you are constructed of chemicals.

ok so like 3 months ago discord user pie sent this message in the queentenna server and proceeded to ruin my life /SILLY

im gonna just copypaste the shit i wrote down in my milanote board but i would like to preface that this au fundamentally makes no fucking sense in story and all the lore i came up with boils down to hype moments and aura its just stuff i thought could be cool. aus are just for fun obviously but im a fiend for Lore and i get salty when shit doesnt make sense so this feels like betraying my principles. anyway.

So the swap au. Tenna is a state-of-the-art Smart TV and Queen is a Mainframe computer from like the 70's or 80's. mainframe computers of that era are absolutely massive and fill an entire room, so obviously i jumped at the chance of designing a huge old lady queen without giving it much thought. initially

Tenna is, of course, your average massive flatscreen Smart TV. I avoid smart tech like the plague but i know enough abt smart tvs to know theyre basically laggy phones that can receive cable signal idk i hate the current state of tech today LMAO. on the back of his head is an arm wall mount meant to be one of those that can fully extend the tv off the wall and shit, so he can move his head like 360 degrees in any direction.

Theres also a small router back there, because his name is goddamn Ant Tenna and he needed something adjacent to an antenna. He has access to the internet of course. Kris probably uses him to watch youtube.

Oh, and important design note:

Story wise i genuinely believe that if he wasnt in a broken household and didnt have the threat of being thrown away looming over him he would be quite similar to queen, and would serve a similar purpose in story, especially since they both are uniquely invested in their respective lightners lives. swap tenna is basically the answer to what if he wasn't doomed.

Conversely this means that swap queen is very much doomed. in the au. im sorry women

(here i was still figuring out her design ^ ) Speaking of Queen, she's kind of the one that ruined everything for me LOL. the more i thought about it, the less plausible it seemed that a machine of that type would be kept anywhere in hometown. old mainframes were Expensive, like buying a house expensive, and hometown seems like a rather small town so . where would they even have that. and on a whim i thought: what they had one in the shelter? someone researching about dark worlds decades before the events of the game take place?

This accidentally makes her Too Important since i think the game is building up to a grand reveal of. whatever the fuck is going on down there but its fine. its fine. im still not quite sure which specific elements im going to swap but i picture it as their specific story beats staying more or less the same (tenna's section being more confined to certain spaces and doing things while queen's section has more exploration of the dark world with queen herself showing up sporadically)

Even if she weren't trapped in an underground bunker, very few people would enter the room she's in let alone use her. canon queen's relationship with Noelle and to a lesser extent the other lightners is an extremely important part of her character even if a lot of ppl choose to ignore it, so queen's deeply caring (in her own way...) nature, whether present or absent, has to be acknowledged in some way. to me this is non negotiable. I want her to still care because Its Cute but also, as a bunker computer, her desire to keep everyone safe would mirror canon queen's desire to make people happy.

trapped down there she would hardly know about the outside world let alone grow fond of it. but since this is a god damn QueenTenna AU i thought... what if queen found a way to tune into hometown resident's electronics? not through herself as an object but using the dark world formed inside the shelter? some kind of dark signal or some bullshit idk . this is where i get fully delusional by the way. it would be nothing too strong though. she can only get vague glimpses of it all.

that is. until one of her stray signals reaches a certain TV, and he responds.

they "meet" and start talking. she asks him about what is out there, and he tells her of the things he sees on his programs and the stuff kris looks up (and most of it goes over her head)

she asks him about what he sees of where he is, not on tv. And he tells her of a sweet little family, of a pair of siblings playing together, of the cool girl next door and her little sister, of a mischievous little kid and their horned headband.

this goes on for years. queen's signals slowly become routine, and tenna finds himself looking foward to them. they grow closer, despite never seeing each other and barely knowing who the other is