#still mad about the microchips tho

[englishlaboratory]

I have to admit that I'm surprised people are flipping out over Dave Filoni writing Ahsoka to train Sabine. The change is consistent with his writing style, and it's far less drastic than his other choices.

"It breaks pre-established lore"

Remember the Clone Wars microchips that spat in the face of preexisting books and games? Or the inconsistencies in Kanan's origin between the books and Bad Batch? Or how RotS strongly implies Obi-Wan and Grievous had never met before? At least this change has some lore to back it up (Force in all things).

"Filoni is only doing this to make his original characters special"

That's not unique to him. Just look at Saba Sebatyne or Alema Rar from Legends. Ahsoka appears in TCW, Rebels, Mandalorian, and has her own show. I still remember when everyone thought she was going to die in Order 66

"It goes against the themes and purpose of the Jedi"

Again, microchips. A show that revolved around showing clones as people only to turn them into meat droids at the end of it. Not to mention the way he scrambled the characterization of the Night Sisters (not originally necromancers), General Grievous (look at 2003), Thrawn (more cartoonishly evil), and Onderon (it's almost unrecognizable from its source material)

[courfeyracs-swordcane]

teddy, king, beloved, sunbright,

what the fuck are the ballad brothers

Therse guys in my head. I don’t know very much about them but maybe making a masterpost will help? Literally I cannot emphasize enough how much I was just listening to music while I was driving and. now there’s guys in there. With a lot of implied sci-fantasy worldbuilding I don’t understand yet. Anyway!

Kyrie Aleidis Ballad

29, she/her, former sword-for-hire, current fugitive. The older Ballad Brother. Priorities include vibing and keeping things good for her baby brother (before) and trying to fix the world after it broke (metaphorically) while she was gone (after). Diagnosed big fuckoff “microchip sword like that guy from Transistor”

The Horatio to FG!C. The Gojo to Haibara. The Mordred to Gawain (HNOC). Also Guinevere (HNOC). Laertes (Hamlet). If Roddy was a little more serious and had less responsibility. Little bit of Cyclonus aswell but in a Whirl way. Dyker robobs if he was marginally less traumatized.

Alonzo ‘Toro’ Ballad

(Except only Kyrie is allowed to call him that)(Ari tried it once to be obnoxious and he punched them)

25, he/him, former Little Guy, current sword-for-hire. The younger Ballad Brother. Priorities include: being just like his sister when he grows up (before) and do you think he fuckin knows he’s just trying to get from day to day over here (after). Terminal funny bitch (emphasis on the bitch). He’s even asexual.

If Feldspar DM grew up to be FG!C/Underhill Jay Sleepaway. The Haibara to Gojo. Gawain HNOC. Tien Stormlight. Cyrus Planegays. They’re both kind of Zoro also actually. If Miki RGU grew up to be John-or-Benny OSCU. If you combined the entire Ricosquad robobs into one guy.

Ari Basil Finch (Seneca)

25, any pronouns, several jobs best summed up as Mad Scientist. (Weapons tech guy. Intern. Part time front desk in the financial department. Necromancer. Not the order they would put those in.) Priorities include: bringing their [somebody] back from the dead, causing problems on purpose. (No I don’t know who they’re trying to bring back I just know they can’t do it.)(why? good question.) Nepo baby extraordinaire. There’s something wrong with them in the brain <3

Other Things I Know:

there’s an organization

Kyrie fucked off to work there as a sword for hire when Alonzo was like 14 without saying anything (first time they had ever been meaningfully separated)

These bitches don’t have parents (possibly sci-fi shenanigans)

Alonzo found out that’s where she was a couple years later and joined up as soon as he could

Shortly before that she quit and/or got fired very very dramatically and became the organization’s Public Enemy Number One

Alonzo was kind of underground during that and he still doesn’t really know what’s going on. He’s not gonna get her ass tho.

At some point they have a confrontation swordfight on a roof. I don’t know what the deal with that is.

