#orga's lucrative modelling career is a hilarious au and i thank you for the opportunity to discover it

[stillness-in-green]

i realized mika's the only one of the tekkadan boys to have a specific thing he wants to do outside of fighting- farming- which is kinda ironic considering he's been called aimless. so do you have any ideas of what the other boys could/would like to do as a profession/career outside of fighting (not counting what they actually ended up doing in the epilogue)? doesn't have to be for everybody, just for whoever you can think of. thank you :)

I got this ask ages ago and have been periodically rolling it around in and around other things, but I put it in front of myself again today and finally typed out a response. Below the cut, some thoughts on what these boys would be doing if they had, not only all survived the series, but done so in a way that left them free to pursue whatever ambitions or talents they might desire or discover.  

Most of them.  

Lets start with the inner circle and work our way out.  

I think Biscuit (whose survival is probably the reason everyone else is alive in this hypothetical AU of ours, because he would have an aneurysm before he let Orga join hands with McGillis Fareed) could be good at practically anything he puts his mind to, and therefore, what I think he should probably do is go to school.  He obviously values education–he spent lord knows how much time endangering life and limb to earn the money to put Cookie and Cracker through school, and clearly admires how far Savarin’s schooling took him in life.  As to what he might study, there are a number of ways that could go–agricultural sciences to help his Granny Sakura with the farm, business to pick up where Savarin left off, possibly a social science so he can find a job in all the inevitable restructuring that Mars’ new government will be doing.  

Eugene, more than anyone else, strikes me as wanting to find someone to settle down with. Unlike Shino, who talks about women solely in the context of his sex drive, Eugene is interested in romance. And while he doesn’t seem to have had much luck with that in IBO’s canon epilogue, in a more peaceful time, it’s easy to imagine him devoting more energy to dating.  Without Tekkadan eating up his attention, whatever career he finds a way into–possibly bodyguard work still, or maybe an office job like Zack’s–would, I think, be just a way to help support a family.   

Akihiro, unlike most all of the boys, already has a girl who’s interested in him, and if he survived this show for this AU, I see no reason to not imagine the Turbines did also. Lafter plainly was never going to leave the Turbines to be with him, of course, but if there was no Tekkadan to protect…  I don’t think Naze would be very keen to break his girls-only rule, but every chick must leave the nest eventually–perhaps Lafter and Akihiro might be entrusted with protecting/leading another branch of the business?  Given the size of the organization*, there must be other battleships doing the transport business/transport protection thing.  Or they could just accompany whichever shipment Naze directed them towards.

   That is, though, probably kind of a longshot. Tekkadan Inc. or no, Akihiro has strong feelings about protecting his family, and where I think that’s most likely to leave him is actually in Dante’s place in the epilogue, helping run the orphanage and taking care of children.  While I don’t know that gentleness and empathy will ever come easily to him, he would be able to relate with the stories of the many ex-Debris children that orphanage is implied to be seeing post-outlawing-of-legal-child-trafficking, and it would be a way to both honor and grapple with the memory of Masahiro.

Derma would probably end up in about the same place he does in the show–assuming Akihiro doesn’t get adopted by the Turbines, I think Derma would follow him to the orphanage.  He had been more directly under Dante’s wing in the series, of course, but for a lot of reasons, I don’t think that the same things that would appeal to Dante in civilian life would hold much interest for Derma.  He doesn’t have Dante’s knack with computers; he doesn’t share Dante’s itch for fame.  But he does have a load of self-confidence issues that make him exactly as likely to relate to orphan ex-Debris kids as Akihiro’s losses make him.  (It’s also the case that Derma is the Tekkadan kid who’s the least explored outside of being a child soldier, so I’m inclined to err on the side of what the show points him to rather than make things up wildly, which is essentially what I’d be doing otherwise.)

Returning to the main group, Shino is easy; in a scenario in which he isn’t a paid civilian soldier, that guy has got “stunt show pilot” written all over him.  I doubt Mars’ entertainment industry is so well developed that they need or can afford to hire mobile suit pilots for TV/film work, but I bet the planet can support something more like the Post-Disaster equivalent of monster truck derbies.  They’d probably involve old/restored mobile workers, rather than the expensive military hardware that is a proper mobile suit, but I certainly don’t put it past Shino to showboat around in a decommissioned Flauros from time to time.

