#also if the main character either lacks empathy for robots or whose relationship with a robot character isn't built on the idea of

[brawltogethernow]

I'd like to hear more about your murderbot transmigrator thoughts :))

Okay obviously when I said I wasn’t going to think about a Murderbot/Scum Villain fusion that was more of a goal, which is a lot like a lie. I have pecked out ~1k of prose for it, but none of it is presentable for longer than one line. The problem with this concept is that it’s actually very good, and there are a lot of meaty ideas to dig into with it, like, too many of them.

1. Murderbot would be immedately inclined to empathize with the System and guess at its motivations. Depending on what those are this may still stay an antagonistic relationship, because the way the System leverages its cosmic powers to coerce and strongarm people stomps on a lot of Murderbot’s triggers and is generally a dick move. The points system is just a gamified governor module. But it’s still a relationship, and if the System turns out to be an antagonist, it’s in that role as a fleshed out character with a personality who has been interrogated by someone with every reason to assume somebody made it and has commanded it to act like this for their own reasons.

Murderbot asks its function and designates it NarrSystem (Narrative System) or StorySystem or something because “the System” is too generic coming from its setting.

2. Transmigrating into a human body would be badweird and transmigrating into a human brain would be absolutely horrifying. (SecUnit could transmigrate into a system, but we’ve kind of been there done that with 2.0.) Dysphoria central! Murderbot gets to address that while it has never wanted to be a human, all humans are so convinced that being human is better that on some level it WAS worried that they were right. And now it can say with absolute certainty that they are not and this sucks. But also some things that it would have thought would be fundamentally different are actually the same. It’s just a whole time.

This is part of why I’m deviating from transmigration story standard and full stop making the transmigration a temporary situation, the other main reason being that Murderbot has more going on in its own world than your standard transmigration protagonist.

3. Either Murderbot gets back by hacking the System or it intends to but it’s ultimately the System’s decision. This is a very slow process because it can’t access tech the way it’s used to and the System’s structure is very different from what it’s dealt with before (because it strongly resembles Windows Vista). It needs tech and more control over its situation stat though so it’s going to keep at it until it works. Open your damn menus. SecUnit is going to rig transmigration until it’s like playing The Sims with cheat codes.

4. (This one is for me.) The System still talks in garbled Chinese netspeak, and Murderbot is like. Wow this program speaks in the lost tongue of an ancient civilization. How old is it. I can barely understand it. (Because of the bad memes not the Chinese.)

5. Murderbot gets yeeted into The Rise and Fall of Sanctuary Moon and has to deal with the emotionally exhausting scenario of empathizing with everybody present. It likes the heroes, and it likes the other heroes they’re in conflict with, it likes the more complex villains with fleshed out motivations, and it even has a soft spot for a lot of the side characters and bit villains. This is fundamentally incompatible with how it tries to ration its empathy, assess situations by sorting people into allies/nonhostiles/hostiles, and compartmentalize by nicknaming the people it’s in conflict with things like Target 1, Target 2, and Target 3.

6. The Scum Villain’s Self-Saving System, as the specific transmigration variation we’re jumping off of here, was not trying to interrogate the infinity mirror effect of heteronormativity reflecting back and forth between media and people, and as such is not like, a solid narrative about this. That said, this book is basically like:

Shen Yuan reads this giant mess of a book with a lot of straight sex fantasies, not completely without appreciating the romance, but with more antipathy for it than he admits to himself. Then he ends up in the book and thinks he’s meant to enable the romances he read, which he’s so completely resigned to doing he doesn’t notice that the main character is queer and gone on him, or that he, himself, has been studiously suppressing the desires he assumes he should have while unable to perceive what he actually wants and how it affects his behavior.

