Decoration Zu Der Oper : Die Zauberflöte.

some strawhats at sea

Victim Blaming

"No one ask me to draw Megatron again" I say and then draw him four more times.....

Got pretty good at drawing seekers making this! ....not so much Cyclonus or Galvatron. Too many pieces/parts, by far.

I dunno, I was possessed by the angst demon.

Tiny ecosystems 🍃

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”which could mean nothing” is maybe my favorite phrase of all time. where would we be without it

‘Thoth and the Chief Magician’, 1925. Evelyn Pau

Takes a guy who's obsessed with saving people even if it risks his life and a guy who is literally allergic to asking for help in any situation and puts them in My stew puts them in my fucking stew and stirs it

You are a student of a superhero academy for people with useless superpowers.

I saw a post talking about how media like Detroit Become Human that use robots as a metaphor for racism never quite hits the nail on the head because, well, robots aren't people and the fear of being replaced by automation is a legitimate one.

And it made me think about Rockman-san.

Which is coming out very soon as Mr. Megaman, in English, so might as well talk about it now!

For a gag comic, Rockman-san has a very melancholy tone to it. It often touches on concepts like deterioration, obsolescence, and... well...

Automation.

The original Robot Masters of the Rockman-san comic are sentient. They can think, they can feel, they can love. It's a staple of Rockman/Megaman media for its Robot Masters and Reploids to be self-determining, but Rockman-san takes that to its extreme and, without getting into spoilers, has a real blurring of what it means to be human and what it means to be a machine.

Their humanity is what labels them as "dangerous," and that type of robot is being phased out and replaced with robots that can't think or feel. Yup - AI took the AI's jobs. The RMs are largely struggling with employment - some are having difficulty holding down a job, while others have been pushed out of the industries they were made for and find the work they took up to survive unfulfilling, while others are finding fulfillment in repurposing their hardware and programming to a new career. They have a variety of ways they experience the hardships of the world that... honestly hit me pretty hard, my first time reading, because it was probably the first time I'd read a story that felt like it was really talking to my actual lived experience as an adult.

By including these more real world ai machines, it reminds the audience the RMs are fantastical and highlights what the narrative is trying to analyze - "what does it mean to be self-determining? what does it mean to be sentient? is it a blessing or a burden? what rights does a fully aware, self-determining, sentient being have if it is not human? when do they become a person? what do you have to strip away from a human to make them no longer a person?"

Rockman-san manages to balance a narrative of robot discrimination while acknowledging that the presence of robots in their world is harmful to humans. It acknowledges that, by making the robots sentient, the scientists have accidentally created an underclass of person - the robots are thinking, feeling people who have to work to survive, to pay for energy, pay for repairs, pay for a place to live, pay for recreation. Robots work longer hours for less pay and have no legal recourse.

Rockman-san hits the nail on the head that this benefits the wealthy and harms the working class. Capitalism rears its ugly head yet again. The sentient robots get exploited, abused, and tossed aside. The working class suffers and dies. The wealthy profit.

And the finger gets pointed to the exploited underclass rather than those in power, as it so often does. But then... how would one ethically close Pandora's box? What changes would allow humans and robots to coexist? Can they coexist?

Just, something about how Rockman-san handles its robot rights narrative resonates, y'know? It doesn't rely on cheap parallels that don't really work. It's mostly asking questions of Megaman's premise. There's a lot of varying life experiences and opinions expressed by the characters, and it doesn't really ask you to agree with any of them - not even Rock or Dr. Light. We're not trying to come to definite answers, just exploring what it means to be alive and how to live in a society, how it works and how it fails.

I dunno. I'm not about to say it's a perfect narrative, but there's something about it I like.

(028) An academic rival shares Skyfire's laboratory for several months and relentlessly sabotages him.

"I'm sure he doesn't realise he's taking plates I poured," Skyfire tells his sometime-collaborator, Starscream, on the comm. "And he probably doesn't even know that you can't store bleach in direct sunlight. He can't possibly have meant to contaminate everything, either," he adds, "because it ruined his experiments too."

Unbeknownst to the relentlessly pacifistic Skyfire, Starscream's half-intetested noises of agreement are disguising the sounds of him setting up a sniper rifle on the roof of the next building over.

Star Wars headcanon #107:

Luke Skywalker really knows his water.

Much as he hated it, Luke spent nineteen years on a moisture farm with an uncle who was actively trying to get him into the business. And on Tatooine, water is SERIOUS business: the EU mentions water imposts, different prices for different grades of water, and so on. An experienced moisture farmer could probably taste a glass of Tatooine water and know what grade it was, what part of the planet it likely came from, and what the impurities were.

All of which leads to a scuffle when, more than a decade after Luke left home, he and Mara are on Tatooine chasing a lead and the local barkeep–figuring them for offworlders–sells Mara a carafe of Grade Three water at Grade One prices. Luke takes one sip and flips from Jedi Master to Farmboy in an instant. Specifically, Farmboy Pissed at Being Handed a Bad Product and what the hell are you trying to pull, pal? I know for a fact you didn’t pay anywhere near these prices per liter, not with those calcium levels–Striker’s Ridge water, right? Have they ever replaced those vaporators? Who do you think you’re kidding here?

Mara finds this simultaneously embarrassing and weirdly endearing. (Farmboys have to drive hard bargains too, after all.) But that doesn’t stop her from teasing him about it later.

(A scream from the shower: “Skywalker! Help! CALCIUM!”)