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.

Scientist Toilet is largely responsible for the war between techfolk and the Skibidis.

It would have made sense for G-Toilet and Co to recruit the techfolk - "there's an Astro invasion coming and I need to transform the humans into an ascended form that can survive the attack." Even if you can't transform the robots into more skibidis for your cause, they'd still be more useful as peons than enemies.

We can assume Scientist Toilet is brutally unhinged, from the experiments seen in the bunker arc, and the fact that we don't see really messed up skibidis since his death.

When the invasion started, Scientist told the newly-transformed Skibs "Slaughter the techfolk, and I'll turn you back into humans." Of course, he never had any intention of following through on that, even if it were possible.

Day 1: Which "main" character is your favorite? What draws you in?

All the titans! Because I’m an anthropologist, I’m fascinated by how people experience the world differently. Titan units are a really interesting thought experiment, because they’re completely unique beings. Being a titan would be like living in a society of Lego-person-sized humans, the closest thing they’ve got to their size is the large units, but even the biggest large units are doll-sized in comparison.

So the titan units are kind of a micro-culture of three people. But they’re also the centre of their factions’ cultures and need to primarily be loyal to their own factions. Which makes me think of human relationships with pantheistic deities in pre-Christian religions, when deities weren’t believed to be all-powerful and had relationships with each other that competed with the attention they paid to humans. Deities are loved, but there’s also a sense of unpredictability and danger, which is very obvious in stories like Ragnarok in Norse mythology where warring deities will destroy the world. That’s totally something I want to explore in my fics, the concept of titans as purpose-built deified figures, because it’s fascinating to bring a mythological feeling into (kind of) realistic sci-fi.

The other thing that’s interesting is the experience of what it would be like to be a titan. A philosopher called Nagel wrote that we can imagine what it might be like to be a bat, but we can’t know because a bat’s world is so different to a human’s. An Alliance robot’s worldview is pretty mysterious anyway (how speakermen perceive the world if they don’t see, for example) but to add size and all the multiple sensors and equipment that titan units have, and it’s really possible to imagine an alien worldview. All the titan units would have their own perceptual quirks, but I think Titan TVman is particularly fascinating. If his other TVs act like heads then he might be able to split his consciousness. He’s also slightly different from the other titans in that he seems to be slightly distanced from his faction - I interpret this as because he’s (in my fic interpretation, most of the Alliance including Titan TV use gender-neutral pronouns, but I’m using canon pronouns here for clarity) out fighting and working with other factions while other TVmen generally seem to be secretive, a tendency that more TVmen also start challenging as the series goes on. He’s been an interesting character to use to explore ideas about neurodivergent thinking, semi-plural experiences, and alternative ways of doing relationships!

Invis seems to have identified Titan TV Man as the leader of the Alliance. This makes sense to a casual observer (maybe one who doesn’t read subtitles) because he’s extremely visible and he’s quick to take action. This is a real thing that happens in social movements too, where spokespeople and organisers get misidentified as movement leaders. Titan TV has definitely got some autonomy in what he does on the battlefield and likely some say in movement strategy overall. But the plot hasn’t actually presented him as the leader of the Alliance (or even of the TV Men). Boom’s even explicitly said that the Alliance has no overall leaders, and functions more like a decentralised communist organisation.

Titan TV probably wouldn’t make a good movement leader either. He’s definitely brave and quick to act, and he cares a lot about others. But he’s also impulsive and irrational at times. He ends up being hacked by the Astros because he’s not happy with the change of strategy after so much effort and so many lives were invested in the previous strategy. He makes an impulsive decision to fuck off and leave to do his own thing because he feels that he can’t make the rest of his faction understand him. If he was the leader of the Alliance, that wouldn’t have happened plotwise, but the Alliance likely wouldn’t have allied with the Skibidis either.

Thank you! I do think I headcanon TTV’s relationships like that, maybe it’s kind of like some people’s relationships with their families or first friendship group, where they’ll always love them first but needed to move away and make grownup friends to understand who they are. He’ll always love his faction first, but needed to spend time with other titan units and other factions to figure himself out. I also like to imagine him bonding with Polycephaly over being grumpy about other TV Men (particularly Sci TV haha).