Dante, always grouped with Shino in combat, would probably follow him here.  In a peaceful epilogue, Dante easily could have an entirely lucrative (and possibly illicit) career with his computer skills, but I think he’d finding sitting at a computer all day to be unfathomably boring the more like an actual desk job it became.  Compared to the measure of fame Shino would be making for himself, it’s obvious which Dante would go for.  Also, with two people with mobile suits, they could possibly get some kind of MS boxing circuit going.  I think that would be a very longterm project, more suitable for when things calm back down and there are all these mobile suits around collecting dust.  

Yamagi is a mechanic–he’s one of the few characters with job experience other than “soldier,” and there’s no reason to expect him to change streams from the canon to this AU.  However, I think Yukinojo and Merribit would have encouraged him to go work with Shino’s pit crew/show team before too long, if he ever held a job down at Kassapa Factory to begin with.  He and Shino are, almost certainly, dating on the side.  Just, like, fill in Shino and Yamagi for the Special Feeling umbrella meme.

Ride is another gimme.  He has an obvious artistic streak, the evidence of which is painted all over the Isaribi, the Tekkadan complex, and the orphanage building.  If he didn’t need to fight (and while he was pretty gung-ho about it originally, I have to think the trauma from Hashmal and the agriculture plant is going to be long-lived), it’s very simple to imagine Ride getting nudged into pursuing art in a more professional way.  Especially if Kudelia’s new government is subsidizing such things.

Chad is another one that I’d like to see in school.  There are several instances in the series that impy he’s doing serious amounts of research/study on the side–he’s constantly shown asking pertinent questions or showcasing some skillset or bit of knowledge that he has no business having access to based simply on what we’re explicitly told about him.  Given that, it’d be interesting for the others to convince him to set aside the helper ant mentality and go learn something he thinks is interesting.  While Biscuit has family needs to guide his academic choices, Chad could really get into anything.  I would slot him into a field that involves research but also quantifiable knowledge–history, for example, or psychology, rather than e.g. theoretical physics.  I kind of love the idea of Chad getting access to a bunch of banned books via Kudelia or their Teiwaz connections. 

Takaki seems on-track to wind up in politics, if not as a politician himself, then as the sort of lobbyist or aide that any notionally democratic government runs on. Given that he bailed out of fighting by choice, this seems to be his chosen path in any case.  He’s also likely to make a hell of a diplomat when he gets older and picks up more confidence in himself.

Aston is so rooted in his self-image of “soldier” that it’s difficult to imagine what he might want to do outside of that field.  We do know a few things about him that could give us a direction, though: he’s observant (noticing more about Fuka’s schoolwork than her own brother), he’s relatively prudent and cautious (his teamwork with Vito, and his reluctance to wildly charge McGillis), and he’s a mediator (between his quartet back with the Brewers, and again between Takaki and the other Earth Branch boys).  So what kind of career could combine those traits with his gravitation towards military settings?  Personally, I think he’d do really well as a crisis negotiator–a specialist brought in by police to help with hostage situations and other threats of e.g. domestic violence, terrorism, suicide, and so on.  Of course, the trick there is less getting certified for that job than it is finding a group to work alongside–while I can see him joining an Arbrau/Edmonton police force, it’s much harder to imagine him being able to get a job with Gjallarhorn.  In any case, assuming he can manage to find an avenue for said work, he’d be great at it. 

This brings us to our Season 2 newbies.  

Hush I would mostly see following Mikazuki into farming.  Not just to be following Mika, mind, but because Hush’s motivation, beyond a big ol’ chip on his shoulder about the Alaya Vijnana system, is much the same as so many others–to protect and provide for his social circle.  If he’s provided an avenue for that that isn’t constant endangerment of life and limb, I think it’s what he’d go for. And farming is helping to provide for a great many people, some very directly–the fact that he can still be around to help Mikazuki is just a bonus.  

Zack joined Tekkadan because of their fame, rather than out of real necessity–so what exactly did he think was so cool about Tekkadan to begin with?  Given his reticence about actual combat when he comes face to face with it, perhaps it’s more the “spitting in Gjallarhorn’s eye” aspect than the feats of badassity?  Given that, what could he do that would scratch that itch? Well, he’s a hell of a programmer, and has Dante available to teach him anything about hacking he doesn’t already know. I think he’d be very happy being one of those whistle-blower internet Ariadne activist types, finding secret information, info on cover-ups, or details on corruption, and providing proof of such things to the world at large, particularly given how government-controlled the media is in the setting.  

