hello lets talk about robots

[redthedragon]

this is an undead post!
IE: if it's dead, no it isn't. It's permanent. It never dies. If you want to come in five years from now with a comment then good for you, let's jam.

I got a list of prompts for you, and I want you to answer it, and then we can ~headcanon jam~ because I feel like it.


1) What's your favorite thing about a character that you like but who makes you uncomfortable?
2) What's the coolest thing your favorite character did that no one talks about enough?
3) What's your favorite pairing? (Note: if i don't ship it this is your chance to make me. Write the ship manifesto. I'll read it. I'll jam with you)
4) What's your least favorite pairing (between characters you like)?
5) What's some personality trait that you can just mine for gold in one of the characters you like?
6) How do you see your favorite established relationship (platonic or romantic or enemy-ic or whatever) coming together? What does it (or could it say about those characters?
7) What's your favorite theme?
8) What's your favorite worldbuilding tidbit?
9) What's your favorite worldbuilding headcanon? What does that mean for the text?


You can respond to any, all, or none of these! I want to hear Interesting Tidbits. I want to hear what gets your (metaphorical) engine to turn over. Or maybe something that gets under your plating in a badgood way. Let's talk about implications! Let's talk about throwaway lines that Could Mean Things even if you don't really think it does! It is that deep but if it isn't it's time to break out the pickaxes (if you so desire) and MAKE it that deep. "The ground is soft and I'm ready to dig" but even if it isn't I own power tools and a disregard for common sense, let's put some holes in this thing.

Metaphorically speaking.

Note that this post may be updated with new prompts; I'll keep a log down here.

Comments

[autobotscoutriella]

Oooh, I have got a Cool Thing that my fave did that not enough people talk about!

So, Bayverse Blackout. His only major scene in the entire movie, and the very first time we see a live-action Cybertronian on-screen. And it is this one Decepticon fucking up an entire military base without breaking a metaphorical sweat. It is awesome. It is terrifying. I entirely understand why his Animated counterpart was the lone survivor of a battle between the Wreckers and the Decepticon Heavy Brigade. (I don't care if that's not Bayverse-canon, I'm still headcanoning him as the last Heavy Brigade survivor because it's cool, damnit.) He's absolutely terrifying and I love him.

[redthedragon]

Ooh, that is cool!

Honestly, Bayverse Blackout was really cool, and I liked his introduction a lot. One of my biggest complaints with Bayverse on the whole is how many neat characters they introduced and then just inexplicably wrote out, and Blackout was one of them. He was just so cool.

I've never heard about the Autobot Wreckers or Decepticon Heavy Brigade in Animated. That also sounds neat as hell. Is it sort of analogous to IDW's Wreckers and ...whatever the IDW Decepticon counterpart was?

Bayverse did such a good job coming up with unbelievably terrifying Decepticons with absolutely neat concepts. Reedman lives in my head rent free, for example. It's (imo) a shame the movies don't have more like broad interest in the fandom, because I'd love to see some of them explored further- Blackout included.

[autobotscoutriella]

I'll be honest, my personal headcanon for Bayverse always includes Blackout surviving, one way or another. He is FAR too cool to go out in the first movie. If nothing else, he's got a recognizable tail number, and I really, really wanted him to show up in later movies for the "oh fuck" reaction from the human survivors from the first movie. The lack of surviving Decepticons between movies meant we didn't really get much of the "oh shit, it's so-and-so" horror, and I feel like Blackout being remembered as the guy who completely wrecked a military base single-handedly the first time he showed up and never stopped doing that would have been far more interesting.

Blackout was a pretty minor character in Animated, so his entire backstory comes from tie-in material, but it is awesome. Basically, in the backstory war that happened pre-series, the Animated Wreckers were a black-ops commando team and were such a giant hassle for the Decepticons that Megatron specifically created the Decepticon Heavy Brigade to deal with them. The two units almost completely wiped each other out and Blackout was the only survivor on either side to walk away from the final battle. When he shows up in the actual show, he's still wearing the Brigade brand (slightly modified from the regular Decepticon one) because he IS the Heavy Brigade now. It's not necessarily Bayverse canon, but it would have added SO much dimension to the Bayverse characterization we do have - per the tie-in material, BV Blackout is basically The Starscream to Starscream, and having him slightly outside the main chain of command for Heavy Brigade reasons would play into that really well. Honestly, I'd love to see the Decepticon Heavy Brigade in general incorporated into more continuities (minus the complete wipe-out) because the idea that the Wreckers were SUCH a problem that Megatron specifically made a unit to go after them speaks volumes.

