#does it count as m3 meta analysis if it's half wrapped up in my own interpretations and deep cut postgame headcanons? who's to say

[twothpaste]

Fic snippets & delirious thoughts under the cut, featuring a washed-up chimera scientist & Commander Doctor Claus Westwood 🙃???

(The one above's a post-canon heart-to-heart about cybernetics and the human condition, between adult Claus and Gilbert Campas - one of Porky's former chimera scientists. The one below's a mid-canon flashback exchange between the same two characters, many years prior.)

And I'm totally not emotionally compromising myself over the contrast between these scenes, I swear. Feeling normal about how writing Claus & Gilbert versus The Commander & Dr. Campas is like writing completely different characters. Neither of 'em were permitted to see each other (or themselves) as people, under Porky's control. Condemned to this stilted arm's length, even basic recognition of each others' personhood was out of the question. It's like they'd been stripped of the capacity. (When present-day Claus "meets" Gilbert earlier in the fic, he doesn't even recognize the guy, despite his mostly-reclaimed memories. While the young Dr. Campas conversely had no idea the Commander really was a reconstructed human child.) It's only years after the fact that they get the chance to actually know each other. They come to realize that they're both complete human beings with rich perspectives & a lot in common. And, unnervingly, that they always were, even way back then. Or couldda been, if given the chance...

I have this running thing going on with Porky's lackeys & subordinates, where he treated them so much like disposable toys, or cogs in his machine - that they started to believe it and act like it. His whole operation on Nowhere hinged upon a level of alienation & dehumanization that goes beyond just mind-control technology. The antithesis to Tazmily's community (and the community these folks gradually build, after he's gone). Claus breaks free of it, and so do the rest of 'em. But in the aftermath, years later, there's still a forlorn sense that something was taken from them. Like? Maybe they could've prevented all those stolen years, if they'd just put forth the effort and care to connect with one another from the start.