#i finally wrote it...

INTRO

That's right baby, I'm giving this an intro and everything. Alright, this essay is all about exploring and explaining my version of the Walter/Michigan ship using the characterisation I gave them for the APV verse. First I'm going to drill down into the individual characters, what makes them tick, their backstory, etc, before finally going into detail about how they mesh together as a ship and why they're both good yet terrible for each other.

THE WORLD LORE

To understand Michigan and Walter, we need to understand the type of world they were born into. Furlong Dynamics is a major powerhouse on the Jupiter colonies, owning several shipyards and carving a specific niche for themselves as the weapon-dealer for interstellar craft. They may not be as well-known or successful as Arquebus or Balam in the defence industry in terms of MTs or ACs, but if you're arming an interstellar craft, you sure as shit are going to use Furlong Dynamics weaponry.

Problem is in post-Fires age, that corner of the market is stagnating due to a lack of new interstellar craft being built. Prior to the discovery of Coral as an energy source, humanity had to do long-stasis and slow-walking their way across the galaxy, which meant trade and the like was incredibly limited between extrasolar colonies. With Coral, however, they were able to make tremendous technological shortcuts to create what they called the "C-Wave Drive". It functions a lot like the hypothetical Alcubierre Drive, with Coral producing the insane amounts of energy required and running the equally insane amounts of calculations needed to ensure the craft doesn't crush itself into a singularity (also, Coral has a very strange relationship with spacetime, the scientists found...). An added bonus as well was that these "C-Wave Drives" required no refuelling.

The interstellar craft needed crude fuel for sublight travel and other functionalities on the ship, but as for long-distance travel? There was no need to make pitstops or set aside cargo space for fuel, so many ships got used to just carrying a small amount that would allow them to travel as needed locally, as it would be easy to refuel when arriving at their destination as and when was needed.

Post-Fires changed this landscape drastically. Overnight, the interstellar craft market was rocked by the realisation that the previously thought limitless and abundant miracle substance that made FTL travel easy and convenient was now extremely finite had them all scrambling. The UEG openly seized every single galactic store of Coral from the corporations, citing "galactic security", and all orders for new interstellar craft - amongst other Coral technologies - instantly halted.

By Young Jupiter time (ten years post-Fires), Furlong Dynamics is beginning to feel the strain. They built their empire on focusing predominantly on interstellar craft - their designs, their weaponry, their engines - and their frantic R&D into solving the energy problem the Coral had shortcutted wasn't going very well. All that could be done was continue to maintain the existing ships that existed, as theoretically the C-Wave Drives could run indefinitely until some sort of mechanical failure happened due to wear and tear. As for new ships, the only ones being built were those utilising the old "slow-walker" engines, which meant bigger, bulkier, slower ships, with less room for ammunition fabrication and storage, and more for stasis compartment and fuel storage. Corporations that had specialised mostly in stasis technologies enjoyed an unexpected windfall, while those like Furlong Dynamic began to languish.

But as they say, shit rolls downhill. With the Corporations struggling to adjust to the Coral shortage and the UEG viciously hording the few galactic stores that remained, the working class found their workload increasing - heavily.

Factories that had benefited from the automation of Coral technologies found themselves in the position where they needed heavy reliance of human productive power. Yet they didn't want their productivity to lower thanks to human limitations, and neither did they want their profits to dent by either hiring too many workers, or paying the few higher wages to make up for the harder work. The few worker protections that had been steadily built up over the past few decades were immediately torn down and rescinded, and the working class were forced to work to maintain the corporations' and the UEG's productivity in their factories and fabrication facilities on basically starvation wages.

So, we have a world that has suffered from a fatal blow to the comfortable status quo. Furlong Dynamics is desperate to try and stem the bleed from their profits that the Coral shortage had started, and the boot has never been heavier on the working class's neck. It's an atmosphere that creates considerable tension within the various stratas of society, and the Jupiter colonies especially - known as the industrial powerhouse of the solar system - have become a bubbling pot. Any socialist talk or gatherings are viciously cracked down on by the corporate and government forces, and the workers are becoming increasingly frustrated and antagonised.

