#trans!vace

[sashasskribbles]

egg vace for my modern AU project

I just love the trans!vace fanon.

[kitthenameless]

Trans!Vace & Other Exocolonist Thoughts

Random "I Was A Teenage Exocolonist" post because I still have a few thoughts floating around that have no where else to go since I wasn't going to put them in my review. (It's an incredible game, btw. Throwing that out there for anyone who hasn't played.)

The genetic augmentations. What exactly was going on with those on Helios? Because on Stratos, it seemed everyone got their augments as babies or kids. And Nomi-Nomi not knowing theirs implies it was done when they were too young to remember. But Rex is just part dog. Which is a wild augment, because why? To me, that implies he chose it himself. Because why would any parent choose that? (Does he at least have dog senses? That would make more sense, but I don't remember if that was mentioned.)

And then the real confusing one is Vace, whose augment is a bigger dick. I would guess that maybe it was a secondary augment, sort of like how Tang's is that she needs less sleep, but she also changed her body as part of transitioning. Except Vace's listed augment in his profile is "well-endowed." I know they didn't do that to a baby. He definitely got that when he was older. So what is going on?

Also, sort of weird that he'd admit that so proudly? I feel like he's the type of man who would rather pretend his dick is just naturally that big. I even thought at first that he was trans, because of the way he said it, like, "Thanks to Daddy Genetech, no one doubts I'm the man anymore," or whatever. As though people used to not see him as a man. Which, yes, would be a problematic thing to say because you can be a man without having a dick, but it's already problematic anyway, and Vace being problematic is just par for the course. But then his profile just listed that as his augment. If he were trans, I'd think he'd have some other augment. Except him being trans would make more sense with how excited he is to talk about it. Maybe on Helios they only get one chance to alter their body? Unlike Stratos where everyone gets an augment and can also transition? Or maybe he has another augment that he just never mentioned, and so Sol just thinks that's his augment, so that's all we know about because the game is from Sol's POV?

Probably none of the above, because trans Vace is not confirmed or even hinted at in any other way, but I like it as a headcanon anyway.

[penguin--person]

i think it's really cool to imagine vace as transfem and here's why!!

so, first off, i wanna take a sec to explore the enviroment that vace grew up in.

it's easy to see the character we meet and think that he's always been like this, but he's 18 when we meet him. he grew up on the helios. what we see ingame is the result of 18 years spent being conditioned for these views. as my friend put it, "vace wouldn't have just popped out of the womb with toxic masculinity!!"

nomi says that there's not many (if any?) nonbinary people on the helios. i think its safe to assume that this extends to queer people as a whole. lum has a very gendered view of things - he adresses the crowd as "ladies and gentlemen", despite nomi, possibly sol, and most likely other nb people being there. given these things, there definetely wasn't a lot of room for experimentation on the helios.

speaking of lum - vace says that he's good friends with him. they're really good pals. he never says anything about friends his own age, though. sure, he's a leader, but that doesn't make the people following them his friends, even if he's on friendly terms with them. lum is the only person that vace considers a friend, i think.

another important part of his character imo that he wasn't always a leader. he says he used to be the runt of the litter, like rex. he only gained respect when he broke rex's arm, proving that he's worthy of that respect. he hurts more people to gain more respect after that, until he becomes the person we meet.

it's so... he earned this. he worked for it. roles of leadership, especially in the military, are typically seen as masculine.

with all that said, i want to delve into why it adds a new cool and interesting layer to his character if you read him as transfem.

he's 100% repressing it. he's refusing to acknowledge this part of himself because he's a Leader. accepting that he's part of the group he's been taught to see as 'other' - that he's part of the group he's abused - would complicate things. what would the soldiers that follow him think? vace isnt 'other', obviously, hes their leader!! but also she's trans?? what're they supposed to do now?? this goes against all that they've been taught - all that he's taught them!!

that doesn't really matter, though, because i don't think vace would ever come out. he likes being a leader too much. he enjoys the violence he partakes in. takes pride in it, even. he's not gonna give that up for... what, gender euphoria?

coming out, transitioning, when just acknowledging that he's trans would mean letting go of everything he's worked for. but he's earned this. he deserves to keep this.

even if he did come out: what would good would that do him? he can't just out with the stratos. he can't pretend he hasn't hurt and abused many of them. he enjoyed it, and they know it. rex would def support vace, but, c'mon man. you think vace is turning to rex for support?? i think, if rex offered it, vace would reject it out of pride, imo.

a really neat thing, to me, is that, like... accepting that he's transfem would not only mean giving his role up, it would also mean accepting that he really is just like rex. he's just like the guy he bullied for years - regularly "beat the shit out of", in rex's own words. he would have to accept that he 'deserved' to be grouped in with rex and nomi. if everything worked according to his beliefs, he'd be the one that had his arm broken.

he's both the victim and the perpetrator and he's stuck in hell. any choice he can make is shitty in one way or another. the easiest thing for him to do is to repress it. acknowledging it in any way would mean disturbing the status quo.

