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nishnormp · 6 months ago

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thinking way too hard about things that probably do not need this much thought

In lieu of tfc merc brainrot, I have decided to do some historical research and character workshopping to shape out the details of everything needed in ficwriting. I have nothing else to post (my art is not going well) so I might as well scream about this

P1: TF2 alternate history bullshit

Abraham Lincoln inventing rocket jumping before the existence of stairs, the entire thing with Australium, so on. Despite TFC having modern kevlar (as opposed to looney toons weapons, but a bit about that later) and a more serious/gritty tone, the setting is still within the TF2 universe; which means having a weird fusion of irl history and vaguely reasonable fantasy absurdities.

To clarify, I am not a bona fide history nut who knows absolutely everything (ffs my own country's history doesn't even play much in western incidents). I've just been doing research thru online articles, videos, and talking to other ppl who know more than me, so my brain can lack a bit for certain things; do correct me if I get anything wrong.

By the 1850s (estimation) Australia became a tech giant due to discovering Australium, making insane progress in basically every field (and also making their population very jacked). Newfound inventions also require raw resources, and this page confirms that australians pick their leader mostly based on pure strength, which begs the question; are they still connected to Britain? Would there still be a benefit for them to be linked to Britian the way they are?

There are many cases where nations plunder other nations just for natural resources; Britian is one particularly infamous force with many colonies, which makes me wonder if Australia ever resorted to snatching them just to afford all the material components that their tech requires. Australia was part of the British Empire up until 1901 irl (not too far from 1890), but the question about resources and sovereignty(even if symbolic) still remain (Britain likely wouldn't like a territory growing at terrifying and eventually unmanageable rates, and at that rate I doubt Australia would settle for middling trade margins)

(Well, apparently Saxton owns England. But that was when he discovered the internet)

There's also the ensemble of first gen mercs. RED and BLU recruit progressively less important mercs as time goes on, starting from important historical/media figures, to modern militant professional-lookin dudes, and finally to the current crop of crackheaded TF2 mercs we know and love. The Original mercs I mostly want to focus on are Abraham Lincoln and John Henry.

I'm not exactly sure if John Henry is even a real person, but he was a symbol for labor movements and the civil rights movement; the fact that he IS a real person in TF2 lore is p vital methinks, especially since him and Lincoln seem to be on the same team. Mercs are paid a lot, even the "bottom of the barrel" tf2 ones: scout has his merch collection to show for it, medic has his exotic animal parts, heavy has his gun ammo (and also casually gave a child 7k dollars), etc; could John Henry have spearheaded civil rights movements not just in America but also other territories (like africa) with the bread and merits he got for the job? Does he have a legacy with rouge merc groups (armed unions?) that fight against imperialism? Maybe even effect/radicalize Lincoln about some things??? Unethical business practices still persist even in Saxton's era (hell, he's an example) but maybe the (hypothetical) challenges to Britain's grasp on its colonies and evolution of munitions would give the people an edge.

I have no idea how a drastically colony-less Britain would affect the timeline of WW1 (esp in less popular side-wars like in South Africa where Britain was very much involved, which may be problematic since my interp of cmedic is FROM there but anyways) (btw they only won that bc they out-attritioned Germany, but by that point maybe the dutch or the americans would take over), but surprisingly enough WW2 ends at around the same time it does irl, despite my initial thought that a roided-out Allied Australia would be more than capable of turning the Axis Powers into a skidmark. The likely explanation for that is that the finer details were just not important for the tf2 comics that took place AFTER (fair enough), but as someone planning to write the 1930s mercs . Pain . My working explanation is that seemingly unaligned private contractors can get ahold of weapons easier than Certain governments, which makes mercs more popular than national soldiers for carrying out certain missions (plausible employer deniability baybeeee).

P2: Conflicting class meta - CHeavy edition

Onto something less heavy, another part of ficwriting is figuring out how characters are...characterized. The TFC mercs dont have much canonical info (I've already turned two of them into straight up ocs because I am NOT going to write p3dos from start to finish of a longfic) so I settle for looking at other things, like gameplay and ingame roles.

The first I focused on was cheavy, the leader of the group. Grouchy, but a surprisingly tolerant team player.

This IS reused from a previous post (im lazy) but the first bullet basically says "otherwise, offensive heavies are frequently looked down on and the power of the other team's defense will have you dead in no time". Gameplay-wise, CHeavy is considered the simplest class and the easiest one to master; most tfc gamers think its a common noob pick. His total health is pretty good, he occupies a big space so he can block narrow paths, and the way he attacks is simple; but he's slow even when b-hopping (grenades cant boost him either) so he can be outrun/picked apart by other classes, which really shows in tfc's most popular game format: capture the flag.

