Memes: Complicated
So I have got to cut myself off from this cracky character-number meme because it's taking up time that I'm supposed to be using for my essays. Posting the answers I have come up with so far seems a good way to tell myself to stop. I will answer the questions in installments because my answers tend to get stupidly long and if I try to answer them all before I post them I will never get them all done.
You can still ask questions if you like (more crack is good for everyone!), but if you do please do so before you read these answers, because it's kind of spoiled if you know who's who.
Questions answered: Four. Fandoms represented: Doctor Who, Final Fantasy X, NCIS, Iron Man movieverse, Tranformers Animated, Star Trek Reboot, Pirates of the Caribbean, ReBoot, and Bones. I've noted which character goes with which fandom to ease confusion.
futuresoon: Lulu (Final Fantasy X), Blitzwing (Transformers Animated), and Donna Noble (Doctor Who) are at a bar. What drinks do they have? Do any of them hit on one of the others? If so, is it successful--and if it is successful, what's the morning after like?
For the purposes of this meme I am assuming that all the robot characters are human-sized (or humanized) when appropriate or things are going to get odd and unmanageable really fast. I am also assuming that robots are capable of imbibing alcohol because it’s more entertaining that way.
Lulu, who really doesn’t mean to get drunk and generally doesn’t make a habit of it, orders red wine, something with intensity to it - a Ribera del Duero, maybe. Just because you’re not out to make a fool of yourself doesn’t mean you have to drink weak booze. Donna is a bit more liberal with her alcohol and orders something large with an outlandish name and fruit in it. Have Harvey Wallbangers got fruit in them? They’ve got fruit juice; I’m sure that counts.
Blitzwing’s three personalities spend ten solid minutes arguing over what to drink (Icy gets all sulky when Hothead implies that gin and tonic is unmasculine) until Donna gets annoyed with him and orders him the girliest, most colorful cocktail she can find in revenge. So of course Random!Blitzwing loves it. He demands a little paper umbrella.
As the night wears on, Icy!Blitzwing trades barbs and witticisms with Lulu, reluctantly intrigued by her stories of the supernatural and organics with abilities like his own; Lulu, for her part, has never seen intelligent machina and finds herself curious as to how they function without the use of magic. They begin to trade tales of their world’s wars, of the power structures he will one day change (and she is still not sure if she should have)*.
Unfortunately, their conversation is continuously interrupted because Hothead!Blitzwing is in the middle of a shouting match with Donna, who is strangely not all that intimidated by the thought of an intelligent tank with a flamethrower. Please, has he ever even seen a lava monster? Meanwhile, Random!Blitzwing is undermining the whole thing by flirting rather mercilessly with her (by his own definition of flirting, anyway, which is…a little unsettling by anyone else’s standards). She’s not exactly a construction vehicle, but she’s certainly bold and sassy.
Ultimately, nobody ends up successful, because Lulu is nowhere approaching drunk enough to consider what one would do with a sentient machine. Donna might be drunk enough, but before she can decide Hothead!Blitzwing sets fire to the bar. She escapes with no damage beyond a singed eyebrow and the conviction that she should probably call it a night.
A few days later, back at the Decepticon Base, Megatron takes a moment away from his scheming to wonder why the can of oil Blitzwing’s drinking has a small paper umbrella in it.
*Yes, I know it’s extremely dubious whether or not Blitzwing actually buys into the whole Glorious Decepticon Cause thing, but shush, I’m on a roll.
kayliemalinza: Bones McCoy (New Trek), Three (Doctor Who), Ziva David (NCIS), Pepper Potts (Iron Man movieverse), and Sari Sumdac (Transformers Animated) are a 5-man band of superheroes that fight crime. What are their powers? What are the group dynamics like? Are they a successful team, or do the citizens of their hometown heave a weary sigh whenever they appear?
The trouble with this, is that not only do two members of the party already kind of have superpowers, but I’m also rather unimaginative when it comes to giving powers. Let’s start from the top.