Blackout has so little fan interest it makes me sad. There's a handful of good fics out there (I have a very good friend who roleplayed a really detailed TFP Blackout for a while, so I got a lot of my headcanons from her), but most of the time if he shows up at all it's in the background. (Or as a rapist, for some reason, which is...not my favorite characterization, for a lot of reasons. I don't mind fucked-up fic, but Blackout is always written as a very Generic Evil Guy in those.) I'm actually kind of surprised Blackout/Megatron as a ship almost never seems to come up, because Blackout's biggest canon personality trait in Bayverse is "super fixated on finding Megatron and pissed at Starscream because he thinks Starscream's not trying hard enough". There's potential there!

[redthedragon]

For sure. And it also just makes for a more continuous story; Bayverse always had this like revolving-door approach to the Decepticon characters that I never really liked.

OOH yeah that's pretty damn cool. And very impressive.

Honestly, I feel like bayverse as a whole is really overlooked as a place to start ficcing from. I first got into Transformers in 2017 or 18ish, so I probably missed a lot of it, but I really feel like there was a lot of potential there that just gets written off in favor of "lol ew, michael bay, evil optimus, weird bug babies" with basically nothing else. I've seen some stuff with Barricade, but that's about it.

Generic Badguy Rapist is like my least favorite characterization for any character. People constantly assign that one to Impactor too, and it's just irritating. If the writer wanted an OC, they could just make one up and save us all the trouble.

[autobotscoutriella]

Honestly I suspect that's why Barricade, out of all the Bayverse Decepticons, gets more fan attention - he's the only one other than Megatron and Starscream who actually shows up in more than one movie.

The Wreckers-Heavy Brigade rivalry is an excellent concept. Someday I'll get around to writing actual fic about it.

Bayverse introduced a lot of really neat concepts and then didn't actually do much with them, which to me is PRIME fanfic fuel (pun intended). I want to read fic about the weird Decepticon Command hierarchy, and the feral skeleton bug babies, and Optimus's corruption arc, and what exactly is Blackout's deal with Scorponok, and and and... but the fandom isn't super interested. Even back in 2009 when I got into the fandom, a lot of the Bayverse fic was heavily mixed with G1 canon.

Generic villains in general make me sad. If I click on a fic tagged with a character's name, I want to read about that character, not the cut-and-paste bad guy who's just there as an obstacle for the heroes! (Now I kind of want to write fic including both Blackout and Impactor, no Generic Badguy Rapists included, but I don't think I have a good enough handle on Impactor's character. Which is a shame. They'd be fun enemies.

[redthedragon]

Yeah, I'm with you. It's hard to get particularly attached to a character if they're on screen for one scene annd then vanish forever (although fuck knows I've done it, see above with my comments about Reedman lmfao)

100% same. Bayverse is just so chock full of STUFF. Every fic I've ever read that really leans into the Bayverse-y worldbuilding (even if the characters are from elsewhere) is just. so. [waves hands around] it's just so NEAT

Same. Like, I don't... mind that much if someone wants to write a generic badguy, but I don't want that to be tagged as a character, and I don't want a character to have all their personality scooped out so that they can go and be Generic Rapist #7 or something. It really isn't that hard to just come up with an oc name. Impactor really does make for a great enemy; he's got a major hateboner for all of the Decepticon Heavy Brigade analogues in his universe to the degree that he went and did a war crime about it to whack them all. I think Sole Survivor Blackout would like, eat at him. He'd really hate that he missed one. It'd be great. The IDW1 Wreckers comics (Last Stand of the Wreckers, Sins of the Wreckers + Requiem of the Wreckers) all together don't take too long to read, and pretty much function as a standalone from the rest of the IDW continuity as long as you like. don't think too hard about some of their flashbacks and stuff lol. If you wanted to mess around with Impactor, pretty much the entire series is focused on him. (And Springer. And Overlord. And Tarantulas. but also Impactor lol)

[sexytronians]

Oh this looks fun!

1) What's your favorite thing about a character that you like but who makes you uncomfortable?

How Motormaster treats the Stunticons. Like QoS’s fics I love because they make me uncomfortable which is a nice feeling sometimes. But the way they don’t shy away are uncomfortable.


2) What's the coolest thing your favorite character did that no one talks about enough?

Scavenger has terrifying aim in the g1 movie and I’m amazed secretly badass Scavenger isn’t more of a thing.

