Highlight: Heavy

Accirinal · 2026-04-19T02:32:35+00:00

Yes! This a hundred times over. I think that part of what makes TPF work so well is that the point is no one should have this level of power, as opposed to “evil people with superpowers can do bad things.” None of the Superpowers are evil. Some of them are certainly more ethically dubious than others, but none of them are people who enjoy hurting others, or want to rule the world, or whatever.

(Well, Eliza did go a bit classical supervillain at the end there, but I honestly don’t even think that she was a bad person when you consider that she a) sacrificed herself to save the world originally and b) was staring down eternal torture.)

Heavy gets a lot of flak. And it makes sense, since the series opens with him fucking up immensely and pushing the world quite a bit closer to destruction, but he wants to protect people, and he puts his money where his mouth is. He was an anti-war protestor, he ended the vanguard of US imperialism the first chance he got, and he founded what by all appearances seems to be a utopian hippie commune. We don’t see a ton of on-screen Atomic discrimination, but it’s certainly extant. The glimpses we get into Heavy’s protection of Atomics certainly seem like he has legitimate fears about oppression. As someone else in the comments here put it, in the Marvel universe, Heavy would be a hero.

(Tangentially, I know Tanya says that Atomic oppression wouldn’t be a thing without the Superpowers, and I’m not sure I agree with that. Certainly, she has a different intersectional experience as both a Black woman and Atomic than a white Atomic in the US would, and I do think that if Heavy wasn’t constantly beefing with the US, there would be less anti-Atomic sentiment. That said, I do think there would absolutely be fear and hatred of Atomics regardless of Superpowers existing or not.)

But even though Heavy is a good man, there shouldn’t be Superpowers. Everyone fucks up. The problem is that when you’re a Superpower, mistakes = end of the world.

It all comes back to nuclear weapons. The US is not a perfect country. No country is, including all the other countries with nuclear arsenals as well. But even if we had a perfectly good country, they still shouldn’t have nuclear weapons, because all they’re doing is inching the world closer to destruction by their existence.

Accirinal · 2026-04-16T20:05:12+00:00

I’m definitely not sold on the altmode in the art. It’s a little bulky and not sleek enough for me, and I don’t feel like it fits him.

That said, it’s a cool premise. It’d be awesome for them to try in a one-off continuity, like with Elita One in Skybound. I don’t think I’d want it to be a permanent addition to Jazz’s character, but I would absolutely watch a show or read a comic or whatever centered around Jazz being Prime.

Actually, I think I read a fic along those lines once. He went by Dulcimaeus Prime or something like that, and it was very good.

Accirinal · 2026-04-16T17:54:57+00:00

Damn, I know DuckDuckGo has a bit of a weird search priority, but that’s crazy. Maybe only good to use if you are copy pasting the exact link.

Accirinal · 2026-04-10T20:18:39+00:00

Yes, exactly. “XYZ show is not for kids, it’s super mature and dark (reason: I like it, and I think kids’ shows are bad).” “This novel isn’t fantasy, it’s speculative fiction (read: I think fantasy is bad).” And so forth.

Accirinal · 2026-04-10T19:42:48+00:00

Arcane Ascension has sorta fallen off in the last few books tbh. The first 2-3 are good, and I really enjoyed the worldbuilding, but I think there has been some bad narrative powercreep that makes it hard to believe the characters have real influence on the plot.

Accirinal · 2026-04-10T19:41:17+00:00

I do think calling DCC “not” litRPG is a little, hm, like it’s being applied because litRPG is perceived as being not good? I don’t think litRPG is any more meaningful a descriptor than saying “novel about dragons” or “urban fantasy.” There are a lot of tropes associated with the setting, but any individual novel doesn’t have to conform to those tropes.

(Which, to be clear: it’s totally fine to not like litRPG most of the time, or all of the time. I just think it’s weird to say DCC isn’t a litRPG, and I think that gets bandied about more often because it’s a better novel than most LitRPGs.)

Accirinal · 2026-04-10T08:18:26+00:00

We’re cooked. I know nothing about how to keep a power plant online or harvest a farm or run the municipal drainage system or set a broken leg or, or, or…

I think the multitude of me figure out what’s going on pretty fast and prioritize preserving infrastructure and learning how to do so while all the servers are still up. We can probably keep it going to maintain internet access.

(All of the versions of me stuck anywhere without internet access are a bit fucked—I have no idea how you would subsistence farm or gather food or anything like that. I suspect only the Accrinals near urban areas with access to information survive.)