So the Murderbot version of this is to subvert amatonormativity with your pretty explicitly aroace protagonist whose reaction to fictional romance is tolerant at best. Murderbot embraces its own lack of desire for romance but dances around acknowledging that it desires other relationships and seems to be working around the incorrect belief that romance and friendship are both human things and that’s why it doesn’t engage with them. So:

Murderbot ends up in the immediate leadup to the resolution of a love dodecahedron - maybe surrounding Eden, just as the only named character from TRAFOSM I think we have. And Murderbot is (internally) like...okay...I was never very moved by ANY of these people as romantic choices for you...but I might as well try to guide you to the least offensive ones, I guess. And it’s so mired in expectations based on its foreknowledge of this arc that it doesn’t notice until Eden spells it out that they’re ditching ALL their suitors and have realized they’re complete without romance and want to devote themself to finding their long lost birth mother or farming science or something, which just takes SecUnit tf out.

Possibly I will become really ungovernable and say that after seizing the System’s capabilities Murderbot just offers to take Eden on a reverse isekai right off of Sanctuary Moon, leaving ART’s crew and the Preservation team to be like, Where Did You Just Get This Entire Human.

7. Further going off svsss, there is a meta thread to interrogate by plunking Murderbot into a villain character. It's already an evil robot trope that declined to go evil, this is true in-universe and it knows it, and it has very low expectations of the morals of the group that it belongs to - informed by the same media that was a lifeline to it when it was in a very bad situation - that it is still in the process of working through. The layers.

So yeah there’s a lot going on here. Send help.

[seasonsandcenturies]

for the character ask meme: Pidge (if you haven't done her already) and/or Haggar

These are two characters I didn’t entirely expect to be asked about but here we go, anon!

Haggar

favorite thing about them: how SURPRISINGLY NUANCED she is as a villain?? she’s so loyal to Zarkon but she’s also kind of a wild card, because she doesn’t spend her time monologuing about what her plans are and it’s not clear just how much of her current actions are driven by remembering her past. she clearly doesn’t think the Galra need Voltron and is much more interested in using quintessence and genetic modification to make their empire last, but she’s also surprisingly invested in politics/maintaining the empire’s status quo, going out of her way to keep their crown prince alive despite not really getting along. she’s not a typical bad guy. it’s hard to say what really motivates her. is she self-serving? is she really just a mad scientist?  WHO KNOWS.

least favorite thing about them: specifically as Haggar, the basically immortal witch with rift-induced magic powers, and not as Honerva the potentially-redeemable genius alchemist? her cruelty. Haggar is not nice. it doesn’t seem possible for her arc to end in anything but a tragic death, because even if she regains her memories she can’t possibly atone for 10,000 years of torturing subjects in her experiments.

favorite line: to Shiro, “I made you strong and this is how you repay me? You could have been our greatest weapon.” expecting thanks for torture like it was a good thing?! yo this lady is super dangerous!! to me this was one of the first times Haggar really stood out as more than just Zarkon’s lackey but as a villain in her own right, because what she did to Shiro had nothing to do with Zarkon’s goals for the universe.

brOTP: I really want to see Haggar and the space!dangerous ladies/generals go on a zany adventure. at this point, I think they could all use a break.

OTP: while the obvious answer is Haggar/Zarkon, it’s also really weird because it’s heavily implied he never forgot anything the way she did… and he’s not very nice. so that’s problematic.

nOTP: everything. Haggar mostly seems to be heartless. how to ship this???

random headcanon: she made the druids. they are not bodies. or aliens. they are like suits, filled with a rift creature or something. that’s why they’re e x t r a  creepy.

unpopular opinion: I can’t even think of any popular opinions about Haggar.

song i associate with them: had to think about this for a bit but for its perf description of instability I’m gonna say MK Ultra by MuseHow much deception can you take/How many lies will you create/How much longer until you break/Your mind’s about to fall//And they’re breaking through

favorite picture of them: that Altean reveal tho!