Dane is already living a life free of fighting, so it’s possible that, absent Tekkadan being a bunch of criminals, he might end up working at Kassapa Factory anyway, or perhaps going with Yamagi to Shino and Dante’s venture.  He’s another big mystery as to things he might enjoy outside of work; for example, he evinces little patience with Hush until Hush starts showing some basic empathy/humility, which leads me to think that close work with people would probably not be his thing.  So sticking to work with his hands, I wonder if he, like Ride, would get any mileage out of art?  He could snap paintbrushes like twigs, of course, but I can see him being good at something like pottery, and if his pre-show history is as violent as we’re lead to believe, I can see it being relaxing–probably as a hobby, rather than a career, just something he can do on his own time and terms.  

So, that’s every–mm? A significant exclusion?  A deuteragonist undiscussed? 

Oh, right.  

So, Orga. What would Orga do in peacetime? Well, that’s difficult to even try to conceive.  Orga, like McGillis, is massively defined by both his ambition and his dissatisfaction with the status quo.  He’s never satisfied, never content; he interprets Mikazuki’s intense gaze as a challenge, and it never stops pushing him forward, no matter who else tries to tell him he’s going too fast.  What could Orga ever do in peacetime?  It’s tempting to say that every one of the hypothetical outcomes above was paid for in Orga’s blood, because less than a handful of these people would ever desert Orga if he lived, and while he lived and had people looking to him, he would never stop.  In that way, Tekkadan is in a feedback loop that they can’t get out of without a system-redefining change.  Looking at his skill set, we again find a bunch of things that suggest that Orga works best as a leader–he’s canny, highly charismatic, a quick thinker, and he has killer instincts, albeit with some Mikazuki-sized blind spots.  This is a kid practically fated to be a gang leader–and he’s also oathsworn to the mob, making getting out of that life safely a dicey prospect.

   So what is there for him, if not fighting?  Purely as an imaginary exercise, he’d be a scary effective community leader.  I mean, just imagine being a city representative showing up to a town hall meeting and this is waiting in the front row:

   But that’s still pretty mundane.  Lets try something really different on for size.  

   During the season break, Orga is attending some official function at Saisei, lurking around afterward and waiting for a chance to talk to Naze.  Out of nowhere, he gets jumped by the fashion equivalent of Saisei’s eccentric mechanic, who insists that Orga’s je ne sais quoi levels are off the charts, and he absolutely must grant her at least one modeling session.  Naze, walking in on this conversation, has a huge laugh about it and goads Orga into accepting.  And then the whole of the second season gets derailed because suddenly Orga is faced with the argument that sufficiently famous people are also rich and powerful, rich and powerful enough that he could relocate his entire gang to some private satellite around Jupiter if he were so inclined.  And maybe it feels immaterial, and maybe it wasn’t the method what he expected, but that doesn’t make the paycheck any less real.  The designer tells him in no uncertain terms that if he wants to continue, she will personally talk McMurdo Barriston’s ear off about how he is completely wasting this surly teenager’s God-given personal magnetism.

  Orga immediately has a huge crisis over it, because it feels terrifyingly unmasculine and he has no concept of the term “soft power.” Atra loves it, though, and Biscuit thinks it’s strange but effective.  Things almost fall through anyway when it comes out that Orga has a whisker implant, but the designer is insistent, so they end up just photo-editing it out and limiting his public appearances, which is just as well, because he finds crowds and fans alike to be extremely uncomfortable.  

  Tekkadan still do odd jobs for Teiwaz now and again, like protecting Kudelia from Dawn Horizon, but are mostly out of the line of fire when McGillis starts looking around for allies.   McGillis, deprived of a Tekkadan he can talk around on joining him, is left profoundly annoyed.  How things go from there is a whole new question.

*Allow me to quote from this post: 

In the interest of context for the number I’m about to lay on you, the Dawn Horizon group–a band of pirates who have ten ships and are considered sizeable enough that they fill a niche that’s important to Gjallarhorn, and would also be too much a pain to try to oust entirely, have around 2,500 members.  Wow!  That’s a lot!  

The Turbines have 50,000 members.

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