Aside from his quick-thinking, medical mind, Bones has some sort of force-field superpower, like Sue Storm in the later Fantastic Four comics, something that’d let him both defend his party and, used creatively, essentially throw a brick wall at his opponents. It kind of fits with his role as a medic and thus mostly defensive player, but mostly it allows me to draw further amusing parallels between Bones and Ratchet.
Super!Third Doctor can probably fly, because he has a cape and by superhero logic having a cape generally enables one to fly. His extant psychic abilities are expanded to include telekinesis (thus giving him convenient blunt objects to throw whenever he pleases), mind-reading (thus giving him a window into his enemy’s plans), and the ability to break brainwashing or mind control a la Wonder Woman’s lasso in later interpretations. And this all is in addition to his canonical Venusian Aikido skills and inexplicable ability to take a bullet to the head without dying.
Ziva is the team’s heavy-hitter, with super strength and defenses in conjunction with her extant martial arts and spy training. She’s capable of dead-lifting enormous weight, so the American idiom “trust someone as far as you can throw them” makes even less sense now. Unfortunately these superpowers don’t extend to the bullets in her guns and thus she’s most effective at close range.
Pepper was a little harder to figure out. At first I was going to give her a custom Iron Man combat suit, but see below. But then I figured, why not a shapeshifter? That way she can be anybody she needs to be, do anything she needs to do, a sort of extension of her role as Tony’s Do-Everything Assistant. It also allows her to hack security systems (by mimicking retinas and voice prints), spy, and even copy a superhero’s abilities if she shapeshifts into them, though hers may be a less powerful or incomplete set. (Couldn’t Mystique do that in the movies? I thought she could.)
Sari’s superpowers are pretty much just like those she gets in Season 3 - flight from her jetpack (which might be incorporated into her actual body for convenience), blasters unfolding from her palms, and maybe one of the energy weapons from her initial upgrade because it seems unfair to lose all of them. So, basically, a diminutive yellow Iron Man.
The team dynamics are not as fraught as one would think, because most members of the team are used to not being in command - Ziva and McCoy canonically take orders from somebody else, and if Pepper can deal with Tony she can deal with just about anybody. As such the Doctor more-or-less appoints himself leader; he can think up plans on the fly and account for everyone’s abilities, which is a good skill for a leader to have. Which is not to say that they work completely without incident, because there are three very abrasive personalities here and Ziva and McCoy do not put up with his “superior species” gesturing without remark. Ziva has this tendency to remind him of her ability to snap necks with her pinkie finger when annoyed, and McCoy just refuses to be impressed by anything about the Time Lords and questions the Doctor’s leader credentials. Not to mention Sari, who is not going to get bossed around by some stuffy old man in a stupid cape and snaps back at him whenever he (inevitably) insists she stay behind because their mission is no place for a teenaged girl*. It falls to Pepper to smooth things over and tend to four flaring tempers, including suggesting compromises in the Doctor’s plans, formulating her own, and tugging all four of them back down to Earth when they get too hostile to work as a team. Truly, Pepper is the real superhero here.
*That said, the image of Three shouting it out with a sixteen-year-old girl (who is technically ten) amuses me greatly all on its own. Ziva probably takes her side.
Blitzwing is their arch-nemesis. What is their master plan, and if/how are they defeated?
I don’t know if Blitzwing really does master plans; that’s more his boss’s domain. If we’re (somehow) talking Blitzwing as Decepticon leader or free agent…well, I can imagine him having some sort of plan, but I can also imagine that on his way to execute part of said plan he spies Our Heroes, and his Hothead personality promptly decides that he would much rather kill them on the spot than bother with plans.
Our Heroes have the obvious problem of scale to contend with, as well as the fact that their hardest-hitting member, Ziva, is ground-based, so if Blitzwing takes to the air they really don’t have much of a way to strike back against him. Sari’s blasters don’t appear to be powerful enough to do much damage to a fully-armored Decepticon (they put a hole in Soundwave, yeah, but Soundwave is also constructed from Earth materials; only his schematics are Cybertronian), and I doubt the Doctor’s telekinetic powers are enough to actually render Blitzwing immobile or grounded because a) the Doctor would have to do that while flying, b) controlling an inanimate object is probably a lot easier than controlling a conscious being, and c) it’d be way too convenient. So if he switches back to Icy or Random personalities and takes to the air, they’re kind of in trouble.