... but, as i've said, he wants the status quo to stay the same. he wants to keep his status, the power it gives him. she's not gonna confront this part of herself until sol pries it out of her

there's also the obvious, like vace's fragile and toxic masculinity - his insistence that He's a good leader, Trust. He's manly. Trust him. He's so manly and masc. but there's not much i can say about - it feels so obvious im not even sure what to say about it? im just pointing at this

that's it i think <3 thank you for reading!! i hope u can find it in your hearts to become transfem truthers with me, iwatex fandom...

if anyone has any thoughts on transfem!vace - please please please share them with me!!! i'd love to hear what people think about her!!!:)

[skyvalii]

IWATEX (is that the acronym??) Sexuality Gender headcanons

I saw a few of these and wanted to hop into it. Tangent - Canonically Trans, Bisexual but it's like the meme where it's every woman ever and then One man.

Nomi - Nonbinary, Aro/Ace (Feels very little romantic attraction)

Anemone - Listen. Listen. Something about her being a lesbian struggling with CompHet is very important to me. I love her...

Vace - I understand the Vace hate, I really do, but I also crave the Angst of Closeted Vace and the whole side piece part. Some form of queer, but refuses to admit it. (I like to think on the Astronaut ending he figures it out).

Dys - Bisexual Grayromantic. I love him <3

Cal - Would definitely kiss Male Sol and be fine with it but I truthfully see him as Straight from a headcanon stance.

Marz - Pan, love her for it.

Rex - Pan as well.

Note: I would wanna put that they are polyam but I don't think that I could see any of the canonic open relationship people having a steady relationship at all.

Tammy: I also see Tammy as straight but I also see her on the Asexual spectrum.

Sym: Agender Queer!

Sol: Genderfluid Pan!

I think I might do this for the NPCs too at some point because I have thoughts <3

[theomenroom]

I Was a Teenage Exocolonist spoilers (meta about the Heliopause and musings about what life's like for the Helios)

I get the impression that the Heliopause was hit a lot worse than the Stratospheric was, given that it takes them four years to even start trying to replace the governing council of the place they've just taken over in a military occupation, and also, like, Lum is only three years older than Utopia, who boarded the Stratospheric at the age of four. Even if we make generous assumptions and say the Heliopause is a faster ship, Lum was probably not more than, like, ten when he boarded the Heliopause.

Also there's the stuff Rex and Nomi say about how Lum got the job.

It's very likely that there weren't any Heliopause survivors who boarded the ship as adults.

The Heliopause is a military ship, with more-or-less universal conscription (Nomi and Rex's narratives aside; I have theories but that's out of scope here).

Every single one of the Helio soldiers who shows up to take over the colony when the Helio lands, then, either was selected as a child to be raised for conscription, or was born for conscription.

In other words, the Helio shows up with two platoons of child soldiers in a can whose entire command structure has just disintegrated, possibly literally. And, without their senior officers, they need the technical experts in the Strato colony, even if they have a bunch of preserved food for the landing.

You could tell an entire story just about that, honestly, about trying to find freedom between the environment you grew up in, the occupying soldiers, and the hostile wildlife (having the outside hostile environment be something that the soldiers can be pointed at makes the balance more interesting, or at least, interesting in a different way than, say, a dome city in a hostile atmosphere would be). The problem there isn't even Lum, not really, it's that there are a bunch of soldiers who have few useful skills except fighting, and more guns than you, and they expect to live off of that. The game's mechanics require that you're still given a lot of freedom, to do what you want and slack when you want/need to, which limits its ability to portray the soldiers acting on their established motivations.

Also, surprisingly for a coming-of-age story about teenagers, there's not a whole lot of story about exploration and self-acceptance in restrictive environments (for instance, none of the characters' pronouns change over time; Tangent and Nomi are trans, but both of them have settled genders before their ships land), which doesn't give them much room to show Helio soldiers as Sol's peers other than Vace (indeed, I remember fighting a Glow raid with Anemone and her squad, none of whom were important enough to give a face or a name to).

Honestly, though, I'm not sure how much of this is criticism and how much is me wanting to run off in a different direction with its ideas.

[vergess]

Legit I thought the implication here was that Vace is also trans and the big dick augment was overcompensation on his part, so finally getting around to medical and finding out, nope, he was just born that way was.... a lot.