Alonzo and Ari have a weird fucked up gay thing going on best described as Part Time Boyfriends. Kind of dating. Also Ari is 100% milking the sugar daddy angle of Running Front Desk In The Financial Department. And also they’re kind of just coworkers (derogatory). (TLDR. POV you have to wrangle with the financial department at work to get your expenses account in order for your next assassination but you got a little too close to the guy running the front desk over there and now they think it’s funny to fuck with you)

Alonzo doesn’t have any faith in the necromancy. Heehoo!

That’s about it??? Rotations to follow.

[tumblunni]

I had such a weirdly detailed dream!

I remember feeling convinced this was a videogame, and like it had an aesthetic like a mixture of The Bouncer and Parasite Eve? There were a bunch of characters who could all turn into some sort of super form, and I just remember that all the ladies looked super similar and boringly sexualized and one was named Candy. And also i think one of them could turn into a 80s punk style dinosaur man? The gameplay was some sort of thing where I was playing a leader or strategist or something, and I didnt actually get to see any of the battles but just picked various teams to send off to fight different threats and then it played out automatically. It was just more about time management cos certain teams could defeat certain enemies faster.

I had the general sense that my protagonist was quite heartless and sarcastic, but also that there was no consequences if someone died. Like... we were fighting alien kaiju things, and we all had the same powers as them. And we were some sort of government experiment to create controllable aliens who could fight the aliens? But then we weren’t really just humans with the alien powers, we were some sort of.. like.. framework robots..??? We looked like those posing mannequins you use in art, except plastic/metal instead of wood. So like it was a situation where all the ‘characters’ were sorta costumes we put on? For some reason in order to use various powers we had to download some sort of ‘life data’ of various human characters, and then inhabit their personality and stuff. I think all these ‘characters’ were people who were part of the original experiment to create us, and they all died and we were the only successful experiments. But I don’t know if we were robots or if like we were once human too and suffered a complete erasure of identity into like.. full alien but just capable of sentience and understanding human language, and under the control of the human troops thanks to microchips or something. So probably all the kaijus were also these weird living metal mannequins too? And like their monster forms were.. ships?? They could also ‘wear’ various shapeshifts, and these big scary ones were like their equivelant of military warships. The stolen shapes of other alien species who could survive in the vaccuum of space, like trophies of their conquest of that other planet..

Anyway so we were a lil crew of strange mannequin people! And like any of us could become any of the ‘characters’, and we’d take turns and stuff. And tease each other for not playing them right, and swap tips on how to use punk guy’s powers and etc. It was like we were living a game. But also I think we really believed we were that person while we had them ‘installed’? Even if we all sorta interpreted each person differently based on our real personalities as the robot alien things. So like the punk guy would be really confused why he has a bunch of conflicting memories of all his previous lives, and like ‘man i used to like this ice cream flavour last week why did I completely forget that??’ Tho I think it was like at first we were lucid and knew who we were and then getting overwhelmed by the human personality was a bad sign from staying transformed too long. And we all had different stats in how long we could transform before that happened? And it was like a bad status effect cos that person would freak out and start acting weird or disobeying orders. Like punk dude running away from the battlefield and trying to find his still-living girlfriend and then the HUGE DEPRESSINGNESS of when it actually happened! Cos like ‘you’re not acting like him, you look like him but you’re not him’ and then being SO CONVINCED that you’re him, and you try and remember something to prove it but you just... can’t?? And she’s saying you’re dead and you were part of some experiment?? I just recall a really sad scene of someone who was 100% convinced they were human getting some sort of gash on their arm and seeing nothing but white metal, and then tearing off their own face to find nothing else but a blank mirrorlike orb. And the rest of the party found them all curled up in the corner of the bathroom half-transformed and like.. still making sobbing noises, all glitched up through their speakers, even though they didnt have any eyes to cry with. And then like all the human higher ups would just be mad at you for causing a scene, and making them have to explain to the girlfriend that her boyfriend had donated his corpse to science and this was just a machine using his parts, and then having to pay her off to keep it secret. So no sympathy whatsoever for the poor alien robot people who were suffering huge PTSD from having to switch identities so often. Being shoved full of someone else’s memories and having to come back from that over and over again, and remember what they really were...

