This bypasses "things I want to write" and goes right to "things I really shouldn't".
But first, Useless Fact Time: After looking at lyric translations for both, I've realized that Rammstein's "Dalai Lama" actually tells the exact same story as Sarah Brightman's "Figlio Perduto". Really. Both are based on the Goethe poem "Der Erlkonig"; the Brightman song is an Italian translation of the poem itself, while the Rammstein song is a modernized adaptation. How's that for musical connections you never thought you'd make.
How come nobody talks about "Dalai Lama", anyway? I got Reise, Reise for "Keine Lust" and "Los", and "Keine Lust" was the big single from the album, but "Dalai Lama" is probably one of my favorite Rammstein songs thus far. The high, chanting chorus is beautifully eerie. And then besides that there's "Ohne Dich", which is downright tender and proof that not everything in German sounds angry by default. I mean, just look at the lyrics!
(While I'm on the subject: Dear Herzeleid, for a late Christmas present it would be very very nice if you could give me the rest of the translations for Liebe ist fur alle da, because I really want to know what "Donaukinder" is actually about before I start singing along to it in garbled phonetic pseudo-German.)
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I always come up with several dozen more fic ideas than I ever write for any given fandom, and this would probably be one of the ones I don't write just because it only dubiously makes sense in canon, as well as being...well, kind of wrong even for TF fandom standards. But if I talk about it than I can resist writing it whereas if I leave it buzzing about in my head I'll end up trying to write it and then I'll have to explain myself. Or not finishing it.
So because apparently every fandom has one episode that I fixate on (it's "Inferno" for Doctor Who), I've been given more ideas for "Human Error" related fic, as well as general bunnies regarding Sari. Granted, it's difficult to meta about a series that makes only dubious sense and is about as far as it's possible to be from hard science fiction without being on another planet, but I do try.
See, from what I've seen (which, admittedly, isn't much so far) the extent to which Sari is a machine and the extent to which she's organic isn't really clear. She's human enough to need food and sleep, to get sick, to feel heat and cold but possibly not pain (she doesn't even react to getting covered in what's probably scalding water in "Nature Calls"), but what I'm curious about is whether she ages. We know that robots live for ludicrously long amounts of time compared to humans (measured in the billions or trillions of years, from what we can glean), and Sari hasn't appeared to grow or change any between seasons 1 and 2 - but, post-"TransWarped", she begins acting mostly like a teenager, despite still physically being only eight. It's as if she grew to teenage years like a human did. It's stated in "TransWarped" that she's "mostly human" , but what does that mean? How does she age? Would she have aged at all had it not been for her upgrade? I WANT TO KNOW, ISENBERG. Don't make me schlep over to BotCon and actually ask you or something.
Anyway, this mostly makes me deeply curious about what's going to happen if and when she hits puberty. Will she physically grow up any more? Will she grow up more slowly, drawing out her physical and psychological development over possibly decades (poor girl)? Has she done all the growing she's going to do? Will she automatically upgrade herself at certain intervals?
It doesn't help that the explanation of Cybertronian aging is really inconsistent; Word of God says they don't age, but Ratchet is clearly older in the present day than he is in his War flashbacks; his voice is even pitched different. Arcee hasn't aged, but I attribute that to her amnesia and being in stasis for such a long time; same with Omega Supreme. The other bots don't seem to have aged from their flashbacks (Bee kind of looks like he has, but not much), but those flashbacks are also implied to be sooner and they're younger, anyway. And that still doesn't solve the problem of how any of that works for a techno-organic, because the only other samples we have of that population are Blackarachnia and Waspinator, and they aren't around long enough for us to observe them aging.
So it's possible that Sari will age normally; it's also possibly that she'll age like a robot and outlive everyone she knows, depending on how you choose to interpret it.
But, since I'm predictable, my own thought ran to what'll happen if/when she starts getting interested in boys/girls/both. It's distinctly possible that she'll be asexual; bots in this canon don't know what sex is and seem mildly horrified at the concept. But then again, she's still "mostly human", so it's also possible that she'll have interests like many other girls hitting puberty, or be asexual just like some people are asexual rather than being asexual due to being a robot.
All I know is I had this entertaining mental image of grown-up!Sari becoming interested in some guy or girl and experiencing conflicting desires to either make out with them or give them a wash and tune-up* - the latter of which would be difficult, of course, on account of how the object of her affections wasn't a robot.
Now where this really gets wrong is when I start to think about this in terms of shipping Sari with Bumblebee; I currently ship them in a mostly BFFy, non-romantic fashion, but I'm also intrigued by the idea of intespecies romance (you maybe could tell, what with all the Time Lord/human shipfic I write) and am always curious as to how to make it work. And Sari's got to be awfully lonely after the Autobots leave, given that she called them her "best friends" after knowing them for about a day, implying that she had no other friends at all; I could see her close friendship with Bumblebee taking on a romantic cast when she reminisces about it as she grows older.