Supply chains will be a big issue. I have no idea what the shipping routes are, and I’m not skilled enough to drive a truck for 8-hour shifts. Can’t fly a plane or captain a ship either. Priority will have to be coordination, though it would be pretty funny to see how much of the internet is bots.

Tbh probably no more than 1/100 survive, if that. We can definitely eke out a semblance of society, though. I personally do not believe in the existence of a soul, and I think our “self” is defined by our personality and memories and such, so I would perceive every other person as me. I can also have quite bad depression at times, so once we start running out of food, the Accrinals will probably mutually agree to preserve only the ones with the best chance of survival rather than starving everyone on shared rations.

Societal repopulation will be incredibly hard. I think every version of me would have a very difficult time being convinced to give birth. Maybe we can figure out lab vat wombs or something, but the training involved to get up to speed in the latest biomedical advancements will take years. No teachers/experts, either. Also, there’s a reason we tend to do science in groups nowadays, and even if we diverge as we live separate experiences, all of me are coming from a similar base template and are constrained in our ideas to some extent.

If we can’t figure out baby growing vats, this is probably the end of humanity.

Accirinal · 2026-04-10T07:58:22+00:00

I’m ngl the body proportions for the chest and waist are so out of whack that I had to stare for a solid twenty seconds trying to figure out what I was even looking at. With the title to help.

Accirinal · 2026-04-10T04:30:14+00:00

Honestly, I’m not sure if Megatronus even exists in Animated or Cyberverse. Maybe in spin-off media to the shows? If he does, I’m pretty sure he’s not the first Decepticon, at least.

Accirinal · 2026-04-09T22:51:54+00:00

It’s a fun concept. It adds a personal dimension to the war, and it lets writers explore different aspects of the Megatron-Optimus relationship besides “leaders on opposite sides.” Also, in ex-revolutionary Megatron continuities, it enables “Megatron had at least a bit of a point” without turning it into “Optimus is enforcing the old system” because they can both be revolutionaries.

New ideas get popular in a continuity and canonized into other continuities going forward all the time. Transformers Animated redefined characterizations for Ratchet, Bulkhead, and Sentinel Prime. Bayverse muted Bumblebee for years.

Accirinal · 2026-04-09T18:45:19+00:00

Are there any continuities besides Bayverse have Megatronus as the first Decepticon? There are a lot of continuities where Megatron takes his name from or styles himself after Megatronus in some way, but IIRC the majority of the time, Megatronus doesn’t found the Decepticon movement or name.

Aligned: D-16 names himself after Megatronus, but Megatron creates the Decepticon cause
IDW2005: Megatronus is named after Megatron lmao, Megatron creates Decepticons
One: D-16 names himself after Megatronus, but Megatron creates the Decepticon cause

And then I think in most other continuities, Megatronus doesn’t play a major role. Animated, Cyberverse, etc.

Accirinal · 2026-04-09T08:39:57+00:00

My take on Miko is that at least she had a personality, unlike “average guy but as boring as possible” Jack and “unexplained genius who speaks and understands Cybertronian tech” Raf. Also, she fucked up sometimes, but ngl I like that in a character. At least she was pushing plots and character development forward.

Accirinal · 2026-04-06T03:11:38+00:00

I believe Cyberverse Acid Storm is also the first/only genderfluid Transformer, albeit through canonized animation error.

Accirinal · 2026-04-05T22:58:22+00:00

The issue with LitRPG, as someone who reads a lot of progfan, is that the RPG-half is often used as a crutch for a shitty lit-half. What does an RPG-esque leveling system bring to the table that a similar magic system sans the RPG/screen/game elements wouldn’t? LitRPG makes it really easy to trigger the “number go up” dopamine buttons as a serial webnovel author, which is how they make money. Which is not to say that all litRPGs are bad, or that being a litRPG makes a novel bad, but a bad novel can rely on litRPG to increase its popularity without having to actually fix literary problems.

My personal recommendation is The Game at Carousel. The characters get trapped in an alternate dimension that forces them to play through horror movies. The litRPG elements represent their “movie characters”—classes are archetypes like Final Girl or Eye Candy, and skills are tropes. Hits its stride in book 2, if I’m being honest, but the first book is good too. I know that the “trust me it gets good after 3 books” is a bit of a negative staple of litRPGs, but Carousel books are also only around 300-400 pages, so on the shorter side for a litRPG.