However, they might have a chance if Sari’s jetpack is a part of her robot mode, because that would mean that if Pepper shapeshifted into Sari she’d be able to use the jetpack, which would mean they’d have another flyer to use. She can then airlift either Bones or Ziva (probably Bones, since he’d be able to cushion his own fall to an extent if she got hit and dropped him) to participate in the fight, either serving as offense or deflecting Blitzwing’s attacks. Meanwhile, as Bones and Sari draw his fire, the Doctor can use his telepathy to “read” Blitzwing’s cybernetic processor; with his technical know-how, he might be able to figure out a way to shut it off temporarily. At that point Pepper (still as Sari) can airlift Ziva in, have her and Sari damage one of Blitzwing’s jet-mode wings enough to destabilize his flight pattern (and potentially ground him) and remove whatever paneling the Doctor needs to access his processor. From there the Doctor’s able to take him temporarily offline - though, of course, he refuses to do so permanently. Wouldn’t be right.
Note that none of this is necessary if Blitzwing stays in tank mode, at which point Ziva (and Pepper transformed into Ziva, presumably) can get at him a lot easier and do more damage a lot sooner. The main question is whether Our Heroes are fast enough to get all this done before they’re gunned down, since for something that big Blitzwing’s kind of maneuverable. Our Heroes may be smaller and harder to hit, but that won’t protect them forever.
flo_nelja: Would Bob (ReBoot) rather date Abby Sciutto (NCIS) or Pepper?
First off, because my anal-retentive canon-wanker feels the need to do this: Shazam, Bob is in the real world.
Funnily enough, I didn’t realize until now that Pepper and Dot have more than a few similarities: super-competent, organized, self-sufficient, usually calm, able to kick arse when need be. Pepper may never have grabbed an Exosuit the way Dot did (next movie, next movie, next movie please), but I think she definitely could if she had to. So while it’s not that he wouldn’t like Abby, she’d be more like Mouse, methinks - except that he has plenty of chemistry with Mouse, too, and while he might have a long-term partner in Dot I cannot completely discount my OT3 here (Bob/Dot/Mouse, in case you were wondering).
So. Um. More likely Pepper with Abby as an ambiguously-flirtatious friend, but OT3s remain a distinct possibility. As they do.
Sari feels like meddling: which pairing(s) will she encourage between (possibly humanized)Blitzwing, Elizabeth Swann (Pirates ofthe Caribbean), and Seeley Booth (Bones)?
All things considered I’d imagine Sari is still a bit mad at Blitzwing for the whole “trying to kill her and her friends and family” thing, so she’s not going to be particularly invested in his romantic life. Guiltily, though, some days when she’s older, she finds herself contemplating what exactly robot selfcest would be like. She speaks of this to no one.
In fact, Sari just doesn’t seem interested enough in romance at all for her to try playing matchmaker for anyone. She’d much rather hear about all the cool things Elizabeth has done, did she really command a pirate ship, what’s it like being a pirate captain, and hey, Mister Booth, didn’t you say you were in the FBI? Sweet! D’you ever spy on anybody?
And if Booth happens to become a bit smitten with Elizabeth in the process despite his own internal conflicts over her lawbreaking, well, whatever, so long as Elizabeth lets her ride on the pirate ship like she promised.
Though while we’re on this topic…you know, even translated to the modern-day or whatever, Elizabeth is still a military commander by the end of Movie Three. And given the spin that the Decepticon cause is given in TFA (i.e. with the Cons seeing themselves as La Resistance against a corrupt Autobot empire) you could kind of tie it in with anti-imperial piracy or privateering. And despite his mental state Blitzwing’s rather good at taking orders from someone commanding enough. Granted, this does leave the problem of him taking orders from an organic, which he would despise (if I’m not going to use the humanization dodge - which I might ‘cause I’m lazy), but if I can somehow get around that…
Oh man. The Pirate King and the mentally-unstable inexplicably-German war machine she’s formed an uneasy alliance with. I think I might ship it.