3) What's your favorite pairing? (Note: if i don't ship it this is your chance to make me. Write the ship manifesto. I'll read it. I'll jam with you)
I know this means one ship but I’ve got a lot of favourites. I even managed to narrow them down!

-Scrapper/Hook. They’re such a good combination and play off each other well. Hook is the engineer there to make Scapper’s artistic ideas plausible. Scrapper is social and easy going where as Hook is antisocial and painfully uptight. They squabble a lot and argue but love each other platonically or romantically in a deep and possibly codependent way depending how I feel.

-Motormaster and Breakdown. I just like tiny cute guys being fucked by big mean guys. On a less horny level, I feel like the dynamic between them can be fun as a dark abusive mess. The expected dynamic can be flipped on it’s head with Breakdown being the dominant or far more aware of Motormaster and how to manipulate him into doing what Breakdown wants than anyone realises.

-Vortex/First Aid.
I like the dynamic because it can be either really horny, or fucked up. Or both. They’re such opposites and play off each other well.

4) What's your least favorite pairing (between characters you like)?

-G1 Jazz/Prowl in certain flavours. But more specifically when people write an arguably black coded character as a sex worker like they read an Exodus Cry manifesto as a reference. Also it’s a bit of a case of me being bored by most depictions of the ship because they’re a bit sameish?

-Knockout / G1 Breakdown. You already know why I don’t like this one.

-Dead End/Motormaster. Ruined for me by antis shipping it and I’m just not into it unless other Stunticons are involved.

5) What's some personality trait that you can just mine for gold in one of the characters you like?

-Angry characters. Because I’ve gotta know why they’re so pissed.

-Scared characters. ‘Breakdown is scared’ is less fun than ‘Breakdown is scared because of paranoid delusions and also because he has reasonsto be paranoid’

6) How do you see your favorite established relationship (platonic or romantic or enemy-ic or whatever) coming together? What does it (or could it say about those characters?
I have so many potential versions of characters getting together I don’t think I can list them all lol.

7) What's your favorite theme?
How someone’s environment and experiences shape them. How someone copes with horrific circumstances. How love can look like so many things regardless of if platonic and romantic. What does disability look like for alien robots?

8) What's your favorite worldbuilding tidbit?

Mixmaster’s stutter, Motormaster having a bunk in his altmode and Jazz liking dancing.

9) What's your favorite worldbuilding headcanon? What does that mean for the text?

Seekers and Praxians can feel air currents ect with their wings. Lacking eyes or eye function isn’t considered a serious disability in the same way that loosing a wing would be because wings are so vital for communication and sensory analysis.

[redthedragon]

1) Oh big mood. I read their fics like looking at a trainwreck.

2)Honestly yeah. Especially because Scavenger of all characters has such beautiful yandere potential, if you want to go there. It's not usually my thing, but like.... the potential is right there!

3) Oh, I should fix that wording, I'm the multiest multishipper there is and my "favorite ship" changes based on the hour, let alone the day LMAO
Scraphook is a great ship name, so that also helps LMAOOO. Honestly, I usually go for the Constructicons as one big messy polycule but I like that breakdown. It's neat. These two really do have very complimentary personalities.
YES YES MANIPULATIVE BREAKDOWN YES THANK YOU. I fucking LOVE Big Horny Kind Of Dumb!Motormaster and "ohgodohfuck" Quick Thinking -> Oh. huh that works!Breakdown. It really just throws so many various load-bearing wrenches into the entire dynamic. Like, sure, you could stop Breakdown from manipulating Motormaster, but then things would start to fall apart, and sure, you could stop Motormaster from occasionally going and screwing Breakdown, but same problem there. It's just such a mess. It's so good.
Vortex/First Aid mmmmmm very delicious food. one guess what i've been reading all morning lmfao

4) god there are antis in the stunticons fandom??? what are they even doing here

5) Oh, mood. Those really are the softest grounds, lol. "This character is [emotion that is a response to some stimulus]. Just like that. In a vacuum :) nothing else to it" okay say no more, i'm getting out the shovel, because this could be So much deeper.

7) does going "vibes" here work? vibes. good themes.

8) motormaster having a bunk in his altmode is honestly really cute. Like that's just SUCH a touch.

