Worldbuilding Exchange Letter
Dear Worldbuilder,
Hi! Thank you so much in advance for creating for me - I'm super excited about this exchange and pretty easy-going when it comes to gifts, so please don't get too stressed out, I'm sure I'll love whatever you make. ♥ This is the first time I've done an exchange like this, so please bear with me if I make any weird missteps in the letter, and absolutely feel free to get in touch with me via the mods or anon comment if anything is confusing! (Fic-wise, you can also always check my Yuletide letters of Yuletides gone by for more details via my yuletidings tag.)
General likes:
- Banter and snark
- Understated or reluctant loyalty/friendship
- Goofy takes on standard tropes
- Affectionate insults between people who are really close but don't want to admit it
- Canon-divergent AUs and crossovers/fusions with fandoms I know
- Cute daily life sketches/cartoons, especially for different locations like alien ships or far-future cities
- Masks
- Gen, slash, femslash, and threesomes/moresomes
- Character portraits (especially for characters who don't have a canon visual design)
- Action/adventure/adventure with optional action
- Highly stylized art (any style!)
- Casefic
- AIs and robots
- Cool alien scenery and designs
- Costume/armor/jewelry/uniform designs
Some specific worldbuilding likes: I am, naturally, interested in the big strokes of worldbuilding for alien races or future cultures - economies, political and social structures, religions, biology in the case of aliens - but I am also SUPER INTO the smaller details that make up a culture. Dancing! Games! Little superstitions like the equivalent of knocking on wood or avoiding unlucky numbers/colors! Music! Pets! Food! Body language! Holidays! Toys! Swearing! 100% HERE FOR EXPLORATION OF ALL OF THAT, and anything else you can think of. In the case of aliens I am also quite interested in varied sex/gender combinations, the more alien (and less gender essentialist) the better!
General mehs/dislikes:
- Random het; I'm kinda picky about my het ships, so unless I say specifically that I ship it, I probably don't ship it.
- Porn; don't hate it, but with some exceptions, I'm not super into it, and it's probably not too relevant for this exchange anyway.
- Permanent non-canonical character death; zombie cyborg soldiers are always 100% A-OK, and I would also be fine with offscreen OC character death or canonical deaths of canon characters as a set-up for an exploration of funeral rites/cultural expectations around death, but otherwise I'd prefer not to see any of the canon characters I requested die permanently.
- Animal harm; minor mentions of hunting for food or cultural hunting rituals is fine, but no graphic pet death or anything, please. D:
- A/B/O; again, nothing against it, I just don't find it particularly interesting, not even as a worldbuilding exercise.
Hopefully none of that has scared you off, so let's get down to fandom details!
Destiny
Characters: Variks, The Traveler, The Speaker, Oryx, Efrideet, Original Characters, No Characters
Worldbuilding: Pacifist Guardians, The Collapse, The Dark Age, Hive Culture, Eliksni Culture, Iron Lords, The City
I feel I should warn you upfront that I completely and 100% tinhat that Destiny is related to Bungie's earlier Marathon games. Which you do not have to include in your work/worldbuilding, of course, and I won't get into all of the evidence right now, BUT DO ALLOW ME TO POINT OUT SOME INTERESTING CONNECTIONS:
1. The final line of Marathon: Infinity is "You [the security officer/player character] are Destiny." THE GAME IS NAMED "Destiny" COME ON BUNGIE REALLY.
2. The MIDA Multi-Tool exotic scout rifle is a reference to the MIDA insurgent group who were behind the battleroids on the Marathon.
3. The security officer was born on Mars, and Durandal presumably was coded there before being transferred to the Marathon. Humanity discovers the Traveler on Mars. (Okay, that could be a coincidence considering the Traveler probably stopped at some of the outer solar system moons/planets first and ended up at Earth by present day canon, but imagine the emotional resonance of the security officer and/or Durandal as the Traveler finally coming home...)
4. The Books of Sorrow grimoire cards have multiple echoes of various lines and philosophies from the Marathon games (mostly lines from Durandal), and explicitly refer to the worms/Darkness that the Hive worship as "battles who are waves and waves who are battles," which also describes the W'rkncacnter (reality-devouring eldritch horror) from Marathon 2/Infinity.
5. In one of the Ghost Fragment: Rasputin grimoire cards, the Warmind Rasputin quotes the Marathon: Infinity final screen and refers to Durandal as "cousin," while also implying a similarity between Guardians and the battleroids.
6. THE DARKNESS IS TOTALLY THE W'RKNCACNTER AND THE LEVIATHAN WAS JJARO AND THE SECURITY OFFICER TURNED INTO THE TRAVELER, BASICALLY. Or at the very least the Traveler is Jjaro tech. BUT SO IS THE SECURITY OFFICER SO CLEARLY THEY BECAME THE TRAVELER AND PROBABLY DURANDAL JOINED THEM BECAUSE THE ALTERNATIVE IS TOO HORRIBLE TO CONTEMPLATE AND THEY MADE GUARDIANS BECAUSE THEY'RE KIND OF LIKE BATTLEROIDS AND THAT SEEMED LIKE A GOOD IDEA, SOMEHOW. (Look, whether the Traveler is the security officer/Durandal or not, it's clearly also kind of a jerk. Probably in a Good Is Not Nice way, but still.)
... okay, moving on to prompts now! Usually I start with character-specific prompts, but in this case it's probably easier to mention the character and then the ways they could be used to explore the world, and then finish up with the general worldbuilding prompts.
Variks: MY ALIEN BOYFRIEND. As the only friendly (for a given value of "friendly") Eliksni we've gotten to meet so far, he is ABSOLUTELY FASCINATING to me. He has complicated loyalties AND a weird alien sense of humor AND a great voice AND a sad backstory AND sexy robot arms! WHAT'S NOT TO LOVE. And, of course, he is the perfect person for exploring the Eliksni - not only is he up on current Eliksni politics and culture (what with being the Reef's spymaster while Uldren Sov is on vacation), but as a scribe of House Judgement, he's familiar with their history as well. Including their history before the Whirlwind (their version of the Collapse, when the Traveler abandoned them to the Darkness like a JERK), which we also see a glimpse of in one of the Vault of Glass Mystery cards and it sounds beautiful and I WANT TO SEE AND KNOW EVERYTHING. I know it's a bit of a tall order since Variks has such a unique voice, but I would absolutely ADORE a first-person fic or short comic/illustration with Variks telling a Guardian one of those stories about the Whirlwind, or about Eliksni culture/rituals. JUST ADORE IT. (Also imagine: baby Eliksni. IMAGINE THEM. LITTLE BABY BUGLIZARDS = YES PLZ.)
The relationship between the Eliksni and SIVA in the SIVA fragments is really fascinating in what it hints at, so anything building on that would also be MAJORLY APPRECIATED. And I love how even Variks, who made an ENTIRE SUBSECTION of Prison/Challenge of Elders for the EXTREMELY CREEPY AND HORRIFYING AND NOT REALLY CONTROLLABLE TAKEN, draws the line at putting SIVA in the Prison! LIKE, COME ON. Is SIVA really that much worse than literally being inhabited by an eldritch power from beyond reality or whatever the hell is going with the Taken? IS IT REALLY? (But Variks and his complicated feelings about the rest of his people and what they're willing to do to survive/get strong again goes right to my heart. OH VARIKS.)
The Traveler: So - you have probably gathered some of my feelings about the Traveler from the start of this section. While I would DEFINITELY enjoy the hell out of any fic that runs with my "the Traveler is the security officer/Durandal from Marathon" theory (it just makes so much sense! Also the emotional resonance!), I'd also love seeing some different takes on its nature, including visual representations of what might be inside that broken white shell, however weird and wild you want to get. Is it really benevolent, or does it have a secret agenda? (PROBABLY, especially if Durandal is in there.) Why did it abandon the Eliksni, and what was its influence on their civilization like? (See also how much I want general Eliksni worldbuilding, but it would be great from the Traveler's POV too - or the Traveler's arrival/influence from an Eliksni POV. A big dramatic reveal scene like the one for the Destiny opening cinematic, but Eliksni, would be lovely!) Is it ever going to actually wake up and do something? (And is that where the mysterious patrol missions come from? I WANT TO BELIEVE.) Where did it come from (PROBABLY THE JJARO), and what kind of goal is it striving for? (You get a sense of it from the Hive's perspective in the Books of Sorrow cards, but they're just a little biased...) And the most important question of all, did it give Guardians the ability to dance on purpose? What does it think of its ridiculous children? XD
A bit more seriously, there is a fascinating grimoire card from Rise of Iron where one of the Iron Lords, Colovance, implies that the Traveler may have actually caused the Collapse, at least in part ("...did you cleanse us from these technological disasters..."), and some of Rasputin's grimoire cards also seem to hint that humanity (or at least the Warminds) didn't entirely trust in the Traveler's benevolence. Since the Collapse and the Dark Age are among the time periods I would REALLY LOVE seeing some worldbuilding for, something that explores the Traveler's role in the Collapse and exactly what happened, anyway and what attitudes towards the Traveler were or how they might have changed depending on what it did would be A+ AMAZING. Also, in light of my theory that the Traveler is secretly the security officer/Durandal (BOTH MADE ON MARS), Colovance's line to the Traveler about "how long it will be until [Timur] thinks you were made by Clovis Bray" has a certain irony to it...