That child's father really did a number on him lmaoooo

Imagine giving your child the big dick gene. Vertumnans are developing Oedipal complexes we can't possibly hope to understand in our lifetime

[vergess]

Hello there! I apologize for the late hour, but I was just wondering if you have any headcanons or speculations about Besk, the twins' deceased mother from I Was A Teenage Exocolonist. I already heard back from @exocolonistfeelings and @arionwind , but I thought a third opinion would be good for my curious brain 😅

Oh, you never need to apologize for sending me asks about my Favourite Subjects, don't worry! Unfortunately, I had already gone to bed by the time this arrived D:

So, before we begin, this post will have spoilers for:

MAJOR: Robotics job storyline.

MAJOR: Dys and Tang friendships (duh)

MAJOR: Delusions run/achievement

MAJOR: Barista job storyline.

Marz friendship (minor)

Doctor job (minor)

Prolific parenting ending (minor)

Life on Earth achievement (minor)

It will discuss the following stressful subjects:

Suicide

PTSD

Depression

Psychiatric abuse

Child abuse

Substance abuse (alcohol, psychiatric medication)

Cult indoctrination and abuse

Human extinction

And finally, Besq has a character profile in the game data, but it's never used. The profile informs us that she:

Was named Arabesque;

Was female;

Died at age 32;

Was born in Early Quiet;

Was ~12 years younger than Instance, ~7 years younger than your parents, and the same age as Anne, Tirah, Al and Bernie.

Combined with details from the Twins, Marz and Instance, we can develop a very complete timeline of her life.

And it's nasty.

But let's start a little lighter.

Like Ari, I am a definite "Arabesque And Instance Truther." For a while, I honestly considered that Instance might have been the other genetic donor for the twins. Tangent's resemblance to her is particularly noticeable.

So, I figured they were besties, and maybe exes, but in that way you get with queers where no one is sure if they dated or not even though they definitely both lived together for a while and had sex.

Until I started plowing through all the endings, I was under the impression that when Tangent talked about bonding during her transition it was because Instance is also trans. That seems not to be the case (if you become a geneticist or a doctor or something, you develop a more perfected transition technology and it's used specifically for Utopia and Tangent, but not Instance or Vace).

So I was honestly under the matching impression that when Arabesque needed a genetic donor for her Depression Baby, she went to her "Friend" rather than going to the genetic banks, possibly because she knew she would not pass any meaningful examinations. Medicins aren't good at it, but they are trained to look specifically for depression in mothers. With the entire colony hinging on reproduction as aggressively as it does, I truly thought she would have been caught by even the most basic screening.

Of course, as a psych herself, she could easily just lie about everything and get a donor sample.

And that seems to have been the case because of 2 things.

1) Tangent implies she checked her genome against Instance's at one point around year 14 and found no significant commonalities suggesting relationship.

2) If you do Prolific Parent after picking menstruation/breast growth in adolescence (and maybe also null?) and have a female partner, you help the colony develop XX-to-XX fertilization so you can go around knocking up other people too. (Again: 40 children!!! You must be stopped!! Literally! The colony has to stop you from having more children!!).

So, if Instance is indeed cis, the tech wouldn't have existed yet for her to be the other donor.

At this point, I now believe Tangent looks like Instance because she was going to come out looking in some way undesirable to Besq. Was Tangent going to look like her genetic dad? Like Besq's ex? Like Besq herself? (I suspect it may be the latter)

Whatever the case, it seems Besq went full Designer Baby on that shit, and used her Bestie 'Tans as a model.

Bestie, exes, singular point of psychological support in perhaps the most horrific possible torture chamber.

~*~Just Girly Things~*~

As Ari mentioned, it was wildly irresponsible for the cult to designate one singular person as the entire emotional support system for hundreds of people living in a heretofore unknown and unknowable stressor, knowing that they might kill their entire families in the process, thereby rendering their entire movement extinct, and possibly the entire human race if the Earth ending is to be believed.

Really sit on that. Think about the horror that the adults, capable of understanding what they are and what they're doing, are going through every single day.

And every single one of them relied exclusively on a single woman to process that trauma, even as she had to process her own trauma without anyone to trust.

And even then, even then, she lives years on the strato. She survives over a decade of a kind of psychological torture that I cannot even begin to understand.

Now brace yourself, because it's time to payoff on that timeline comment.

Arabesque was 16 when she boarded the Strato as their designated trauma therapist.

She spent her entire adult life in hell.

The twins are 1 year younger than Sol. Besq is mentioned in Marz's high friendship event as being alive, but already heavily drinking, when the twins are turning 5. She dies shortly afterwards.

For the twins to be turning 5, the ship has to have been traveling for just under 16 years. She dies on or around her 32nd birthday. Only four years out from the wormhole.

