an AU for you

Day 2: Cornered

“Hey! Kid! Stop running, we just want to get you some help!”

Dani sprinted down the alley in another attempt to shake off her pursuers. She hadn’t been expecting to start melting, much less have some concerned civilian report her condition to nearby officers before she could find somewhere to hide and get her gooey problem under control.

It had become a nonissue since the ecto dejecto, but since landing in this strange world she’d have the occasional relapse. The first time it had happened had been the worst, she’d thought she’d dissolve into nothingness in a foreign world without anyone ever knowing a thing about what happened to her. To her surprise though, she hadn’t shed a significant amount of ectoplasm at all, and once she’d stopped actively melting, she’d been able to reabsorb what she’d shed.

“Shit!”

Deadend.

She could get out of this if she could pull herself together enough to phase through the wall.

Concentrate!

She closed her eyes, and breathed in deeply like she’d seen the heroes do in movies.

She peeked open an eye.

Nope! Not even invisible!

Come on ghost powers! It would be reaaaaally handy if she could make like a ghost and disappear!

Her hands flickered like a faulty lightbulb before they started more noticeably dripping.

Okay! This was fine! Perfect even! She was definitely not panicking! No way!

There was still a chance she could convince them she was fine! Dani took another deep breath in and willed herself to be as solid as possible, wiping some of the residual goo dripping from her face onto her sleeves. After a moment of thought, she decided to shove her hands into her pockets too before turning around and trying to act as innocent as possible.

Not a second later and the two officers closed in on her.

“Haha hi there guys! I’m sure there’s been some kind of misunderstanding, I am perfectly fine!”

“Whether or not that is the case, we’ll still need you to come with us. A young lady such as yourself shouldn’t be running around back alleys on her own.”

“I wouldn’t say she’s on her own.”

The dread and anxiety that swirled in Dani’s stomach was replaced by with relief when a familiar figure was revealed towards the mouth of the alley.

“Mr. Greed!”

Greed sauntered further into the alley before wrapping an arm around each of the officer’s shoulders, dragging them down a bit with his weight and momentarily distracting them as Dani skirted around them and towards sweet sweet escape!

“What seems to be the problem here officers?”

His teeth flashed threateningly, and he was visibly putting more weight onto his latest victims. Dani snickered a bit to herself while Greed got things sorted out.

Boo-yah! Great timing Greed!

“Come on kiddo, let’s get outta here.”

From a genre perspective, I believe the Autobots could/would be "just as bad" as the Decepticons simply because it's written as a gritty/realistic military fiction, and in real life there is no army that never commits war crimes or abuses the other faction under the justification of "they're the bad guys/they're the ones who ruined society/etc"

However, I also think that the narrative/writers tried to have their cake and eat it too with the Autobots, where they simultaneously write them as committing heinous war crimes but also as the objectively better good guys

Which is bad because a lot of the times the way the Autobot "war crimes" exist doesn't feel like the way war crimes would feasibly exist under the code of ethics, worldbuilding, and leadership they have. Biggest culprit being JRO and writing The New Institute as still happening under Optimus' rule in secret even though 1. this makes Optimus look either stupid or ignorant in a way that he's not established to be or 2. this splits the Autobots into such divided internal factions morally that it's hard to imagine that the New Institute both went undiscovered AND there were never interpersonal conflicts among these different Autobots with different morality. I could go on and on about this specific point but this bullet point is already too long.

Even when the Autobots are textually stated to be just as bad as the Decepticons, it's always in a vague, unspecified way (the Aequitas files, what Tyrest saw in the trials that turned him into a neutral) and never in a way that's defined with explicit acts, explicit perpetrators, or rationales for how it was allowed to exist. We are entirely "told, not shown" that the Autobots are allegedly just as bad as the Decepticons, but it's never in a way that's revealed to the universe at large, never in a way where specific hero Autobots are actually held accountable or punished for what happens.

It also feels like a cover-up for flimsy writing to have these unspecified files/trials say "the Autobots are totally just as bad as the Decepticons" as an excuse to not actually specify what they did that was "just as bad" as something like, say, Grindcore, which was literally modeled after concentration camps. Like I'm sorry but even as a morally gray Autobots/flawed IDW Optimus enjoyer, there's no fucking in-character and rational way that you could tell me "yeah Optimus would totally endorse and allow concentration camps for Decepticons to be run." Which ties back to the second bullet point where I said that the writers try to make the Autobots just as bad, but not in a way that actually makes sense for the organization as it's run.