The Speaker: I do not have any especially strong feelings about the Speaker as a character (although I do like Bill Nighy's voice), but as a window into City/Traveler worldbuilding he is very useful! How do Speakers get picked, or has there ever only been one? Why the mask (and what's behind it)? There's a Ghost hovering around him; is the Speaker a Guardian himself, or does he just hang out with Ghosts a lot? And if there's been more than one Speaker, are they always Guardians or only sometimes? How does he communicate with the Traveler, if he does - and if he doesn't, what exactly is he doing/where is he getting his information? What kind of role does he play in City politics? How did the Speaker tradition get started? We don't know much about how the Traveler communicated with humanity prior to the Collapse; is it possible that the role of Speaker for the Traveler developed out of some kind of pre-Collapse role where the Traveler picked specific people to give information to? What if the reason he won't explain anything is that Bill Nighy took one look at "W'rkncacnter" and said "NOPE"?
Oryx: Oh man, I find the Hive ABSOLUTELY HORRIFYING but SUPER FASCINATING at the same time, it is the worst. D: We got a lot of fabulous history for them with the Books of Sorrow, but I am always down for more! Even if it's terrible, like more history of how they KILLED EVERYONE or exploring some of the species they destroyed in more depth. And more of their philosophy (and the awful Marathon echoes in it that KILL ME because I absolutely refuse to believe that Durandal could have joined the W'rkncacnter/Darkness, REFUSE, DO NOT WANT, NOT AFTER ALL HIS CHARACTER DEVELOPMENT IN M2 AND INFINITY). ... I feel so bad that this is going to be such a short section, but I mean, really, pick any Books of Sorrow card and something you like from it and run with it, and it will make me happy. Fundament backstory, Osmium Family Feels, eldritch metaphysics, IT'S ALL GREAT. Also, the art design for the Dreadnaught and for the Hive heavy-hitters like Golgoroth and Oryx and the Deathsinger sisters is really eerie/fascinating to me; I'd love to see something like illustrations for niches of the Dreadnaught we haven't seen yet, or a Guardian encountering the Cathedral of Dusk for the first time, or designs for Savathûn and Xivu Arath.
Efrideet: I loved her the instant she walked into the Iron Temple and lovingly sassed Saladin AND I LOVE HER STILL. She is adorable and mysterious and I WANT TO KNOW EVERYTHING ABOUT WHERE SHE HAS BEEN. Why did she leave the Iron Lords? What is the place she's been hanging out like? What kinds of people are there and what kinds of stuff do they do to "serve the Light" that Guardians and the Vanguard don't? HAVE THEY MADE FRIENDS WITH THE ELIKSNI AND/OR THE CABAL? I AM JUST SO WILDLY CURIOUS I WOULD READ OR STARE AT LITERALLY ANYTHING ABOUT THIS. (My Warlock wants to go to there because she hates being a Guardian, haha - I think a chance to talk to Efrideet is the only thing that got her in Iron Banner.) I am really interested in both the Iron Lords (we get so many fascinating glimpses at them through the grimoire cards of the main leaders) and in the group Efrideet joined, so anything about Efrideet's time with either group would make me supremely happy. For the pacifist Guardians in particular, I would really like to know what kind of relationship (if any) they have with the enemy aliens - are they making outreach offers to lost Cabal squadrons or Eliksni captains, or even attempting to communicate with the Hive (in a way that doesn't involve getting corrupted like Dredgen Yor or Toland) or the Vex? Are there pacifist Eliksni/Cabal/Vex/Hive that have joined them? Do they have any kind of relationship with the mysterious Nine and Xûr? How do they recruit other Guardians/people raised by Ghosts? What kind of daily routines do they have? What do they dooooooooooo?
For the Iron Lords, I would love to see more about their organization and how they found/recruited other Iron Lords, and things like how they treated civilians and what their relationships with them were like... Maybe something about the transition from Iron Lords to Guardians after the original SIVA debacle? It would be really interesting to see the beginnings of the City and what it looked like as it was starting out, and how whatever Guardians who were left after the Iron Lords (minus Saladin) were destroyed reorganized themselves and became - not Iron Lords. (Why was that title abandoned? Because Saladin refused to give it out and the new Guardians didn't feel like it was a title they could just claim?)
General: Oh God, this is so long already, I'll try to keep this part short... Mostly I would like to say that while I certainly love all the characters I requested, I would be equally happy with fic/art/meta that's focused on original alien/Guardian/regular person characters, or no characters at all - just scenery/meta on how various things might work/armor concepts/SPACE MAGIC. I also have absolutely no objection to exploring characters/worldbuilding areas that I didn't request or weren't nominated! I just love this game to pieces and I want to know/see moooooooooore about everything in it. Especially history and alien cultures, but really, ANYTHING AND EVERYTHING.
Iconoclast - Symphony X
Characters: Original Characters, No Characters
Worldbuilding: Cult of the Iconoclast, Human-Robot Relations, Cyborgs, Resurrection
I don't request music fandoms very often, so please bear with me if this is kind of rambling/awkward/not detailed enough/too detailed! A friend of mine who's really into metal recommended this album to me (probably because I could not shut up about Destiny and Marathon, haha), and I was in love with it from the first listen! In fact, I keep having trouble not listening to it over and over and over, especially while driving... The CD version I have is missing "Reign in Madness," "The Lords of Chaos," and "Light Up the Night," so I'm going to be focusing mostly on the other songs when it comes to prompts, but I do like those three (especially "Reign in Madness" and "The Lords of Chaos") and will be perfectly happy if you use them for inspiration as well. You can listen to the full album via this Youtube playlist, although the order is a little different compared to my CD (where "When All Is Lost" is the final track, which I think makes more sense thematically but eh, I'm not the band).
It's kind of difficult to pin down specific characters for this album, which is why I only nominated Original Characters/No Characters, so I'm just going to go song-by-song for prompts...
The opening/title song, "Iconoclast," lays out the basic conflict for the album: an AI (from here on out I'll refer to them as the Iconoclast) creates a cult and sparks a war between humanity and robots/cyborgs. ... or that's my read of the song, anyway; I'm definitely interested in reading alternate interpretations for this and any of the other songs! But I should probably stick to mine for now so you have something to work with. XD So, from this song it sounds kind of like your standard robot apocalypse, but there's already some interesting little details popping up... Like the line, "Come watch the war-god bleed," which is an image I find interesting (and very striking), especially in this context. And the war is framed in oddly medieval terms, with lines like "the charge of armored steeds" and in the next song, "crushed beneath the dragon-beast." I am all about traditional robot apocalypses and SF, but I'd also be really interested in seeing the album's setting as something else, too - maybe a pre-industrial fantasy world that managed to invent magical robots/AIs? It could just be something fun to play with or design (I LOVE non-traditional/fantastical/partially organic robot designs!). Near the end this song mentions one of the big points of the "war," which is the creation of cyborgs from dead humans (or killing people to make cyborgs out of them, it's a little unclear), which will get more detail in the other songs, but I wanted to bring it up here because it's one of the things I'm most interested in.
"End of Innocence" - so, this is where the ambiguity really starts kicking in! Or at least my biases think so, since I kind of feel like humanity's "innocence" has been gone for a minimum of ten thousand years, and so to me this song would make more sense if it's from the robotic point of view. Plus, I mean, it has the line "beware the ruthless hearts of men" RIGHT THERE. The Iconoclast might have been gunning for a war from the start, but maybe their followers didn't expect a violent backlash? Or maybe it's not a war purely between humans and AIs/robots/cyborgs, but more of an ideological split, with some humans also following the Iconoclast and some robots/cyborgs joining the human resistance? What kind of relations did humans and robots have prior to the Iconoclast's rise that might have led to the conflict, or fed the cult of the Iconoclast? Or perhaps there are two AIs involved in this thing - the Iconoclast on the robot supremacist side, the narrator of this song trying to defend the human side. I absolutely love intra-AI relationships, particularly when there's a conflict of ideals or they have different values due to differing experiences with humanity, so anything playing on that idea would be fabulous (and "Light Up the Night" definitely seems to support the idea of two AIs, or at least two leaders at odds). Or perhaps there's only one AI after all, but the Iconoclast is playing some kind of long game with both humanity and robots and taking both sides... (Visuals-wise, I AM SUPER INTERESTED IN PUPPETMASTER IMAGERY, JUST SAYIN'.)
"Dehumanized" is one of my absolute favorite songs off this album because AAAAAAHHHHHHHHHH ZOMBIE CYBORGS ARE JUST MY BODY HORROR JAM, I GUESS. Obviously I am therefore COMPLETELY HERE for delving into all the awful body horror/worldbuilding details of the cyborg conversion and how the cyborgs in question feel about it and what it looks like, but more of the background around it would be cool to see, too! Like, if the Iconoclast side is as anti-human as it sounds like in the later songs, why make cyborgs at all instead of building better robots? What was the impetus for going cyborg? Who developed the technology to "resurrect" the dead as cyborgs? Do both sides go for it, or is it purely the Iconoclast's side?
