Aaah, three episodes one after another, so goood. Can't wait until the next one hits, this was quite the cliffhanger!
Lieutenant Fusilier 2 (Abandoned, do not read)
- Thread starter open_sketch
- Start date
- Original Mature Sci-Fi
Ooh ooh, I get to nitpick! Slévárna is used only in the specific context of casting metal pieces. Robota is more specifically corveé, but also any labour in a number of Slavic languages.
Unfortunately Czech does not check out to English 1:1 in here. If the name is supposed to be a generic denominator, the best would be I think "Výroba robotů" - robot manufactoring. If it is meant to be a proper name of an industrial group the wording I am inclined to is "Výrobní závody robotů (XXX) -production plant for robots (with the XXX being the name of a company, without parenthesis OFC).
Anyway, mystery deepens indeed.
Unfortunately Czech does not check out to English 1:1 in here. If the name is supposed to be a generic denominator, the best would be I think "Výroba robotů" - robot manufactoring. If it is meant to be a proper name of an industrial group the wording I am inclined to is "Výrobní závody robotů (XXX) -production plant for robots (with the XXX being the name of a company, without parenthesis OFC).
Anyway, mystery deepens indeed.
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- Location
- Ottawa
- Pronouns
- She/Her/Whatever
Yay thank you! I was using autotranslationining because i wanted to just write it up and get it out. Do you mind if I poke you for consultation in the future?
Missing a word here I think. Very nice chaotic close quarters brawl. I wasn't expecting the volley gun to be so explosive, I was figuring it'd be more of a shotgun situation, but that's certainly a show stopper, no wonder they go first. With only sixty seconds on the countdown, I'm not feeling confident the downed marines are gonna make it out of there to potentially be recovered. I was wondering at first if the buzzing was some sort of electronic warfare thing the robots were trying, but since its their own radio I wonder if its just interference from it or if the buzzing itself is their language, a lot more inhuman, like how their body's barely even pretend to be humanesque outside of proportion.
Oh also an apostrophe missing here I think
I was wondering the exact same thing even before the golden orb mention, probably because I just happened to watch a video on what Transformers did with the same concept today so I was primed to be thinking about it. If so I wonder if it could be an alien race found such a probe, made their own 'improvements' which caused problems before machines hit a critical mass to help steer their society like they did for humans or machines left alone got corrupted somehow, perhaps by loneliness/lack of work, perhaps some natural phenomena breaking their programming.
- Location
- Mid-Atlantic
It's conceivable that the weird fashy Czech breakaways could have independently re-invented the word "robot" through the same derivation (in that it comes from the Czech words for forced labor or serfdom).
- Location
- Soviet Canuckistan
Oooh. Ooooooooh, this is interesting. And I love to see one of those orbs pop up. Not going to bet either way on the alternate universe vrs very old Czech breakaway group thing yet; not enough information to make it more than a blind guess - the orb is suggestive but could very easily be a red herring.
- Location
- Germany
Weird Czech breakaways makes me think of what happened to all those nascent nationalist movements that came into being after the Napoleonic wars. When the old Empires never fell...
...just what happened to all the nationalist movements that never got to propagate for equal rights and maybe never radicalized into demanding their own nation states...
...just what happened to all the nationalist movements that never got to propagate for equal rights and maybe never radicalized into demanding their own nation states...
- Location
- Mid-Atlantic
Yeah, I mean, what did Giuseppe Garibaldi, HOT BLOODED REVOLUTIONARY ADVENTURER, get up to in this timeline, I wonder?
Their writing is QR code, their speech might just be straight binary. That would sound like a buzz if it was really fast, I think.
- Pronouns
- She/Her
Just wait till it turns out that the baddies are us operating under the guidance/control of Lucy's counterpart, who's the inverse of generally decent and utterly useless.
Didn't Lucy specifically get quite the reaction to using the word robot, which Dora's nonplussedness means would imply that that's specifically a thing her machine staff knows because of her current body's prior inhabitant?
BRB gonna go... brush up on my deep lore. Yeah. That's it. The deep lore.
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- Pronouns
- He/Him
Depends on the encoding, really. But binary encoded as a waveform would likely be a strange sort of buzz, yes. Think modem sounds, but much, much faster and much, much more complex.
It could be the other way around. People being people, someone would have suggested using the machines as slaves back in the early days, before all the laws and traditions protecting machine dignity existed. Capek may have written RUR as a warning and a criticism of such an attitude. After all the robots in RUR were overthrowing humanity before Skynet made it cool.
...so, having now actually read part of DragonCobolt's thing from which Lucy originates, I uh, gotta ask... exactly how much of it is canon?
Also, if the answer is "most or all of it"... what would the rest of the concert's society in general think of Lucy's machines? I would assume they'd be considered extremely glitched, most likely as the result of some sort of coping mechanisms for dealing with the behavior of Lucy's predecessor without quitting? Or is that sort of behavior secretly more common than we'd assume since our point of view characters are Marie (who is recently unboxed, slightly anomalous in design, and has always been relatively isolated from other machines) and Dora (who is explicitly extremely repressed, is socially isolated even when surrounded by her peers, and has only recently started getting knowledge of anything beyond being a soldier)?
