bad, really. I sort of picture it being run by Committee, likely made up of various descendants of powerful families ([insert 10 tons of political intrigue here that I'm picturing, it's amazing, ANYWAYS]) Zi's government is definitively a plutocracy.

There were plenty of people on the planet who were ambivalent towards the Empire and the Republic's nonsense and just carried on what social norms and culture that had been established by the early colonists. Many didn't LIKE that all the fighting was happening because innocent, uninvolved people kept getting killed, and that sucked because they just wanted to live quiet lives in secure towns and be left alone.

There was also a desire for more law enforcement in general, since gangs, bandits, and the Zi equivalents of sovereign citizens kept causing problems. So when the Guardian Force was established initially to wrestle peace into place, it was largely welcomed and people were very, very glad to get rid of hundreds of years of war.

This also meant a lot of people had kids because things became markedly more stable. In fact what led up *to* New Century was probably several solid centuries of strong population growth, establishing additional stable strongholds in habitable areas (new cities were established and built up), modernization and other general signs of prosperity.

So, all this blah blah blah leads up to several key realities for New Century:

-There isn't a strangehold on population growth, nor are there formal limits. However, the chemical-whatever that causes the inbuilt birth-control to fuck off is under the purview of - or at least monitored by - the government. So... there's that. It's also overwhelmingly likely that people have figured out other sources for this over time, if for some reason they're distrustful.

-This inbuilt bc is in effect for everyone. Both folks involved have to be on board. I mean, it'd technically be possible to surreptitiously slip some of the chemical-whatever to an unwilling partner? But it's not like that would be difficult to figure out.

-Family units range from what we'd recognize as a 'family' to entire towns sharing children/parenting responsibilities. Monogamy is the norm but polygamy isn't weird. People can be pretty sexually loose and it's not frowned upon at all - because let's be real, NC0-society is at full-on bread-and-circus levels of operation. There seems to be a moderate anti-intellectual bent and Zoid battles are the height of achievement. People are chasing highs as a way of life.  

Topically relevant individuals' headcanon:

I think Steve's wife died in childbirth (having Leena.) It neatly explains what happened to her and Layon's unhealthy obsession with Leena.

Feel like Bit and Brad both were raised in the more "communal" type of settings.

Harry's family comes from old Republican money.  

Stoller came from a family that's the equivalent of a house in the south that has confederate flags everywhere. Except they're Imperial.

ARE YOU STILL HERE? GOOD LORD WHY. WELL NOW THIS IS A SHITPOST ABOUT ZOIDIAN HYBRIDS AND OTHER ANCESTRY FUCKERY

Remember in some other post I wrote I said that when you start to hybridize Zoidians in, reproduction becomes more difficult? That's IN PART because of the bc thing, and in part because general genetics fuckery. But once you *had* a hybrid you had very robust individuals, who initially lacked a fully functional version of the inbuilt bc. Over time that was mixed back in, but there were at least a couple janky generations.

Literally every hybridized line in existence is either from Hiltz or Ryss. Fiona didn't reproduce (wasn't for lack of trying. Both her and Van being bonded to the same Organoid caused problems in that department.)

Ryss had two kids with Raven. The reality of Raven aging and dying sucked. The reality of her kids, grandkids, etc aging and dying sucked. Though her immediate offspring lived a lot longer than progressive generations did, as the bloodline became more diluted, a slightly-improved human lifespan became the norm. This was incredibly depressing to Ryss and is a large part of why she fucked off to the middle of nowhere to live with things that wouldn't age out and die on her. It's also why she didn't continue to have children.

Hiltz... Hiltz fucked (and well, raped) a lot of people (50% as a power/hate thing and 50% because he's from the Feed-Fuck-Fight club) and some of the people that lived to talk about it had offspring. The same aging issues were in effect for these offspring, but unlike Ryss's family they didn't have the benefit of anyone explaining what the fuck was going on. So they had a strange time.

Remember that these direct hybrids would've been of age squarely in the aforementioned, post-GF "everyone is having kids" time, so a fair number of distinct new lines were created and persisted. There was also a weird range of ages involved, because the direct hybrids lived A WHILE and could have offspring for most of that time.

Now, in the context of "many years later", this means a fair number of people carry these genes in varying dilutions. It's not a large amount in the context of the entire human population. It's a handful of family lines with increasingly baffled histories. But family groups frittered a lot in the aftermath of GF, so a lot of that knowledge was functionally lost.

Basically no one has any idea anymore, what little idea that they had in the first place. The only families with distinct and traceable genealogies are the rich/old-money ones.      