In general the writers want the Autobots to be just as bad as the Decepticons, except they (including notorious Megatron apologist JRO) seemingly can't let go of the over-the-top Decepticon monstrosity plotlines where they continuously have ridiculous shit like concentration camps, divisions solely dedicated to organic planetary genocide (Phase Sixers), an internal Stazi force dedicated solely to eradicating traitors to the cause (the DJD), multiple mad scientists that either partially or fully destroy whole planets in the name of their experiments, so on and so forth.... and then the best you can give me on the Autobot side is like, War Crimes Georg Prowl, Mesothulas (who was acting on Prowl's behest so that's technically a subset of Prowl's crimes), and the Wreckers.

Like really the faction morality in IDW1 seems to be a mix of authors wanting to have their cake and eat it too re: "the Autobots are morally gray BUT they're actually still the best heroes ever" OR just going "erm yeah the Autobots are just as bad um, throw in some unspecified war crimes that will never have a meaningful narrative impact ever" or "let's have some random Autobot or two be an absolute mass murderer torturing brainwashing evil freak and have them fill out the atrocity quota for the whole faction so that we can call the Autobots 'morally gray' even though the 'moral grayness' is entirely pinned on a handful of token evil Autobots."

Like hey chiefs, what if the Decepticons are objectively worse than the Autobots AND they also don't deserve to be completely eradicated for their war crimes. What if we came up with a solution for the war that wasn't just "the better people get to survive and rebuild society and the worse ones should die starving in a hole."

The DJD alone is a glaring condemnation of personal freedom, including the freedom to not want to fight in the war, and it's successful to the point that it's explicitly stated that most neutrals are ex-Autobots because every ex-Decepticon gets murdered (and thus there is no significant Decepticon coalition post-war to do things like, say, keeping them out of ghettos).

The Autobots having a guy who is nominally a religious figure but largely maintains secular-based policies is at least a little less bad than the guy who says "having personal religious beliefs is an executable offense because no Decepticon is allowed to believe in a higher power that isn't me."

At best you could point to the existence of the New Institute for the Autobots being comparably controlling of their numbers, but that's literally one of the aforementioned instances I was complaining about of "the authors telling us the Autobots are bad by giving one example and never mentioning it again or fully going through the implications" (not to mention weird timeline shit like how the Institute/New Institute was made/renewed under Nominus and Zeta respectively, but Brainstorm who's a wartime MTO was depicted as working for them). AFAIK we don't even get any kind of actual institutional scale of how many Autobots the New Institute affected. When we are told about Autobots being shadowplayed to fall in line, it's by Chromedome who was (AFAIK) talking about pre-war era work under Nominus/Sentinel/Zeta. And evidently they don't do it very stringently considering that there are hundreds of Autobots who defected and became neutrals while being extremely anti-Autobot.

•The Symbol Witch is, notably, the only (fightable) exedra witch we've only seen the familiars of, with 0 attention paid to the witch herself. While this is likely just because the minions exist to be upgrade quest fodder, that doesn't necessarily mean she's doomed to remain irrelevant. After all, the Mirror witch is also a witch that exists to be a game mechanic, and she has lore!

this is an Exedra theory about what's really going on behind the scenes and why things are the way they are in the game.

First of all, we know Walpurgisnacht is a fusion from a recent trailer. But what is Walpurgisnacht a fusion of? It could be the souls of magical girls, but that's unlikely due to the fact Magical Girls can still become part of Walpurgisnacht even when their souls, or soul gems, or grief seeds are destroyed. So then, what isn't destroyed regardless of what anyone does, Kyubey or other Magical Girls? My answer is memsparks. If Walpurgisnacht consists of memsparks and draws power from them it makes sense how it can be a fusion without having any sort of defined identity, because...

My friends dub the au, TransMary

Vicar Amelia from Bloodborne

Deep in the ocean, mermaids can take on extreme forms, divorcing themselves from human mimicry for the sake of survival.

The Gulper Eel Mermaid has jaws that take up the entire length of their torso, repurposing arms to support long, thin bones lined with tiny teeth. While the prevailing theory is that the large jaw allows them to consume prey many times their size, they have been known to open their mouth for a different purpose. By filling their baggy body with water, this mermaid swells up to an intimidating size. Other creatures think twice about tangling with what appears to be an immense predator of pure muscle.