...so the upshot of this meme is that I apparently ship Blitzwing with everybody now. Awkward.
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So very late, guys. Must pick up laundry. Then finish two papers. And then I'm done for a week. Hoorah.
You can still ask questions if you like (more crack is good for everyone!), but if you do please do so before you read these answers, because it's kind of spoiled if you know who's who.
Questions answered: Four. Fandoms represented: Doctor Who, Final Fantasy X, NCIS, Iron Man movieverse, Tranformers Animated, Star Trek Reboot, Pirates of the Caribbean, ReBoot, and Bones. I've noted which character goes with which fandom to ease confusion.
futuresoon: Lulu (Final Fantasy X), Blitzwing (Transformers Animated), and Donna Noble (Doctor Who) are at a bar. What drinks do they have? Do any of them hit on one of the others? If so, is it successful--and if it is successful, what's the morning after like?
For the purposes of this meme I am assuming that all the robot characters are human-sized (or humanized) when appropriate or things are going to get odd and unmanageable really fast. I am also assuming that robots are capable of imbibing alcohol because it’s more entertaining that way.
Lulu, who really doesn’t mean to get drunk and generally doesn’t make a habit of it, orders red wine, something with intensity to it - a Ribera del Duero, maybe. Just because you’re not out to make a fool of yourself doesn’t mean you have to drink weak booze. Donna is a bit more liberal with her alcohol and orders something large with an outlandish name and fruit in it. Have Harvey Wallbangers got fruit in them? They’ve got fruit juice; I’m sure that counts.
Blitzwing’s three personalities spend ten solid minutes arguing over what to drink (Icy gets all sulky when Hothead implies that gin and tonic is unmasculine) until Donna gets annoyed with him and orders him the girliest, most colorful cocktail she can find in revenge. So of course Random!Blitzwing loves it. He demands a little paper umbrella.
As the night wears on, Icy!Blitzwing trades barbs and witticisms with Lulu, reluctantly intrigued by her stories of the supernatural and organics with abilities like his own; Lulu, for her part, has never seen intelligent machina and finds herself curious as to how they function without the use of magic. They begin to trade tales of their world’s wars, of the power structures he will one day change (and she is still not sure if she should have)*.
Unfortunately, their conversation is continuously interrupted because Hothead!Blitzwing is in the middle of a shouting match with Donna, who is strangely not all that intimidated by the thought of an intelligent tank with a flamethrower. Please, has he ever even seen a lava monster? Meanwhile, Random!Blitzwing is undermining the whole thing by flirting rather mercilessly with her (by his own definition of flirting, anyway, which is…a little unsettling by anyone else’s standards). She’s not exactly a construction vehicle, but she’s certainly bold and sassy.
Ultimately, nobody ends up successful, because Lulu is nowhere approaching drunk enough to consider what one would do with a sentient machine. Donna might be drunk enough, but before she can decide Hothead!Blitzwing sets fire to the bar. She escapes with no damage beyond a singed eyebrow and the conviction that she should probably call it a night.
A few days later, back at the Decepticon Base, Megatron takes a moment away from his scheming to wonder why the can of oil Blitzwing’s drinking has a small paper umbrella in it.
*Yes, I know it’s extremely dubious whether or not Blitzwing actually buys into the whole Glorious Decepticon Cause thing, but shush, I’m on a roll.
kayliemalinza: Bones McCoy (New Trek), Three (Doctor Who), Ziva David (NCIS), Pepper Potts (Iron Man movieverse), and Sari Sumdac (Transformers Animated) are a 5-man band of superheroes that fight crime. What are their powers? What are the group dynamics like? Are they a successful team, or do the citizens of their hometown heave a weary sigh whenever they appear?
The trouble with this, is that not only do two members of the party already kind of have superpowers, but I’m also rather unimaginative when it comes to giving powers. Let’s start from the top.
Aside from his quick-thinking, medical mind, Bones has some sort of force-field superpower, like Sue Storm in the later Fantastic Four comics, something that’d let him both defend his party and, used creatively, essentially throw a brick wall at his opponents. It kind of fits with his role as a medic and thus mostly defensive player, but mostly it allows me to draw further amusing parallels between Bones and Ratchet.