Unironically and without reserve, Arabesque's inconceivable resilience is responsible for the survival of the human race. Without her there to soak trauma up like a sponge for 16 years of isolation, there is 0 chance that everyone else on the Strato would have had the emotional competence and resilience themselves to make it to Vertumna, let alone establish a colony.

And I don't give the cult any benefit of the doubt in this one, by the way. Modern therapy is great, but it's not the only system for developing emotionally resilient groups. It's specifically terrible for small groups that live together.

This is something that anyone trying to create a planned community of any kind should know on day one. It's unbelievably irresponsible to do what they did.

They didn't need a therapist; they needed social hobbies. They needed a knitting circle, a sewing circle, a banjo band, a bonsai club, three mutually exclusive tabletop rpg groups, a teach-what-you-know art class, a choir, a peer-support therapy and study group, and a dozen other small-group hobbies to foster strongly interconnected emotional group bonds.

That or they needed a religious system. Those are basically the two options. But honestly the cult is alarming enough as it is, so hobbies!!

They did NOT need to make a child bear that burden, and certainly not by herself.

What the Strato needed, and the cult should have provided, is what their children got. A wide variety of small activities that contribute to the overall longevity of the colony while building friendships.

And we only got it because Besq lived long enough for everyone else to survive, and then died spectacularly.

Because of her death.

The severe shock of finding that she hung hung herself in her office, between appointments, completely breaks the "therapeutic" strategy the cult imposed on the colony. Unlike every other job with a possible death in the game, Besq is never replaced.

It takes 20 years and a complete restructuring of the social system of the colony before it's even possible for another therapist to emerge, and only rarely!

Meanwhile, even Congruence struggles under the weight of managing the automated therapy protocols when Besq dies. It's mentioned frequently in certain playstyles that Congruence's therapy is fine for what it is, but it doesn't work nearly as well as a real, trained therapist. Vace describes it as confusing and monotonous. Sol simply describes it as "not as good."

It's a mostly automated system. The handful of excerpts we get from it suggest a very basic CBT regimen. That makes sense, since CBT's non-holistic approach makes it especially easy to self administer. However, it also severely limits the kinds of problem CBT can treat.

And even still, Congruence almost dies the same way Besq did. Only, if Congruence goes, so does the rest of the colony.

That's the end of the Robotics storyline.

After a shockingly similar ~16 years, the strain of mental health for the entire colony, combined with constant trauma, breaks Congruence. An AI many hundreds of thousands of times faster than a human, who regulates everything in the colony, who was designed to self-repair for millennia.

Congruence is the human equivalent of the Overseer, and she lasted exactly as long as Besq did under that strain, while doing significantly worse than Besq did.

Speaking of CBT's inherent limitations: Tangent seems to favour the Psychodynamic approach if she becomes a therapist.

However, Tangent's psychodynamism stands out specifically because of her willingness to use medical and technological intervention alongside it. This is relatively uncommon in our world, if only because psychology (therapy) and psychiatry (medication) are two different fields with totally different demands and licensures.

But even in cases when a psychologist and a psychiatrist share a practice and work together, the ease and readiness with which Tangent approaches those additional interventions is fascinating.

It suggests to me that Besq was likely also a psychodynamist, but a non-medical one.

This is also fun, because it plays well with the theme of reuniting the twins. Instance says outright that Tangent takes after her, while Dys takes after Besq. (Instance saying this is a large part of why I think they were exes rather than unresolved, because it seems like a sort of 'history repeats itself' statement, since it's specifically in the context of 'why Dys and Tangent can't love each other.')

TI is only when Tangent combines the dynamic, holistic approach of Dys (and psychotherapy) and with the the rigid, numerical approach of Instance (and psychiatry), that Tangent overcomes the hurdles her mother failed.

Tangent's happiest lives come from reuniting with emotionality, trauma, and soft skills through Dys, and through the echo of their mother Besq.

Her happiest lives come when she surpasses the horror she inherited when her mother's all-too-human strength finally failed.

And I think that's part of why Tangent is often so... accepting of her early death (she never lives past 60). And why even in the best endings, she doesn't have children of her own, though she donates genetics to a few.

She achieves her goals simply by surviving her trauma instead of being consumed by it. Her legacy is the health and happiness of humanity as a species, not herself or her bloodline. She's very much the mirror image of Dys and the Gardeners, in that way.

There is one other kind of mental health intervention in the colony without Tangent, though. If Congruence's workbook therapy doesn't help, then there's Instance's meds.

When Arabesque dies, Instance devotes herself wholeheartedly to creating self-regulating psychiatric drug implants. In the Barista job ending, Tangent talks about how she and Instance have perfected the technology and Tangent uses it herself to manage her depression, anxiety and paranoid delusions.