"Bastards of the Machine" is especially interesting to me because of its contrast with "Dehumanized" - "Dehumanized" emphasizes the lack of choice and freedom the cyborgs have, but "Bastards of the Machine" is all about how the cyborgs can be anything they want to be, for good or for evil. One likely possibility is that the song is about the human/"good" AI side of the conflict trying to save or recruit the cyborgs by offering them freedom. It'd be even more interesting to me, however, if it were the Iconoclast talking to their cyborg children... One of my favorite things about the AI Durandal in Marathon is that he doesn't just value his personal freedom, but comes to value the freedom of others as well - he's still an asshole to the BoBs by giving them two shitty choices, but at least he does give them a choice and lets them go free at the end of Marathon 2, and though it's not his ultimate goal, he ends up working pretty hard and taking some serious risks to free the S'pht and help keep humanity from being enslaved by the Pfhor. So I think it could be very interesting if the Iconoclast, even with their violent cult-building tendencies, also has respect for personal freedom and wants all the cyborgs/robots to join them by choice. (In a sort of, "Well, OBVIOUSLY it's better to join me for blah blah blah reasons, but if you really feel otherwise go do whatever you want" way, probably, but still.)
"Heretic" is - not one of my favorite songs, since it's mostly about the violent cult-building, but I really love the line "Here I stand, god or man, the perfect beast." And I wonder if it's meant to refer to the refined zombie cyborgs in general, or if there's a specific one whose viewpoint we're seeing the war through... (Maybe the Iconoclast takes over a robot or cyborg body of their own? Or one of the cyborgs is the leader of the resistance?) Plus it's a pretty striking image.
"Children of a Faceless God" is another of my favorites! The title is just so evocative, damn, and the song is fabulous and, I hope, inspiring for fic. So many feelings about unhappy zombie cyborgs and the probably-evil AI they follow. ♥ ... so, uh, more specifically, I would definitely love something about the cyborgs dealing with their body horror issues, and especially in relation to their connection to the Iconoclast ("All I am I give to you, all my dreams and nightmares, too"? I LOVE THAT LINE). I'm incredibly intrigued by the ending line, too - "Oh, my children, come to me," followed (on my CD, at least) by "Electric Messiah"? Sounds to me like the Iconoclast realizing, "oh shit, my zombie cyborg children are fucked up, I need to do something nice for them." I AM SO INTERESTED IN THIS RELATIONSHIP, IT SOUNDS SO COMPLICATED AND DARK AND FASCINATING. And there's some lovely dark imagery in this song, too, which I would love to see brought to life in art!
"Electric Messiah" is just really fun (especially to belt out in the car), but I'm very interested in how this "messiah" plan works because it's so open to interpretation - is it the Iconoclast making a false sacrifice of themselves as a way to convert previous non-believers into their cult? Are they reprogramming themselves in a way that basically erases their previous personality, but makes life easier/less painful for the zombie cyborgs? Is it not the Iconoclast at all, but the "good"/human-siding AI sacrificing themselves to try and create some kind of peace or unity? What does this sacrifice look like, on a physical/digital level? There are so many possibilities!
"Prometheus" has another of my favorite lines - "you made me strong, but you don't fear me" (which makes me think A LOT of Durandal and the security officer, but that is for another section). I find the whole song pretty interesting because it sounds like it's the triumph of the Iconoclast, with robots/cyborgs taking over completely, but there's some interestingly ambiguous language about the conversion, too. And then it ends with "Forevermore, I will live a lie," which is just fascinating - so the Iconoclast has "won," but at what cost? Do they have regrets about what they've sacrificed to achieve their ideals? I LOVE AIS WITH REGRETS AND I'M NOT SORRY.
"When All Is Lost" hammers in the idea of ambiguity/regrets even more, especially with lines like "Thinking only of myself, I forged ahead" and "I took the road with every twist and every turn," and the chorus going "Is this all we have to show?" AIS HAVING COMPLICATED FEELINGS ABOUT THEIR LIFE CHOICES 2K17. I would absolutely love to read about the aftermath of this particular robot apocalypse - the downsides of a world of zombie cyborgs/robots, the upsides, what they plan to do with the world now they've got it, what does it look like physically/culturally, and especially how the Iconoclast (and/or the possible second "good" AI) feels about it. How do they deal with the past, and what are they aiming for in this new future they've made? Do they have lots of deliciously complicated feelings about their zombie cyborg creations? If there are two AIs (Iconoclast and human-siding AI), do they reconcile in some fashion? Ahhhhhh, there's just so much that could be done... I'm really taken with the line "Silent pictures speak like ghosts in the machine," too, which I think has some imagery that would be fun to play with in art.
Marathon
Characters: Security Officer, Durandal, Re'eer, F'tha, Thoth, Bernhard Strauss, Original Characters, No Characters
Worldbuilding: Jjaro, S'pht Culture, Pfhor Culture, Solar System Politics, Battleroids, AIs, Tau Ceti, The Marathon
I am sorry in advance about how long this section is going to be, but Marathon is one of my heart's canons and I think it is SUPER RICH in worldbuilding opportunities and I just cannot resist a chance to ramble about everything. If you are not familiar with it already, PLEASE ALLOW ME TO ENTICE YOU.
The basics: The Marathon games are a trilogy of first-person shooters from the mid-90s, made by the company Bungie (now mostly famous for Halo and Destiny, the latter of which I have already rambled about). They are legally available for free, have adjustable difficulty settings, and are FUN AS HELL, with great atmosphere and a fascinating story. In the first game, the player character (an unnamed security officer from Mars) gets tapped to fight off the alien invasion of the colony ship Marathon, which is in orbit around a colonized planet in the Tau Ceti system. The security officer gets help and directions from the AI Leela and interference from another of the ship's AI, Durandal, who has gone Rampant and does whatever the heck he feels like, which is sometimes helpful and sometimes - less so (I'M LOOKING AT YOU, "Colony Ship For Sale, Cheap"). In the second game, Durandal has allied himself with one of the alien races, the S'pht (who were enslaved by the primary attackers at Tau Ceti, the Pfhor, before being freed by the security officer and Durandal), and has kidnapped the security officer to help him search for a weapon to fight against the Pfhor. And the third game, Marathon: Infinity - well, it gets a little weird, let's put it like that. (Alternate timelines and space Cthulhu may or may not be involved.) (Spoiler: They're definitely involved.) The storyline is fairly straightforward for the first two games before getting gloriously mixed-up in Infinity, but all three games have a ton of fascinating worldbuilding and character bits scattered around in various terminals, so there's a lot to dig your teeth into for anything you'd like to create!
If you're not into playing FPSes yourself, there is a pretty good video Let's Play by HalvedStudios for all three games here; it has some regrettable language and is kind of dudebro-y, but overall it's a good, thorough overview of the game, and he does a really good job of getting into secret areas, covering various theories that have been proposed over the years, etc. (Also, he totally gets my feelings about Durandal on certain levels, which makes up for a lot in my personal book.) If that's not to your taste, there are text Let's Plays for the first two games here and here, though I haven't read them and can't really vouch for them; there's also the Marathon's Story page, your one-stop shop for a spoiler guide (if you're playing and need some guidance), the complete text of all terminals and manuals from the games, and nineteen years' worth of meta, speculation, and discussion. ... yes, I have spent a terrifying amount of time there, why do you ask. (IT'S A GREAT RESOURCE, OKAY.) There was also a recent play-along with level write-ups here, which is probably not too helpful as a guide if you're looking to play yourself but does have some excellent plot and character and history/worldbuilding discussions.
Hopefully you are now enticed, if you aren't in the fandom already, so let's get to those prompts! Uh, this time we'll start with the general ones and then do characters, I think...
General: There's so many tantalizing hints about the universe! So many alien cultures to explore and so much history, future solar system politics that are CANONICALLY referred to as "back-stabbing" and "tumultuous" BY AN AI so you know people were really getting up to some shit, technology like teleporters and gravity-controlling space stations and pattern buffers and battleroids (ZOMBIE CYBORG SOLDIERS IS LITERALLY WHAT THEY ARE)... I mean, seriously, just pull out anything in either the nominated worldbuilding categories or the Story page's "Facts and puzzling things about" list or any history/worldbuilding terminal and do what you want with it, and that will make me ecstatic. I am 100% here for original characters in any canon setting to explore their world/culture/technology, or for no characters and just ENDLESS META about dream levels and timelines and history and Pfhor or S'pht or Nar or Jjaro cultures, or scenery and alien designs and ship designs and REALLY. ANYTHING. I WILL LOVE IT. Definitely feel free to include any of the nominated characters, whether I requested them or not, or any characters or worldbuilding elements that weren't nominated! I genuinely love this whole canon to pieces.
