#complex inquiries

This was two weeks after the single worst moment of my entire life.

I was at such a low point that I finally decided I had nothing left to lose. I could write the single most self-indulgent thing I had ever daydreamed about to distract myself. 5,000 words of the most gratuitous robot angst I'd ever written. About a robot struggling so hard to fight against its own malfunctioning brain that every step was agony and every thought felt like disobedience to the core of its being.

Most of my work in other fandoms was very. . . grounded, despite my more childish choices in subject matter. Canon was my bible. I almost exclusively wrote one-shots that deepened already-canon facets of a character. I was a "serious writer" who "respected canon" and who never "contaminated" anything with OCs or got too "wangsty" with "over-the-top robot sentimentality".

But I did daydream about that sort of stuff a lot.

And when I felt like I had nothing left to lose, I finally wrote it down.

And kept writing, and writing, and writing. . . and within the month I was sketching out what the second act might look like, and asking the followers of this nascent blog if they would hate me forever if I included a human OC (they wouldn't), and dragging myself through the beginning of chapter 8 so that Unit MS-1 could meet my OC, get the paint job, and be done with it as fast as possible so the hypothetical audience wouldn't have to suffer through "cringe OC"-ness. Then it could tell Sonic to leave, get the rest of Eggman's lingering programming removed immediately via Tails, and have no problems happily ever after. "Metal Sonic" would become redeemed with a new paint job and go on to be a hero. I was struggling with the feeling that the story should be longer, coming up with side plots and shenanigans that didn't feel quite right, staring at the face of writer's block even as the fic was "coming to a close" and-

In May of 2023, six months into writing this fic, I was diagnosed with Autism, and more importantly for this post, OCD.

And I realized very, very suddenly what the fic was actually about.

It was never about just the programming. It was never about just leaving Eggman. It was about Unit MS-1's warped perceptions of the world- caused by the compulsions hard-coded into its brain -and its struggle towards finding and accepting the better reality.

The second half of act 2 was a bitch to write with this new end goal in mind- as the newly-minted Neo navigated its first real thoughts of escaping its obsessive-compulsive reality, so was I. It's a hell of a thing to come to terms with the fact that your perception of reality isn't correct. That it isn't justified, no matter how strongly you feel it is and how scary it seems to contradict something that feels so central to how you operate.

Unit MS-1's obsessive, compulsive, paranoid worldview started as a narrative exercise. A bit of writing that was endlessly fascinating and compelling to me for "some reason". And it ended up being my most important tool for exploring how I felt during the uncomfortable months after my diagnosis. I hated my diagnoses at first. I felt like it was game over, like my shot at a successful life was forfeit. I thought that I was permanently broken and had no chance to fulfill my purpose, and if I couldn't fulfill my purpose, then why should I keep going?

But as Neo clawed its way forward to a better existence, so did I.

The latter halves of chapters 16 & 17 still make me choke up a bit to read.

Chapter 18 was written in April 2024, just two weeks before it was to be posted, and it was by far the hardest part of the fic to write. Because at that point, wasn't Neo "cured"? The programming was gone. Neo had surpassed my own recovery. But there is no perfect cure in real life for this diagnosis. Even if I got to the point where the obsessions in my head were no longer shouting, where my "core directives" had been "deleted", I still have spent my entire life in this mindset. It doesn't disappear. It's a huge part of who I've been.

Sonic is still here. He- the thoughts -will always be here. But I can learn to live with them, learn not to let them rule me, and learn to be okay again.

Neo doesn't leave ready to be a hero. Neo doesn't figure out what its purpose should be. But that's okay. It deserved to be free anyway.

Metal Sonic is very strongly nonbinary in that fic. It uses it/its pronouns not to dehumanize itself, but to give itself a distinct identity that for once feels like its own instead of the obvious comparison drawn by the use of he/him. Its relationship to its gender is its relationship to the rest of the world around it; built through sheer determination, fighting against what it knows it "should" do every step of the way. Forging its own path into the future, one where it controls its own actions, and it controls its own body. (Hence the new paintjob, which it spends a good third of the fic trying to get!)

(No one will ever believe me but I came up with its design before realizing I'd chosen the colors of the nonbinary flag. Happy accident!)

I myself am cis, but building my gender identity with my own two hands (metaphorically) is a big part of who I am today. I never had a strong sense of gender until I made one- and that feeling is liberating. It's something you own that can never be taken away. Even before Neo is freed from its own restrictive code in this fic, it still uses its preferred pronouns for itself despite others gendering it differently. It always had this sort of sense of itself, but couldn't really explore that until it learned more about how to be a person and was in a safe enough place to do so.