#falconposting

For me it’s falcons and falconers. I’m not the first to come up with the idea, but I might be the first to spend night after night on YouTube watching bird videos to fall asleep, listening to falconers talk about their birds, drifting off imagining the girls who take after them all.

It almost completely inverts the dynamic. You try to dominate a bird of prey the way Handlers dominate Hounds, and just won’t respond. You handle your bird poorly? It’s flying free when it hunts- and it’ll just leave you. Recapturing it? Yeah, good luck- either with a real bird or with a pilot in a huge steel frame.

And I mean, really think about it. You have to be pretty fit to pilot a mech. The g forces straining on your body while you still snap out lightning quick lethal reactions. The physical endurance to keep fighting in those conditions for hours at a time. The mental toughness to deal with one unpredictable situation after another while riding the edge of death.

I’ve seen more than a few pounds positing “what if Hounds, except we replace this one thing I don’t like”? The most common one is to go towards trying to make the two partners build each other up more. In-universe, you’d see this new pilot archetype as a reaction to Hounds, trying to improve on them.

If your alternate archetypes are “nicer”, I suggest going the other way: lean into your concept as hard as possible, and then ask: how do we get from this animal back to Hounds?

When I first started sketching my ideas for falcons and falconers, I conceived of falcons as being an in-universe counter to hounds. After all, I was reacting out-of-universe in that order. But now it goes the other way: in my current setting guide, falcons came first, and then hounds came about as a corruption of the dynamic.

Total War Makes Total Monsters. The harshest version of your concepts should be the one that comes last chronologically. The cycles of abuse and hurt should lead to worse and more desperate measures being taken as things progress.

You can look to real history for this. The nazis ran their armies past the breaking point not with designer combat stims, but by giving them crystal meth and telling them to go another 50 miles. Vietnam was not run on good strategy- it was run on body counts.

If my falcons are designed to have a more functional and uplifting relationship, my hounds are what happens when a fascist tells a falconer that they need results now no matter what.

That falcon who signed up to shoot at aliens and is having an impossible time adjusting to shooting at humans? She’s a prime target for being made into a hound.

That one division that thinks war crimes are the answer, no matter how counterproductive and immoral that is? If the falconer and falcon have a disagreement on the policy, they’re probably going to decay into a handler and a hound.