If you do a Delusions run, you get a few more tantalizing hints about that.

After Besq's death, the entire colony develops a SEVERE stigma around mental illness.

When Sol presents with delusions (which CBT is especially bad at handling), no modern therapies are attempted. What happens instead is a horrific combination of futuristic medicine and medieval psychology.

Instance begins with bed rest.

That doesn't work. It wouldn't work even on bog standard psychosis. In the fashion of "The Yellow Wallpaper", being put on bedrest runs the risk of making Sol worse.

If Sol continues to express delusions, Instance moves on to heavy antipsychotics. Because the implant is not yet ready, Sol can fake taking these meds.

But it doesn't matter if you do. You'll eventually be caught, and forcibly medicated in a way you "can't avoid." This is never specified, but is specifically not an invasive procedure.

The antipsychotics cause a horrible reaction, whther voluntary or forced. You become almost catatonic, and are trapped in a permanent hallucinatory dream state with your various lives overlapping in your hearing and sight.

So, Instance, your parents (if alive), and the colony council decide to perform an experimental cyberpunk lobotomy on you. This is suggested to be either a prototype or early version of the implant, as it involves invasive surgery, a long recovery time, the suppression of neurochemicals, and massive personality changes.

When I say there's stigma, I am not fucking around. That's their response to nonviolent, nonthreatening delusions in a child.

And as a natural consequence of this absurd behaviour around modern psychology, the colonists avoid anything and everything that looks even vaguely like modern therapy, with the exception of Congruence's AI CBT.

However, because of Besq's tireless work, the colonists are also generally psychologically healthy enough the "inferior" AI therapy is sufficient.

That means the colonists are healthy enough to more or less self-regulate. Combined with the close quarters and heavy labour demands, a system naturally emerges that prioritizes social-bonding through shared hobbies and work.

I don't think Besq killed herself with that in mind. I can't imagine she planned it that way. I think by the time she got pregnant, it was already much too late for her to have any hope of survival.

But the fact remains: Besq set the colony up to survive, in the most horrific way possible. Tangent's obsession with killing herself so that the colony can survive is very much inherited.

Oh also! I'm pretty sure she named Dys that because he (as the "planned" pregnancy) was her Depression Baby.

There's this thing people do, sometimes, when they're extremely depressed, where they have a kid and obsess over it, because as long as the kid is alive and loves them, then they have a reason to live, etc etc. It's really a horrific pattern, because if the parent(s) don't get help for their psychological issues, it almost always leads to all kinds of child abuse.

It can overlap with post-partum depression, too, which just makes it worse, feeding in to the sense that the only value in your life is your children, or vice versa.

As a psychiatrist and psychologist herself, Besq would have been aware of that. I think on some level she knew she was setting herself and her children up for torment. But it was that or just give up and die already.

I very much believe she had Dys specifically as a way to manage her own dysthymia (major depression) long enough to eke out a bit more survival.

I think her peculiar behaviour towards her children also reflects that. The few times we hear about her aside from Instance, Besq is consistently both drunk and doting. If you've ever read Homestuck, Besq has a very Mom Lalonde energy of desperately trying while utterly failing in no small part due to her substance abuse.

And given that the only other people her age she meets for the rest of her entire life are:

Aunt Anne, the All-Mother

Tirah et al, the most distressingly well adjusted polycule on or off earth

Al and Bernie, the literal fucking dictionary definition of picket fence monogamy

All of whom have kids aready or are just starting to have children (remember, Dys and Tang are the youngest in the group). All of whom are happier and better adjusted than you. In spite of the fact that you were the one doing the adjustments.

With all that, a depression baby starts to sound like a very appealing last ditch effort. After all, as long as she's careful not to hurt the kid herself, then when she does give up and die, at least she knows the creche will keep them safe. And Anne is so happy, so loving.

All Besq needs to do is stay drunk enough not to hurt herself, sober enough not to hurt them, until she's finally done. From the perspective of someone who went through what she did, it must have seemed like a kindness.

Given them a bunch of happy memories of her when they're too young to understand why she reeks of illicit alcohol and doesn't spend time with any adults. Then, when she's too tired to continue, just off herself so she can't hurt them with her self destruction, and let Anne and the creche clean up the mess.

When you're far enough down in the depression, that logic checks out. The idea that your absence could be worse than your presence is unfathomable.

Also, since Besk's birthday is immediately after Dys and Tang's, I have to assume the reason Dys is so weird about birthdays is that Besk made sure to live just long enough for their 5th birthday (the photo Marz has), and then killed herself on or immediately before her own.

That, uh... that would for sure give your kids a weird complex about birthdays, to the degree that your son hates people more if they give him cake, and your daughter refuses to eat any sweets at all.