I've seen about a handful video of tfc gameplay that WASN'T ctf (or the slightly diff gamemode with a defense system), and even if the 4th bullet point is right, those two classes are usually doing more important things during ctf. My main point is that despite being the leader, he isn't the type of class to lead the charge.

The most reasonable thing I can think of is that he's just . Really good at strategy and can keep track of his team while reliably holding down a position. That, and his superior bulk makes him shine more outside of the gravel pits. Whatever it is, it does make more sense to me now that I revisit the comic panels where he is VERY spiteful that his teammates got killed (rather than calling them weak, they fr matter to him bc otherwise, he isn't getting shit done)

(Ik the reason hes the boss is bc big scary dude and karmic ass-handing via other heavy who actually respects his doctor but shh the fic demands reasons)

P3: Conflicting class meta - Cmedic edition

The contradiction I can immediately clock is the fact that cmedic never gets mentioned despite his omnipresence in his original game. Most hc's I've seen interpret him as the exact opposite of the current medic, which is a dedicated doctor who also happens to be a sweetheart (with very rare exceptions), but may I propose the theory that all mannco medic mercs are bastards? I'm 99% sure that the original medic was sigmund freud. TF2 medic is just a menace. Post WW1 most moral and noble medics would bust their asses at hospitals rather than sign up to a contract tying them down to just healing 8 other people and killing other people over and over, but that's just my hc (we're all making shit up, might as well have fun with it).

The most common citing for cmed's hidden menace energy is his virus weaponry, but I think his ingame role also shows it pretty well. Practically taking the scout's niche and making it less punishing by having straight upgrades of his two weapons, giving healing utility AND also being able to sniff out spies like a cscout (he can't diffuse bombs or trail caltrops, but he's already powerful as is). Imagine being cscout, having to compete for flag capture points with this guy who practically has everything you have but better (instead of leaving behind super visible spikes he has a college degree). This isn't even like the modern sniper vs spy debate where it can still be debated that spy has a unique niche with his mindgames, cmedic just straight up took copied his homework, 98% percent matching on the plagiarism bot.

Cscout and cmedic beef is very likely, but if cscout is a literal god at what he does then there won't be much issue, since the best cscout is ultimately better at flagrunning than cmedic. Its likely that cscout is simply human tho, so that's some drama that can happen.

Funnily enough the tfc class that gets the most weight and hate on its shoulders is sniper. This is because servers have a limit on how many snipers can join, and if a shitty sniper took up the slots, the rest of the team would be pretty pissed. Meanwhile, a competent sniper is the bane of every player's existence; a missed shot can still slow someone down until a medic cures them.

P4: cmedic backstory building hell - barely organized nonsense

Last one I swear. My drawings of cmedic explicitly portray him as a person of color- more specifically a cape malay, from the cape territory in South Africa; he even curses in malay in one of the posts. Ig I wanted the cast to be more diverse, but it did make his backstory somewhat harder to write.

Mann co is situated in New Mexico, far from SA. How and why did he get all the way there? With the fanon worldbuilding I set, what is stopping him from simply joining a nearer merc group? Probably heard of it through the grapevine, and travelled for fat stacks; wouldn't be uncommon for doctors (or mercs) to be highly motivated due to money. I wondered of what would set him apart from all the other hypothetical medic applicants that probably graduated from upstanding colleges like harvard, then I recall all those common hcs.

1)Most applicants assumed that the job would consist of primarily healing, without considering how bloodthirsty their company would be, and/or 2)the BLU team has been getting genuine medics and chewing them up like gum (and spitting them out utterly mangled, I suppose). There's also the possibility that some margin of these medics actually had some weapon training, but at that point a lot of time has been spent (also some conflicting motives there, I can't imagine the perks that a deadly merc job has over a hospital job unless the guy got a kick out of it).

My next idea was to make him a ww1 vet on the side of the British (australian? american?) colonies of SA, having joined midway after finishing his education. However this would clock his age during the current 1970s timeline to be around 81, pretty old; most of the tfc mercs would be 70s max around that time. Cmedic is visually the youngest of the mercs too, you can compare his smooth eyes to the more sunken cspy's eyes and there is a notable difference. This is really just an issue of me being on the fence about fully oc-fying him (a friend of him suggested making him a vampire, I am almost tempted to make it so).

In the case that particular hurdle is overcome, there are more details I have to iron out. I figured that his motives either come from wanting to financially help out his family after the war's sheer devastation, or just . a general resentment for the way things unfolded, and he swapped to merc work in the states to get properly paid for his work and (attempt to) fill the void in his soul. Maybe a mix of the two. An outlier in his community for being a godless man and having very material and tangible masters (science and money), he abandons the lofty ideals of nationalism and sides himself with the highest bidder in the private market. Also developed an insane immune system (trenches and exposure are no joke).

