#in the age of google maps how tf do you not know if the place is right???

[pr]

please tell me this sanitized version of arya stark's story. like i am dying to hear this version of events that included high valyrian call and response but managed to exclude literally everything else besides "smol girl fite" apparently.

Taken from a friend of a friend.

This friend of mine has been very consciously raising her young daughter outside of stereotypical gender norms. They’ve done quite a number on my friend, and she’s like, “Nope, my kid’s life will be different.”

Her daughter is small for her age, and will probably remain small. This has affected her self-confidence. Earlier this year, my friend decided to tell her daughter a slightly sanitized version of Arya Stark’s journey in GoT, to basically demonstrate how a small girl could learn to be badass.

Six months go by, and the daughter turns from 5 to 6. Her mom asks her what she wants for her birthday. The daughter says, “I want to learn how to fight.” So my friend, who has zero martial arts experience, looks up a place, and they go there.

The moment they get there, my friend is thinking, “This may not be the right place.” It’s a Krav Maga/MMA gym. Lots of burly dudes beating the crap out of each other, basically. Not your kid-friendly karate dojo.

But she doesn’t want to tell her daughter that they have to leave because the place is filled with intimidating men – it would pretty much fly in the face of everything she’s trying to teach her. So she says, “Okay. I don’t know if they have a kid’s class here. Why don’t you go ask who the teacher is, and then ask them?”

So her daughter walks up to one dude, asks for the teacher, then gets pointed to this tattooed, musclebound dude with his head shaved and a goatee. As my friend put, “The guy looked like your bigger, meaner younger brother.”

She trails behind her kid a bit, ready to step in, and listens in. Her daughter walks up the guy and says, “Hi! Do you have classes for kids? I want to learn how to fight.”

The guy looks down at this wee little girl, and he says, “Uh, well, no, we don’t really. Maybe I can talk to your mom and suggest some places for you? This isn’t really a place for little girls.”

Her daughter reaches into her jacket pocket, pulls out a nickel, holds it out to the guy and says, “Valar morghulis.”

The guy takes the nickel, looks at it, then says, totally deadpan: “Valar dohaeris. Of course I can teach you.”

The mom comes over and says, “I thought you said you didn’t have kid’s classes?” The guy says, “We do now. Come into the office and we’ll work up a training schedule.” The mom: “Do you have any idea how much it’ll cost?” The guy holds up the nickel. “She’s already paid up.”

[sroloc--elbisivni]

Your TF fic got me into fandom. This isnt what I wanted to use my already limited free time on, but interest is a has no mercy and I am already halfway through MTMTE. I got forcefully yeeted from my returning MHA interest directly into TF instead. Thank you for that and how dare you. I will now go reread "Intelligence or vision or the truth" cause it became a comfort fic and I go feral for the way you worldbuilt it and feel despair as I realised this is the only fic of such fascinating au.

one, sorry, two, welcome to alien robot hell 2: electric boogaloo. alien robot hell one being bionicle. MTMTE IS EXCELLENT AND I HOPE YOU’RE HAVING FUN. since I only go here in the first place because I read astolat’s fic I’m thrilled to continue the tradition of hitting people over the head with transformers. I recommend transformers animated and/or G1 next.

sorry also for getting you dragged into my extremely niche fantasy cyberpunk au, i should maybe put a warning on that XD you probably didn’t mean this as an excuse for me to ramble about this fic and my thoughts behind it but I had so much fun doing this so I’m TAKING IT. spoilers ahead.

I keep calling it a ‘fantasy cyberpunk’ because when i first wrote the first scene I was thinking a weird blend of classical sword-and-sorcery fantasy with tech elements and the whole thing took place in a tent. then I decided no actually it’s going to be full tech and I had to change the flavor text but the fantasy elements—the king as the land, the band of righteous rebels, the secret prince, the palace wizard, good vs. evil—are still very much there, as opposed to the corporate world of more traditional cyberpunk. the worldbuilding is then by necessity very economical and tailored to the story, and a mix of balancing transformers lore and integrating fantasy tropes into cyberpunk. rung as an android is balancing transformers lore. optimus and rodimus as sentinel’s clones is both to pull in TF lore and kind of poke fun at the fantasies that are all a king and his sons with no mention of a queen. also because it was a fun twist.

so, since it’s not exactly traditional corporate cyberpunk, there are a couple different things i went in knowing very clearly I wanted to do. one was to get into cyberpunk’s potential for assistive devices. Ratchet has a wheelchair, Soundwave is low vision, Bumblebee is deaf. And that’s just what I could make explicit in the text. They all have both specific devices to adjust to their environments, and their environments also adapt to them—the map table was initially holographic, and then I realized, oh, hang on, this is fantasy tech, I can make it project something that can be navigated by touch.

another thing I wanted to do was to make a fantasy in the ‘if i could have anything’ sense—in the information age, where the internet is dominated by people buying and selling your data the opposite of that isn’t lack of communication—it’s connection, it's privacy, it's control, it’s being able to reach out to the people you love. the Matrix is an information and data network. chips and brain implants aren’t inherently malicious tracking devices or mind control—the chips are signifiers of affiliation. the brain implants are about taking control, not losing it. how far removed from swapping memes is swapping memories? how much do you value the freedom to communicate when it’s been kept from you your whole life?

and in a meta level, the entire fic is built on miscommunication and concealed information. i would love to say i did all of this on purpose.

anything that isn’t one of those two things is me frantically trying to hold the story together with as few plot holes as possible. the medical stuff was the worst. i was cackling writing the jazz-slaughters-the-guards scene and then i paused, googled neurosurgery operating rooms, and went ‘ah, fuck, sanitation.’ so now there’s a sanitized surgery box and surgeons operate with tools inside of it. that will not save me from all the anesthesiologists who are probably out for my blood. (I almost had jazz actually drug optimus, and then have him get a stimulant shot so he’d be awake for sentinel, and then have him drugged again, and then the family friend who was an anesthesiologist for 40 years manifested in my house physically and smacked me over the head. not literally. social distancing!) originally, megatron was going to go down to the server banks and get read into the matrix in a very finding-the-magic-mcguffin but the coronation tropes took precedence.

this is all i can remember off the top of my head but I’m glad to know someone else rereads this fic because i do too and that makes me feel better about posing what is also my comfort fic.