Also, if the answer is "most or all of it"... what would the rest of the concert's society in general think of Lucy's machines? I would assume they'd be considered extremely glitched, most likely as the result of some sort of coping mechanisms for dealing with the behavior of Lucy's predecessor without quitting? Or is that sort of behavior secretly more common than we'd assume since our point of view characters are Marie (who is recently unboxed, slightly anomalous in design, and has always been relatively isolated from other machines) and Dora (who is explicitly extremely repressed, is socially isolated even when surrounded by her peers, and has only recently started getting knowledge of anything beyond being a soldier)?
- Pronouns
- He/Him
I'm sorry to say but the answer seems to be "all of it" a fact that terrifies me to my core
- Location
- Soviet Canuckistan
I'm sure it'll be fine! I imagine there's all sorts of salacious rumors about Lucy and her merry band of Machines, but a society like this? There's salacious rumors about basically everyone, probably.
10ebbor10
DON'T PANIC
- Location
- Present
We do know that in Britain at least, human-machine relations are seen as something that can only end in tragedy and that thus should be downplayed and covered up for the good of all the humans involved.
- Location
- Ottawa
- Pronouns
- She/Her/Whatever
my god, why would you say such a thing about one of high society's most respected members? cease this slanderous prattling immediately until we are behind closed doors and it can become proper gossip!
also yeah, society has rules and a lot of people don't follow them, same as it ever was. while most people's lives don't run on the, uh, genre logic that Lucy's does, it still happens quite a bit more than basically anyone is willing to admit. which is pretty much normal for any cultural rule about sex. hell, humans aren't supposed to be bedding other humans they aren't married to either, but that happens with fair regularity too. especially with the characters who spend a lot of time in the cities like our officers, as opposed to people like Miss Polestar who are more sheltered.
if you write a setting which has a rule, the most interesting characters are the ones who break it. we started with "robots and humans don't fall in love… so here's our romance about a maid and her miss". and then fusie is "in the army, humans are officers and robots enlisted… so here's our robot officer".
a lot of SF/F has a tendency to treat workdbuilding rules like… like they were facts that must be abided by, which i think is one part that nerds are people who want their worlds to be simple, rigid, and logical, and one part that while the works are often progressive, SF/F communities are often extremely conservative, and that was the absolute norm for a long time. i can't tell you how many sci fi novels like to posit societies where gay people have been scientifically eliminated, or which put women in their place, or which praise or simply replicate white imperialism, usually as little more than footnotes as the author assumes the reader agrees.
i wouldn't claim to be particularly progressive or open minded by any means, but this is a tendency i try to push back against in my writing. i don't know how successful i am but i'm trying
you would not claim this but that does not make it untrue
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- He/Him
yeah!!!!!!!!!!
also, like, all things considered, Lucy's household isn't even that extreme compared to SOME of the stuff I heard people in the early 1800s got up to...
- Pronouns
- She/Her
Oh gods, the nipple ring thing...
I bet that was like, the tip of the iceberg, wasn't it?
- Location
- Mid-Atlantic
I think it's that conservatives like dragons and spaceships as much as anyone else, and (with caveats, see Orwell's nonfiction, I forget the specific essay I'm thinking of), conservatives can write entertaining yarns too.
Since the conservatives haven't just shriveled up and died in mainstream society, and in quite a lot of places still have a lot of clout, the same thing is replicated in science fiction. And was replicated even more often up until recently, again as in mainstream society.
Take a representative sample of a population where 20% of people are kinda fash and another 20-30% are prepared to shrug and go along rather than accept anything "weird," and you get a science fiction fandom where 20% of people are kinda fash and another 20-30% are prepared to shrug and go along rather than accept anything "weird."
10ebbor10
DON'T PANIC
- Location
- Present
The history of the genre plays into it too.
A bunch of the most influential figures in the genre were racist, sexist or chauvinist, and they had the ability to rewrite and redefine the genre's history, which was easier with sci fi than with other genres because it was fairly new and isolated, and such dependent on only a few sources of publication.
Vebyast
Nascent Transhuman
Honestly, the only thing in Lucy's story that struck me as vaguely unlikely was the troop transport full of well-endowed Doras. Not their existence, more their concentration, the fact that there were like thirty of them all in one place entirely composing a unit. I knew the setting was relentlessly queer, but there's a point where some intention has to be assumed. Is there something I've not been picking up on? Does Lt. Fusilier gets into more swordfights with other lady fusiliers than I'd thought?
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- Location
- New Mexico, USA
- Pronouns
- He/They
Is there a link to this, if much of it is canon and might factor in here?
10ebbor10
DON'T PANIC
- Location
- Present
There could very well be intention in play. The machines run the military, so they could use their influence to keep their little company in play. The alternative is that, even in universe, Lucy operates by Isekai rules and thus that sexual situations are attracted to her, just like how her counterpart is able to defy the laws of physics to make his technology work in our world.
You can google "In-Another-World-All-of-My-Maids-Are-Robots".
Find whatever disreputable porn website google throws at you, and it'll be there.
I don't think directly linking it is allowed.
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