Super!Third Doctor can probably fly, because he has a cape and by superhero logic having a cape generally enables one to fly. His extant psychic abilities are expanded to include telekinesis (thus giving him convenient blunt objects to throw whenever he pleases), mind-reading (thus giving him a window into his enemy’s plans), and the ability to break brainwashing or mind control a la Wonder Woman’s lasso in later interpretations. And this all is in addition to his canonical Venusian Aikido skills and inexplicable ability to take a bullet to the head without dying.
Ziva is the team’s heavy-hitter, with super strength and defenses in conjunction with her extant martial arts and spy training. She’s capable of dead-lifting enormous weight, so the American idiom “trust someone as far as you can throw them” makes even less sense now. Unfortunately these superpowers don’t extend to the bullets in her guns and thus she’s most effective at close range.
Pepper was a little harder to figure out. At first I was going to give her a custom Iron Man combat suit, but see below. But then I figured, why not a shapeshifter? That way she can be anybody she needs to be, do anything she needs to do, a sort of extension of her role as Tony’s Do-Everything Assistant. It also allows her to hack security systems (by mimicking retinas and voice prints), spy, and even copy a superhero’s abilities if she shapeshifts into them, though hers may be a less powerful or incomplete set. (Couldn’t Mystique do that in the movies? I thought she could.)
Sari’s superpowers are pretty much just like those she gets in Season 3 - flight from her jetpack (which might be incorporated into her actual body for convenience), blasters unfolding from her palms, and maybe one of the energy weapons from her initial upgrade because it seems unfair to lose all of them. So, basically, a diminutive yellow Iron Man.
The team dynamics are not as fraught as one would think, because most members of the team are used to not being in command - Ziva and McCoy canonically take orders from somebody else, and if Pepper can deal with Tony she can deal with just about anybody. As such the Doctor more-or-less appoints himself leader; he can think up plans on the fly and account for everyone’s abilities, which is a good skill for a leader to have. Which is not to say that they work completely without incident, because there are three very abrasive personalities here and Ziva and McCoy do not put up with his “superior species” gesturing without remark. Ziva has this tendency to remind him of her ability to snap necks with her pinkie finger when annoyed, and McCoy just refuses to be impressed by anything about the Time Lords and questions the Doctor’s leader credentials. Not to mention Sari, who is not going to get bossed around by some stuffy old man in a stupid cape and snaps back at him whenever he (inevitably) insists she stay behind because their mission is no place for a teenaged girl*. It falls to Pepper to smooth things over and tend to four flaring tempers, including suggesting compromises in the Doctor’s plans, formulating her own, and tugging all four of them back down to Earth when they get too hostile to work as a team. Truly, Pepper is the real superhero here.
*That said, the image of Three shouting it out with a sixteen-year-old girl (who is technically ten) amuses me greatly all on its own. Ziva probably takes her side.
Blitzwing is their arch-nemesis. What is their master plan, and if/how are they defeated?
I don’t know if Blitzwing really does master plans; that’s more his boss’s domain. If we’re (somehow) talking Blitzwing as Decepticon leader or free agent…well, I can imagine him having some sort of plan, but I can also imagine that on his way to execute part of said plan he spies Our Heroes, and his Hothead personality promptly decides that he would much rather kill them on the spot than bother with plans.
Our Heroes have the obvious problem of scale to contend with, as well as the fact that their hardest-hitting member, Ziva, is ground-based, so if Blitzwing takes to the air they really don’t have much of a way to strike back against him. Sari’s blasters don’t appear to be powerful enough to do much damage to a fully-armored Decepticon (they put a hole in Soundwave, yeah, but Soundwave is also constructed from Earth materials; only his schematics are Cybertronian), and I doubt the Doctor’s telekinetic powers are enough to actually render Blitzwing immobile or grounded because a) the Doctor would have to do that while flying, b) controlling an inanimate object is probably a lot easier than controlling a conscious being, and c) it’d be way too convenient. So if he switches back to Icy or Random personalities and takes to the air, they’re kind of in trouble.
