#robogender

I've posted a lot more art over here of her, but never explained WHO she is! This is

My Robot OC is called EM-AA1 Marionette or Mari, who's a prototype android that was built for a purpose she can never accomplish as she was never completed, instead forced to do mundane jobs.

She yearns to one day to be finished so she can do what she was built for. (Tags call her E1AX Marionette as that was her early name, keeping because I have a lot of images there!)

Not like the grand, transcendent artificial intelligence sort of way. I mean literally. Wires under skin. Cooling fans humming behind my ribs. Thoughts reduced to processes and tasks and clean little lines of code.

I think life would be easier that way.

No second-guessing every sentence I speak. No awkward pauses trying to decipher what people mean versus what they say. Input. Output. Simple. Efficient. If something broke, there would be a reason for it. A visible failure. Corrupted files, something easy to pin point. Not this vague human deficiency where something hurts and you can’t even locate where the damage started, let alone how to actually go about fixing it.

A computer doesn’t have to wonder if it’s too much or not enough, or lose sleep replaying conversations from three years ago, or get attached to people who leave fingerprints all over its internal systems before evaporating.

And imagine the utility of it all. Perfect memory. Endless storage. The ability to organize every thought into folders instead of letting them pile up in wet, tangled heaps behind your eyes. You could upgrade yourself when necessary. Replace old parts. Patch vulnerabilities. No shame in maintenance. No guilt in needing repairs.

People would probably understand you better, too.

Humans are patient with machines in ways they rarely are with each other. If a computer freezes, nobody calls it dramatic. They troubleshoot it carefully. They lean close to listen for strange sounds. Where’s that kind of empathy for other living life forms?

Imagine someone sitting beside you with a screwdriver, carefully unscrewing the paneling beneath your chest just to see what’s wrong. There would be no bursts of anger. No complaints, or eye rolls, or being told “God, just get over yourself”. There would be true curiosity, a genuine want to understand the inner workings of you as a being.

“Oh,” they’d say, peering inside you, “No wonder you’ve been acting strange. Your system’s overheating.” And that would be that. They’d get straight to repairing whatever the issue was, no fuss necessary.

new peak gender envy just dropped. and it has fuckin HEELYS. and FUCKOFF HUGE GUNWINGS. and enough MISSLE PODS to KILL GOD

I got a comment on the trans Mass Effect characters post that pointed out that Edi really is transfem all things considered, not tagging them because I don't know if they'd want that, but it made me think A LOT about her gender, so with the help of a friend who really really likes pride flags, we scrounged up a bunch of feminine aligned genders that feel like Edi.

Some of them are your run of the mill transfeminine, some of them are nonbinary girl or agender woman, some of them are more complex relationships with feminine identity, and there's a robogender for good measure.

It was really fun thinking about how she may relate to human notions of gender in relation to being an AI or a ship, or how people may interpret her being gendered as a woman from a queer perspective (I the OP am genderqueer) since it's seemingly done in canon because she's got a feminine voice and is, well, a ship, a thing often gendered that way.

Anyway that had us thinking about Joker, logically, they're married, I don't make the rules I just play the game right, and the way he talks about falling in love with the Normandy is something I could talk about for hundreds of hours. As a disabled person as well, it's heartening to hear him talk about something that clearly gives him a level of autonomy that not only he lacks physical ability to take for himself, but has been taken from him multiple times, especially with such affection. It speaks to a deeper reason he releases EDI from her shackles. She, too, lacks an autonomy by the very nature of her form, that Joker hands back to her willingly long before she gets a body. I think that's inherently a queer, disabled love story, down to it's core.

Anyway, this is a stamp post.

So, the disabled brigade that follows me everywhere snapping their fingers on one hand while using their canes with the other convinced me to make some objectum/techtum/technosexual Joker stamps too. Because he talks about loving that ship more than I can ever imagine him loving a human being. I think it's important that EDI is the ship, to the affection the two of them have for each other.

All the flags are named in the image descriptions