So it makes sense why Walter and Michigan initially have a bit of a rocky start, coming from these polar opposites of society. Michigan, the son of a Furlong Dynamic's director, and Walter, a Rubiconian refugee clawing his way out of the slums.

But alright, world context has been laid down, it's time for the character context. First up:

MICHIGAN - THE PRINCE WHO WANTS TO BE A PAUPER

So, Michigan. G1. Hell On Four Legs. Where did he come from, and who is he? To answer that, we need to look at his family... and Furlong Dynamics' leadership.

Every corporation is unique in its structure and the way it handles leadership. For example, Balam is well-known for its unusual meritocratic selection process for its CEO, though that hasn't exactly escaped the nepotism that pervades the upper echeleons of corporate society. Those with advantageous beginnings normally win the meritocratic race: they just have to work a little harder than most. Furlong Dynamics, however, are upfront about their leadership roles being hereditary.

Five families sit on the board for Furlong with one presiding as a CEO, a role that rotates every five years in a set pattern between the five families. This is a system that has worked for almost as long as Furlong Dynamics had existed (almost 300 years by this point), and needless to say that those five families were old money. They're the equivalent of an aristocracy in a hypercapitalistic galaxy.

One of these families is Rivera, which Michigan was born into as Gabriel Rivera. It was expected of him to succeed his father and sit on Furlong Dynamics' board as a director, so from a very young age he was prepped for this eventuality. His father dictated everything in his life, from his hobbies to what he wore and right down to what he ate. He was drilled in everything to do with business, politics and the interstellar industry, as his father was keen for Michigan to be ready and prepped for when he succeeded him, especially as Furlong Dynamics was entering a critical slump for the first time in its long history due to the Coral shortage. He didn't want his son to be the weak link.

Michigan despised this. He hated the people his father forced him to interact with, he hated the two-faced communication and backstabbing schemes he was encouraged to learn and inflict on others, he hated how boring yet stressful this kind of life was. Contrary to his personality later in life, Michigan was reclusive and anti-social when he was young - a direct result of his father's overbearing and relentless micromanaging - and when possible would hole himself up in his room and escape by watching classical films.

Classical films being... war films and action movies.

Though plenty of media had been lost when Earth suffered from ecological devastation, many had been salvaged throughout the centuries. It had begun from Michigan pilfering from his father's collection, something to put on display and boast about possessing rather than watching, and found himself hooked.

Brave soldiers heroically saving their comrades, taking charge of their destinies, denying fate, overcoming the odds, starting from the gutter and rising to the top from their own merits, making fire-forged friends that were genuine and not shallow transactional facades... this type of fantasy entranced Michigan, giving him a craving that he couldn't quite itch with his luxurious yet empty life. He desperately wished he had been born as some poor bastard whose only option was to join one of the corporate militaries, and distinguish himself by commiting acts of heroism, have people awed by him because of his own merits, and not because he is a Rivera and surrounded by brown-nosing sychophants.

It was a delusional dream driven by an intense desire to escape and forge a genuine connection with anyone, and after years of burying himself deeper and deeper in the propaganda belched out by these old action films (the message of 'war is hell' from the more solemn ones flying miles above his head), Michigan decided: he was going to disown himself and become an MT pilot.

Which he managed. To cut a long story short, Gabriel Rivera became just Michigan, the Rivera name used sparingly and only for legal reasons. He left behind the comfortable executive life to start at the very bottom of the pilot ranks, working his way up with grit and determination, denying any advantages or opportunities that came his way due to his blood or name. He wanted to emulate those heroes that he had watched in those films, he wanted to start with nothing and become something, all with his own efforts, and leave behind the Rivera name and reputation for good.

He started acting more like those gunslinger heroes, loud voice, boisterous personality, easy-going nature and possessing a masculine charm. He's always seeking that big, heroic event, that euphoric moment of victory and achieving the impossible against the odds... but he never really found it. Even after abandoning Furlong Dynamics entirely to jump ship to Balam, he realised that it was just more of the same, his battles against downtrodden workers protesting against their inhumane treatment, or furthering corporate interests over some useless moon in the middle of nowhere. There was no glory or higher purpose - just the company's bottom line.