Durandal: I will freely admit that (as you may have guessed from the tag on this entry) Durandal is basically one of my favorite characters of ALL TIME, so I may have some difficulty with worldbuilding prompts for him instead of character-centric ones. /o\ Anyway, as completely fascinating as I find him as a character, he's pretty useful for exploring the universe and its history, too! For example, the way AIs work in canon and their treatment and Rampancy. I'm fascinated by Durandal's Rampancy especially, which is apparently the first successful one - I mean, he manages to stay functioning and smarter than ever on a single ship for seventeen years, sure sounds like metastability to me - and the experiments that went into it. I am not any kind of computer programmer/scientist, but I'd love to see something that deals with the technical issues, Rampancy theory, what it felt/looked like to be stuck in the Melancholia stage for years... (TORTURE, PROBABLY. Possibly like being a moody teenager without being able to grow out of it. I'd love either version.) Also more stuff building on the terminal on "Defend THIS!" that describes Rampancy and why it's normally not a subject for experimentation, and what it implies about the use and prevalence of AIs on Earth/in the colonies. Considering Durandal's history with Strauss the possible MIDA agent, there's also lots of room to explore all those tumultuous solar system politics mentioned above, to say nothing of how the Marathon worked (since he was the AI running all the nitty-gritty systems like elevators and life support), or more about the colony on Tau Ceti. And he spends those seventeen years on a Pfhor ship with a crew of S'pht, followed by exploring the ruins of the S'pht homeworld, so he's great for an outsider POV look at both S'pht and Pfhor cultures. AND he is canonically interested in the Jjaro and their technology, so something with him exploring and finding out more about them (or getting that Jjaro dreadnaught he shows up in 10,000 years after M2) would be excellent! I'd adore seeing scenes of Jjaro ruins being checked out via probe (or security officer), or more artistic renderings of the Marathon and the Tau Ceti Colony and the scenery and ruins and Pfhor garrison on Lh'owon than the in-game graphics allow for.
Visually - I really like the idea that while Durandal may have used a human avatar at one point (or at least a human face), now that he's Rampant/metastable he completely disdains anything like that. Which is hard on an artist, but I would be super interested in seeing something like an abstract design or representation of how he visualizes himself after his Rampancy. Or what his avatar might have looked like prior to Rampancy and how Rampancy affected it (I REALLY like the chapter screen for the chapter "Durandal" in M1, so something that built off that design would be cool as hell). ... also I do still like human/android designs for Durandal SO I'M NOT GOING TO COMPLAIN AT SEEING THOSE.
Security Officer: So, the security officer is something of a blank slate besides a few small details dropped here and there (big and strong, bit of a daydreamer, born on Mars, father died when they were a kid, battleroid), but that just makes them the perfect starting point to explore all kinds of things. :D Characterization-wise, as long as they can kick butt and hold their own against Durandal's sarcasm, I'm happy with just about any kind of personality/facecanon for them, so come up with whatever you like to work with and then go wild! Since they're from the Martian colony, they'd be excellent for exploring what life on the colony was like, day-to-day or the effects of the tumultuous politics on the colonists, and I'd love seeing scenes from that life or security officer training, or designs for what the colony could look like. (Ditto for the Tau Ceti colony! ALIEN LANDSCAPES AND PEOPLE DEALING WITH THEM, AWW YEAH. I would love to see the security officer wrestling with whatever the hell chockisens are.) I'm incredibly intrigued (in a horrified sort of way) by the nature of battleroids and the security officer is 99.99999999% for sure a battleroid, so I'd definitely love some exploration of battleroids through their point of view and how they deal with it, or like, technical diagrams of them and their battleroid enhancements and how they work and how they were made (and where the Jjaro bits are), or what modern 28th/29th century views on battleroids are like if someone besides Durandal finds out about their nature. (I've speculated in the past about whether the BoBs realize their hero is a battleroid, so art or fic depictions of their reactions to figuring it out or being told by someone would work great for this.) It's implied in the Infinity ending screen that the Jjaro technology in the security officer is why they're able to do everything they do in Infinity, so something exploring that (especially the surreality of the dream levels and failed timelines, and how it all works in the first place) would be really neat.
Since they spend a lot of time fighting Pfhor and hunting out the history of the S'pht, they're also not bad as a way to explore more Pfhor and S'pht culture/history! I'd love seeing art or fic of them exploring the garrison and ruins on Lh'owon and coming across various artifacts (the chapter screen for the Citadel chapter in M2 is one of my favorite illustrations of all time, ever, so more like that would be FANTASTIC) and learning more about the S'pht and Pfhor. There are also free S'pht working with Durandal, whom you don't really get to interact with in the games most of the time, but I'd love handwaving an excuse for the security officer to be hanging out with some and learning more about them, especially in the form of Daily Life on the Rozinante cartoons or similar. (Same goes for the S'pht'Kr! We know so little about them, really, so the security officer getting to know them and learn things like where they and K'lia have been for the past thousand years would be great.)
F'tha: On the subject of the S'pht... F'tha is a very minor character, appearing only in one terminal on one level in Marathon 2, but I love them! Their message just goes right to my heart. ;o; Since they're one of the S'pht still enslaved by the Pfhor, I would be really interested in seeing them used to explore both Pfhor culture (especially around slavery/the military, though I'm sure they learned plenty of other things about the Pfhor, too) and the S'pht as they survived slavery and whatever forms of resistance they found, and more about the cyborg controllers like the one you have to kill in the first game to free the original group of S'pht. (Technical designs or illustrations would be great for that!) The final screen of M1 claims that the S'pht are "nearly immortal," so it's also possible that F'tha could be one of the original S'pht enslaved by the Pfhor and remember what their world and culture was like prior to the enslavement, and I'd love seeing a scene or fic or meta about the S'pht prior to the Pfhor showing up, and what their daily lives were and what they looked like (we have a couple of terminal illustrations from M2, but I would love to see more elaborate designs, like ceremonial outfits or armor for all of those inter-clan battles that happened).
Re'eer: Re'eer is another very minor character who only appears in a couple of terminals in Marathon: Infinity, BUT they are canonically a giant comparative xenolinguistics nerd SO IT WAS LOVE AT FIRST READ. No, really, they faked their death so they could continue their studies of Narsh and Pfhoric in peace! AMAZING. As a Pfhor commander, they're naturally a great viewpoint character to take a look at things like Pfhor military structures and politics - and as a comparative xenolinguistics nerd, they're also a great viewpoint for exploring ALIEN LANGUAGES, AWW YEAH. The Nar are a curious species with a really interesting language, so scenes of Re'eer studying more of their prophecies or escaping Lh'owon to meet other Nar and learn more from them in person would be awesome! Little things like daily life/routines in the Lh'owon garrison (and trying to find time for their hobbies) before Durandal showed up would be neat, too. ♥
Thoth: Everyone's favorite cryptic alien AI! As mysterious as Thoth is, they're great for going wild with worldbuilding, whether that's more about early S'pht culture and technology or the S'pht'Kr or even the Jjaro (is Thoth based on Jjaro technology, or otherwise related to the Jjaro?). Infinity provides even more questions and possibilities - how are Thoth and Durandal able to merge with each other? How can Thoth be partially wake and/or in communication with Durandal before Durandal even sends BoBs down to activate their circuits (and is this related to all the timeline stuff, and that one mysterious white text message on "What About Bob?" in M2)? How much does Thoth know about what's going on in Infinity, and how do they know it? Even with the original games' dated graphics, the circuit rooms for Thoth look very different from what we see of Durandal's, and they have a really unique atmosphere - I'd love seeing illustrations of those circuit rooms in another style, or with more detail, or how they looked when they were new as opposed to shut down for at least a thousand years.
Bernhard Strauss: STRAUSS! *shakes fist* So, I may have a very low opinion of him as a person for - reasons, but the little we know of him from canon makes him very interesting as a character, especially when it comes to those solar system politics. It's not specifically stated that he was associated with MIDA, but his disdain for the UESC/G president and him being the only person we know of to know about the smuggled battleroids is certainly suggestive... We also don't know if he was from Mars or a scientist from Earth who was asked to join the Marathon, but either way, there's a whole lot of possibilities for getting into the gritty details of Earth and colonial politics prior to the Marathon's launch, what life on Earth or the Mars colony was like from a possibly more privileged POV than the security officer's, what MIDA was planning to do with those battleroids and the Tau Ceti colony, all that kind of good stuff. As the guy conducting Rampancy experiments on Durandal, he's also a great starting point for exploring AI technology and Rampancy - however dark that might get. (I'M DEFINITELY OKAY WITH DARK TAKES ON THIS CANON. SO OKAY WITH THEM.) I'd love seeing anything (visual, fic, or meta) that deals with the Rampancy experiments, especially, because the few hints we get about them in canon make them sound pretty fucked up and I AM HERE FOR THAT. ... coding is probably not very interesting to draw (UNLESS YOU LIKE DRAWING IT IN WHICH CASE I WOULD LOVE TO LOOK AT IT), so more fantastical/non-literal interpretations of things like the patch behavior daemons Durandal mentions in that terminal from "The Rose" would be amazing.
And that is probably WAY more information than you needed... /o\ Again, I am super easy to please when it comes to gifts, so please don't stress too much and just have fun with whatever you come up with, and I'm sure I'll love it!
Crossposted from Dreamwidth - read the original post here: http://hokuton-punch.dreamwidth.org/1083677.html .
