Monday DE: It's all in my mind

[bjornwilde]

As suggested by i_am_your_host :

Got any new headcanon for your pups? Or any recent or significant Millicanon? Basically anything that your pup has been up to in Milliways that affects their life in important ways.

Comments

[exiled_heir_of_the_eighth]

Well, I've just finished up a delightful thread between Sahaal and Sinric, in which Milliways' resident Night Lord learnt to play the flute. Honestly, I've been wanting him to start learning more normal skills so he can actually have a life, so he's definitely keeping that up.

[quick_clean_pure]

The headcanon I've developed playing Graverobber is that he keeps literally everything of value in his life somewhere in his trenchcoat, because he has nowhere else to keep things.

And then I saw a screenshot of him carrying a satchel bag around and immediately ignored it because I like my headcanon better.

[bjornwilde]

Satchels can be good for carrying things, but are much easier to steal than the coat off your back!

Of course, picked pockets can still happen, but I can totally see keepign the important things as close as possible being viable.

[quick_clean_pure]

Exactly! Especially since the coat's big enough that I imagine he can cart some stuff around in inner pockets/the coat lining.

[sdelmonte]

I got some weird headcanon for Swamp Thing. There was a recent appearance in Batman that basically ignored how he behaved in his previous series. So I have decided, based on the fact that in essence there are two versions of the Alec Holland Swamp Thing, and that the one in Batman was the other version and not the one I am playing. Oh, the things we will come up with to undermine bad writing.

[aaaaaaaagh_sky]

It's not exactly new, I used it in the Point Lookout DLC OOMs, but it came up again recently- my headcanon is that Ellen is extremely prone to seasickness. Mostly I just did that to make it easier for me to put her on a boat for plot reasons, because if she's trying not to puke then I don't have to write much else until she hits land again, which means that once I'm ready to send her to the Commonwealth I won't have to do multiple OOMs for the trip.

I have also got a bit of Millicanon for one of the Fallout 4 NPCs that she will probably be encountering, which I admit is basically me taking an in-joke that a friend of mine and I had about the character and running with it: Deacon, the Railroad NPC who constantly rotates through disguises and claims to get a new face every few years to throw his enemies off the scent, is in fact Keanu Reeves. The Internet theory that Keanu Reeves is an immortal? In the Fallout universe it's true, and in the future of that universe, he's gotten himself involved with the synth liberation movement. If ghouls and supermutants can effectively live until something kills them rather than dying of old age then I'm ruling that Keanu Reeves got the same deal, just through another means, possibly alien intervention.

[inlovewithwords]

SW universe combo here: R2 and Anakin helped Cassian re-build an X-Wing.

Thing is, Anakin ripped it to shreds and put it back together. Anakin, who may be one of the best mechanics in SW and certainly one of the best pilots, but who also therefore has very specific preferences in his steering and sensitivity controls that almost everyone else thinks are, you know, insane.

So everyone in Red Squadron absolutely hates that X-Wing. Like, they can't deny it's faster than the other ships, and has basically top-tier work on it, but it's also extremely finicky and most of them just don't want to handle a machine liable to be really difficult to control, even with droid help. R2 is going to pretty much keep it maintained and whoever the newest poor sod in the Squadron is gets stuck with it unless there are other ships free.

Of course, after Scarif, they're going to be down a lot of ships going into Yavin. Pity the only ship available for the newbie fighter pilot in Red Squadron is the really-good-except-kind-of-terrible-as-a-result one.

R2 is extremely pleased.

As for Anakin himself: too much knowledge is a dangerous thing with him, especially when he thinks there's a Magic Solution to his problems. Experience with Milliways is going to make one particular aspect of Episode III much, much worse.

I'll do Tavi later if I think of it.

[bjornwilde]

Some wish for head canon: When Sabine learns lightsaber forms, Anakin gives her some pointers and moves. (Support for this is the move she uses to end the fight with Gar Saxon. See Anakin's last fight with Dooku.)

[cottoncandypink]

Some of the occult blogs I follow on Tumblr have been giving me some really good ideas.

One of the ideas I started out with in my initial worldbuilding is that pixies sort of run the place, and are responsible for the magic that makes saves and resets, etc work. Even though pixies aren't really a part of American folklore, The Legend of Zelda didn't take place in America, so it worked.

But after seeing a bunch of posts about endless fields of corn, and doing a little playing around with how time gets funny in the desert, I've decided that the pixies really have no presence, and very little influence over what goes on in America because they took one look at the ancient, malignant deities that live under the ground over here, and noped right on out. Which is why America in particular is so chaotic in this universe.

This kind of goes hand in hand with another set of posts going around right now about how America uses The Devil is a catchall for anything sinister, whether or not it is, in fact, biblical in nature. It's something I've been doing a bit without realising it, but which I'd like to lean on a bit heavily.