So yeah, that's about that.

I suppose I should mention her Ex from Earth, the one that comes up in her suicide note. But honestly? She was 16 when she left. I'm not exactly shocked that she idealizes some boy she left back home. Even without the trauma of everything else that happened in her life immediately after leaving him and which never ever ended which would necessarily conflate his existence with the last time she felt joy?

It's not that weird for a 16 year old to have a strong crush, and then wax nostalgic about it as an adult. I mean, most people are willing to make a bit of fun at themselves for how silly and obsessed they were as a teen riding high on that first rush of "oh my god I have sex/romance/whatever feelings now."

It's just that, unlike most people?

When Arabesque says 16 was the best her life ever got, she's right.

[transnamesuggestions]

I’ve been going by Dylan for some time (I’m trans masc/gnc trans man). But I’ve also been using Ozzy and Tenny as well. Do you have any names that fit a similar vibe? I’m considering changing my name.

Here’s a couple ideas: Davis, Jett, Jace, Jax, Knox, Lennox, Blade, Luca, Bryce, Trent, Vale, Vace, Casen, Cash/Kash

[dear-indies]

Hello! Do you have any trans faceclaims that look like Troye Sivan?

Trans men:

Ryan Cassata (1993) - has resources. 

Miles McKenna (1995) - has resources.

Theodore Zane (1998)

Casil McArthur (?)- has resources.

and here are some short and/or curly haired non-binary suggestions:

iO / iO Tillett Wright (1985) - he/him or no pronouns - has resources. 

Nico Tortorella (1988) Genderfluid - they/them - has resources.

Rain Dove (1989) Genderqueer - they/them. 

Olly Alexander (1990) - he/him - has resources.

Jude Karda (1996) - they/them - has resources.

Chandler Wilson (1998) Agender - they/them 

Chella Man (1998) Chinese, Jewish - Genderqueer - he/him - deaf - has resources.

Vace AKA datavace (?) Non-binary.

Trinity Bree (?) Androgynous, Non-binary - any pronouns.

Hey anon - Troye Sivan is Jewish but the only non-cis Jewish faceclaim I know near Troye’s age is Chella Man so if our followers have any suggestions please send us a message and this post will be updated! -C

[deusexlachina]

These are pretty solid rationales! Thanks for sharing.

I agree that Sym is very creepy. I usually rank characters by how interesting they are, and honestly I tend to prefer characters with at least a streak of creepiness - Cole and Merrill in Dragon Age, (Slay) The Princess, Ophelia in Dragon Commander, and of course everyone's favourite Genetic Plague Maker. If creepiness gives a low score, Sym being lower than Tammy definitely makes sense.

With Nomi, I've played I think 3 runs (not counting the inevitable reloading), and they're one of the characters I've interacted with more since I always get drawn to the techy jobs. I agree that Vace isn't much more important, aside from that one ending where you fight the Gardeners. I just don't like any of the Helios; the Strato children, with the exception of Tammy, were designed first and it really shows. Utopia is the most unambigously heroic of the trans characters, often standing up against the Helios and being the first to speak out against Lum's regime. So it's not that I particularly dislike Nomi, it's more that I particularly like Utopia.

I do like the idea of Rex being a spy or something. If he had a dark side, that would absolutely make him more interesting. But I'd settle for a character arc. His bar (and the Golden Tang Ending) is a very persuasive argument, well-tailored to the audience.

With Antecedent, the big thing for me is how much she follows which way the wind is blowing, being the sole character to change votes purely because other people did. And her looking the other way with Vace abusing Nem never really reaches a dramatic head (like Instance's relationship with Tang or even Cal's defence of Socks). Evil can be compelling, spineless generally isn't. Her affection towards Sol is a point in her favour, though I wish she treated Nem as well.

objectively correct tier list feel free to ask why i put ppl here bc almost all had specific (if subjective) reasons for their positioning even within their own tiers

[alienvace-blog]

