#I kinda stopped watching Ren at some point early on in where this headcanon starts

[leo-crafts-theories]

Ren the Cyberdog

You know that accident that nearly killed Ren at the end of s7, where he fell into his own lava river (I think)? Where he had to get some janky-looking cybernetics from Renbob that may or may not have been made of random junk/spare parts laying around the RV? Let's talk about that.

The rules of when respawn does and doesn't work are... shaky, in my thoughts. (in my fics I get a lot of mileage out of situations where the characters are unsure whether respawn is working right or not.) Either due to a glitch, or because Ren was lingering for so long at the end of HC-7's inhabitation, respawn wasn't working for him. So, he had to get rescued, and patched up, and has now been permanently altered in the ambiguous eyes of The Universe.

What cybernetics does he have? His right arm at the elbow, and right leg at the knee; some grafted patches on the left side of his chest and leg; maybe one or both eyes (haven't decided on that yet); and, arguably most importantly, an artificial heart/pacemaker in his chest. He would have died without these augments.

Throughout his time on HC-8, Ren's cybernetics remained janky as hell. Stubbornness? Not having the time? Too much interruption by manic voices in his and Doc's heads? It doesn't really matter. The jank is why Ren always looked so pale and about a step away from death all season.

When they finally left HC-8 - once again rescued by Renbob - Bob knew a guy, who knew another guy, who could do proper cybernetic work. (Doc, somehow, had no idea who this contact was, despite having run in those circles for quite some time.) Ren's slapdash spare parts were swapped out for real, modern tech. He was given the option to show it off, like Doc, but Doc mostly has his tech exposed for maintenance and intimidation purposes, and Ren is not the intimidation sort. So he picked the cosmetic option to hide whatever wasn't under clothing anyway. Many people outside Hermitcraft don't even know, and can't tell at first glance.

Fics about this headcanon

Ren shows the pacemaker, and explains a little bit to BigB:

Ren and Doc both encounter cybernetics issues, based on a canon moment where they had just finished a bit of their ARG and returned to Hermitcraft, but kept crashing/disconnecting from the server. (This wasn't even the first time their shenanigans messed them up; the whole "look in this hopper and instantly crash" thing from the chunk of death is something I've decided is cybernetics-related as well!)