I don't have much time to play with any of this, but something I have been able to explore a little bit is how the only relatively save areas are in large cities, and the further outside of them you get, the more terrifying the world becomes.

[notallofus]

We have a lot of headcanon! The story in these OOMs about Hera's family's history on Ryloth is mostly headcanon, though it was inspired by a note in some semi-canonical Star Wars reference book that nearly 6000 members of the Syndulla clan were enslaved during the Hutt occupation. And Nabat is a canonical city on Ryloth, and was shown in the Clone Wars "Storm Over Ryloth" arc.

The first thread also alludes to my headcanon about Hera's brother, the existence of whom was suddenly included near the end of canon without much context, but! For us he was her younger brother, who followed Hera everywhere and whom she was very close to. He died when he was about four years old (Hera would have been about seven), due to a combination of malnutrition and Bybbec fever shortly after the events of "Supply Lines" in Clone Wars, when Separatist forces were blocking supplies to Ryloth. This is part of why Hera has a particular sore spot when it comes to siege tactics in war.

ETA: Oh! And I forgot, that OOM also has Hera saying that the Hutts would propagate the idea that Twi'leks sold themselves into slavery to get off Ryloth, which I headcanoned, admittedly as a kind of criticism of that actually being the case in the old EU.

And we use a lot of other random headcanons that I don't think we've shared before, like:

- Neither Twi'leks nor Jedi typically celebrate birthdays. Twi'leks have what I've dubbed in my head as a "Name Day", when a child is around four years old, which is when the child chooses their name and gender, as a means of formally becoming a part of their clan (and as mentioned before in Totally This Headcanon, Twi'leks have three long-culturally-recognized genders). Before this children are often referred to as 'daru,' the neutral gender word for 'child', or by various nicknames (in one thread Hera mentions that she was nicknamed after a type of beetle that ran up along cave walls, because of her rambunctious nature), though it's common for children to make their choices known even before the formal ceremony. This idea is sort of referenced in the thread above, where Hera talks about parents encouraging their children not to take the Syndulla clan name. And in my headcanon, Hera's brother died before his Name Day, and hadn't chosen a name yet, though he had made his gender preference known.

- Twi'lek women and girls typically wear head coverings starting after their Name Day, which is part of a widespread cultural association with women and working outside, especially in hunting/gathering/farming/scouting.

- This thread makes reference to another part of Hera's past that I've headcanoned, based on a line from A New Dawn that she spent a short time as an activist. (I know a lot of these are about Hera but to be fair, that's because canon seems way more interested in giving us Kanan backstory, hmmmmmmmmm.) In that thread Hera runs into someone who knew her by a false name she used to use (Isis Vao – this is a reference to Battlestar Galactica, where a character also named Hera is briefly known as Isis, and then a nod to the Twi'lek character Mission Vao from Knights of the Old Republic), and mentions that she used to work off Coruscant. The idea behind this was that for a few months after she left Ryloth, she ran with a group of four other activists who focused on non-violent resistance, especially through exposing Imperial misdeeds, but that in that time all of them but Hera were killed, and this experience was part of what convinced her that armed insurgency was the only option. And we're planning to get into that in a later thread.

... and I mean. Hera getting kicked off Pamarthe repeatedly for disrupting slavers is headcanon but. Whatever.

- As for Millicanon... there is going to be a thing we're planning on to use the Bar in a behind-the-scenes kind of way but. We're not there yet! So. I'm not sure we have any big Milliways influences besides that, other than that it will likely soon allow for some of our rebels to have more communication than would be possible otherwise.

[configuration_birdwatcher]

The Bastion/Reaper thread got me thinking. Bastion units (either Omnic Crisis era or just in general) may well have some sort of tamper-proofing daemon that would cause a factory reset if someone tries to reprogram them, especially interfering with their combat programming. I don't think Bastion actually knows for sure; I doubt they've ever seen it attempted. But on the other hand, if someone had a compelling reason to try reprogramming one and wasn't attached to the original personality, they wouldn't have to tread as carefully around whatever failsafes may be in place for this occasion and could just keep resetting until it worked. It's much simpler to take something apart if you know it never has to go back together again.

They also don't fully trust anyone except Ganymede, who for all his cleverness and emotional intelligence is still a bird rather than a sapient peer. They don't feel like they can rely on anyone else being concerned about their physical and/or mental integrity and will worry about even their friends double-crossing them or throwing them to the wolves. Knowing that someone doesn't have a motive to do that and does have a motive to do the opposite eases their mind somewhat, but doesn't completely banish their fears. (They do tend to take people's presented selves at face value. It was very difficult for anyone to infiltrate the omnic army as a spy without being assimilated into it for real, so that's a blind spot of Bastion's.)

Also now they're questioning the other Overwatch members' judgment for letting them basically do whatever they want so long as they stay on base. I don't think that's quite what Reaper was going for but I'm sure it's fine with him.