Michigan started his piloting career as a rich kid craving adventure, naive to the true gritty nature of the galaxy. After decades of piloting under his belt and with an intimiate insight on both sides of the corporate ladder - both at the bottom and the top - to say Michigan was jaded by the time he landed on Rubicon would be an understatement.

He learned that there's no such thing as big damn heroes in this shitty galaxy. All the titles and medals he earned were just window dressings to whatever shitty advertisement his corporate master touted to bolster its reputation or sales. He hated his "Hero of Jupiter" title, and he took great pleasure in launching his "medals" off a cliff and into the ocean like they were frisbees. He hated that in the end his father had been right, that becoming a pilot wouldn't let him run away from the corporate lifestyle, it'd just throw him down to the very bottom and get him trampled

In short, Michigan's a man who tried to forge his own destiny by following a childish dream. His naivety resulted in him being trapped in a life that only had one escape - crawling back to his father and retaking the name Gabriel Rivera - and he viewed that worse than being a corporate attack dog with no real freedom. He'd rather die in some shitty hole in a random ditch somewhere over some pointless resource that meant nothing to him. Was it pride by that point, or stubbornness? He really didn't know.

He just knew that he was just another guy suckered in by the corporations' glitzy and false promises.

WALTER - THE AVENGER WHO KNOWS HE'S DIGGING A GRAVE FOR MILLIONS

Walter, meanwhile, was born to a privileged family of a different sort.

A good few decades before the Fires, Rubicon had done the unthinkable in human history: it had broken away from the UEG and declared independence, becoming a self-sustaining colony with a distinct identity - and able to negotiate with the fuming UEG on equal footing due to its sole access to Coral and its development of the C-weapons. The UEG couldn't take Rubicon or its resources by force (though it surely contemplated it from time to time), and so begrudgingly dealt with them as a peer, legitimising Rubicon as an independent colony and allowing it to forge its own desinty on the galactic stage.

While UEG and its many colonies functioned as a hypercapitalist ogligarchy, Rubicon became a technocracy, with the Rubicon Research Institute having considerable sway over the Rubiconian central government - to the point where it was understood that despite the elected 'president', it really was the Institute that was in charge. This gave rise to the 'intellectual elite', the scientists and academics who ran the Institute - the class that Walter belonged to before the Fires.

His parents were both scientists that worked on the Xylem and lived on-site. They were passionate about their work with the Coral and highly respected within their community, but while they clearly loved Walter, he was always second priority to their research and ambitions. Walter was the only child growing up in the labs (at least, the only one that wasn't a test subject of some kind), and only ever interacted with adults - all of whom were scientists or the security staff. He had never left the Xylem either, his concept of the 'outside world' being the small, sanitised courtyard with the lone tree, and the street he could see past the bars of the labratory's secure and gated exit. While he had some freedom of movement within the facility, there were areas he was barred from entering due to sensitive experiments, or to minimise his interaction with detained test subjects.

As a result, Walter became scarily self-sufficient from a young age, and came across as taciturn or emotionally stunted. He spoke like an adult but struggled to navigate social situations in general, unable to sugarcoat his words and coming across as rude or abrasive when speaking to others. While he found himself occasionally curious about interacting with people who weren't harried scientists that barely tolerated his prolonged presence, Walter genuinely found himself unbothered about his isolation. He was lonely, yes, but he occupied himself well enough, and filled the long stretches of time in furthering his education - determined to become a scientist like his parents and continuing on their work, as what was expected of him.

Then his father began the augmentations and everything went terribly wrong.

His mother volunteered to be Gen Zero, the prototype used to present to the Institute to have the augmentation project greenlighted. Initially, things went well. His mother suffered no significant drawbacks, and demonstrated an incredible boost in mental acuity and calculation power that current neural implants couldn't even begin to compare to. Once the Gen Ones were well underway, however, with a significant death rate at that, his mother began to rapidly degrade, physically and mentally. Walter's last memory of his mother was her unable to recognise him and talking to people who weren't there, knowing that it was the Coral's fault somehow.