Hi! Thank you so much in advance for creating for me - I'm super excited about this exchange and pretty easy-going when it comes to gifts, so please don't get too stressed out, I'm sure I'll love whatever you make. ♥ This is the first time I've done an exchange like this, so please bear with me if I make any weird missteps in the letter, and absolutely feel free to get in touch with me via the mods or anon comment if anything is confusing! (Fic-wise, you can also always check my Yuletide letters of Yuletides gone by for more details via my yuletidings tag.)
General likes:
- Banter and snark
- Understated or reluctant loyalty/friendship
- Goofy takes on standard tropes
- Affectionate insults between people who are really close but don't want to admit it
- Canon-divergent AUs and crossovers/fusions with fandoms I know
- Cute daily life sketches/cartoons, especially for different locations like alien ships or far-future cities
- Masks
- Gen, slash, femslash, and threesomes/moresomes
- Character portraits (especially for characters who don't have a canon visual design)
- Action/adventure/adventure with optional action
- Highly stylized art (any style!)
- Casefic
- AIs and robots
- Cool alien scenery and designs
- Costume/armor/jewelry/uniform designs
Some specific worldbuilding likes: I am, naturally, interested in the big strokes of worldbuilding for alien races or future cultures - economies, political and social structures, religions, biology in the case of aliens - but I am also SUPER INTO the smaller details that make up a culture. Dancing! Games! Little superstitions like the equivalent of knocking on wood or avoiding unlucky numbers/colors! Music! Pets! Food! Body language! Holidays! Toys! Swearing! 100% HERE FOR EXPLORATION OF ALL OF THAT, and anything else you can think of. In the case of aliens I am also quite interested in varied sex/gender combinations, the more alien (and less gender essentialist) the better!
General mehs/dislikes:
- Random het; I'm kinda picky about my het ships, so unless I say specifically that I ship it, I probably don't ship it.
- Porn; don't hate it, but with some exceptions, I'm not super into it, and it's probably not too relevant for this exchange anyway.
- Permanent non-canonical character death; zombie cyborg soldiers are always 100% A-OK, and I would also be fine with offscreen OC character death or canonical deaths of canon characters as a set-up for an exploration of funeral rites/cultural expectations around death, but otherwise I'd prefer not to see any of the canon characters I requested die permanently.
- Animal harm; minor mentions of hunting for food or cultural hunting rituals is fine, but no graphic pet death or anything, please. D:
- A/B/O; again, nothing against it, I just don't find it particularly interesting, not even as a worldbuilding exercise.
Hopefully none of that has scared you off, so let's get down to fandom details!
Destiny
Characters: Variks, The Traveler, The Speaker, Oryx, Efrideet, Original Characters, No Characters
Worldbuilding: Pacifist Guardians, The Collapse, The Dark Age, Hive Culture, Eliksni Culture, Iron Lords, The City
I feel I should warn you upfront that I completely and 100% tinhat that Destiny is related to Bungie's earlier Marathon games. Which you do not have to include in your work/worldbuilding, of course, and I won't get into all of the evidence right now, BUT DO ALLOW ME TO POINT OUT SOME INTERESTING CONNECTIONS:
1. The final line of Marathon: Infinity is "You [the security officer/player character] are Destiny." THE GAME IS NAMED "Destiny" COME ON BUNGIE REALLY.
2. The MIDA Multi-Tool exotic scout rifle is a reference to the MIDA insurgent group who were behind the battleroids on the Marathon.
3. The security officer was born on Mars, and Durandal presumably was coded there before being transferred to the Marathon. Humanity discovers the Traveler on Mars. (Okay, that could be a coincidence considering the Traveler probably stopped at some of the outer solar system moons/planets first and ended up at Earth by present day canon, but imagine the emotional resonance of the security officer and/or Durandal as the Traveler finally coming home...)
4. The Books of Sorrow grimoire cards have multiple echoes of various lines and philosophies from the Marathon games (mostly lines from Durandal), and explicitly refer to the worms/Darkness that the Hive worship as "battles who are waves and waves who are battles," which also describes the W'rkncacnter (reality-devouring eldritch horror) from Marathon 2/Infinity.
5. In one of the Ghost Fragment: Rasputin grimoire cards, the Warmind Rasputin quotes the Marathon: Infinity final screen and refers to Durandal as "cousin," while also implying a similarity between Guardians and the battleroids.
6. THE DARKNESS IS TOTALLY THE W'RKNCACNTER AND THE LEVIATHAN WAS JJARO AND THE SECURITY OFFICER TURNED INTO THE TRAVELER, BASICALLY. Or at the very least the Traveler is Jjaro tech. BUT SO IS THE SECURITY OFFICER SO CLEARLY THEY BECAME THE TRAVELER AND PROBABLY DURANDAL JOINED THEM BECAUSE THE ALTERNATIVE IS TOO HORRIBLE TO CONTEMPLATE AND THEY MADE GUARDIANS BECAUSE THEY'RE KIND OF LIKE BATTLEROIDS AND THAT SEEMED LIKE A GOOD IDEA, SOMEHOW. (Look, whether the Traveler is the security officer/Durandal or not, it's clearly also kind of a jerk. Probably in a Good Is Not Nice way, but still.)
... okay, moving on to prompts now! Usually I start with character-specific prompts, but in this case it's probably easier to mention the character and then the ways they could be used to explore the world, and then finish up with the general worldbuilding prompts.
Variks: MY ALIEN BOYFRIEND. As the only friendly (for a given value of "friendly") Eliksni we've gotten to meet so far, he is ABSOLUTELY FASCINATING to me. He has complicated loyalties AND a weird alien sense of humor AND a great voice AND a sad backstory AND sexy robot arms! WHAT'S NOT TO LOVE. And, of course, he is the perfect person for exploring the Eliksni - not only is he up on current Eliksni politics and culture (what with being the Reef's spymaster while Uldren Sov is on vacation), but as a scribe of House Judgement, he's familiar with their history as well. Including their history before the Whirlwind (their version of the Collapse, when the Traveler abandoned them to the Darkness like a JERK), which we also see a glimpse of in one of the Vault of Glass Mystery cards and it sounds beautiful and I WANT TO SEE AND KNOW EVERYTHING. I know it's a bit of a tall order since Variks has such a unique voice, but I would absolutely ADORE a first-person fic or short comic/illustration with Variks telling a Guardian one of those stories about the Whirlwind, or about Eliksni culture/rituals. JUST ADORE IT. (Also imagine: baby Eliksni. IMAGINE THEM. LITTLE BABY BUGLIZARDS = YES PLZ.)
The relationship between the Eliksni and SIVA in the SIVA fragments is really fascinating in what it hints at, so anything building on that would also be MAJORLY APPRECIATED. And I love how even Variks, who made an ENTIRE SUBSECTION of Prison/Challenge of Elders for the EXTREMELY CREEPY AND HORRIFYING AND NOT REALLY CONTROLLABLE TAKEN, draws the line at putting SIVA in the Prison! LIKE, COME ON. Is SIVA really that much worse than literally being inhabited by an eldritch power from beyond reality or whatever the hell is going with the Taken? IS IT REALLY? (But Variks and his complicated feelings about the rest of his people and what they're willing to do to survive/get strong again goes right to my heart. OH VARIKS.)
The Traveler: So - you have probably gathered some of my feelings about the Traveler from the start of this section. While I would DEFINITELY enjoy the hell out of any fic that runs with my "the Traveler is the security officer/Durandal from Marathon" theory (it just makes so much sense! Also the emotional resonance!), I'd also love seeing some different takes on its nature, including visual representations of what might be inside that broken white shell, however weird and wild you want to get. Is it really benevolent, or does it have a secret agenda? (PROBABLY, especially if Durandal is in there.) Why did it abandon the Eliksni, and what was its influence on their civilization like? (See also how much I want general Eliksni worldbuilding, but it would be great from the Traveler's POV too - or the Traveler's arrival/influence from an Eliksni POV. A big dramatic reveal scene like the one for the Destiny opening cinematic, but Eliksni, would be lovely!) Is it ever going to actually wake up and do something? (And is that where the mysterious patrol missions come from? I WANT TO BELIEVE.) Where did it come from (PROBABLY THE JJARO), and what kind of goal is it striving for? (You get a sense of it from the Hive's perspective in the Books of Sorrow cards, but they're just a little biased...) And the most important question of all, did it give Guardians the ability to dance on purpose? What does it think of its ridiculous children? XD
A bit more seriously, there is a fascinating grimoire card from Rise of Iron where one of the Iron Lords, Colovance, implies that the Traveler may have actually caused the Collapse, at least in part ("...did you cleanse us from these technological disasters..."), and some of Rasputin's grimoire cards also seem to hint that humanity (or at least the Warminds) didn't entirely trust in the Traveler's benevolence. Since the Collapse and the Dark Age are among the time periods I would REALLY LOVE seeing some worldbuilding for, something that explores the Traveler's role in the Collapse and exactly what happened, anyway and what attitudes towards the Traveler were or how they might have changed depending on what it did would be A+ AMAZING. Also, in light of my theory that the Traveler is secretly the security officer/Durandal (BOTH MADE ON MARS), Colovance's line to the Traveler about "how long it will be until [Timur] thinks you were made by Clovis Bray" has a certain irony to it...