Not much is known for certain, as these beings are reclusive; even from other mermaids. They're very sensitive, you see. Perhaps one day we will liaison with them and learn of their culture.

Ichiji senses that something is wrong. Nobody suddenly becomes that smart.

And Sanji already has a plan:3

what does this have to do with boiling your surgical tools? well look, the boiling water releases bubbles of steam which carries the malign influences up to heaven. you boil a knife, you send all the miasmic particles off with the steam to heaven. if you rinse the knife off in a bucket the water isn't hot enough, the particles go into the water and then right back on to the knife. you gotta boil it to get the particles all the way away. how can a tool or rag or a bed have miasmic particles on it when you can't smell them? humans have a lousy sense of smell. look at your dog on the hunt. are there no rabbits in the woods just because you can't smell them? we know that miasma is carried on the air, and is what makes stench so dangerous, and we know that humans can't smell worth a damn compared to dogs cats horses etc. a dog can smell if a rat died in a corner of the room last week. you can't. do you think licking the spot where the rat died is going to go well for you? luckily, what humans lack in snout we make up for in brains. we have extra brains where our sniffers should have been. God set that up for a reason.

and why does a rinse with wine spirits work? man, look how fast alcohol evaporates. my guess is that because wine contains a lot more vice than water, it evaporates a whole lot faster, in sort of an equal and opposite way that a rock falls faster than a feather. if you want the miasmic particles to get off there FAST, you dunk it in something that's going back to heaven at a gallop.

"For example, there was the Raddles' privy. Miss Level had explained carefully to Mr and Mrs Raddle several times that it was far too close to the well, and so the drinking water was full of tiny, tiny creatures that were making their children sick. They'd listened very carefully, every time they heard the lecture, and still never moved the privy. But Mistress Weatherwax told them it was caused by goblins who were attracted to the smell, and by the time they [Weatherwax and Level] left that cottage Mr Raddle and three of his friends were already digging a new well the other end of the garden.

'It really is caused by tiny creatures, you know,' said Tiffany.

...

'Is that so?' said Mistress Weatherwax sarcastically."

'Yes. It is. And Miss Level believes in telling them the truth!"

'Good. She's a fine, honest woman' said Mistress Weatherwax. But what I say is, you have to tell people a story they can understand. Right now I reckon you'd have to change quite a lot of the world, and maybe bang me Raddles' stupid fat head against the wall a few times, before he'd believe that you can be sickened by drinking tiny invisible beasts. And while you're doing that, those kids of theirs will get sicker. But goblins, now, they make sense today. A story gets things done. And when I see Miss Tick tomorrow I'll tell her it's about time them wandering teachers started coming up here.'

'All right,' said Tiffany reluctantly, 'but you told Mr Umbril the shoemaker that his chest pains will clear up if he walks to the waterfall at Tumblr Crag every day for a month and throws three shiny pebbles into the pool for the water sprites! That's not doctoring!"

'No, but he thinks it is. The man spends too much time sitting hunched up. A five-mile walk in the fresh air every day for a month will see him right as rain,' said Mistress Weatherwax.

'Oh,' said Tiffany. 'Another story?'

what does this have to do with boiling your surgical tools? well look, the boiling water releases bubbles of steam which carries the malign influences up to heaven. you boil a knife, you send all the miasmic particles off with the steam to heaven. if you rinse the knife off in a bucket the water isn't hot enough, the particles go into the water and then right back on to the knife. you gotta boil it to get the particles all the way away. how can a tool or rag or a bed have miasmic particles on it when you can't smell them? humans have a lousy sense of smell. look at your dog on the hunt. are there no rabbits in the woods just because you can't smell them? we know that miasma is carried on the air, and is what makes stench so dangerous, and we know that humans can't smell worth a damn compared to dogs cats horses etc. a dog can smell if a rat died in a corner of the room last week. you can't. do you think licking the spot where the rat died is going to go well for you? luckily, what humans lack in snout we make up for in brains. we have extra brains where our sniffers should have been. God set that up for a reason.

and why does a rinse with wine spirits work? man, look how fast alcohol evaporates. my guess is that because wine contains a lot more vice than water, it evaporates a whole lot faster, in sort of an equal and opposite way that a rock falls faster than a feather. if you want the miasmic particles to get off there FAST, you dunk it in something that's going back to heaven at a gallop.