(Certain classes have shared characteristics across gens, like the demos' deranged smiles and engies' wholesome vibes. With sigmund freud, tf2 medic as the archetypal mad doctor, and tfc medic as the archetypal capitalist doctor, there are now three gens of doctors with dubious machinations.)

He'd probably be a great medic, respecting merc code and all (funfact tf2 medic mentions tfc demo by name, implying that he knows his real name and putting a dent in my theory that being on a first-name basis is a big deal actually , my countertheory to that is that grey mann gave him the team's files and tf2 medic wants to spite them). Cmedic also reverse-engineered the medkit and made a new version for non-gravel war missions, since the usual has several hard drugs (heals to full instantly and gives adrenaline boost, sounds sus especially if you read jarate's side effects) since he ended up somewhat caring about his pack of rabid animals

#tfc #tfc medic #classic medic #tfc heavy #classic heavy #cmedic #cheavy #im going to regret it all in the morning #no beta read we die like cmedics hopes and dreams of a fair universe #nish rambles

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emblemxeno · 7 months ago

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Sorry, I have returned with another heavy representation related question

Do you find it odd that the push for black characters is disproportionately higher than the push for black culture?

Aside from all the interesting history and cultures in Africa, there's aboriginal Australians and Afro-Brazilians who invented an entire martial art to escape slavery and fight off colonizers. Capoeira is awesome btw

Why represent black people, but ignore black culture?

Good question!

I don't know if I have a great answer to this, but if I were to start anywhere, it's that part of it is definitely because of just how significant the U.S. is (or at least is treated) in how culture moves, shapes, and released. In the risk of sounding like a baby leftist eager to use buzzwords all the time, honestly it all ties back to capitalism. What sells, generating profit, buying out smaller companies for their better critical acclaim-to-commercial success ratio.

And a notable cog in the capitalist machine is what U.S. corporations do as, despite being an extremely young country, it is a superpower with massive amounts of land and wealth that it hoards. It stands to reason that anything that comes out of the U.S. can and will be marketed and capitalized off of if it reaches a certain point of popularity and/or notoriety.

Black American culture is one part in that American capitalist cog, where, despite being a proported bastian of modern day human rights, the U.S. values the dollar of the world's citizenry over actually making efforts to improve the damn planet they live on.

And true to that type of attitude, that resulted in Black American art at first being mocked ("a Negro wrote a book? yeah and pigs can fly haha"), then the 'emancipation' happened (ignore the fact that slavery technically still exists under the 13th amendment as punishment for crime and doubly ignore which racial population is drastically over-arrested and accused for crimes of which they either didn't do or have outrageous sentences compared to the crime committed e.g. weed posession, the U.S. doesn't want you to think about that) /s

After mockery, came mockery+profit, such as minstrelsy, and later whitewashing and theft of cultural aspects (music is a big one) at the expense of Black Americans not getting their due.

Then the Civil Rights era happened (ignore how socialist MLK was that's not good for the money making machine) and with that led to a more rapid dissolution of segregation, and that meant Black people can be on screen and can sell stuff to other Black people. Later, Black culture started becoming really cool and hip to non-Black people in America. White boy hip-hop, white guy and gal R&B (Timberlake, P!nk's first album), whatever the hell X-tina was doing with those damn cornrows lmaoooo.

And this corporate co-opting of the culture has proven to be a major money maker for the past 5 decades, and is still perpetuated today. Any accusation, claim, or slander of "Gen Z/TikTok/Stan Twitter" language is how Black Americans have been talking for decades upon decades (I wish I could remember there was this show from early days of color tv that had a black cop do a "white to black" translation as a joke on the show and he said "my partner wants the tea on the old bird" cuz that's really a big indicator of that fact.)

The double edged sword of this, is of course that this is a way of speaking, culture, art, and lifestyle that a group of people live, and despite it continuing to be marketable as trendy and cool, Black Americans are still not really getting the lion's share of praise for it, because well... the U.S. is still systemically racist and any trend that starts from a non-lighter skinned cultural/ethnic group that can be whitewashed, will be in order to sell more. Unconscious bias as a result of being raised in a country built upon injustice and genocide is something I don't imagine will be undone for even the next century or two.

Getting to the actual point you asked about, it's because of the topics in my aforementioned ramblings why it's most likely harder/less seen for Black culture to be pushed over just Black/dark skinned characters.