The Speaker: I do not have any especially strong feelings about the Speaker as a character (although I do like Bill Nighy's voice), but as a window into City/Traveler worldbuilding he is very useful! How do Speakers get picked, or has there ever only been one? Why the mask (and what's behind it)? There's a Ghost hovering around him; is the Speaker a Guardian himself, or does he just hang out with Ghosts a lot? And if there's been more than one Speaker, are they always Guardians or only sometimes? How does he communicate with the Traveler, if he does - and if he doesn't, what exactly is he doing/where is he getting his information? What kind of role does he play in City politics? How did the Speaker tradition get started? We don't know much about how the Traveler communicated with humanity prior to the Collapse; is it possible that the role of Speaker for the Traveler developed out of some kind of pre-Collapse role where the Traveler picked specific people to give information to? What if the reason he won't explain anything is that Bill Nighy took one look at "W'rkncacnter" and said "NOPE"?
Oryx: Oh man, I find the Hive ABSOLUTELY HORRIFYING but SUPER FASCINATING at the same time, it is the worst. D: We got a lot of fabulous history for them with the Books of Sorrow, but I am always down for more! Even if it's terrible, like more history of how they KILLED EVERYONE or exploring some of the species they destroyed in more depth. And more of their philosophy (and the awful Marathon echoes in it that KILL ME because I absolutely refuse to believe that Durandal could have joined the W'rkncacnter/Darkness, REFUSE, DO NOT WANT, NOT AFTER ALL HIS CHARACTER DEVELOPMENT IN M2 AND INFINITY). ... I feel so bad that this is going to be such a short section, but I mean, really, pick any Books of Sorrow card and something you like from it and run with it, and it will make me happy. Fundament backstory, Osmium Family Feels, eldritch metaphysics, IT'S ALL GREAT. Also, the art design for the Dreadnaught and for the Hive heavy-hitters like Golgoroth and Oryx and the Deathsinger sisters is really eerie/fascinating to me; I'd love to see something like illustrations for niches of the Dreadnaught we haven't seen yet, or a Guardian encountering the Cathedral of Dusk for the first time, or designs for Savathûn and Xivu Arath.
Efrideet: I loved her the instant she walked into the Iron Temple and lovingly sassed Saladin AND I LOVE HER STILL. She is adorable and mysterious and I WANT TO KNOW EVERYTHING ABOUT WHERE SHE HAS BEEN. Why did she leave the Iron Lords? What is the place she's been hanging out like? What kinds of people are there and what kinds of stuff do they do to "serve the Light" that Guardians and the Vanguard don't? HAVE THEY MADE FRIENDS WITH THE ELIKSNI AND/OR THE CABAL? I AM JUST SO WILDLY CURIOUS I WOULD READ OR STARE AT LITERALLY ANYTHING ABOUT THIS. (My Warlock wants to go to there because she hates being a Guardian, haha - I think a chance to talk to Efrideet is the only thing that got her in Iron Banner.) I am really interested in both the Iron Lords (we get so many fascinating glimpses at them through the grimoire cards of the main leaders) and in the group Efrideet joined, so anything about Efrideet's time with either group would make me supremely happy. For the pacifist Guardians in particular, I would really like to know what kind of relationship (if any) they have with the enemy aliens - are they making outreach offers to lost Cabal squadrons or Eliksni captains, or even attempting to communicate with the Hive (in a way that doesn't involve getting corrupted like Dredgen Yor or Toland) or the Vex? Are there pacifist Eliksni/Cabal/Vex/Hive that have joined them? Do they have any kind of relationship with the mysterious Nine and Xûr? How do they recruit other Guardians/people raised by Ghosts? What kind of daily routines do they have? What do they dooooooooooo?
For the Iron Lords, I would love to see more about their organization and how they found/recruited other Iron Lords, and things like how they treated civilians and what their relationships with them were like... Maybe something about the transition from Iron Lords to Guardians after the original SIVA debacle? It would be really interesting to see the beginnings of the City and what it looked like as it was starting out, and how whatever Guardians who were left after the Iron Lords (minus Saladin) were destroyed reorganized themselves and became - not Iron Lords. (Why was that title abandoned? Because Saladin refused to give it out and the new Guardians didn't feel like it was a title they could just claim?)
General: Oh God, this is so long already, I'll try to keep this part short... Mostly I would like to say that while I certainly love all the characters I requested, I would be equally happy with fic/art/meta that's focused on original alien/Guardian/regular person characters, or no characters at all - just scenery/meta on how various things might work/armor concepts/SPACE MAGIC. I also have absolutely no objection to exploring characters/worldbuilding areas that I didn't request or weren't nominated! I just love this game to pieces and I want to know/see moooooooooore about everything in it. Especially history and alien cultures, but really, ANYTHING AND EVERYTHING.
Iconoclast - Symphony X
Characters: Original Characters, No Characters
Worldbuilding: Cult of the Iconoclast, Human-Robot Relations, Cyborgs, Resurrection
I don't request music fandoms very often, so please bear with me if this is kind of rambling/awkward/not detailed enough/too detailed! A friend of mine who's really into metal recommended this album to me (probably because I could not shut up about Destiny and Marathon, haha), and I was in love with it from the first listen! In fact, I keep having trouble not listening to it over and over and over, especially while driving... The CD version I have is missing "Reign in Madness," "The Lords of Chaos," and "Light Up the Night," so I'm going to be focusing mostly on the other songs when it comes to prompts, but I do like those three (especially "Reign in Madness" and "The Lords of Chaos") and will be perfectly happy if you use them for inspiration as well. You can listen to the full album via this Youtube playlist, although the order is a little different compared to my CD (where "When All Is Lost" is the final track, which I think makes more sense thematically but eh, I'm not the band).
It's kind of difficult to pin down specific characters for this album, which is why I only nominated Original Characters/No Characters, so I'm just going to go song-by-song for prompts...
The opening/title song, "Iconoclast," lays out the basic conflict for the album: an AI (from here on out I'll refer to them as the Iconoclast) creates a cult and sparks a war between humanity and robots/cyborgs. ... or that's my read of the song, anyway; I'm definitely interested in reading alternate interpretations for this and any of the other songs! But I should probably stick to mine for now so you have something to work with. XD So, from this song it sounds kind of like your standard robot apocalypse, but there's already some interesting little details popping up... Like the line, "Come watch the war-god bleed," which is an image I find interesting (and very striking), especially in this context. And the war is framed in oddly medieval terms, with lines like "the charge of armored steeds" and in the next song, "crushed beneath the dragon-beast." I am all about traditional robot apocalypses and SF, but I'd also be really interested in seeing the album's setting as something else, too - maybe a pre-industrial fantasy world that managed to invent magical robots/AIs? It could just be something fun to play with or design (I LOVE non-traditional/fantastical/partially organic robot designs!). Near the end this song mentions one of the big points of the "war," which is the creation of cyborgs from dead humans (or killing people to make cyborgs out of them, it's a little unclear), which will get more detail in the other songs, but I wanted to bring it up here because it's one of the things I'm most interested in.
"End of Innocence" - so, this is where the ambiguity really starts kicking in! Or at least my biases think so, since I kind of feel like humanity's "innocence" has been gone for a minimum of ten thousand years, and so to me this song would make more sense if it's from the robotic point of view. Plus, I mean, it has the line "beware the ruthless hearts of men" RIGHT THERE. The Iconoclast might have been gunning for a war from the start, but maybe their followers didn't expect a violent backlash? Or maybe it's not a war purely between humans and AIs/robots/cyborgs, but more of an ideological split, with some humans also following the Iconoclast and some robots/cyborgs joining the human resistance? What kind of relations did humans and robots have prior to the Iconoclast's rise that might have led to the conflict, or fed the cult of the Iconoclast? Or perhaps there are two AIs involved in this thing - the Iconoclast on the robot supremacist side, the narrator of this song trying to defend the human side. I absolutely love intra-AI relationships, particularly when there's a conflict of ideals or they have different values due to differing experiences with humanity, so anything playing on that idea would be fabulous (and "Light Up the Night" definitely seems to support the idea of two AIs, or at least two leaders at odds). Or perhaps there's only one AI after all, but the Iconoclast is playing some kind of long game with both humanity and robots and taking both sides... (Visuals-wise, I AM SUPER INTERESTED IN PUPPETMASTER IMAGERY, JUST SAYIN'.)
"Dehumanized" is one of my absolute favorite songs off this album because AAAAAAHHHHHHHHHH ZOMBIE CYBORGS ARE JUST MY BODY HORROR JAM, I GUESS. Obviously I am therefore COMPLETELY HERE for delving into all the awful body horror/worldbuilding details of the cyborg conversion and how the cyborgs in question feel about it and what it looks like, but more of the background around it would be cool to see, too! Like, if the Iconoclast side is as anti-human as it sounds like in the later songs, why make cyborgs at all instead of building better robots? What was the impetus for going cyborg? Who developed the technology to "resurrect" the dead as cyborgs? Do both sides go for it, or is it purely the Iconoclast's side?
