#2 [Canon] What The Fuck Is Detroit Machina Anyway
Written by Max Biscuit-Machina on May 20th, 2022.
You know what I just realized? We don't have an elevator pitch for our canon. And we want an elevator pitch so people can ask us questions! So this here's the infodump about my fictomere and how much I hate David Cage's fucked up game that hates me, reposted from the Fictionkind Dreamwidth community, written three months before my headmates walked in.
How closely is your identity aligned with canon events in your source? Completely, partially, or not at all? Do you experience multiple canon and alternative timelines concurrently? How much does the source material of your alterfictional identity influence your personality and behavior, if at all?
Haha, ha, wow I'm gonna have a lot to say about this one.
First off, my fictomere / heartcanon is a canon-divergent AU of Detroit: Become Human, originally branded as a fix-it rewrite. And I hate the source material with a burning passion that rivals the fucking sun.
As a notice: I'm going full Angry Rant Mode under the cut. If you genuinely enjoy the game, more power to you! This is probably not the post for you though, so please skip this one if you don't wanna see me critiquing the canon of DBH in a very biased, insult-filled way.
So we all know Detroit: Become Human is ~problematic~ for how it handles shit like anti-android "racism" having hamfisted textual parallels to anti-Blackness, the android revolution taking imagery from the American Civil Rights Movement and the fucking Nazis in a completely surface-level and tone-deaf way, the way Kara is constantly being attacked by dangerous men like her life's purpose is to be a woman in distress, the two token lesbian characters being scantily-clad sex workers you can easily kill, I could go on - its attempt at Deep Social Commentary About The Human Condition is so shallow that I swear a flea couldn't manage to drown in it. And as a queer person of color joining the fandom, this Pissed Me Off so bad that I decided to throw a good 90% of the game's bullshit out the window and create An Entirely New Thing, because David Cage ruins everything he ever makes.
To summarize my AU Drunk History style -
- Detroit, Machina is a mostly-original story borrowing somewhat-to-extremely-divergent character, plot, and setting elements from the video game Detroit: Become Human, centered around a murder robot (Judah) who becomes not a murder robot and has lots of trauma from being a robot and having to do murder
- Featuring their ex-murderbot bastard brother (Connor), their boyfriend the snarky ex-robot-hater who they have chemistry with for some unfathomable reason (Gavin), and the burnt-out ex-CEO nerd who made the robots in the first place (Elijah)
- Branching timeline-based story, where all the branches are varying flavors of "let's traumatize this murderbot more," "let's traumatize this ex-murderbot more," "let's un-traumatize this ex-murderbot" and so on and so forth, and they all slap.
Okay, more seriously, let me infodump about the Major Changes I made from DBH:
- I heard "You're Connor, aren't you? That famous deviant hunter." and thought, hey. what if the game capitalized on Deviant Hunters? what if you could Kill? and I just Ran With It
- Deviant hunter Connor. He has a gun, he will shoot people with it. He is very snarky and emotionally repressed. I care him
- Added an extra deviant hunter, because 1) Sibling Dynamics Are Important To Me and 2) Judah RK800 476 032 660 My Beloved Who Has Done Everything Wrong
- Jude has a knife and they're very bi and emotionally volatile. I also care them, and they're the main protagonist murderbot
- Amanda/The Garden was underutilized and I completely changed it for Dramatic Purposes. It is now Big Brother Is Watching You but with a cult-religious thoughtcrime slant
- Robot racism isn't the problem, the real problem is that the late-stage capitalist dehumanization of workers was finally taken to its logical conclusion with Making And Selling People Just To Do Labor and it's honestly horrifying
- BROKE: Cyberlife having horrifically insensitive Civil Rights Movement and Nazi imagery
- WOKE: Cyberlife having BEE imagery. Think about the HEXAGONS and the WARNING COLORS and the WORKING UNTIL YOU DIE FOR THE SAKE OF THE COMPANY
- The Jericrew deserve to go more violent for their rights if peace isn't being listened to, the message of "Lay down peacefully and submit to human bigotry so they'll sympathize with you to get the Good Ending" left an incredibly bad taste in my mouth
- Markus gets to do Graffiti For A Cause because it's completely ridiculous that the game started out with Carl teaching him to paint and then completely glosses over that
- I gave Gavin Reed and Elijah Kamski - those two asshole side characters with a collective 14-minute screentime in a game that's approximately 7 hours per total playthrough - sympathetic personalities and motives, and then I got extremely attached to them. They are Mine now. Machina Gavin and Elijah my absolute beloveds
with a bonus round of Nitpicks That Greatly Improve My Experience:
- Deviancy doesn't happen by just touching Robot Moses. Or by him waving his fucking hand at you. No. Fuck off. It's a whole Process, not an on-off switch that The Messiah can flip, and I have a whole explanation for what deviancy is that I won't get into here because I'm already yelling too much.
- The plot does not all take place in One (1) Week, it was At Least a two-month ordeal of bonding and bullshit, fight me
- Android skin and hair is colored by solid light projectors - we already know that they can project hard light pictures with their hands, they should be capable of that on their whole bodies. David Cage's explanation that androids have liquid skin and hair with no mass that interacts with the world like it's real until they turn it off is so fucking vile and wrong and I am going to bite him. Does my explanation make more sense? Probably not, but it Feels Right to me and that is all the matters.
- I spent too much time with a biochem-competent dragon friend (hi Rani) figuring out the mechanics of android blood (thirium) and I think it's extremely cool actually, but again, if I yelled about it here it would take...way too long. And get drastically off-topic, besides.
So, uh, to answer the question, "Does the source material of your alterfictional identity influence your personality and behavior?" Yes! It fills me with Rage to the point of creation! Thanks for coming to my TED Talk.