9) Oh i like that. I've always preferred headcanons where there was anything other than Just Eyes Like Humans for the robots. And wing/doorwing body language and communication is great.
yvannairie and I were talking a little while back about different methods that TFs could use for observing the environment, like. Sonar. EM fields. Etc.
I actually like to think that they might not "see" in the traditional way at all, depending on what they do. Why would you need to encode data as visual images that could be easily understood by organics if you never come into contact with them, and stuff? I'm working on an oc at the moment who pretty much exclusively uses (my very fantasy version of) EM and heat-seeking to navigate, without ever really messing with the visual spectrum because it's just not terribly useful for her purposes.

[redthedragon]

2) Ooh. I'll have to check that out then.

3b) YEAH! And like... it really isn't that unreasonable, either. The entire dynamic they have is just. nightmarish. I mean it's great for us, but fuck knows I wouldn't want to be part of it. Breakdown leaning into making things slightly more predictable is probably the best choice he has, and just making him "the nice one" is like. it's boring. it doesn't even make sense. There's so much more meat on his bones than all that.

8) mshsdla i was about to plug QoS's humanformers Stunticons fic but I realized you've probably gotten there before I did. Anyway please send me a link if and when you do that, because I want to seeeeeeeee, lmao.

9) I usually don't get into it in my fics; it takes the pace down and I tend to just skimp on all the descriptive details in general lol. But I am always Thinking about it.
Oh, I really like that idea. That makes a lot of sense.

[sexytronians]

3b. Same here. I don't want that shit but I do want to make the pretend robots cry. Yeah like, I feel manipulation is one of the few methods of control he has in his life. A terrible fucked up one but no one has taught him better. Imo Drag Strip can also be manipulative but he can't do what he sees as lowering himself to do what Breakdown does.
Yes! its the same with all the Stunticons not just Motormaster to me. Again, QoS does this well because they give all the Stunticons a good balance of hurtful* behaviors and genuine care for each other.

(* not a good word for this but work fried my brain.)

8. Yes I've read all of their Stunticon fics. I'm not sure when I would be writing that it just depends on the ADHD wheel of interest--I never quite know what I will be writing when I sit down to write.

9. I tend to do a lot of descriptive details but I think that's because I visualise scenes in my fanfics like movie scenes. I can 'see' all the backgrounds and sensory stuff the characters experience so tend to write it.

[sexytronians]

(Reposted this because the thing I said about antis felt like it’d give me possible drama and I felt like I was being a bit too much of a dickhead. Enough that it bothered me for like days. But I wanted to keep the rest of my reply up.)

2. I have a fic that uses that potential if you ever wanna check it out.
https://archiveofourown.org/works/280976/chapters/446669

3a. Oh cool! I should have included more ships lol.
I’ve never used or seen that ship name but yes it is good and I will use it now. I also love them as one big messy polycule but sometimes I like focusing on the dynamics between two or three Constructicons in particular.

3b. It is far too easy to make Breakdown the ‘nice Stunticon’ and it gets boring for me tbh. Especially as QoS wrote him as manipulative even if he’s got good intentions in The Second Time and I just ran with it.

Breakdown using Motormaster because he knows it’s safer to be in Motormaster’s bed than outside of it know that most ‘Cons won’t touch him because Motormaster would kill them (or at least try really hard to.)

Breakdown knows Motormaster wants to feel powerful and important but also needed. Because in Motormaster’s mind if the other Stunticons didn’t need him to lead, why would they keep him around and who else would want him?

Breakdown is very good at making Motormaster feel like he needs him. Like he’s the only one who can help Breakdown be happy and feel safe. And doesn’t that feel good to know Breakdown will never abandon him?

Also Breakdown can make Motormaster feel important and powerful via being very enthusiastic over taking his big cables. Which Breakdown will emphasise the hugeness of. (Motormaster is not great at sex but Breakdown is fine with okay sex if he gets to watch Vortex be smashed into a wall repeatedly by Motormaster for groping Breakdown.)

8. I need to write one of the Stunticons being turned human just so they can sleep in the bunk and Motormaster can have weird feelings about it.

9. Yeah! I tend to write them as seeing like humans for convenience sales in a lot of my fics. But honestly Cybertonrians having non human senses is so fun. I like the idea that Scavenger for example sees using his tail and by pinging sonar regularly. Which works great in mines which he was built to work but not so much open spaces—hence why he was a great shot in the movie—the enclosed space shuttle meant he could ‘see’ really well!

[heliopauseentertainments]

I'm late! I'm not and I know that.

