#nastya rasputina analysis

[astralsyst3m]

Nastya is the older sister sibling of Jonny, the younger sister of Scuzz, who over time interacts with the crew less and less and the adoptive daughter of Carmilla, who is thrown out of the airlock by her own son.

Nastya is a woman who has lost so much, yet has so much left to lose. She isolates herself out of habit and fear of what may happen should she get too attached, yet she ends up attached anyways.

Nastya, despite all of her isolation habits falls in love. She falls in love with Aurora and with Ivy and Raphaella. She loves her crew as her family and she fears losing them. She fears them changing in a way that leaves them unrecognizable.

Nastya goes Out because she thinks that Aurora has changed because there are none of her original parts left. She does not realize that over the course of the millennia she and the crew have lived they have all changed in so many years. She fears the worst, fears that she will lose or has lost the woman she loves. The woman who in a way was her only connection to Cyberia she had left, even if she hates that place with her entire being.

Nastya goes Out and leaves behind a mourning crew, thinking that her leaving is for the best. She does not realize how loved she is, does not realized how her leaving affected the crew and Aurora. It is not until she is floating in space that processes Jonny's screams of her name. It is not until she is floating in space that she starts to realize what she has done and who she has left behind, yet by then it is too late.

[miralines]

as per @ladydragonkiller‘s request, and inspired by @classicallymar‘s recent post about Marius, a continuation of my rambling in the tags, on the subject of the Mechanisms, their individual manners, and their approached to charm and politeness.

This is going to be long, so here’s a cut.

Obviously the mechs are all unreservedly unhinged terrible people (with Carmilla as the sole person who tries to be less terrible). But just as their particular moral compasses or lack thereof manifest in unique ways, so too do their mannerisms, and the degree to which a bystander understands “oh god I should get out of this person’s vicinity immediately for the sake of the lives of everyone I know and love.”

As I mentioned in the tags, Marius at times comes across as more hinged than many of the others (Jonny, Nastya, Tim, Raph) because he is interested, fairly frequently, in coming across as normal, polite, and/or charming. Jonny will be sullen and moody and tell you to fuck off, and if you don’t fuck off you at least should really see the gunshot coming. Or he’ll be on a gleeful violence high (see Sleeping Beauty) and it will still be obvious that he is Like That. Marius, on the other hand, will befriend you. He will charm his way into whatever position he wants to be in for his violence, whereas Jonny just works with where he is. Marius’s manner will occasionally be... off. A little too enthusiastic, in the weird, vaguely unsettling way of Expert Testimony. Most of the time that’s because he wants to be. Occasionally he just gets overexcited. The point is Marius is both interested in and capable of Seeming Normal.

Contrast this to TS, who is extremely polite! It is very interested in acting like a human and being charming and gentlemanly. It’s just made of wood, and pings the uncanny valley instinct way too quickly to get anywhere with its manners.

Ashes is often charming as well, but their charm is a more intimidating type. They want people to listen to them, to respect them, to do what they say, not to like them. They’re charismatic enough to frequently be given positions of power, and to maintain them, but it’s much more about their capability, competence, and what you can’t actually prove they’ll do if you fail them.

Nastya has never once in her life been charming. She has never once wanted to be charming. If she expressed any modicum of interest in being charming, that’s when you would know she’d been replaced by an imposter. Nastya is a weird antisocial little vent gremlin and I love her.

Ivy cares about being accurate. She can take or leave charming. Which is good, because most often her manner is at least slightly robotic, if only due to the overly technical speech patterns.

Tim’s manner depends largely on his mood and whether his (canonically horrifying-looking) eyes are visible. He can come across as relatively normal and polite, maybe a little edgy, but well within normal mortal person ranges, especially if his eyes are not visible. Seeing his eyes tends to make people question him a little more, but that varies from “oh god an abomination” to “it’s rude to make assumptions of people based on their prosthetics, be normal, Janet.” Of course, when he gets into a mood (see this broadcast or. you know. any of the gleeful violence) that all goes out the window. Honestly, in this way I think of him as the most “normal” in his expressions. Like many mortal human people, he will try to be pleasant enough when he’s in a decent mood, but if he’s not he may get a little snappy, or grumpy, or homicidal.

