Unfinished Fics: The Banner of the Landwaster - Lost In Transmission v.2

[koilungfish]

Unfinished Fics: The Banner of the Landwaster - Lost In Transmission v.2
Lost In Transmission
Temporal weirdness begins on Cybertron, Starscream goes missing in the Bermuda Triangle and Skyfire has an ethical crisis.

Comments

[lunatron.livejournal.com]

I tried to invoke my powers of people-think-my-stuff-is-canon to nudge that mistake aside. Doubt it will ever happen.

Ahahaahah. XD

I like the bit wherein Wheeljack is talking about why Autobots don't fly and why Autobots who do fly are... jerks.

I've always liked the idea that flight systems are just somehow imcompatible with Autobot hardware or software and that it is a pain for Autobots to add it in after the fact.

Chaining it to their morality, though, gives them a very good reason why they wouldn't just change their machining techniques or update their code.

Though I kind of wonder why they can't just drop to dual fail-safed moral compasses, for the fliers.

Slag on Dinobot philosophy is very excellent.

Also, Wheeljack not giving his 'children' any ethical hardpoint plates is kind of... cool? I can sort of respect him for it.

I kind of wonder if Thundercracker #2 is from the Marvel comics. >_>

[koilungfish.livejournal.com]

Eh, I might as well use my Communist Space Monkeys for Good rather than Evil? :: shrugs ::

Yeah, it was a bit of a wrangle, but Slag and Wheeljack just popped up in my head and started talking, as sometimes happens.

Wheeljack's basically saying that they've taken out the third layer of moral compass failsafes in the fliers ... and all Autobot fliers are jerks ... so what that says about what happens to Autobots without hardwired moral compasses is of question. I work on the assumption that the Autobots, because they live by hardwired morality [without questioning], if at any point they are without those hardwired compasses, their ability to make moral decisions - indeed, to really think about morality - is seriously compromised by their long-term - both individual and social - reliance on hardwired morality.

Slag ... just turned up and talked. Sometimes it happens.

Yeah, that ties in to Engineer of Souls. Not quite the same, but similar. As mentioned in the notes Wheeljack was built and spent the first few thousand years of his life in a neutralist enclave in the Decepticon capital, even married a few Decepticons. So his perspective on things is much less black-and-white. Also, he probably doesn't have Autobot-style moral compasses, no ...

Nope, not at all. If I was doing a cartoonverse-comicverse crossover I'd have warned for it, and been much stricter and clearer about the canons.

[lunatron.livejournal.com]

I am now picturing Wheeljack singing All My Exes Live in Kaon (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o5mRs9agHTs). Thank you ever so much. Where did you get the idea for Wheeljack as a serial divorcee, anyway?

All things considered, I would think that Kup is missing at least a few of those hypothetical moral layers. I recently had reason to go back and study him, and he's... always advocating to kill whatever it is that the other Autobots don't want to kill, with one odd exception. And he sometimes dismembers enemies alive and then uses them to beat on other enemies. And he pretty bluntly says that he thinks Spike is an idiot. And so on. It's like... Kup is what you would get if a Dinobot was socially respectable instead of a pariah.

[koilungfish.livejournal.com]

Haah. No idea. Just turned up.

And he's recovered from battle fatigue, which is otherwise unknown for Autobots ... I guess perhaps he's so old he predates some of the moral hardcoding? I have him down as being from early in the Second War, at which point there was a lot more interaction between the various factions.

[lunatron.livejournal.com]

Hmm, so back to a previous post, you're saying that most Autobots are basically on morality auto-pilot, so if you remove one level of that auto-pilot, they turn into jerks, because they've never really sat down and thought out their morals, because they just rely on the auto-pilot to do it for them? But someone like Wheeljack, who thinks a lot about morality and ethics and develop a consistent internal morality and follow it?

(That makes moral Decepticons a bit more impressive than moral Autobots, since a Decepticon would really have to work at it the hard way.)

How does your Wheeljack's fierce love of choice fit in with the Dominator Discs?

How is Skyfire set up?

I have to say, as a general comment, that I found the Autobot bits in this fic the most interesting and was a lot less interested in the Decepticon parts, which is odd, given how the Decepticons are essentially the stars of this 'series' you were writing.

Personally, I've written Kup as someone who was built without emotional dampners by mistake, like Slag, so he's got that constant internal struggle to keep himself from just beating the slag out of things. Kind of ties in nicely with how Kup can get self-recriminating sometimes (see his guilt in 'Chaos') and also with how he burned out. Kup's hit quite a few 4 million year marks by now, which means multiple berserker flip-outs.

[koilungfish.livejournal.com]

Yes, pretty much.

[Decepticons run on conflict. Aggressive debate is much more their style than being all accepting of the status quo.]

As Wheeljack said in LiT, the Decepticons are a bunch of xenocidal psychopaths. Your freedom to choose stops when you choose to start killing, as far as he's concerned. He's lived with 'cons, he's had that moment when reality hit him in the face and he realised what all the in-jokes he didn't get were about, and unlike a lot of Autobots he's damned sure that the 'cons will always be what they are. There isn't going to be a peace, not in his mind.

Skyfire, being a non-Autobot, had a different set-up to begin with. Being a trained xenologist and explorer, he had his moral hardwires removed and took extensive courses in ethics and moral logic so that he could interact with xenos whilst being flexible about their morals.

Possibly because the Autobot parts were about morality, and have already been thought through, whilst the Decepticon bits are more action/mystery based, and highly incomplete?

I'd not take him for someone without emotional dampers, but certainly someone who's life experience has surpassed what his moral and emotional hardwires originally gave him.