Heya

So yes, this is officially my first post , so hey everyone. My name is vace. Well not really, but as for right now, i would like to go by that just so people from school dont exactly know who i am. I might post a pic or so of myself, but i think i would like to wait until my account actually reaches people. I hope you understand. Anyway im a normal dorky teenager with a green pixie cut. Typical loser i know. The kind of kid who makes dick jokes to themselves in the back of the classroom while they wish they could be talking to that cool kid making the same kind of jokes, but with another person. So yeah, im kind of an outcast. Ever since i moved away from home, lifes been..difficult. of course its always been , but heck im having a bad time ok! Im either around a bunch of immature kids, or people who jist dont understand me. So help a kid out, message, follow me or whatever dude . Haha, welp i dont want to bore you guys for this long, so ill just try and keep it short (haha nah) but yeah, i guess ive kinda been stalling , but i just want to say i recently came out to my mom as androgynous. I was born female, but ive always had male traits . Ever since i was young. Heck most of my friends are guys. I know for sure im female, but there is apart of me who doesnt feel completley cis. Im not even sure what my sexuality is yet. But trans kids ? Hot. Heck nb kids? Hot. Cis ? Demi? Whatever else? Your all beautiful! So idk if ill stick to the term androgynous forever. But its a start in discovering who i am, and i hope all of you are on the same path. No matter what your all going through stay cool! My messages are open. And i literally just made a tumblr today so ... lets see how this goes. Im hoping i can meet friends of the lgbt community, or even people who arent apart of that at all. Im cool with everyone. So i guess no matter what, everyones welcome here! So stay chill . ;)

[penguin--person]

for the character asks HITS YOU WITH MY ANEMONE BEAM ‼️‼️‼️‼️

AHHH NEM BEAM!!! THE NEM BEAM!!!! AHHH

favorite thing about them honestly i love her whole character!!! nem might even be my fave iwatex character.. i love her design (her big big hair and the big switch between her teen self to a helios soldier and her star freckles) and i love her attitude !! and i love that she always, always turns to the helios, its such a cool thing - it sucks for her, but like, thematically its awesome.. i love her growth and i love her soo much. but . to be totally honest. i love her big hair. its awesome

least favorite thing about them unsure.. it sucks she always turns to the helios and becomes a soldier, but thats !! cool thematically !! mm. not silly enough

favorite line I FORGOR !! ANY OF HER LINES... i rlly like the scene where you save her from the 'dog' though!!! i love that shes still got it in her to cry. after going through so much, kom dying, dating vace, being a soldier, she still has it in her to cry for sol when they get seriously wounded, might die. its rlly neat. ohh i also like it when she runs up to koms dead body 👍and cries and wails. OH i also love her rightful insistance that her scales are cool and how she wants cool scars... and i also love her event where you get matching tattoos!!!! i love her whole get-better arc...

brOTP VIC 👍👍👍VICTORY MY GOOD FRIEND VICTORY!!! they'd get along i think.. vics like. lived their whole life (well, until they land) with the helios !! i think they'd get along:) enemies to friends i think maybe bc vic could be mean

OTP oh mannn.. who knows ?!? (forgets everything about exocolonist ever) ... mm .. uhh . .. umm .. synth x nem is cute but not a true pair .. umm . uhh .. umm.. sol i suppose!! idk 👍👍

nOTP n

random headcanon

like every fave character of mine shes on the aro spectrum 💪💪💪aroace maybe even. who knowx... i dont rlly have any like. thoughts on how or where on the spectrum she'd fall. wait ok this lets me talk about an interesting iwatex thing to me like !! so, they have information on earth - i love iwatex worldbuilding btw - but not everyone is all that interested in it. like, sol doesnt study up on it, anemone (iirc) finds learning about it lame and stuff, you know? its like, theres cool stuff in thsi world (like, past civilisations) that i dont learn about !! you know? like umm . i find it all cool!! awesome!!! but its like. lik.e. gouhh. ok onto my point. can you imagine like, the new gender and sexuality and who knows what spectrums they made on vertumna? theyre making whole new genders there!!! how many of queer words and stuff did they take with them?? you know !! how much remained !! i dont know . anemone probs wouldnt know the words to describe her sexuality in words we know, right?? if she was aro . but she'd still be it to me !! or maybe something else? like. goddd man. theyre making whole new genders and sexualities on vertumna. shes also TRANS of course.dont ask me how. and lesbianl.and everything ever. shes QUEER she doesnt know the words!! shes just queer dude shes just queerrrr

unpopular opinion i dont know what the popular opinions surrounding nem are:( uukkmm... :(( sorry

song i associate with them OH DUDE i was just thinking about how this song

is nemcore the other day!!! almost messaged you about it.. almost drew redrew some parts of this as her.. the songs about shutting out grief, that its just something you have to accept, nothing you can do about it, people will die and youre stupid for being sad about it. when the helios arrive and the vertumna celebration happens, nem says "we should be grieving, not celebrating", give or take.. so i think this is a very. post helios arrival nem. when they teach her to fight about it n stuff. "something about this doesn't seem okay/i hear my voice as if its really far away/my shadow darkens under the sun" "i'm ready to be blinded by the breaking day/you'd think by now the chains come undone, but i'm afraid of breaking into a run" "i chose to shut my eyes, you (vace) chose to bare your teeth" but nem doesnt have such a "whats the point in pushing back against the mill that grinds the world to dust" mindset, does she? shes fighty. she believes shes on the right side of things.WAIT I KNOW!!! I KNOW A SONG!!!

maybe??? oughhh man youre getting a BIG POST... if anyhting this is a solcore song. to me. ive wanted to send it to u for some time but i was scawed youd think im cringe .. like a LOSER!!! its SWAG its a COOL SONG and i LIKE IT

favorite picture of them

i love this one. shes happy. its def post her breakup with vace. shes HAPPY shes HANGING OUT shes AUNT NEM!!! sjes SILLY!!! shes HAPPY i want the best for her

i think nemmie is my fave exo character hehe...