Brian is fairly similar to Marius in a lot of ways, but I think that A) his baseline temperament is a lot chiller and calmer and B) his politeness/charm is also quieter. Reactions to him vary on the planet they’re on and local views towards robots, androids, automatons, and/or mostly metal humans, but assuming they’re someplace where he is assumed to be a person, not a very elaborate machine or a former corpse (although in the most technical sense, that assessment is accurate), he tends to initially come across as a nice, kind of quiet, kind of weird guy (or a prophet, when he chooses to, but that’s a role he plays sometimes more than a regular expression). Then you get into his moral advice and things start to look. Concerning. But he’s also very good at sounding reasonable in whatever justifications he comes up with for anything, so he’s usually perceived as trustworthy until things get very extreme.

Like Ivy, Raph can come across as robotic sometimes when she’s explaining something, and like Marius, it occasionally suits her to try to be charming (though much less frequently, and much less successfully). Mostly she comes across as very enthusiastic about whatever she’s interested in at the moment. She does sometimes try to leverage that into recruiting test subjects, but they often catch on that she is far more interested in the science she might do on them than them as people. Y’know how Aurora says she has a weird look in her eye? That. She comes across as quite sincere a lot of the time, but like Marius’s Expert Testimony shenanigans, it’s in an off-putting way that tends to raise red flags for people. She also sometimes forgets what’s normal and what’s not, and will casually mention some horrifying violation of scientific ethics without remembering that most people don’t like that.

I don’t have any neat way to end this but thank you for coming to my ted talk

[noncentsical-fanbug]

oh boy i have more analysis in this vein!!!

in “the ignominious demise of dr. pilchard”, when he’s listing off how each of the mechanisms were taken down and and captured, you can hear that their instruments trickle in at the same time!!

tim and ashes are the first to be listed, and their guitar and bass are the first instruments to join the song

“with nastya succumbing to a computer virus” brings in nastya’s synth

“drumbot brian, marched to the brig at gunpoint” ends with brian’s signature banjo

“ivy was enticed there by the prospect of a book fair” …to be so honest with yall i can’t hear their instruments But i am inclined to believe that they are playing their euphonium and it’s just mingled in with ashes’ bass!! no ivy alexandria erasure in my house!!

“raphaella la congnizi, chloroformed in her lab”— again, can’t hear her piano, but tbf it’s usually just filling out the background anyway, so i’ll let her slide

“the toy soldier caved in to peer pressure” and its glockenspiel is pulled in, just like in gptvtmk!!!

jonny caved in to octokitten pressure and cannot be included /j

anyway when the mechanisms,,,,,

me: in “teatime with the kaiser”, the last song in gunpowder tim vs. the moon kaiser, the music is mostly a mix of guitar, bass, and drums behind jonny’s lyrical narration. after the line “tim looked the soldier in the eye / and he gave the order, ‘FIGHT!’” the music is joined by the glockenspiel, which is specifically one of the only instruments played by the toy soldier. in the part of the story where the soldier was brought into the fight, the song itself brings the soldier into the music!

the unsuspecting victim i have cornered in the alleyway: *sobbing* what do any of those words meeaan

[majorshatterandhare]

Who’s your favorite Mech?

You can tell I’m a STEM person because I did mild data analysis on the posts on my nerdy side blog. I wanted to see if it was evident who my favorite character is. My hypothesis was that it is clear based on what posts I reblog and create myself. For reference I started this side blog on Dec 23, 2022, and I gathered this data on Jan 30, 2023; so there is just over a month’s worth of posts. This blog also runs on queue, so there are some posts in my queue not currently posted, which have not been counted in this survey.

I had several categories, and I counted posts that I made separately than ones I reblogged because that may show more interest in the character. This did not include album characters, except Hades and Merlin, of course, because Ashes and Brian *are* them.

Rankings

First- Drumbot Brian with 32 total posts; 25 are reblogs, 2 are original posts, and 5 reblogs about the Brain Gang.

Second- Gunpowder Tim with 30 total posts; 26 reblogs and 4 original posts

Third- Jonny d’Ville with 18 total posts; 17 reblogs and 1 original post

Fourth- Everyone** with 15 total posts; 14 reblogs and 1 original post

Fifth- Marius von Raum with 13 reblogged posts

Sixth- tie between Nastya Rasputina and Ivy Alexandria with 9 total posts; Nastya has 9 reblogged posts; Ivy has 4 reblogged posts and 5 reblogs about the Brain Gang

Seventh- the Toy Soldier with 7 total posts; 2 reblogs and 5 reblogs about the Brain Gang

Eighth- the Brain Gang (as a group) with 5 reblogs

Ninth- Ashes O’Reilly with 4 total posts, all of which are reblogs

Tenth- tie between the Aurora and Dr Carmilla, each have only 2 reblogged posts

Eleventh- Raphaella la Cognizi with a single reblogged post

Initial analysis

Does this align with my hypothesis? Sort of.

