A quick sketch comic for an old au I did today
Basically Tommy and his parents got stranded on a planet when he was little and they just live their now.
Techno is their android, he’s a repurposed protection robot and is Tommy’s ‘big’ brother
Wilbur is an alien who lives on the planet
oh so they’re just saying the quiet part out loud? Good to know they’re just out and open now
That’s not the quiet part.
There’s something else, something they might not even be fully aware of themselves. The real quiet part is that if it was *their* child or *their* ectopic pregnancy they’d pull out all the stops to save their life or get their grandchild aborted. Planned Parenthood sees reactionaries and regressives all the time, and they are every bit the nightmare patients you’d imagine them to be. But the one thing all those patients have in common is that *their* abortion is *justified*, and the next week they’ll be outside the clinic again, rejoining the protestors for “killing their baby”.
It’d be one thing to have ghoulish principles, but the far-right have none at all.
When I was younger and had more time to waste on the internet, and spent a lot of time in various online forums getting into arguments -- on purpose -- I made up a game I called Six Degrees of Slut.
The game (which is a variation on the well known Six Degrees of Bacon) was very simple. In any discussion of abortion, see whether you could get the other side to articulate, within six back-and-forth exchanges, some variation of The Filthy Sluts Must Be Punished. Regardless of where their argument started, the goal of the game was to get them to admit that.
I never once lost a game of Six Degrees of Slut. On a few occasions the match was inconclusive - the other person left off arguing before we reached round six - but I never lost; I never once reached six rounds of debate with a prolifer without them expressing some variation on this sentiment. But what was really remarkable to me was, a lot of times, that there was no effort involved at all -- they would blurt it out themselves, with effectively no provocation.
Scratch a prolifer, and you'll find right under the surface the conviction that The Filthy Sluts Must Be Punished. I have never once yet found an exception. Sometimes you don't even have to scratch.
Well, on our planet, you would have been awarded the highest honors.
TRANSFORMERS: PRIME (2010-2013)
1.06 | Masters & Students
I’ve talked about this episode several times, but it still gets me, so here’s yet another long post about it LMAO
What kills me about this to this day is that Ratchet’s model of Cybertron that he made for Miko depicts the planet back when it was fully alive and thriving.
We see current Cybertron in Orion Pax Part One, and it’s nearly completely grey, with most cities/polities bombed out, thus changing what the surface of the planet looks like. The two orbiting moons may have suffered massive damages from the war as well.
But in Ratchet’s model, we can see several hubs of activity and development-- The brightest, most densely concentrated yellow-orange spot might be the metropolis of Iacon.
He wanted so badly to show the kids some Cybertronian science and educate them on his home world. He wanted to show them that Cybertronian knowledge is still important, it still exists. He wanted them to learn what his planet looked like, back when it was habitable and in it’s peak state.
He got so obsessive with building these because he wanted it done “right”, because he wanted these projects to make an impression.
He wanted the kids to be able to show off Cybertronian science, to learn with a bit of Cybertronian flair. He wanted to prove his old rusty bolts can be useful and help them achieve that, to help them achieve beyond the average human standard--- We know that Ratchet is a little self-aware about his age, relative to the others.
Ratchet doesn’t know if he’ll ever be able to pass along his knowledge. We know he is passionate about science, in various forms and specialities.
When was the last time Cybertron was capable of supporting new generations? When was the last time the Well of All-Sparks produced a new bot? When was the last time he got a new group of residents to train on the wards at Iacon Medical?
When was the last time he got to lose himself in any benign little hobby project, that wasn’t related to something that needed to be figured out urgently for the war effort?
Even if he approaches it begrudgingly at first, it’s pretty clear Optimus realises that this is a good task for Ratchet. For both him, and ideally, for the kids too.
Sure, he doesn’t like the kids all that much this early in the show.
Or at least, he wants everyone to think that, even though his immediate first concern upon meeting the kids is to express worry about their safety while at the base.
But surely it hurts Ratchet to look at them and maybe just wish they were sparklings instead-- I think a lot of his gruff behaviour towards the kids comes from a place of hurt, rather than genuine dislike.
It’s impossible for him not to be somewhat bitter. Look at Earth, teeming with life, riddled with humanity. All their little communities, their organic cultures. Their children, upcoming generations.
There is so much hope and promise in Earth and its people, which is hard to find for Cybertron.
And what about Cybertron? What about Cybertronians, and all they had achieved as a people, as a world? All they can afford to fixate on is the never-ending conflict. Does anyone care about anything else? Does anyone left have the capacity for that, anymore?
Ratchet cares.
Maybe these projects are one way to get humanity to learn there’s more out there, that Earth sciences are relatively undeveloped in comparison, that there is a whole other scale of existence out there beyond our planetary atmosphere.
Cybertron has so much to offer, even now that it is largely dead. Their knowledge lives on primarily in their few survivors.
Please learn. Please pass along the legacy of our people, our advancements and discoveries have so much value. Your children can learn from us, even though we no longer have any children of our own.
Sure, Ratchet gets caught up in the build process. It reminds me a lot of my father, who was a war medic/scientist as well, completely taking over my science projects when I was a kid-- This whole episode hits a nostalgia note for me, personally.
But it’s not just about the potential fun of these projects, it’s about their importance. Their actual purpose.
And we know Ratchet must consider them important on some level, even though they do appeal to his personal interests as well, because Ratchet takes his duties seriously and wouldn’t allow something he truly saw as minor to pull him away from his work.
He wants to share, he wants to educate the kids in a Cybertronian way. He wants the kids to have Cybertronian style projects, even if the prompts for those projects are fairly Earth-specific (like Raf’s volcano, or Jack’s non-living metal Earth vehicle engine).
By the time season three rolls around, Ratchet is teaching Raf to read and code in Cybertronian, possibly starting to provide him with the kind of basic education that sparklings might be provided with as part of an initial data packet upon getting their first frame.
He wanted to take the chance to give the kids a little bit of Cybertronian education, to show them how Cybertronians would approach these design challenges, to try to show them how to do it “properly” when done the Cybertronian way.
He wanted to literally show them his world, and the value inherent in it, even now that it has been functionally destroyed.
And the kids come back, and their science projects failed.
Ratchet plays it off a bit, sure.
But it’s devastating, really, to think that he may be the only one left who values the scientific progress that Cybertronians achieved in this way, that he may be the only one left who sees this kind of worth in their people.
Cybertronians aren’t just war machines. They are so much more than perpetual soldiers. There were artists and scientists, writers and archivists, builders and designers and engineers, anything you can think of.
It’s not all about the future, which is murky for them at best, and it isn’t all about their devastated present either. It is about their past, their greatest cultural victories, what made them a truly great and noteworthy civilisation-- Not their victories on the battle field.
It makes season three that much sweeter, to find out Ratchet’s been teaching Raf for clearly some time (based on Raf’s competency in Cybertronian later on).
If even just one human learns and carries forward any Cybertronian knowledge at all, then not all is lost.
These science projects were important.