His father was driven to perfect the augmentations to ensure his wife's sacrifice wasn't in vain. In Walter's words, he began a carnival of horrors within his labs, killing and mutiliating hundreds within his labs in his pursuit of the refining the augmentation process, with the Institute pumping unlimited resources, funding and test subjects into the project. The glimpse of the future Gen Zero showed them had them eager to achieve that perfection, no matter how many bodies they had to stack up.

It disgusted Walter. While he had never been emotionally close with his parents, he had still respected them, and to see his mother reduced to a crazed husk of herself before dying and his father turning into a monster, destroyed the pedastal he'd put them on. Walter found himself fostering a near irrational hatred for the Coral, rationalising that none of this would've happened if Coral had never been discovered - if it had never existed. He wished, vehemently, for it to disappear.

He got his wish with the Fires.

While the augmentations had made Walter view the Coral with a negative lens, seeing the damage it could do in the wrong hands, the Fires cinched it as a traumatic avatar of destruction in Walter's mind. The Coral was too dangerous to exist in their galaxy, not with how greedy humans could be, and blind to the dangers in pursuit of power. But his motivations weren't noble: he absolutely despised the legacy it represented, how he couldn't hear the word 'Coral' without thinking of his father, his mother, and how everything was robbed from him. It seeded in him an obsession, a hateful, vengeful obsession, because focusing on that, on gunning for a tangible entity that you've vowed to destroy, is far easier to stomach than processing the fact that your life was utterly ruined by selfish ambitions and a freak accident.

Overnight Walter went from part of the very prestigious intellectual elite on Rubicon, to a penniless refugee on one of Jupiter's colonies: Ganymede. It was a shock to the system to find himself in a world where food wasn't simply there whenever he desired it, that shelter wasn't a given, and that clinical cleanliness was a privilege, not a right. He fortunately had Carla with him, though, and while the first few years were rocky, they managed to find their footing by creating a scrapping service in the Ganymede slums, Carla using her previous experience in R&D at the Institute, and Walter his education, to repurpose old tech and mechs or salvage somewhat valuable tech to sell on.

From there, they began to plot, to focus their shared hatred and distrust of the Coral to really make sure it was gone for good, that it wouldn't come back. In the filthy slums beneath Ganymede, with a promise made between two emotionally exhausted yet furious Rubiconian refugees, Overseer was born.

But that's its own story.

Walter's endless conga line of misfortune did well to harden him and make him adaptable to unpleasant surprises. He always expects shit to go wrong at the most inconvenient times, he doesn't trust a single person to do the right thing even if he's known them for years (Carla, who all but raised him, he only trusts to a certain extent), and he realised how hypocritical most people could be. Though he was born as one of the intellectual elite, witnessing and experiencing first hand the oppression and indignity the working class suffered in UEG territories genuinely sickened him - and cemented in his mind that this galaxy couldn't be trusted with the Coral at all.

He had to destroy it for good. He had to make sure it could never come back and hurt anyone else. He had to erase every drop of legacy his shit-for-brains father had built and let history bury him forever. Walter, for all of his outwardly cold and emotionless masks, feels deeply and intently, and all of it is bitter rage.

Walter just doesn't know how to process his emotions well - he was never taught, and he missed those vital milestones with his lonely childhood, locked away in an ivory tower filled with nothing but scientists and test subjects. He feels so much over his father, the Fires, the Coral, but has no idea how to sort through it all. So he stuffs it away. He keeps his gaze fixed on the horizon where his mission to destroy the Coral hangs. He tells himself that once he destroys it for good, it'll all go away: these incomprehensible, heavy and painful emotions. The source of them all will be gone.

Imagine that: condeming millions to death because of crippling, unaddressed daddy issues.

THE SHIP ITSELF

Right, with all that context given, onto the part people really care about: so, why does the Walter/Michigan ship pair well? Or at least, why does APV Walter/Michigan pair well.

Michigan's POV:

From Michigan's side, he's fascinated with Walter. Everything about him just doesn't make sense. He's a 'sewer rat', a working class drone that managed to claw their way out of the muck and elevate his social standing through stubborn grit and determination - but his demeanour belies that. Walter demonstrates a level of education and sophistication that the working class just don't have. Michigan has grown up on Ganymede, and despite the high-ranking executives living in their gated communities and busying themselves with the day-to-day running of their businesses, they do keep an eye on what the working class are up to.

