Ok So We've Talked About Mech Dysphoria And Dysmorphia Before Yeah? Your Body Doesn't Feel The Same When

Ok so we've talked about mech dysphoria and dysmorphia before yeah? Your body doesn't feel the same when you climb out of a mech, doesn't feel 'right' anymore.

Too few limbs, not enough sensors, everything feels too big, now that you're not? There's no more combat stims and pleasure chemicals either, you're down to just your stock standard dopamine, which you have a clinical deficiency of now, btw. You struggle to pick objects up, your hands an unfamiliar shape, with not enough strength. You struggle to get out of bed sometimes because you can't tell what proportions things should be anymore?

Yeah, all that has been discussed to death.

What about communication?

What about pilots who, just, can't talk outside of their mech? Become socially inept without all the assistant systems they plug themselves into within the cockpit?

Think about it, mech combat becomes very disorganised very fast if it's allowed to. We are talking clashes of potentially dozens of war machines, the size of buildings, with enough guns to level cities. Orders need to be direct, easily understandable, followed immediately, actually projected onto the pilot's vision.

Every order, every report, every sentence, is punctuated by hundreds of layers of feedback. Tactical simulations and overlays, attachments for battlefield plans, every order having many implied conditions transmitted to the pilot through code and dictionary references to make sure a pilot cannot POSSIBLY misinterpret it in the few seconds before the command should be executed. On top of that, each order can also be wired to project a different cocktail of stim/pleasure chems/whatever have you, ensuring a pilot knows exactly what to feel about the order, establishing the priority of it through the pilots own brain chemistry.

And the same can be true about communications between squad mates! So much of it would be sending those same simulations around as sit reps, or enormous data packets containing not just the words the pilot is trying to say, but also links to relevant information and mountains of meta data, establishing tone, intention, context. Within the cockpit, a portion of the onboard AI is delegated to parsing this metadata, projecting it into the pilots consciousness, speeding up the process of understanding these mountains of digital documents to mere moments.

Now put a person used to that in a social setting. Where they are not made instantly aware of what someone is talking about or referring to. Where they cannot just query an AI and receive every piece of relevant info at once. Where they have to understand the subtext of what that person is saying without any metadata to indicate sarcasm, annoyance, disinterest. Where they are unable to understand the many nuances of communication and body language and expression without the helpful hand of their mech's processors. Hell, where they don't know how hearing certain things should make them feel without the presence of the chemicals to guide their response. Imagine them seeming lost outside of their mech, unable to talk or connect anymore, the social, human part of their brain having atrophied from disuse much like their neurotransmitter production. Imagine them scurrying back to the safety of their mech where, in the digitally overlaid world, everything is so much clearer and understandable and-

HAS THIS BECOME AN AUTISM METAPHOR???