However, they might have a chance if Sari’s jetpack is a part of her robot mode, because that would mean that if Pepper shapeshifted into Sari she’d be able to use the jetpack, which would mean they’d have another flyer to use. She can then airlift either Bones or Ziva (probably Bones, since he’d be able to cushion his own fall to an extent if she got hit and dropped him) to participate in the fight, either serving as offense or deflecting Blitzwing’s attacks. Meanwhile, as Bones and Sari draw his fire, the Doctor can use his telepathy to “read” Blitzwing’s cybernetic processor; with his technical know-how, he might be able to figure out a way to shut it off temporarily. At that point Pepper (still as Sari) can airlift Ziva in, have her and Sari damage one of Blitzwing’s jet-mode wings enough to destabilize his flight pattern (and potentially ground him) and remove whatever paneling the Doctor needs to access his processor. From there the Doctor’s able to take him temporarily offline - though, of course, he refuses to do so permanently. Wouldn’t be right.
Note that none of this is necessary if Blitzwing stays in tank mode, at which point Ziva (and Pepper transformed into Ziva, presumably) can get at him a lot easier and do more damage a lot sooner. The main question is whether Our Heroes are fast enough to get all this done before they’re gunned down, since for something that big Blitzwing’s kind of maneuverable. Our Heroes may be smaller and harder to hit, but that won’t protect them forever.
flo_nelja: Would Bob (ReBoot) rather date Abby Sciutto (NCIS) or Pepper?
First off, because my anal-retentive canon-wanker feels the need to do this: Shazam, Bob is in the real world.
Funnily enough, I didn’t realize until now that Pepper and Dot have more than a few similarities: super-competent, organized, self-sufficient, usually calm, able to kick arse when need be. Pepper may never have grabbed an Exosuit the way Dot did (next movie, next movie, next movie please), but I think she definitely could if she had to. So while it’s not that he wouldn’t like Abby, she’d be more like Mouse, methinks - except that he has plenty of chemistry with Mouse, too, and while he might have a long-term partner in Dot I cannot completely discount my OT3 here (Bob/Dot/Mouse, in case you were wondering).
So. Um. More likely Pepper with Abby as an ambiguously-flirtatious friend, but OT3s remain a distinct possibility. As they do.
Sari feels like meddling: which pairing(s) will she encourage between (possibly humanized)Blitzwing, Elizabeth Swann (Pirates ofthe Caribbean), and Seeley Booth (Bones)?
All things considered I’d imagine Sari is still a bit mad at Blitzwing for the whole “trying to kill her and her friends and family” thing, so she’s not going to be particularly invested in his romantic life. Guiltily, though, some days when she’s older, she finds herself contemplating what exactly robot selfcest would be like. She speaks of this to no one.
In fact, Sari just doesn’t seem interested enough in romance at all for her to try playing matchmaker for anyone. She’d much rather hear about all the cool things Elizabeth has done, did she really command a pirate ship, what’s it like being a pirate captain, and hey, Mister Booth, didn’t you say you were in the FBI? Sweet! D’you ever spy on anybody?
And if Booth happens to become a bit smitten with Elizabeth in the process despite his own internal conflicts over her lawbreaking, well, whatever, so long as Elizabeth lets her ride on the pirate ship like she promised.
Though while we’re on this topic…you know, even translated to the modern-day or whatever, Elizabeth is still a military commander by the end of Movie Three. And given the spin that the Decepticon cause is given in TFA (i.e. with the Cons seeing themselves as La Resistance against a corrupt Autobot empire) you could kind of tie it in with anti-imperial piracy or privateering. And despite his mental state Blitzwing’s rather good at taking orders from someone commanding enough. Granted, this does leave the problem of him taking orders from an organic, which he would despise (if I’m not going to use the humanization dodge - which I might ‘cause I’m lazy), but if I can somehow get around that…
Oh man. The Pirate King and the mentally-unstable inexplicably-German war machine she’s formed an uneasy alliance with. I think I might ship it.
...so the upshot of this meme is that I apparently ship Blitzwing with everybody now. Awkward.
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So very late, guys. Must pick up laundry. Then finish two papers. And then I'm done for a week. Hoorah.