The corporations have perfected subjugation and propaganda to an artform. They can only achieve this if they know their target audience. Michigan knows, as any self-respecting Rivera knows, how the working class tick, their current worries and desires, the statistical trends of their few purchases and which style of propaganda they're most receptive to. Walter fits none of the established norms for Ganymede working class - he doesn't even have a recognisable Jupiter colony accent - so he already presents himself as an interesting puzzle for Michigan to break down.

There's also some genuine respect there too. Michigan acknowledges that Water had to work hard to get where he was, and he appreciates that Walter doesn't mince his words or beat around the bush. He's blunt, direct and isn't in the business of brown-nosing or fawning to ingratiate himself. You always knew where you stood with Walter, or so Michigan felt, and admittedly, Walter reminded him a lot of a certain character achetype in his precious films: the underdog, the guy you ended up rooting for just because he worked so fucking hard for what he wanted.

So, to Michigan, Walter's interesting, he's mysterious, and he's a representation of what Michigan wanted for himself. He wants to be like Walter: a poor as shit refugee making something of himself, with a whole future to distinguish himself and build his own reputation, to forge himself in fire! Michigan is mildly envious, but thinks as well that if he sticks close to him, he'll be able to live vicariously through him, to get a taste of dream he really wanted to achieve...

And because he's so fascinated with Walter, he starts to learn all of his tics and mannerisms too. He begins to understand the minute shifts of Walter's expressions, what he leaves unsaid and knowing when Walter is feeling but just doesn't know how to express or word himself. Michigan is the more emotionally intelligent of the two, and very perceptive despite how he acts. Combined with his easy-going nature and his respect for Walter's hardworking nature and competency, this helped him break through a few of Walter's walls - despite Walter doing his best to rebuild them as fast as possible.

Not to say they don't butt heads: they butt heads a lot. Arguing is their favourite pasttime. They challenge each other, and Michigan knows that he can say whatever and Walter can dish it out right back. Walter doesn't give a shit about any potential ties Michigan may have to the Rivera family - he just gives a shit about Michigan waking him up at 6am and asking him to go running with him. He snaps at him, argues with him, insults him... he treats him as Michigan, and this is what Michigan cares about the most.

Walter's POV:

Meanwhile, Walter's feelings towards Michigan are very complicated. He's irritated by what he sees as Michigan's nosiness towards his private affairs, and he doesn't appreciate him trying to figure him out. Mostly because he doesn't want him figuring out his true identity. Walter wanted to sever any and all ties between him and his father's legacy, and he and Carla took great pains to have no one realise that he was the famous Dr Kohler's son. And the disowned heir of the Rivera family? Definitely in the best position to connect the dots.

But Michigan's also the first person to ever just... treat him normally and roll with his verbal punches. People are usually scared away by Walter's cold attitude and sharp words, but Michigan gave as good as he got, and always shrugged off Walter's meaner comments. It left Walter at a bit of a loss, and after a while he slowly desensitised to Michigan's presence. He rationalised that it's just pointless wasting energy trying to chase off Michigan, but the fact was he... ended up liking his company. He had no idea socialising could be so enjoyable, once you learned to tolerate their more aggravating parts.

There's also a colder and more pragmatic side too: Michigan is useful to him, as a son of an executive, disgraced or not. Walter is aware enough to acknowledge that a small chunk of his tolerance is proportional to Michigan's use for him, but in his mind he sees it as an expected part of their relationship. It's transactional, what they share (or so he tells himself). He offers entertainment to Michigan, who in turns offers the same - and lets Walter take advantage of the few perks being "friends" with an executive's son offers.

He tells himself he can't get attached - he has his mission after all - but by this point Walter's good at ignoring his feelings and burying himself under six feet of concrete denial. He clings to the rationalisation that they're just "friends with benefits" for years, that from the beginning they were only making use of each other - there wasn't really anything there. Even to him that sounded hollow when he finally cut ties and left, to pursue his hopeless and doomed mission. He never really stopped thinking about Michigan, the what-ifs.

He hated it.

...

Also they both share a hatred of their respective fathers, so they Get That. They're part of the Dads Suck club.

CONCLUSION