Pidge

favorite thing about them: she’s incredibly relatable!! intelligent, nerdy, likes terrible puns, can dress up and look nice or chill and be comfortable, a little socially awkward, super passionate about hobbies/interests, very much into science/tech – this probably describes 90% of the people I went to school with, because I went to nerd school, and it’s SUPER EXCITING to see that kind of character be a hero! nerds are always side characters, they don’t get to be main characters until they seem “normal”. (example: haruhi in ouran host club, despite literally not caring how she looks, doesn’t get to be the heroine until getting a makeover.) Pidge doesn’t have that! she’s cool just the way she is.

least favorite thing about them: her lack of empathy/morally grey streak. it’s frustrating that literally no one calls her out on this, because at the rate she’s going Pidge is just as likely to grow into someone like Honerva, and the only thing keeping her from that are her friends acting as her moral compass.

favorite line: either “I’ve always been a tech junkie. That’s how I connected with the world. But, for the first time, I feel connected to everything.” orrrrr “STICK AROUND >:D”

brOTP: TEAM PUNK. I love how Hunk went from being the guy who rummages through her stuff to the guy who can finish her sentences because they are on the wavelength, except I’m pretty sure Hunk thinks she’s way nerdier than he could ever be. so far a lot of their relationship seems to be her bossing him around, I’d love to see a few scenes where Hunk just flat-out tells her not to do something and she has to listen because he’s actually…. not wrong??…

OTP: Pidge/Lance. I’m 100% on board with the Pidge-has-a-crush theory. also the VLD-drops-topics-that-are-important-immediately-before-they-come-up theory. (seasons 1 and 2, she mentions him by name the most. her vlog is almost all memories involving him, despite talking about her new friends. you’d think it’d be about how much she does with Hunk or something but nope!! she then almost ignores him for the next few seasons. and even when Lance is wayyyyy over the top with Allura (e.g. growling at Matt??), she barely reacts. doesn’t tease him, doesn’t snark, just doesn’t do anything.) and that quote from Lauren M. about how Lance needs someone who knows herself? that sure sounds like Pidge, who’s the only girl in the show who’s confident about who she is. Lance is the kind of person who can pull Pidge out of her shell, and make her slow down and explain her ideas so everyone can understand. I think there’s a lot of potential there.

nOTP: hmm, gonna go with Allura/Pidge?? it’s not very common, but also not my jam. Shiro/Pidge is a pretty common nOTP but aged up I could see it. (also: I can’t say I ship Pidge with anyone with the idea that that equates to immediately sleeping together? this is one of the weirder assumptions about shipping imo.)

random headcanon: Pidge’s balance and strength come from years of rhythmic gymnastics. she choreographed her own fight  sequences for the voltron show based on her old ribbon routines, but that’s a secret she’ll take to the grave. (Matt was the martial arts guy in their house, when he was little he demanded ninja lessons. he showed her a few moves. Katie taught him how to do a cartwheel.)

unpopular opinion: while I can understand why people see Pidge as trans/genderfluid etc., and that’s cool, I think she’s really just a tomboy. imo there’s no reason to think that she dislikes being feminine/going by Katie; her friends all know her as Pidge, they haven’t been in space long enough for her hair to grow back and they’ve had no reason to change out of their clothes, and her dad deciding to call her Pidge instead of Katie seemed more like showing support for being a Paladin. I mean, this is a character who spent her time listening to alien signals doodling ladybugs and princesses right along with a giant robot with a flaming sword, who nearly cries when she has to cut her hair, whose bedrooms have both been just as stereotypically ‘girly’ (pictures taped up, string lights, cute animal slippers, mermaids??) as geeky. sure, the only time she’s been seen in a dress was for a special occasion, but even her choice of casual clothing was much more feminine. she doesn’t seem to care if she’s mistaken for a boy so it clearly isn’t important to her to obviously be a girl, but it also seems like she really only cares what her friends/family think about her…… (and tbh I think modeling her hacking face on Ed’s from Cowboy Bebop is another nod to Pidge being a non-stereotypical girl – like Pidge, Ed is a young hacker of indeterminate gender who confides primarily in the other more intelligent non-verbal member of the ship (Ein the genius dog, instead of Rover the robot), and her crew is shocked by the reveal that she’s actually female. Ed doesn’t much care either way.)

song i associate with them: I’d like to suggest Science Fiction by Christine and The Queens. techno beat, space-themed, a little bittersweet, some random italian; it’s the kind of song you put on when you’re pulling a late night on a coding project. Scattered stars/You never come back from/Space with no memory//One day I’ll leave/For nine planets, as many lives

favorite picture of them: (shhhh it’s a gif but that’s okay)