#mod miralines

[mechanismslorearchive]

Do y'all know about the Mechs April Fool's joke story?

Happy April Fools! (AKA Don't Trust Jess Day)

To be clear, these are real tweets-- I debated posting them tomorrow so no one doubted, but this felt more seasonal.

[mechanismslorearchive]

Out of personal curiosity (both mine and Travis's):

(one of us will almost certainly discuss it here when the poll is over, for anyone who wonders! it is our beloved)

[mechanismslorearchive]

This is the question we all need answered..

Does Jonny bite?

Do you want the canonical answer or the answer we all know in our hearts to be true? While there are instances in canon of other things (octokittens) biting Jonny, there is no evidence of his biting someone (at least, not while they're still alive-- he does eat people). In fact, the crew claims that they, collectively, don't bite, even if "other forms of assault are fair game." Of course, they may be lying, as they do about most things.

However, I think we all know instinctively that that man is a biter.

[mechanismslorearchive]

hi i have a question because i'm uh stupid and ur my last hope for an answer since yk ur an lore archive for mecha, WHO IS DR CARMILLA? HOW DO I FIND ANY INFORMATION ABOUT HER??

Hello! This is a fantastic question, actually, because it gives me a chance to infodump about my beloved Carmilla.

I don’t know how much information you have, so I’m going to start at the very beginning.

In-character: Dr. Carmilla was the scientist who invented the mechanization process and created (some of!) the Mechanisms. She traveled with them for a while before departing under mysterious circumstances, which the crew claims was a tragic accident involving her falling out of (read: one of the crew shoved her out of*) an airlock. She is loosely inspired by the titular character of the 1872 vampire novel Carmilla by J Sheridan Le Fanu.

Since her time with the mechs, she’s been up to vague and mysterious shenanigans, and last I heard was working with a forthcoming band called Dr. Carmilla and the Void Quartet.

Out-of-character: she’s another musical artist named Maki Yamazaki who originally formed the band as Dr. Carmilla and the Mechanisms, before they decided to go their separate ways. She still makes music, both as Dr. Carmilla and as herself!

It’s worth noting that while the Mechanisms don’t discuss her in a flattering light, they do canonically lie to the audience (source with spoilers to Death to the Mechanisms), and that there are two sides to every story. Carmilla has been a… let’s say, a controversial figure to the fandom, in the past, but, if I can editorialize a bit, she is no more evil or violent than any of the Mechanisms (which is to say, she’s done many terrible things, but no worse than they have).

If you want more information about her, the two starting points I’d recommend are this fantastic and extremely thorough post by lucky-sevens, and checking out her music, which you can find on her Bandcamp here or on YouTube here! There’s also Lashings, which is the only live show we have a full recording of where she appears with the Mechs, and is well worth a watch!

(*The crew canonically shoved her out an airlock on at least three occasions, but according to word-of-god canon from Maki her final departure was not via the airlock! Still, I’m including these sources for informational purposes)

[mechanismslorearchive]

Hello friends, Romans, and countrymen!

Travis and I have been talking about tumblr's announcement with AI. Neither of us are giving up on tumblr just yet, but we're guessing a lot of people will jump ship, and we don't want the mechs fandom to splinter. Travis is making a dreamwidth, but we also wanted to get a sense of where mechs fans are already going so we can stay as unified as possible. So with all that said:

[mechanismslorearchive]

So we appear to have found a person on Livejournal that was connected with Dr. Carmilla and the Mechanisms, mentioning them by name, as early as June 2009?

We have no idea who this person is, but it puts the earliest formation up to a year or so earlier than we previously thought, and raises a large number of questions.

Or, in Travis's words: "I'm having a crisis."

[mechanismslorearchive]

Does the crew of the Aurora canonically discuss, plan out, and practice all their songs before performing them? I know there is (was?) the "random quotes said during rehearsal" Twitter page, but I figured that was more about the performer's shenaniganery than anything canonically to the mechsverse.