I would say Tim and Brian are my two favorite characters and whether you count Brain Gang posts or not they are first and second place. I do not consider Jonny a favorite, I feel neutral about him; I know why this is, it’s just a bit odd. That being said, I think a lot of people make posts about Jonny and he has a song for his backstory, so it’s easy to “know” him. I’m surprised about Nastya, Ashes, and TS being so low, as I like them quite a lot; I have some idea why this might be, but it doesn’t fully explain it. I’m surprised at how high Marius is, because I really just started learning anything about him. I do not know much about Ivy, Raphaella, the Aurora, and Dr Carmilla, and that definitely contributes to them having lower ranks.

Mild stats

The average (mean) number of posts per character (or group) is 11.3 posts. The median number of posts per character (or group) is 9 posts. The mode numbers of posts per character are 9 and 2. It’s been 4 years since I took AP stats, so I don’t remember all the fancy statistics. That being said, the graph of this is *not* a bell curve, which means that the number of posts about each character is not random. That makes sense, there are multiple factors influencing what I post. They include the characters I like best, the character I am interested in the moment, what characters other people post about, if photo posts have image descriptions, and more. There are no outliers; which I had guessed, but checked anyway. I don’t know if this is a solid math assumption, but I based my guess partly on how close the median and mean numbers are.

I hope literally anybody else finds this slightly interesting

[honey-beesknees]

Going through my drafts to find a post I was writing is like. Incomprehensible analysis of my singing monsters. Barry Bluejeans gender. Nastya Rasputina. Lucretia Adventurezone and Magnus Burnsides friendship appreciation. Rinse and repeat

[miralines]

actually I also want to talk about the mechs’ approaches to the concept of good and evil and why literally none of them are anywhere near good

under the cut because it got so so long

I truly believe there was a point in Jonny’s life when he wanted to be good. That time was a decade past even by the time he met Carmilla. I think Jonny learned pretty early on that good was not an option for him, which soon morphed into a deeply-held belief that good is not something he is capable of. In reaction to this, he leans heavily into being terrible (see Interview Transcript). He believes there are good things and evil things (and plenty of ambiguity as well), and he finds good admirable, if uncommon and more than a little naive, but I think he fundamentally believes that any part of him that might have once been good was broken beyond repair before he became a teenager.

Nastya, on the other hand, views herself as capable of goodness. Sometimes. If she’s lucky and not missing anything and nothing goes wrong (see the storming of the Winter Palace). She even tried, post-mechanization, to continue to be good. But between the events leading up to her death and the unending horrors that followed, she came to the conclusion that good is not worth it. Good gets you hurt or killed or blows up in ways that make things even worse. She keeps to herself, looks out for herself and her own, and will actively hurt anyone else (because given the chance, they’ll almost certainly eventually do the same).

In a similar vein, Ashes probably figured out “good” doesn’t get you anywhere by the time they were eight. Good got you taken advantage of or killed. They do value loyalty-- if you’ve formed a relationship with someone and you value it, you will help them out, or at least not sell them out (cough mickey). This is honestly more pragmatism than anything, though-- they had no issue leaving Daedalus to die, despite having a “deal.” Mostly it applies to people they’re stuck with. Not betraying people makes things much easier when you have to spend a lot of time around those people. Do they care, in some weird way, deep down? Yes. Are they personally hurt by betrayal? Also yes. But for them, it’s the consequence of picking the wrong person to do business with, and bad things happening is as natural a force as stars shining-- including when they’re the person doing the bad things.

I think Ivy actually values good and sees it both as a desirable trait and one she’s capable of. She just has... a really skewed view of what constitutes good. A combination of trauma, personality, and the inevitable corruption of immortality have led her to an extremely utilitarian set of ethics (”for the greater good”). The “greater good” is very often preservation of knowledge, and that comes above everything else-- human life, continued existence of planets, etc. I firmly believe that at least once, the mechs have been on a planet where some authority was trying to destroy Terrible Knowledge before it could make it into the hands of their enemies, and Ivy brought it to those enemies for the sake of keeping it known. This may have led to the destruction of the whole planet, but at least the survivors fleeing from the wreckage still had the records! Ivy’s perspective is so zoomed out that most petty immoral actions (murder, theft, whatever the hell “neuro-arson” is) don’t really register as important one way or another.