So like.. all the mannequin people had formed a very close little family to support each other through all this hell. And they all still had sort of an aspect of innocence even though some of them were older models than others and took parental roles in the group. They tried to just think of the whole thing as a game and make Relateable Jokes about how punk guy’s range stat is terrible, so they could deal with the whole thing. And they also tried to see it as like.. secondary to their happy family life. Just a job that they had to do to keep food on the table. And they tried to only make the older models do it, and spare the newbies as much as possible. Which caused some conflict cos at least one of the kids was all ‘waaah but i wanna fight, i wanna be a hero, i wanna prove myself!’, not fully understanding the horror of it all. Maybe they were the one who had that freakout with the girlfriend? And I think they lived in some sort of old abandoned house that they were renovating into a liveable space. Tho they were robot alien mannequin things so they could live comfortably there even before they fixed it up, they just really wanted to pretend that they were a regular normal family. Reading all this stuff in books they’d scrounged from trashcans, and idealizing the concept of humanity...

But then the protagonist leader character was really cynical and hated all this, and kept being like ‘focus on the mission!’ and stuff. It would really wound their ego if they could realize the blatant truth that they were only promoted to leader because they were the most obedient and manipulateable... And then like the actual content of the dream was about some sort of day where there were too many alien attacks at once, and all of them had to suit up, even the kids. And like they’d already lost a bunch of the ‘characters’ in battle, and everyone was having to switch between forms over and over and getting really worn out both mentally and physically. And they were all getting pissed off at leader protagonist guy, cos apparantly they’d never actually gone out to fight in battle before? Like a ‘I’m too important, I need to stay behind’ ego thing. But then today they finally broke down and confessed that they were terrified of shapeshifting and losing their identity, and it was like a really vunerable moment of such an unapproachable asshole and the moment where they really became part of the family. And i think there might have been something about the leader bot being ‘defective’ and having human memories even before using any of the ‘characters’? Like they were born already remembering being one of the scientists who created these creatures. The first person who was used as a prototype experiment, the forbidden ‘secret character’... Like.. even though they were android things they also had some sort of biological element inside their core, alien cells that were necessary to run the whole thing. And all the ‘characters’ were humans who died in the experiments to try and give these powers to humans, before the scientists gave up and started making artificial people who could use these powers instead. But like they used the dead bodies of the failed experiments sorta as petri dishes? They had to cultivate more of the alien material if they were gonna build an alien from scratch. And this particular android was made from an alien core extracted from the first prototype- that one scientist who was dying of cancer and volunteered himself as an experiment. Apparantly something actually went right in that failed attempt, and the scientist’s soul or conciousness was successfully transferred into the alien core. He survived even if his body decayed away, and while they thought they were just injecting the spark into a machine to acivate it, they actually brought him back to life. ....or this is just a machine mafunctioning because the core was defective. Leader guy is really terrified of shapeshifting because he doesnt know which answer is true. He’s scared of finding out that his memories aren’t real, if all these fake memories end up feeling exactly the same as them. Maybe they’d just fall away as easy as sand through an hourglass, and then nothing would be left except the life he leads today. And he’s not as optimistic as the others, he can’t believe that they could ever make a ‘real family’, let alone someday defeat all the aliens and get to be free. I mean the humans will probably just execute the android division after the job is done... And all the other androids hug him as he sobs and assure him that even if he isn’t human he’s still a person, he’s still real, he’s still their beloved grandpa, yknow?

And then he finally used his powers and went some sort of super form out of Love Power, and kicked all the alien ass and saved the day! But the dream ended before I got any answer as to whether the ghost of that scientist within his soul was actually real or not. I’m sure he’d be okay either way, though.