feraliminal

This is a Skibidi Toilet and random weird horror and scifi blog. It’s not the thing I expected to turn into a hobby, but there you go!

Fic requests post - give me ideas!

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Skibidi Toilet fanfic, mostly NSFW (sex or weirdness) and mostly about robot perceptions of the world.

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Speculation on lore

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I think something like that could work, wetware computers made with neurons are a real thing, as are computers that are designed to copy the human brain. My headcanon is that titans’ (and other units’) brains/thinking processors/whatever are mechanical but patterned on human brains for exactly that reason, a conscious mind is more chaotic, but is more adaptable. I think this also causes a problem though, that the ability to resist hacks and hostile commands also means it’s difficult for their own programmers to work with their code after their minds have matured. So training needs to act more like actual human training and less like a knowledge download or command, because for a conscious mind, knowing something isn’t the same as being competent in doing something.

I’m also fascinated by the contradictions in being a titan, that they’re war machines and… kind of sheltered pets, really! They go out, fight, and come back and get maintained, and don’t have the opportunity or need to do normal life things. But it must also be stressful that the one thing they do have to do is a life-or-death mission. I expect that must indeed result in very close bonds with their engineers, scientists, and other units that look after them. It must feel comforting for them to be fussed over and listen to smaller units talking about mundane things, I love that idea! 🥺

I haven’t actually thought a lot about what will happen to titans when the war ends, but yes, this is a very good point. Because they’re conscious, even though they were built for a task, they can think beyond that and wish that life was kinder and easier. I like some people’s headcanons that titan units might be able to use smaller bodies to have more normal lives, which could practically be canon now that we’ve learned in some leaks that Camerawoman can use a spare body! But I also like your ideas that they’d find peacetime uses for their original bodies too.

Relationships between human governments and the Alliance would, presumably, have been exactly that if there hadn’t been a war and titans surely would have been treated like battleships or something and the Alliance as another branch of the military. Post-war though, I expect that the Alliance/Union is likely to be more powerful than any surviving human governments, so they’d end up making the rules. I’d like to think they’d do a better job of it in some ways than some current world leaders because they seem to want intelligent life to survive so might not prioritise making money over maintaining a functioning planet. But they also aren’t exactly a stable structure and are likely to have all the usual problems of infighting and disagreements!

Thank you! I do think I headcanon TTV’s relationships like that, maybe it’s kind of like some people’s relationships with their families or first friendship group, where they’ll always love them first but needed to move away and make grownup friends to understand who they are. He’ll always love his faction first, but needed to spend time with other titan units and other factions to figure himself out. I also like to imagine him bonding with Polycephaly over being grumpy about other TV Men (particularly Sci TV haha).

Re: privacy, that’s something I’ve wondered about for all the titans, they’re all the focus of their faction’s attention and it looks like hangars are busy instead of being like private bedrooms. But yeah, Titan Cameraman has the added issue of always broadcasting. I suspect this might indeed be relatively normal for cams and they might not have the human expectation of privacy - or maybe he’s able to switch it off sometimes? Would that worry the cams? It is interesting that he needed to watch Poly’s screen - maybe it was just like when a friend shows you something on their phone instead of sending you the link? Or maybe TCM isn’t able to consciously access Alliance feeds because it would be overwhelming to be seeing it all? It would be horrible to see cams being destroyed, and might be a distraction on the battlefield.

Day Three: Tell us a theory you have/believe in?

I’ve already more or less answered who my favourite titan is, so I’m going with this one!

My theory - distinguished from headcanon because it’s what I think Boom probably has planned instead of just what I think would be cool - is a Grand Unified Theory of Skibidi. I think it’s quite obvious that the gate experiments and the Secret Agent have something to do with why toilets came to Earth to infect humans. But I also think robot consciousness and the void are linked in to that somehow. I think that there’s likely a reason why Astros look like humans too.

My headcanon - which I don’t think is likely to have any relation to Boom’s plan - is inspired by the historical pseudoscience of a magical vital energy that permeates the universe and allows life. Pneuma, aether, Odic force, etc. The void is the energy realm under the surface of the material universe.