I just want to know if Jonny D'Ville has to keep defending his tendency to take the lead role in every album they perform, or if someone's solo crime time ever gets interrupted by the Aurora showing up out of the blue because the rest of the crew desperately needs them playing their instrument to figure out how it fits into the songs.

Ik Carmilla's old website mentions that her "children" continue the cycle of music and crime, so I've desperately got to know if there's anything on their rehearsal or practice process hahaha

You're right that the thingsmechssay twitter was out of character. There isn't any solid, unambiguous canon on how this works in-character, but there is a tweet from Kofi Young that sheds some light on one perspective:

(The bit about personal canon refers to the fact that any of the performers would have a different answer, and that each is equally canon-- this tweet isn't to be taken as word-of-god evidence that no other interpretation is correct, but it's one idea of how that works!)

[mechanismslorearchive]

This, by the way, is exactly why I phrased our intro post as "as complete as possible"-- I swear we're going to keep finding new things until we're both eighty

[mechanismslorearchive]

I'm assuming y'all know about Morgan's Nastya/Aurora fic

But if not.. it's interesting for sure (NSFW) so be wary

oh we know.

we know.

(and it is archived, as it counts as canon in our eyes! the only reason it isn't on the fiction page of the website is, according to a tweet by Morgan, because Jonny wouldn't let him put smut on the official website)

[mechanismslorearchive]

Hey. Has anyone ever wanted to read an interview with Maki about Dr. Carmilla? Because Travis has just found:

[mechanismslorearchive]

@bag-0f-b0nes I'm making a separate post for this (for everyone else, this was a comment under the post of my greatest journalistic failure, aka the "does jonny bite" ask), but it is implied that Jonny participated in Moon War-era cannibalism in the GPTVTMK lyric "Thank your lucky stars that you taste so good/ cause you wouldn't want your corpse to go to waste." Jonny's cannibalistic tendencies are confirmed in this exchange in Eskhatos:

“I’m sure they’ll find something to eat,” Jonny said, taking another bite from his chunk of meat. He paused in contemplation. “Since we’re not technically human, does it count as cannibalism?” Ashes shook their head. “You ask me this every time you eat someone, and the answer is still I don’t give a fuck.

So Jonny canonically regularly eats people, and asks if it's 'technically' cannibalism whenever he does!

[mechanismslorearchive]

Last night I dreamt I came across a cache of canon information about Ivy. All I remember is that there were a bunch of photos and canon drawings of her kissing Raphaella, and that according to this source, she was actually usamerican

[mechanismslorearchive]

A fun behind-the-scenes fact about the archive that I don’t think we’ve mentioned before is that I’ve taken to referring to Travis as Photos Georg

“average mechs fan has 5 million photos” is actually a statistical error. travis gunpowderdtim, who has every known mechs photo and then some, is an outlier and should not have been counted

[mechanismslorearchive]

Hello lore enjoyers. I have a post I have been meaning to make about the mechanisms blog posts. I am going to make this post by the end of the week. I am posting this now in the interest of promising publicly to do it so I stop putting it off.

[mechanismslorearchive]

heard some people say jonny is cononicaly omni? do you know where this is from?

This is from a twitch clip from Jonny’s streams! I don’t have the link at the moment, but someone asked him quite a while ago about the joke/discourse (brief pause as I am overcome with the specters of discourse past) regarding Jonny d’Ville being homophobic, based on the line in one of the fictions where he asks if Nastya is having one of her “queer orgies.”

Jonny said that he didn’t write that story, so he can’t say for sure what was intended with the line in question, but that d’Ville is, in his mind, omnisexual, and not homophobic. This makes it word-of-god canon, which of course depending on your approach to the text (the text in this case being the albums, fictions, social media posts, and other in-character, official sources) may or may not count as canon in the way that, say, Brookes from Pump Shanty (Bashful) being mlm does. But that’s where it comes from!

[mechanismslorearchive]

I am glad we are doing it and it's important but screenshotting every single tumblr post made by the mechs is incredibly tedious

the good news? the thorough approach means I get to feed my personal ouatis obsession through all the fanart people made of it in 2012-2014