Now, in a hypothetical post-series verse in which the Space Bridges are easily accessible** and Bee could make trips back, would there be any way to make that work? Would they talk about it? Do robots even understand loving relationships (we get inter-robot romances in G1, but none here - even the Optimus/Elita-1 pairing is ambiguous - although I'm not sure how to interpret Bee and Bulkhead's reactions to Blackarachnia if robots have no concept of romance/intimacy/attractiveness)?
But then I realized - hey, technically we never saw anybody dismantle Soundwave's machinery from "Human Error". Technically, if supervised, one could enter it voluntarily and construct illusions with any feature one wanted, much like the training programs in The Matrix. In theory, both Bee and Sari could use it to temporarily interact while both were humans - or both were robots. It allows them to have a romance more easily (removing the size differences as such), but brings up a whole other set of interesting problems/questions - after all, it would take several "sessions" for Bee to get used to the human-form illusion (which, for these purposes, I'm assuming would be older than the one in "Human Error", since Human Error!Bee looked to be about eight and that just doesn't make sense) or for Sari to get used to being a robot. There would be questions of whether they're still the same people if they're robots or humans, if loving someone means being able to be physically intimate with them (and I'm not even talking about just sex for once but things like physical contact, hugs, species-specific modes of intimacy), whether Sari is more comfortable as a human or a robot and where she fits in, what Bee thinks of being human (after all, he'd probably do something like that just for exploration's sake even if it wasn't for Sari) and how being in a human illusion designed by someone raised human would be different than being in a human illusion designed by a robot, the exact nature of the affection between them...
I just think it'd be interesting, is all. And, okay, kind of sweet and squooshy, because I'm a big softie at heart, but you ought to have realized that when I took a break from the giant robot combat to start shipping old people.
* I have this fanon about how a thorough car-wash and tune-up are gestures of intimacy among robots - after all, it requires knowing and contacting someone else's chassis body in intricate detail, and it'd make them feel good. Okay, I'm willing to admit this is mostly based on reading too much movieverse Sam/Bumblebee fic, but it makes sense to me.
**I don't know if they are at the end; I haven't seen the finale and don't want to spoil myself any more than I've already been spoiled.
Good golly, I'm even meta-ing about this series. What on Earth's gotten into me.
Bits of this were written as my reward for completing a sufficient amount of homework, and now I suppose it is time to pick up the pace. Cheerio.
How come nobody talks about "Dalai Lama", anyway? I got Reise, Reise for "Keine Lust" and "Los", and "Keine Lust" was the big single from the album, but "Dalai Lama" is probably one of my favorite Rammstein songs thus far. The high, chanting chorus is beautifully eerie. And then besides that there's "Ohne Dich", which is downright tender and proof that not everything in German sounds angry by default. I mean, just look at the lyrics!
(While I'm on the subject: Dear Herzeleid, for a late Christmas present it would be very very nice if you could give me the rest of the translations for Liebe ist fur alle da, because I really want to know what "Donaukinder" is actually about before I start singing along to it in garbled phonetic pseudo-German.)
---
I always come up with several dozen more fic ideas than I ever write for any given fandom, and this would probably be one of the ones I don't write just because it only dubiously makes sense in canon, as well as being...well, kind of wrong even for TF fandom standards. But if I talk about it than I can resist writing it whereas if I leave it buzzing about in my head I'll end up trying to write it and then I'll have to explain myself. Or not finishing it.
So because apparently every fandom has one episode that I fixate on (it's "Inferno" for Doctor Who), I've been given more ideas for "Human Error" related fic, as well as general bunnies regarding Sari. Granted, it's difficult to meta about a series that makes only dubious sense and is about as far as it's possible to be from hard science fiction without being on another planet, but I do try.
See, from what I've seen (which, admittedly, isn't much so far) the extent to which Sari is a machine and the extent to which she's organic isn't really clear. She's human enough to need food and sleep, to get sick, to feel heat and cold but possibly not pain (she doesn't even react to getting covered in what's probably scalding water in "Nature Calls"), but what I'm curious about is whether she ages. We know that robots live for ludicrously long amounts of time compared to humans (measured in the billions or trillions of years, from what we can glean), and Sari hasn't appeared to grow or change any between seasons 1 and 2 - but, post-"TransWarped", she begins acting mostly like a teenager, despite still physically being only eight. It's as if she grew to teenage years like a human did. It's stated in "TransWarped" that she's "mostly human" , but what does that mean? How does she age? Would she have aged at all had it not been for her upgrade? I WANT TO KNOW, ISENBERG. Don't make me schlep over to BotCon and actually ask you or something.