Humanity managed to tap into the aether through the gates, and used the mysterious energy in experiments that would accelerate technology rapidly and result in conscious robots. But the tech renaissance didn’t last long, because the gates acted as a beacon to the Astros - specifically, to some rogue Astros looking for a planet to use as a base.

This is already a thing that Astros do, they’re creatures from distant space that came into being spontaneously though a random fluctuation in the aether (a fantasy Boltzmann brain, if you want to get super nerdy), so they’ve got one stretchy appendage in the material world and one in unreality. Space isn’t very habitable, so they terraform planets for resources by dispersing nasty Astro frogspawn into space. Sometimes it lands successfully and changes a barren rock into a planet with life. This is why humans and Astros look alike and why humans quickly change into larval Astros when exposed to the trigger sound.

If this continues, at some point in the future, the entire multiverse will be nothing but a homogeneous mass of warring Astros. Whatever the Secret Agent and his people are, they’re trying to prevent that. But humanity might have done something special too by setting up the right conditions for the Alliance to build war machines powered by the same vital force that powers Astros…

Day Two: Whose your favorite "background" character? What made them stand out to you?

The samurai cameraman and friends in Osaka. I’m fascinated by the Alliance’s tendency to wear costumes, and I’d love to know what’s behind it. Although some of the Alliance elites have human memories, I think most of the Alliance are likely robots and wearing costumes seems to be part of the robot quirks they’ve got. A human probably wouldn’t dress as a chef or maid to greet human survivors from a terrible tragedy, but a robot who’s trying to understand how to do a task properly or who has some leftover code written for entertainment service bots just might!

I imagine that the cameramen at least began as a relatively orderly army, but chains of command began to break down as the war became more chaotic, more units were built who hadn’t experienced the pre-war world, and armies spread out. I think this is probably why Camerawoman seems more grim than the other elites, she’s been trying to maintain pre-war military discipline and is fighting a losing battle with an increasingly decentralised structure. When the Astros came and old strategies no longer worked at all, armies needed to become even more individualised and started operating more like guerrillas. The truce with the Skibs could have began organically when everyone figured out that it was stupid not to.

Day 1: Which "main" character is your favorite? What draws you in?

All the titans! Because I’m an anthropologist, I’m fascinated by how people experience the world differently. Titan units are a really interesting thought experiment, because they’re completely unique beings. Being a titan would be like living in a society of Lego-person-sized humans, the closest thing they’ve got to their size is the large units, but even the biggest large units are doll-sized in comparison.

So the titan units are kind of a micro-culture of three people. But they’re also the centre of their factions’ cultures and need to primarily be loyal to their own factions. Which makes me think of human relationships with pantheistic deities in pre-Christian religions, when deities weren’t believed to be all-powerful and had relationships with each other that competed with the attention they paid to humans. Deities are loved, but there’s also a sense of unpredictability and danger, which is very obvious in stories like Ragnarok in Norse mythology where warring deities will destroy the world. That’s totally something I want to explore in my fics, the concept of titans as purpose-built deified figures, because it’s fascinating to bring a mythological feeling into (kind of) realistic sci-fi.

The other thing that’s interesting is the experience of what it would be like to be a titan. A philosopher called Nagel wrote that we can imagine what it might be like to be a bat, but we can’t know because a bat’s world is so different to a human’s. An Alliance robot’s worldview is pretty mysterious anyway (how speakermen perceive the world if they don’t see, for example) but to add size and all the multiple sensors and equipment that titan units have, and it’s really possible to imagine an alien worldview. All the titan units would have their own perceptual quirks, but I think Titan TVman is particularly fascinating. If his other TVs act like heads then he might be able to split his consciousness. He’s also slightly different from the other titans in that he seems to be slightly distanced from his faction - I interpret this as because he’s (in my fic interpretation, most of the Alliance including Titan TV use gender-neutral pronouns, but I’m using canon pronouns here for clarity) out fighting and working with other factions while other TVmen generally seem to be secretive, a tendency that more TVmen also start challenging as the series goes on. He’s been an interesting character to use to explore ideas about neurodivergent thinking, semi-plural experiences, and alternative ways of doing relationships!