So, in the NC0 cast I officially headcanon 5 folks as these dilute-hybrids. You know most of them; Sara, Vega, and Brad, but I'm impolitely adding Stoller and Iyaga (Ehga?) to that mix because reasons.

Brad and Iyaga are from Hiltz's line. Sara and Stoller are from Ryss's. Vega is unique in that he draws from BOTH; Ryss from his mother's side and Hiltz from his father's. Sara had a *really* hard time actually having a kid as a result of that particular genetic fuckery. IMO this explains some of her behavior towards Vega - by the time she had him she was so emotionally estranged by both the loss of Vega's father and the loss of numerous pregnancies (and by that time was more involved with her 'backdraft career'), she struggled with BASIC AFFECTION.

anyways, thanks for coming to the world's most useless ted talk  

*ZBGF is like world-police, GF is world-gov, ZBC is a branch of ZBGF that keeps battles in line (and monitors usage of things). The GF is "background", in that it's using the more-friendly-seeming ZBC as its eyes and ears while keeping track of things on a higher level.

p.s. the bc thing is actually adapted from another story of mine's background, so don't worry I didn't spend ALLLLLL this time thinking about that for this only sdhgfjdfdf

[mermaidsirennikita]

Same anon re hypochondria. I RELATE SO MUCH. It's actually crippling. I went through a period I was sure I had diabetes and was checking my blood sugar from one of those drug store finger prick monitors several times a day. Then, like you, I became obsessed with gynecological cancers to the point I didn't get a pap smear for several years because I was convinced I had cervical cancer and would die. Then it was lymphoma bc I had a small node in my armpit. I began sweating at night and was sure 1

that was what it was. Now I just generally obsess about me or a loved one getting cancer or every time I sneeze, I'm getting pneumonia and dying. A stiff neck means meningitis. I'm on Zoloft so it's somewhat controlled but I still panic a lot, esp when going to the dr. The medicine helped me stop avoiding drs though. Thanks for sharing your experiences, it really is crippling. I'm also a germophobe and that is of course related. It has affected my personal relationships, quite badly at times. 2

I’m really sorry anon, I feel like this is something that isn’t talked about re: anxiety a lot in part because it’s so related to the body?  And because everyone has those fears at times deep down so they don’t want to talk about it?  When you talk about anxiety, people often think about social anxiety, overwhelming sadness, more “random” OCD tendencies like flipping light switches on and off or counting things.  And those are extremely valid issues, but I think they’ve become the “face” of anxiety when in fact many people suffer from the same issues we have.  Like, anxiety often manifests in a death obsession and therefore we worry about what would cause death.  (My anxiety first began when I was a tiny kid and I was obsessed with the idea of my parents dying.)  And there are so many other reasons why hypochondriacal anxiety begins.  I feel like for women, the obsession with gynecological cancers can often be linked back to us being taught by society to fear our own bodies quite often--and the fact that these sort of cancers make for “great” media stories and the news focuses on them more than other types of cancers which might even be more common.  Another thing is that we--I know this is the case with me--as young women in particular might have this deep-seated insecurity about having this horrid disease where even if we survive it might “ruin” us in the eyes of society.  We won’t be desirable anymore.  I know that’s been something for me.  I used to think about “what if I get breast cancer, what if I have to have a mastectomy, what if nobody ever loves me” and it’s HORRIBLE but it’s this very... almost primal fear that (according to my shrink at least lol) is one of many reasons why young women often obsess over those types of cancers in particular.  We’re not just afraid of dying, we’re afraid of being robbed of what makes us “women” and desirable in society, which is so sad.

The funny thing is that I’ve yet to get obsessed with blood sugar even tho, with my family history and my own health history (I have issues with insulin resistance) that SHOULD be the thing that my mind obsesses over.  It really goes to show how incredibly irrational anxiety can be.

I’m really glad the medicine made it easier for you to go to the doctor!  I’m not gonna lie, at the moment I’m not on meds because I became rather disillusioned and felt that my shrink wasn’t listening to me.  I’m fine with a regular med like Zoloft, especially since I also have depression, but I need a rescue med for my panic attacks and obsessive episodes.  But lol, every time I asked about that people took on this weird paternalistic note and said that girls my age (22) often get addicted to those and we don’t want that to happen, do we?  Never mind that I used to use a rescue med quite often in my late teens before traveling abroad and being unable to get a prescription for a year.

It’s definitely a work in progress, and this kind of anxiety is hard to balance because you have to take care of yourself, but if you overdo it then you’re going to be very ill mentally.  It has affected my ability to carry on relationships as well, sometimes I feel like there’s no point and I’m probably disease-ridden so???  But that’s not reality.  It’s really a matter of being able to step away from your own mind recognize the difference between these dark fantasies and what is actually happening to you.