Anyway, this mostly makes me deeply curious about what's going to happen if and when she hits puberty. Will she physically grow up any more? Will she grow up more slowly, drawing out her physical and psychological development over possibly decades (poor girl)? Has she done all the growing she's going to do? Will she automatically upgrade herself at certain intervals?
It doesn't help that the explanation of Cybertronian aging is really inconsistent; Word of God says they don't age, but Ratchet is clearly older in the present day than he is in his War flashbacks; his voice is even pitched different. Arcee hasn't aged, but I attribute that to her amnesia and being in stasis for such a long time; same with Omega Supreme. The other bots don't seem to have aged from their flashbacks (Bee kind of looks like he has, but not much), but those flashbacks are also implied to be sooner and they're younger, anyway. And that still doesn't solve the problem of how any of that works for a techno-organic, because the only other samples we have of that population are Blackarachnia and Waspinator, and they aren't around long enough for us to observe them aging.
So it's possible that Sari will age normally; it's also possibly that she'll age like a robot and outlive everyone she knows, depending on how you choose to interpret it.
But, since I'm predictable, my own thought ran to what'll happen if/when she starts getting interested in boys/girls/both. It's distinctly possible that she'll be asexual; bots in this canon don't know what sex is and seem mildly horrified at the concept. But then again, she's still "mostly human", so it's also possible that she'll have interests like many other girls hitting puberty, or be asexual just like some people are asexual rather than being asexual due to being a robot.
All I know is I had this entertaining mental image of grown-up!Sari becoming interested in some guy or girl and experiencing conflicting desires to either make out with them or give them a wash and tune-up* - the latter of which would be difficult, of course, on account of how the object of her affections wasn't a robot.
Now where this really gets wrong is when I start to think about this in terms of shipping Sari with Bumblebee; I currently ship them in a mostly BFFy, non-romantic fashion, but I'm also intrigued by the idea of intespecies romance (you maybe could tell, what with all the Time Lord/human shipfic I write) and am always curious as to how to make it work. And Sari's got to be awfully lonely after the Autobots leave, given that she called them her "best friends" after knowing them for about a day, implying that she had no other friends at all; I could see her close friendship with Bumblebee taking on a romantic cast when she reminisces about it as she grows older.
Now, in a hypothetical post-series verse in which the Space Bridges are easily accessible** and Bee could make trips back, would there be any way to make that work? Would they talk about it? Do robots even understand loving relationships (we get inter-robot romances in G1, but none here - even the Optimus/Elita-1 pairing is ambiguous - although I'm not sure how to interpret Bee and Bulkhead's reactions to Blackarachnia if robots have no concept of romance/intimacy/attractiveness)?
But then I realized - hey, technically we never saw anybody dismantle Soundwave's machinery from "Human Error". Technically, if supervised, one could enter it voluntarily and construct illusions with any feature one wanted, much like the training programs in The Matrix. In theory, both Bee and Sari could use it to temporarily interact while both were humans - or both were robots. It allows them to have a romance more easily (removing the size differences as such), but brings up a whole other set of interesting problems/questions - after all, it would take several "sessions" for Bee to get used to the human-form illusion (which, for these purposes, I'm assuming would be older than the one in "Human Error", since Human Error!Bee looked to be about eight and that just doesn't make sense) or for Sari to get used to being a robot. There would be questions of whether they're still the same people if they're robots or humans, if loving someone means being able to be physically intimate with them (and I'm not even talking about just sex for once but things like physical contact, hugs, species-specific modes of intimacy), whether Sari is more comfortable as a human or a robot and where she fits in, what Bee thinks of being human (after all, he'd probably do something like that just for exploration's sake even if it wasn't for Sari) and how being in a human illusion designed by someone raised human would be different than being in a human illusion designed by a robot, the exact nature of the affection between them...
I just think it'd be interesting, is all. And, okay, kind of sweet and squooshy, because I'm a big softie at heart, but you ought to have realized that when I took a break from the giant robot combat to start shipping old people.
* I have this fanon about how a thorough car-wash and tune-up are gestures of intimacy among robots - after all, it requires knowing and contacting someone else's chassis body in intricate detail, and it'd make them feel good. Okay, I'm willing to admit this is mostly based on reading too much movieverse Sam/Bumblebee fic, but it makes sense to me.
**I don't know if they are at the end; I haven't seen the finale and don't want to spoil myself any more than I've already been spoiled.
Good golly, I'm even meta-ing about this series. What on Earth's gotten into me.
Bits of this were written as my reward for completing a sufficient amount of homework, and now I suppose it is time to pick up the pace. Cheerio.