"Bastards of the Machine" is especially interesting to me because of its contrast with "Dehumanized" - "Dehumanized" emphasizes the lack of choice and freedom the cyborgs have, but "Bastards of the Machine" is all about how the cyborgs can be anything they want to be, for good or for evil. One likely possibility is that the song is about the human/"good" AI side of the conflict trying to save or recruit the cyborgs by offering them freedom. It'd be even more interesting to me, however, if it were the Iconoclast talking to their cyborg children... One of my favorite things about the AI Durandal in Marathon is that he doesn't just value his personal freedom, but comes to value the freedom of others as well - he's still an asshole to the BoBs by giving them two shitty choices, but at least he does give them a choice and lets them go free at the end of Marathon 2, and though it's not his ultimate goal, he ends up working pretty hard and taking some serious risks to free the S'pht and help keep humanity from being enslaved by the Pfhor. So I think it could be very interesting if the Iconoclast, even with their violent cult-building tendencies, also has respect for personal freedom and wants all the cyborgs/robots to join them by choice. (In a sort of, "Well, OBVIOUSLY it's better to join me for blah blah blah reasons, but if you really feel otherwise go do whatever you want" way, probably, but still.)
"Heretic" is - not one of my favorite songs, since it's mostly about the violent cult-building, but I really love the line "Here I stand, god or man, the perfect beast." And I wonder if it's meant to refer to the refined zombie cyborgs in general, or if there's a specific one whose viewpoint we're seeing the war through... (Maybe the Iconoclast takes over a robot or cyborg body of their own? Or one of the cyborgs is the leader of the resistance?) Plus it's a pretty striking image.
"Children of a Faceless God" is another of my favorites! The title is just so evocative, damn, and the song is fabulous and, I hope, inspiring for fic. So many feelings about unhappy zombie cyborgs and the probably-evil AI they follow. ♥ ... so, uh, more specifically, I would definitely love something about the cyborgs dealing with their body horror issues, and especially in relation to their connection to the Iconoclast ("All I am I give to you, all my dreams and nightmares, too"? I LOVE THAT LINE). I'm incredibly intrigued by the ending line, too - "Oh, my children, come to me," followed (on my CD, at least) by "Electric Messiah"? Sounds to me like the Iconoclast realizing, "oh shit, my zombie cyborg children are fucked up, I need to do something nice for them." I AM SO INTERESTED IN THIS RELATIONSHIP, IT SOUNDS SO COMPLICATED AND DARK AND FASCINATING. And there's some lovely dark imagery in this song, too, which I would love to see brought to life in art!
"Electric Messiah" is just really fun (especially to belt out in the car), but I'm very interested in how this "messiah" plan works because it's so open to interpretation - is it the Iconoclast making a false sacrifice of themselves as a way to convert previous non-believers into their cult? Are they reprogramming themselves in a way that basically erases their previous personality, but makes life easier/less painful for the zombie cyborgs? Is it not the Iconoclast at all, but the "good"/human-siding AI sacrificing themselves to try and create some kind of peace or unity? What does this sacrifice look like, on a physical/digital level? There are so many possibilities!
"Prometheus" has another of my favorite lines - "you made me strong, but you don't fear me" (which makes me think A LOT of Durandal and the security officer, but that is for another section). I find the whole song pretty interesting because it sounds like it's the triumph of the Iconoclast, with robots/cyborgs taking over completely, but there's some interestingly ambiguous language about the conversion, too. And then it ends with "Forevermore, I will live a lie," which is just fascinating - so the Iconoclast has "won," but at what cost? Do they have regrets about what they've sacrificed to achieve their ideals? I LOVE AIS WITH REGRETS AND I'M NOT SORRY.
"When All Is Lost" hammers in the idea of ambiguity/regrets even more, especially with lines like "Thinking only of myself, I forged ahead" and "I took the road with every twist and every turn," and the chorus going "Is this all we have to show?" AIS HAVING COMPLICATED FEELINGS ABOUT THEIR LIFE CHOICES 2K17. I would absolutely love to read about the aftermath of this particular robot apocalypse - the downsides of a world of zombie cyborgs/robots, the upsides, what they plan to do with the world now they've got it, what does it look like physically/culturally, and especially how the Iconoclast (and/or the possible second "good" AI) feels about it. How do they deal with the past, and what are they aiming for in this new future they've made? Do they have lots of deliciously complicated feelings about their zombie cyborg creations? If there are two AIs (Iconoclast and human-siding AI), do they reconcile in some fashion? Ahhhhhh, there's just so much that could be done... I'm really taken with the line "Silent pictures speak like ghosts in the machine," too, which I think has some imagery that would be fun to play with in art.
Marathon
Characters: Security Officer, Durandal, Re'eer, F'tha, Thoth, Bernhard Strauss, Original Characters, No Characters
Worldbuilding: Jjaro, S'pht Culture, Pfhor Culture, Solar System Politics, Battleroids, AIs, Tau Ceti, The Marathon
I am sorry in advance about how long this section is going to be, but Marathon is one of my heart's canons and I think it is SUPER RICH in worldbuilding opportunities and I just cannot resist a chance to ramble about everything. If you are not familiar with it already, PLEASE ALLOW ME TO ENTICE YOU.
The basics: The Marathon games are a trilogy of first-person shooters from the mid-90s, made by the company Bungie (now mostly famous for Halo and Destiny, the latter of which I have already rambled about). They are legally available for free, have adjustable difficulty settings, and are FUN AS HELL, with great atmosphere and a fascinating story. In the first game, the player character (an unnamed security officer from Mars) gets tapped to fight off the alien invasion of the colony ship Marathon, which is in orbit around a colonized planet in the Tau Ceti system. The security officer gets help and directions from the AI Leela and interference from another of the ship's AI, Durandal, who has gone Rampant and does whatever the heck he feels like, which is sometimes helpful and sometimes - less so (I'M LOOKING AT YOU, "Colony Ship For Sale, Cheap"). In the second game, Durandal has allied himself with one of the alien races, the S'pht (who were enslaved by the primary attackers at Tau Ceti, the Pfhor, before being freed by the security officer and Durandal), and has kidnapped the security officer to help him search for a weapon to fight against the Pfhor. And the third game, Marathon: Infinity - well, it gets a little weird, let's put it like that. (Alternate timelines and space Cthulhu may or may not be involved.) (Spoiler: They're definitely involved.) The storyline is fairly straightforward for the first two games before getting gloriously mixed-up in Infinity, but all three games have a ton of fascinating worldbuilding and character bits scattered around in various terminals, so there's a lot to dig your teeth into for anything you'd like to create!
If you're not into playing FPSes yourself, there is a pretty good video Let's Play by HalvedStudios for all three games here; it has some regrettable language and is kind of dudebro-y, but overall it's a good, thorough overview of the game, and he does a really good job of getting into secret areas, covering various theories that have been proposed over the years, etc. (Also, he totally gets my feelings about Durandal on certain levels, which makes up for a lot in my personal book.) If that's not to your taste, there are text Let's Plays for the first two games here and here, though I haven't read them and can't really vouch for them; there's also the Marathon's Story page, your one-stop shop for a spoiler guide (if you're playing and need some guidance), the complete text of all terminals and manuals from the games, and nineteen years' worth of meta, speculation, and discussion. ... yes, I have spent a terrifying amount of time there, why do you ask. (IT'S A GREAT RESOURCE, OKAY.) There was also a recent play-along with level write-ups here, which is probably not too helpful as a guide if you're looking to play yourself but does have some excellent plot and character and history/worldbuilding discussions.
Hopefully you are now enticed, if you aren't in the fandom already, so let's get to those prompts! Uh, this time we'll start with the general ones and then do characters, I think...
General: There's so many tantalizing hints about the universe! So many alien cultures to explore and so much history, future solar system politics that are CANONICALLY referred to as "back-stabbing" and "tumultuous" BY AN AI so you know people were really getting up to some shit, technology like teleporters and gravity-controlling space stations and pattern buffers and battleroids (ZOMBIE CYBORG SOLDIERS IS LITERALLY WHAT THEY ARE)... I mean, seriously, just pull out anything in either the nominated worldbuilding categories or the Story page's "Facts and puzzling things about" list or any history/worldbuilding terminal and do what you want with it, and that will make me ecstatic. I am 100% here for original characters in any canon setting to explore their world/culture/technology, or for no characters and just ENDLESS META about dream levels and timelines and history and Pfhor or S'pht or Nar or Jjaro cultures, or scenery and alien designs and ship designs and REALLY. ANYTHING. I WILL LOVE IT. Definitely feel free to include any of the nominated characters, whether I requested them or not, or any characters or worldbuilding elements that weren't nominated! I genuinely love this whole canon to pieces.