Re: privacy, that’s something I’ve wondered about for all the titans, they’re all the focus of their faction’s attention and it looks like hangars are busy instead of being like private bedrooms. But yeah, Titan Cameraman has the added issue of always broadcasting. I suspect this might indeed be relatively normal for cams and they might not have the human expectation of privacy - or maybe he’s able to switch it off sometimes? Would that worry the cams? It is interesting that he needed to watch Poly’s screen - maybe it was just like when a friend shows you something on their phone instead of sending you the link? Or maybe TCM isn’t able to consciously access Alliance feeds because it would be overwhelming to be seeing it all? It would be horrible to see cams being destroyed, and might be a distraction on the battlefield.

I think something like that could work, wetware computers made with neurons are a real thing, as are computers that are designed to copy the human brain. My headcanon is that titans’ (and other units’) brains/thinking processors/whatever are mechanical but patterned on human brains for exactly that reason, a conscious mind is more chaotic, but is more adaptable. I think this also causes a problem though, that the ability to resist hacks and hostile commands also means it’s difficult for their own programmers to work with their code after their minds have matured. So training needs to act more like actual human training and less like a knowledge download or command, because for a conscious mind, knowing something isn’t the same as being competent in doing something.

I’m also fascinated by the contradictions in being a titan, that they’re war machines and… kind of sheltered pets, really! They go out, fight, and come back and get maintained, and don’t have the opportunity or need to do normal life things. But it must also be stressful that the one thing they do have to do is a life-or-death mission. I expect that must indeed result in very close bonds with their engineers, scientists, and other units that look after them. It must feel comforting for them to be fussed over and listen to smaller units talking about mundane things, I love that idea! 🥺

I haven’t actually thought a lot about what will happen to titans when the war ends, but yes, this is a very good point. Because they’re conscious, even though they were built for a task, they can think beyond that and wish that life was kinder and easier. I like some people’s headcanons that titan units might be able to use smaller bodies to have more normal lives, which could practically be canon now that we’ve learned in some leaks that Camerawoman can use a spare body! But I also like your ideas that they’d find peacetime uses for their original bodies too.

Relationships between human governments and the Alliance would, presumably, have been exactly that if there hadn’t been a war and titans surely would have been treated like battleships or something and the Alliance as another branch of the military. Post-war though, I expect that the Alliance/Union is likely to be more powerful than any surviving human governments, so they’d end up making the rules. I’d like to think they’d do a better job of it in some ways than some current world leaders because they seem to want intelligent life to survive so might not prioritise making money over maintaining a functioning planet. But they also aren’t exactly a stable structure and are likely to have all the usual problems of infighting and disagreements!

I imagine that the Astros are a spacefaring species evolved from a Boltzmann brain (a philosophical exercise that says if the universe is chaotic and infinite, a brain could randomly appear in space), so they’re adapted to the harshest conditions. They can survive zero gravity, grow back from most injuries that aren’t immediately fatal, self-fertilise, and eat radiation. Their entire society is a survival strategy, which should have made them cooperative and kind. But they’d split from the same space brain and were once a psychically connected clonal colony (inspired by how some real living things like quaking aspens can be one individual split into physically connected parts). Survival of the superorganism mattered much more than survival of the individual, and this alien morality was maintained as the psychic links between individuals weakened.

Boom has used “tvmen”, “tvman”, and “tv-man” in video descriptions, so I don’t think there’s a canon lore reason for any particular spelling. It’s also more or less confirmed that all factions have some members with human minds or memories, so it’s not likely that it’s in some way distinguishing between factions that were human and factions that weren’t. I suspect it’s a stylistic thing because of “TV” being an acronym. The species-style faction name might more appropriately be “televisionmen”, but that’s aesthetically awkward.

Also, it’s Invis canon to capitalise “Cameramen” and “Speakermen”. They feel like common nouns for species or roles to me - I feel like I don’t want to write “there’s a Cameraman” in the same way I wouldn’t write “there’s a Cat” or “there’s a Fanfic Writer”. But we do capitalise nouns that refer to being a member of a specific and intentional group of people. Like (I swear this is a real thing) we write “Gooners” for fans of the UK football team Arsenal but “gooners” for people who could probably do with taking up football as a healthier hobby. I want to capitalise Skibidi toilets and Astro toilets like that, because they’re toilets that say “skibidi” and toilets that are presumably from the Astro faction because “astro” is kind of a non-word on its own. Going by words like “astrodome”, then “astrotoilets” could also be correct.