Brian. Brian is a master of moral justifications. His two settings correspond to the most extreme possible version of the moral philosophies they represent: EJM Brian might destroy an entire planet to prevent the possibility of an interplanetary epidemic, whereas MJE Brian might give corrupt authorities the information that leads to mass arrests and executions because it would be wrong to lie to them. Also I think he enjoys coming up with these justifications and playing with being the moral equivalent of the monkey’s paw.

As far as the Toy Soldier is concerned, it’s not a person. Good and evil are person things. It’s exempt. I very much read its backstory as it slowly coming to reject humanity and all the things that come with it-- emotion, responsibility, even pronouns that don’t traditionally refer to objects (the latter of which can absolutely be read as voidpunk, but there is certainly room to criticize the other two). TS does what it wants, because it doesn’t see itself as part of the group obligated to follow moral rules.

Tim had a moral compass at one point. Maybe even a decent one. But then the horrors of war, etc. Tim believes and behaves as if all of his goodness died with Bertie. He can do whatever he wants now, because what’s the point?

Raphaella does not believe in good and evil. At best, it’s a nice fairy tale, at the worst, it’s a fiction designed to repress freedom and independence. Like Ivy, Raphaella is driven by knowledge, but where Ivy preserves it, Raphaella discovers it-- at any cost. Nonconsensual human experimentation poses no issue to her, because it will yield knowledge. Of course, being rude or hurtful exists, and doing bad things without sufficient reason may be rude or hurtful, but it’s not evil or wrong. Mostly in those cases the main problem is that other people don’t like it.

I’m going to be honest, I’m still very shaky on my characterization of Marius beyond Funney Man (death of byron von raum WHEN), but at the moment I see his crimes as falling under impulsivity or revenge. He feels like killing someone? Sure. He’s really annoyed at someone so constructs an elaborate plot to drive them to madness? Sounds fun. He might have felt bad about it at one point, but by the time he settles into immortality he cares more about A) whether it made him personally feel better and B) welp, can’t change it anyway. In this way, he can be a bit like Jonny, but while Jonny will do bad things for the sake of doing bad things, Marius most often has at least some reasoning, or something he hopes to gain.

If you’re still here thank you for reading and I’d be very curious to hear other thoughts

[the-suns-a-tube]

i fucking love that album

im so fucked. I CANT EVEN LISTEN TO ANY OF THE OTHER ALBUMS IM SO HYPERFIXATED ON THIS S P E C I F I C ALBUM FUCK ME

[crustaceousfaggot]

@lun4rc0w okay lemme explain

Okay so we're doing a novel study on Mary Shelley's Frankenstein right?

But not just cause it's Posh Literature That's Good For Analysis, it's legitimately my ELA teacher's favourite book. He's obsessed with Frankenstein media and anything related to it. He spent like 45 minutes showing us various pieces of Frankenstein movies, comics, songs, merch, memes, anything he could find. He says he collects Frankenstein media, and he encourages anyone to send him any that they think he'll like, but he'll probably already have seen it.

So I bring up the Mechs, right? Frankenstein isn't really their best song IMO, the creature as AI is hardly a new idea and the music itself is actually pretty boring in comparison to most of their stuff? But it's a moderately fresh take on such an old story, and it actually does a great job of maintaining and building on the themes of the original novel. So I figure I'll send it in.

I get an email the next day, saying that he actually really likes it, and he's listened to it a few times. I bring it up briefly in a convo after class about one of my essays, and he says that it's really unique and it's one of the first pieces of Frankenstein media that's been able to "wow" him for quite awhile. He says he's planning on potentially doing something with it in class.

So today, we had a quick in-class project where he played us the song a few times, had us divide into groups to discuss it, and then write a short paper about the way The Mechanisms Frankenstein builds and adapts on the original novel, and about creative interpretation in classical adaptations in general.

And the whole time I'm just sorta internally vibrating because they don't know this band is a club of immortal gay space pirates, they don't know the narrator's stories has occupied my brain for the better part of 2 years, they don't know that the AI is played by Ashes O'Reilly, nonbinary monster arsonist extraordinaire, they don't know who Nastya Rasputina is and they don't know that she fucked a spaceship

HEY SO

LONG STORY SHORT

I MANAGED TO GET THE MECHANISMS TAUGHT IN MY ENGLISH 30-1 AP CLASS

THIS FEELS FAKE WTF