1. Favorite thing about a character I like but who makes me uncomfortable (Tarantulas, all continuities) is that he is a spider (I'm afraid of spiders, precisely why I'm uncomfortable but also like him), but not only that, his alt is designed off of a female tarantula (for pedipalps reasons). This leads to all kinds of interesting questions, but also, to be fair to the designers, female tarantulas look really impressive whereas male tarantulas tend to be kinda... gangly and weird. GNC spider who is an unethical scientist.

2. (Un)luckily most of my faves like Megatron and Prowl get talked about a lot, so I'm going to pick... Skybyte. In RID(2001) he regularly EATS THE ROAD. Bless that weird flying shark man. RID(2001) was weird as balls, but Skybyte was there and that made everything worth it. Also no one talks about how he eats the road at high speed. When people talk about him, they talk about his poetry, but they're sleeping on what really matters: his nonsense.

3. MegaRod, but it's early so this is less a ship manifesto and more an overly detailed packaging label.

Look, hear me out, I know your fave stuff is not MTMTE/LL and I'm against proselytizing as a policy so normally I would refrain, but you asked.

What does this ship have? Well, in no particular order:

• Bickering (that goes from hostile to good-natured).


• Personality clash (both as individuals and in leadership styles - "sensible" guy and impulsive guy)


• They are both having mid-life crises at the same time but over vastly different things.


• Questionably ethical (Megatron is technically in custody and they are coworkers)


• Potentially scandalous (guy who notoriously makes questionable decisions & Mr. Retired-Mass-Murderer)


• Size difference (of your choice since Megan can become minibot-sized but Roddy can also climb him like a squirrel)


• Built-In Tragedy (heavily implied that Megatron is going to die, for in-universe understandable reasons, regardless of what they do, so there is a seemingly unavoidable tragic end). Note: even if the relationship is nonromantic, that's still incredibly tragic to lose someone you're close to


• Built-In Enemies-To-Friends (+To-Lovers if you so choose)


• Megatron knows one of Rodimus' major secrets (destruction of Nyon)
• Trauma from Megatron having murdered Hot Rod (and thusly created Rodimus)


• The weird involvement of Rodimus in Megatron's own absolutely bonkers creation


• Rodimus stopping Megatron from committing suicide-in-the-line-of-duty on multiple occasions (but at least once by holding his hand)


• Megatron outsourced his conscience to Rodimus and Minimus, which could lead to hilarious/sweet/sad/wild outcomes


• And much more but I woke up less an hour ago.

4. Hard to pick a least favorite between characters I like, because I either really like something, I like it okay, or I go "meh." It's hard to say. I guess I'm going to have to say JazzProwl or Dratchet. They're just kinda... meh for me even if I like all of the characters involved individually.

5. Prowl's suspicion, at least in IDW iterations. I can't really do that in other ones, because he's either chill (TFA) or just there (G1, RID[2001], etc.). While he's smart, I enjoy letting his suspicions take hold and run in absolutely buckwild directions. He lets me look at a situation and go "What is the most ungenerous/absurd interpretation of this someone can make, no matter how unlikely?"

6. I'm a little thrown by the meaning of "established." "Established" as in "canon"? If a relationship is canon then we generally, not always, already know how they come together. I wanna be able to answer the question you're actually asking and not something else unrelated, but I'm not sure I follow.

7. I dunno if I have one? Or at least, if I do, it's not somewhere I can find in my brain at the moment. Let's come back to this one.

8. For this one, I'm going to pull from IDW1 again. I've got lots of favorites but this is what I'm coming up with on this not yet-6AM morning. Camiens have a different physiology than Cybertronians as a result of their environment (low resources/limited energy on a moon heated by a white dwarf star), despite the fact that they theoretically all come from the same hotspot and that there's no apparent way for hot spots to adjust like that. Also even then, how would a hot spot/newly forged spark know they were about to be born into a low energy environment?

From one simple tidbit, I have so many questions, especially for a species that, while capable of modifying itself, is not subject to evolution/natural selection in the same way that organic life is. Is the difference in physiology something they somehow induced on purpose when first colonizing the moon? Who knows!

9. A headcanon I have, with absolutely zero reason for it be this way other than amusement, is that to save on fuel costs, cold constructed miners were modified to be able to ingest and extract necessary nutrients from rocks. It's not actually particularly healthy for them, but being able to eat waste rock stretches fuel supplies and costs. I'd imagine they'd also get used to it. Also it's funny to imagine Megatron and/or Impactor just picking up a piece of feldspar or something and just having a casual snack much to the horror of literally everyone around them.