[penguin--person]

🖊tell me abt a blorbo I haven't heard much abt at all :3

you get photosynthesis

synth my buddy synth is an iwatex oc of mine!! i dont focus on them enough.. dont give them enough attention.. smh.. shame on me.. this will contain some iwatex spoilers. here's their relationship charts that i made a few months back! there's an error in anemone's (red/orange girl) teenage thing. it means to say "vace's dislike of synth rubs off on nem"

some of this has changed, but most of it has remained the same. synth is cool. she's trans! which way? yeah! he realizes that during the game, so, sol can help him out and such.. he're younger than sol, also.. her birthname, which they like still, is nudibranch! dib for short:) then, when she realizes she's trans, she keeps their legal name (bc he's lazy lol, and as i said, he likes it) and then have a more public name, which is photosynthesis.

they choose that name because he's rlly a big flower guy. his job is agriculturist! and, florist in the side:) it doesn't pay too many kudos, but he likes it!!! knows all about the vertumnian.. vertumnilian? flora, and loves learning more about it!! however, you can't feed the colony on flowers. so!! their main job is agriculturist, they help maintain the land and all the jazz that agriculture involves. therefore, they're close with cal, and therefore, tammy!! i also imagine sol:) since their mom is head of geoponics

she's just cool... she's nice, love to tease her friends (cough cough go check out @/aru-art 's oc inca theyre buddypals), love to pick them up and carry them around, help them, make jokes.. she's also a bit. skittish..? no.. hm.. whats the right word, i wonder...

he's easy to persuade, i suppose? he's not naive. he dislikes the helios. cough cough vic my good friend vic. he won't help you if you're him them to kill someone. but , if you're good friends, he won't report you, if your reason is good enough, or if he trusts you enough. if you're friends, he'll also help you hide the body. he's v loyal 👍

he's just a chill gal... doesn't like that everyone is like, ohhh what are we gonna do the vertumna wants us dead. bc she thinks that they can coexist with vertumna. just have to show it they dont mean harm. but, whos gonna listen to a little kid who eats dirt lol

has a "what's the point of anything if there's no time to stop and smell the flowers" mindset, sorta.. theres no point to just surviving. you have to live.

HE GETS WITH NOMI ‼️‼️SHE DATES THEM ‼️‼️QPR MOMENT... i also think sol could pair her up with someone. or, try to, lol.. that'd be funny i thin.. but nomi is a safe bet 💪💪💪marz also, i think.. anemone maybe? tangent, if you squint.. worlds most swag yuri polycule on vertumna right now

anyway shes cool 👍

[ochamocha]

overall, sym’s creepiness is forgivable because it’s generally super well written. like i said he’s one of the best written characters imo, i just cannot get past him casually drugging sol out of nowhere. you’re absolutely right that helios got the shaft, but tbh i didn’t know utopia was trans? i don’t remember any lines suggesting that lol but i could be wrong, and yeah no nomi tends to kinda roam a bit. also, i don’t think seedent knew much about vace and nemmie’s relationship. i don’t think she turned a blind eye as much as just didn’t know, which willful ignorance is still bad but it’s worth noting after kom’s death nem’s relationship with her mom is so strained that nem often just didn’t come home, and virtually never initiated conversations. it’s not unreasonable for someone who’s busy in the domestic wing to have no idea what’s happening in the military wing yknow? i don’t think she was really a bad mom, you have to remember when kom died they both were grieving, he was her son just as much as he was nem’s big brother, neither one of them handled it well at all, and they just have methods of coping that didn’t combine well. nemmie wanted vengeance, and her mother wanted to be so busy she couldn’t think about it. also i don’t think it’s that unreasonable for the character possibly least affected by the change in governing to have her vote reflect what her coworkers feel they’d be benefitted by no? ultimately not much changes in domestic wing regardless of who’s in charge, so i saw it more as aligning with her peers who have more stake in the decision. also you don’t have to provide links on the stratos being designed first and seedent voting based on others, ive got dozens of runs under my belt im well aware 😭

objectively correct tier list feel free to ask why i put ppl here bc almost all had specific (if subjective) reasons for their positioning even within their own tiers