On one hand, yes, I did mention how Black culture has been commercialized and commodified, but 1) lots of overt racists still exist and celebrating or even explaining something adjacent to Black culture can and will set them off cuz "THE WOKE AGENDA, STOP PREACHING IN MY FAVORITE FRANCHISE GRRRR" which means a not-insignificant amount of money can potentially be risked since those types are in more spaces than you'd expect, 2) there's extra work to be done now as to not offend the particular culture being portrayed, which is a good thing to do, but sadly often results in said culture just being cut from a character to avoid the work because time spent on sensitivity can be taken as time wasted on not improving other parts of the product, and 3) I know this is a big accusation to make, but... people consume more subpar and shallow stuff than they're willing to admit. Obviously there's nuance to stuff; enjoying a children's show with black characters in it as a kid and thinking it's good representation is no problem whatsoever, in fact I encourage it more because diverse cartoons set developing kids' brains up extremely well for a progressing society.

But there's a very noticeable deluge of applause from even mature audiences when there's a major involvement of a Black person in general that rings hollow because there's usually nothing significant about it other than the produce may not have had Black involvement before. I myself am not immune to this of course, because my favorite game series' are Fire Emblem and Xenoblade, and only in the most recent entries of both did they feature unambiguously Black characters inspired by either cultural taste aesthetics (Timerra and Fogado from Latin America) or physical features (Taion's hair, nose and lips), and I basically fucking cheered cuz those are my babies and they look so cute. BUT, again, those were the most recent entries in series where characters darker skinned than a paper bag (or gray-ish brown) that weren't just insignifanct NPCs were hard to find, and in FE's case got outright fucking offensive (Danved/Devdan).

I suspect this is a similar sentinment with non-American Black culture as well, as since Black American culture is still a controversial celebration, African, Carribean, Black Latin, or Aboriginals of Australia have the same reputation except exacerbated by xenophobia, weird fetishy-exoticism being placed on them, or flat out being unknown to the greater zeitgeist at the moment. Certainly doesn't help that the major powers of entertainment are located in the places that ruined or exterminated those same Black cultures :/

TL;DR: Capitalism profits off of culture, but not too much because that risks losing more money than its worth, so the compromise is usually slapping a "they're black" sticker on whatever they're trying to sell and unfortunately it works a lot of the time because being an uncritical consumer is something we've been raised to deal with as a part of life.

#black history #black culture #african american history

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swoopingsilver · 5 months ago

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Say it with me kids

Cat👏color👏is👏not👏a👏breed!!

The cat you rescued off the side of the road is NOT a Siamese, Bengal, Persian, or whatever you’re going to come up with!!!

Those are cats that are THOUSANDS of dollars, the owners are not letting them wander the streets! And they sure aren’t being born in your back yard by some random stray!

Cat color is just that-color. Cat size, shape, tail, whatever is not how you figure out the breed. Most cats, we’re talking like 90-95%, are NOT PEDIGREE CATS.

I’m sure you’re asking “But Silver, why does this matter? No one is being hurt by me calling my silver mackerel tabby an Australian Mist.”

Ignoring the fact that it makes you look stupid (“oh yeah sure I have a rare exotic cat breed worth more money than my rent. No Im not paying vet bills this cat was free in the parking lot” sure Jan, that’s definitely a pedigreed cat there.)

Breeds tend to have a propensity to certain issues due to their inherent inbreeding and unique characteristics. Take for example, the Manx cat. You know, the cute little tailless ones? They’re prone to spine issues due to that tail. Your cat doesn’t “become a Manx” because it had a tail amputation. That’s not how the breed is determined.

Also, when you call your cat a “Maine Coon mix” at the vet, and then we open your carrier (which you should always bring your cat in a carrier to the vet btw but that’s a rant for another day) and it’s a massively overweight long hair…yeah, that’s not okay. It’s not “he’s big because he’s a Maine coon” it’s “your cat is obese and this should constitute as animal abuse”.

“But Silver, what do I call my dumpster/rescue/cat distribution system cat?”

Easy!

If your cat has short hair, it’s a domestic short hair (dsh for short)

If your cat has medium length hair, it’s a domestic medium hair (dmh for short) (this one is sometimes controversial, because it’s quite subjective)

And if your cat has long hair, it’s a domestic long hair (dlh for short) (medium hairs will be put in this category if for whatever reason you don’t want to use medium hair as a category)

Statistically, you have a domestic short hair. Unless you have a pedigree, your cat is a mix. You can call it a Moggie, if you want to feel fancy.

“But what about his/her color?”

Cats can be colorpoint without being a Siamese. Cats can be blue without being a Russian Blue. Cats can be black without being a Bombay. Half the time y’all can’t say a single feature of the cat breed besides coat color.

Tl;dr: Your warrior cat OC is not a purebred unless he/she was a kittypet with a pedigree. The cat you found in the university parking lot is not a purebred. Stop it you’re making yourself look like a fool.

Edit: forgot the long haired pictures whoops

#tired rambles #this is stupid but it bothers me SO MUCH #idk what to tag this as #cat genetics with silver #basics 101

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