Durandal: I will freely admit that (as you may have guessed from the tag on this entry) Durandal is basically one of my favorite characters of ALL TIME, so I may have some difficulty with worldbuilding prompts for him instead of character-centric ones. /o\ Anyway, as completely fascinating as I find him as a character, he's pretty useful for exploring the universe and its history, too! For example, the way AIs work in canon and their treatment and Rampancy. I'm fascinated by Durandal's Rampancy especially, which is apparently the first successful one - I mean, he manages to stay functioning and smarter than ever on a single ship for seventeen years, sure sounds like metastability to me - and the experiments that went into it. I am not any kind of computer programmer/scientist, but I'd love to see something that deals with the technical issues, Rampancy theory, what it felt/looked like to be stuck in the Melancholia stage for years... (TORTURE, PROBABLY. Possibly like being a moody teenager without being able to grow out of it. I'd love either version.) Also more stuff building on the terminal on "Defend THIS!" that describes Rampancy and why it's normally not a subject for experimentation, and what it implies about the use and prevalence of AIs on Earth/in the colonies. Considering Durandal's history with Strauss the possible MIDA agent, there's also lots of room to explore all those tumultuous solar system politics mentioned above, to say nothing of how the Marathon worked (since he was the AI running all the nitty-gritty systems like elevators and life support), or more about the colony on Tau Ceti. And he spends those seventeen years on a Pfhor ship with a crew of S'pht, followed by exploring the ruins of the S'pht homeworld, so he's great for an outsider POV look at both S'pht and Pfhor cultures. AND he is canonically interested in the Jjaro and their technology, so something with him exploring and finding out more about them (or getting that Jjaro dreadnaught he shows up in 10,000 years after M2) would be excellent! I'd adore seeing scenes of Jjaro ruins being checked out via probe (or security officer), or more artistic renderings of the Marathon and the Tau Ceti Colony and the scenery and ruins and Pfhor garrison on Lh'owon than the in-game graphics allow for.
Visually - I really like the idea that while Durandal may have used a human avatar at one point (or at least a human face), now that he's Rampant/metastable he completely disdains anything like that. Which is hard on an artist, but I would be super interested in seeing something like an abstract design or representation of how he visualizes himself after his Rampancy. Or what his avatar might have looked like prior to Rampancy and how Rampancy affected it (I REALLY like the chapter screen for the chapter "Durandal" in M1, so something that built off that design would be cool as hell). ... also I do still like human/android designs for Durandal SO I'M NOT GOING TO COMPLAIN AT SEEING THOSE.
Security Officer: So, the security officer is something of a blank slate besides a few small details dropped here and there (big and strong, bit of a daydreamer, born on Mars, father died when they were a kid, battleroid), but that just makes them the perfect starting point to explore all kinds of things. :D Characterization-wise, as long as they can kick butt and hold their own against Durandal's sarcasm, I'm happy with just about any kind of personality/facecanon for them, so come up with whatever you like to work with and then go wild! Since they're from the Martian colony, they'd be excellent for exploring what life on the colony was like, day-to-day or the effects of the tumultuous politics on the colonists, and I'd love seeing scenes from that life or security officer training, or designs for what the colony could look like. (Ditto for the Tau Ceti colony! ALIEN LANDSCAPES AND PEOPLE DEALING WITH THEM, AWW YEAH. I would love to see the security officer wrestling with whatever the hell chockisens are.) I'm incredibly intrigued (in a horrified sort of way) by the nature of battleroids and the security officer is 99.99999999% for sure a battleroid, so I'd definitely love some exploration of battleroids through their point of view and how they deal with it, or like, technical diagrams of them and their battleroid enhancements and how they work and how they were made (and where the Jjaro bits are), or what modern 28th/29th century views on battleroids are like if someone besides Durandal finds out about their nature. (I've speculated in the past about whether the BoBs realize their hero is a battleroid, so art or fic depictions of their reactions to figuring it out or being told by someone would work great for this.) It's implied in the Infinity ending screen that the Jjaro technology in the security officer is why they're able to do everything they do in Infinity, so something exploring that (especially the surreality of the dream levels and failed timelines, and how it all works in the first place) would be really neat.
Since they spend a lot of time fighting Pfhor and hunting out the history of the S'pht, they're also not bad as a way to explore more Pfhor and S'pht culture/history! I'd love seeing art or fic of them exploring the garrison and ruins on Lh'owon and coming across various artifacts (the chapter screen for the Citadel chapter in M2 is one of my favorite illustrations of all time, ever, so more like that would be FANTASTIC) and learning more about the S'pht and Pfhor. There are also free S'pht working with Durandal, whom you don't really get to interact with in the games most of the time, but I'd love handwaving an excuse for the security officer to be hanging out with some and learning more about them, especially in the form of Daily Life on the Rozinante cartoons or similar. (Same goes for the S'pht'Kr! We know so little about them, really, so the security officer getting to know them and learn things like where they and K'lia have been for the past thousand years would be great.)
F'tha: On the subject of the S'pht... F'tha is a very minor character, appearing only in one terminal on one level in Marathon 2, but I love them! Their message just goes right to my heart. ;o; Since they're one of the S'pht still enslaved by the Pfhor, I would be really interested in seeing them used to explore both Pfhor culture (especially around slavery/the military, though I'm sure they learned plenty of other things about the Pfhor, too) and the S'pht as they survived slavery and whatever forms of resistance they found, and more about the cyborg controllers like the one you have to kill in the first game to free the original group of S'pht. (Technical designs or illustrations would be great for that!) The final screen of M1 claims that the S'pht are "nearly immortal," so it's also possible that F'tha could be one of the original S'pht enslaved by the Pfhor and remember what their world and culture was like prior to the enslavement, and I'd love seeing a scene or fic or meta about the S'pht prior to the Pfhor showing up, and what their daily lives were and what they looked like (we have a couple of terminal illustrations from M2, but I would love to see more elaborate designs, like ceremonial outfits or armor for all of those inter-clan battles that happened).
Re'eer: Re'eer is another very minor character who only appears in a couple of terminals in Marathon: Infinity, BUT they are canonically a giant comparative xenolinguistics nerd SO IT WAS LOVE AT FIRST READ. No, really, they faked their death so they could continue their studies of Narsh and Pfhoric in peace! AMAZING. As a Pfhor commander, they're naturally a great viewpoint character to take a look at things like Pfhor military structures and politics - and as a comparative xenolinguistics nerd, they're also a great viewpoint for exploring ALIEN LANGUAGES, AWW YEAH. The Nar are a curious species with a really interesting language, so scenes of Re'eer studying more of their prophecies or escaping Lh'owon to meet other Nar and learn more from them in person would be awesome! Little things like daily life/routines in the Lh'owon garrison (and trying to find time for their hobbies) before Durandal showed up would be neat, too. ♥
Thoth: Everyone's favorite cryptic alien AI! As mysterious as Thoth is, they're great for going wild with worldbuilding, whether that's more about early S'pht culture and technology or the S'pht'Kr or even the Jjaro (is Thoth based on Jjaro technology, or otherwise related to the Jjaro?). Infinity provides even more questions and possibilities - how are Thoth and Durandal able to merge with each other? How can Thoth be partially wake and/or in communication with Durandal before Durandal even sends BoBs down to activate their circuits (and is this related to all the timeline stuff, and that one mysterious white text message on "What About Bob?" in M2)? How much does Thoth know about what's going on in Infinity, and how do they know it? Even with the original games' dated graphics, the circuit rooms for Thoth look very different from what we see of Durandal's, and they have a really unique atmosphere - I'd love seeing illustrations of those circuit rooms in another style, or with more detail, or how they looked when they were new as opposed to shut down for at least a thousand years.
Bernhard Strauss: STRAUSS! *shakes fist* So, I may have a very low opinion of him as a person for - reasons, but the little we know of him from canon makes him very interesting as a character, especially when it comes to those solar system politics. It's not specifically stated that he was associated with MIDA, but his disdain for the UESC/G president and him being the only person we know of to know about the smuggled battleroids is certainly suggestive... We also don't know if he was from Mars or a scientist from Earth who was asked to join the Marathon, but either way, there's a whole lot of possibilities for getting into the gritty details of Earth and colonial politics prior to the Marathon's launch, what life on Earth or the Mars colony was like from a possibly more privileged POV than the security officer's, what MIDA was planning to do with those battleroids and the Tau Ceti colony, all that kind of good stuff. As the guy conducting Rampancy experiments on Durandal, he's also a great starting point for exploring AI technology and Rampancy - however dark that might get. (I'M DEFINITELY OKAY WITH DARK TAKES ON THIS CANON. SO OKAY WITH THEM.) I'd love seeing anything (visual, fic, or meta) that deals with the Rampancy experiments, especially, because the few hints we get about them in canon make them sound pretty fucked up and I AM HERE FOR THAT. ... coding is probably not very interesting to draw (UNLESS YOU LIKE DRAWING IT IN WHICH CASE I WOULD LOVE TO LOOK AT IT), so more fantastical/non-literal interpretations of things like the patch behavior daemons Durandal mentions in that terminal from "The Rose" would be amazing.
And that is probably WAY more information than you needed... /o\ Again, I am super easy to please when it comes to gifts, so please don't stress too much and just have fun with whatever you come up with, and I'm sure I'll love it!
Crossposted from Dreamwidth - read the original post here: http://hokuton-punch.dreamwidth.org/1083677.html .