#cameramen

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.

I’m linking to the whole Twitter thread through Nitter because it’s all good, but this page is particularly interesting:

I’m convinced that the TV Men are supernatural in some way - my preferred headcanon is that they’re channeling energies from some kind of spirit realm that’s linked to the teleportation space. Ghost lore says that supernatural beings speak backwards when recorded. This appears to imply that they spookily developed consciousness spontaneously from normal TV sets, which I think fits with that!

Was TV Woman the first to become conscious enough to find a body, and how did she do that? I could imagine something like assembling something from random electrical equipment or convincing a friendly human to do it for her.

…and can you still turn her on by pushing her top right button?

There’s also this. I think this implies that Cameramen existed before the Alliance, which also seems to fit with hints from the series when we see Cameramen hanging around with humans and both watching in horror as the battles begin. I assumed that the Cameramen were instructed by human governments to fight, but maybe they weren’t?

feel free to correct me on timeframe/ect but i think in a better non apocalyptic world the skib objectheads would just be chillin around picrel . cant explain its just they have a similar aura to them yknow ? this is their habitat. this should've been their home.

@theenatiornithebandwagon

I think they might! It’s hard to tell whether the mutants’ bodies are organic or robotic. Skibidi heads are organic, so I suppose the rest of their bodies might have been grown. However, early upgraded toilets were very clearly toilet heads piloting robot bodies. We also know they’ve made a giant chief scientist toilet, which presumably is a nonsentient vehicle with a fake Skibidi head complete with fake skin. It also looks like they’ve used stolen Alliance bodies - the Berserker mutant used a large speakerman body early on, before he got one that seems to have skin.

So my guess is yes, the mutants probably would be something like that, a Skibidi wearing a robot body with a skin-like covering.

I’ve noticed that some artists draw the Alliance like that as well, with skin-coloured skin or with unnatural colours. It makes sense because that’s basically what the Terminator is too, a robot with a skin covering. We’ve seen a femme-presenting cameraman with pink legs. However, we’ve also seen damaged cameramen that didn’t seem to have skin.

This is, of course, because Boom uses assets from games, and might not be canon now because he hasn’t used models with visible skin for a bit. But I like to make up in-world explanations!