This originally evolved from an idea I had of chemical testing equipment to identify ore being tricky to bring underground, so it would be convenient if the miners, who are already down there, could actually just test it themselves. Where would be a convenient location to install a chemical sensor suite without it getting in the way?

That's right. The mouth.

We knew a bunch of people who attend a rock club and, look, they just lick rocks.

[redthedragon]

You're not late! This post is from like three days ago lmao. Even if you were coming in late, it's not that kind of post anyway, but you're hardly late.

1) "Your scientist ex is gnc as fuck" "you're insane!" lol

2) HE JUST EATS THE ROAD????
No one has literally EVER mentioned that where I could see it jshflahlk god that's so fucking funny. Good for him, get them snaccs. Oh my god.

3) Oh I don't dislike MTMTE/LL, I'm just like. in "this song has been playing on loop on the radio for the past like three years and no one wants to talk about anything on the same album that wasn't that" mode lmfao.
MegaRod is a good one, imo. So much potential. Also you get the potential for "extremely awkward best friend is your new boyfriend's ex" stuff with drift is so funny to me, if I didn't ship it for any of the other reasons I'd have to ship it because of the past!Deadlock/Megatron shenanigans.

4) Understandable. Sometimes I really don't like certain ships, but that's usually just a result of overexposure about something I feel meh about tbh. It gets on my nerves sometimes.

5) Oh, mood. It provides so much narrative tension, too.

6) Oh, I meant more like... how do you like to think it happened. Canon or not. Like, I've got a whole thing about Nickel and Tarn having an explicit BDSM relationship; that's obviously nowhere in canon but I could tell you about it anyway. Or, like, Vortex and First Aid, or something. Like, some relationships are fun to think about as just a thing that already exists, you know? Whereas others are more fun for the seduction or the chase or whatever.
I need to go back and adjust the wording on some of these lol.

8) Oh, I just figured that was an upgrades and construction thing. I guess the beauty of Transformers is that there are so many different ways to interpret how they like come into being, but I'm a big fan of "everyone gets some kind of upgrades to match their environment" personally. It just makes more sense to me.
Regardless, though, that's certainly neat. I wonder if there's some way to like almost program the Sentio Metallico to try and output the result you want?

9) dsfjakfhalsdsakakshdfl oh i LOVE that. I do think there's some canon support for "licking rocks means you can identify what's in them" with Swerve but I can't exactly remember where it was; doesn't he scrape up and eat some shavings of some planet or another to identify what it's made of?
God that's funny. Gives a whole new meaning to Drift's collection of crystals.

[heliopauseentertainments]

Oh, yeah, I know I'm not late. I was just joking about being late, lol.

2. Yeah, he totally eats the road! Among other shenanigans. Honestly, he's the only real reason to watch RID(2001). Unfortunately, the wiki doesn't show any of the pictures of him eating the road: https://tfwiki.net/wiki/Sky-Byte_(RID)#2001_Robots_in_Disguise_cartoon

I think the first time he does it, he's chasing Side Burn, who is a sports car obsessed with red sports cars. He'd like Hot Rod and Knock Out a lot. Watching Side Burn hit on non-living vehicles is another great reason to watch RID(2001).

3. Yeah, the over-saturation of MTMTE/LL is a lot, I hear you. But also yes, the weird ex drama would be/is awesome. Yet another reason to also enjoy MegaDrift.

4. Yeah, overexposure is definitely part of it for me too.

5. I love Prowl pulling a Phoenix Wright (though more accurately a Phoenix Wrong) and causing trouble/adding more narrative tension.

6. OH! Now I gotcha. Thanks for the clarification. In that case, I'm going to pull from MiniMegs. Regardless of relationship type, I think they would have confused/logicked themselves into it through a weird, unlikely series of logic leaps and weirdly calm debate that end up at emotional and/or physical intimacy. The type of shenanigans that only two overly "logical" can end up in. One moment, you're trying to talk about the budget and hour later, someone's upside down on a desk with their legs in weird places to prove some sort of now unrelated point.

8. Maybe it was mass upgrades that became just a thing Camiens do. Who knows. It was a comment in passing that came up only a couple of times (in TAAO, I think? It came into play with the Sovereign/Sentinel debacle but I can't remember where exactly that was). I do like the idea you mentioned about "upgrades to match the environment." That would make the most sense, but maybe programmable Sentio Metallico? That would be super cool.

It could also lead to some incredibly unethical but very interesting experiments. I bet Tarantulas would know.

9. That's really what cause Drift/Deadlock to defect. Megan ate his crystal collection. That was the last straw.