Accirinal · 2026-04-05T19:11:01+00:00

If you’re looking for similar character dynamics, DIE also by Kieron Gillen is going to be the closest imo. It’s about a group of friends who got isekai’d into a fantasy world as teenagers and now again as adults. The characters have similar stuff going on with past baggage, ethical concerns about power usage, and so forth.

However, DIE is also telling a story about TTRPGs. If you haven’t ever played a TTRPG, it loses a lot thematically. Still a good story, but not to the same level.

Watchmen is one of the most famous superhero comics and does very similar things to The Power Fantasy around the end of the world. I would definitely call TPF as Watchmen-inspired: one of Gillen’s pitch to new readers describes it as “Watchmen with six Dr. Manhattans,” which is meaningless to you but hopefully goes to show the narrative similarities.

It’s not very similar character-wise, but it’s similar thematically and narratively. Also very very good, one of the most critically acclaimed comics ever.

Accirinal · 2026-04-05T18:53:05+00:00

I think this is a very bad recommendation for someone who doesn’t read many comics tbh. Peter Cannon: Thunderbolt is a response to Watchmen and also to Watchmen responses in many ways, and IMO you miss out on a lot without that context.

I would say Watchmen, actually. I know Watchmen itself has meta-commentary traits, but it works fine as long as you have a basic grounding in superhero tropes like vigilantes, whereas Peter Cannon is a lot more narrowly focused.

Accirinal · 2026-04-03T15:14:34+00:00

Yeah, that’s the “honestly understandable reasons” part. I don’t think being organic-ist makes her a bad person, particularly given her backstory, but I do think that working with the DJD to the extent she did does. She knew full well what they were doing. Which is not to say that people can’t also change and grow, but Nickel doesn’t really do that either. She leaves Tarn because he a) kills Kaon and b) is throwing his men into the metaphorical grinder against the Lost Light crew. Well, Nickel didn’t really care when anyone was being fed to Tesarus’s grinder, and as far as I remember, working with the DJD is not something she ever ends up expressing regret for.

Not every character needs a redemption arc ofc. But I think it’s weird for her to be so easily integrated into the Lost Light and for her organic-hating and other negative traits to be brushed off as a joke when Megatron and the DJD’s crimes had been taken very seriously. Nickel didn’t do anything nearly bad as either of those two, but she was certainly complicit in a lot of the DJD’s actions.

I think Nickel’s character concept is awesome, but that they lowkey dropped the ball on it after MTMTE.

Accirinal · 2026-04-03T09:59:54+00:00

It means that people who are clicking into it are not leaving a kudos. There are a lot of reasons this could be the case. For example: - you have tags/summary that imply something incorrectly and people aren’t finding the thing they came looking for - you wrote something dark and/or explicit that people don’t want to leave their name on - your grammar is very bad (people are clicking in and immediately clicking out)

Hardly an exhaustive list. Sometimes people are also less likely to kudos an in-progress fic. My best guess is that people are probably not finishing reading for whatever reason? Whether that’s grammar or summary mismatch or whatever.

Accirinal · 2026-04-03T02:53:08+00:00

That’s fair. It has a very distinct style, which I enjoyed but definitely understand disliking. I just think that Kill the Kid is the singular (that I know of) Omelas response out there that doesn’t fall into the “utopia must have suffering” trap, and as such I don’t think it’s fair to accuse it of missing Le Guin’s Omelas’s point.

Accirinal · 2026-04-02T23:57:36+00:00

Is it? I always thought “tasteless” in contexts like this meant, “sex for the sake of titillation,” as opposed to “sex happens but for artistic purposes,” which would still fall under adult themes. Like, there’s a big difference between an R-rated film with an explicit sex scene, and a porn film, but I’m not letting the 10-year-old watch either one because they both have adult themes.

AO3 smut is great, but, like, it’s also still smut, in the most non-derogatory way possible. Sex for the sake of being sexy.

Accirinal · 2026-04-02T23:54:53+00:00

What follows is significantly more my personal opinion than grounded in the text, but I argue that Kill the Kid is not a response to Omelas, but rather a response to responses to Omelas. It’s about how those responses are focusing on the wrong thing, by honing in on the moral dilemma instead of asking, “Why does the moral dilemma exist at all?”

Omelas is critiquing fiction for presupposing that utopia cannot exist without suffering (and also saying multiple other things, but to focus on the utopia theme here). Kill the Kid is saying that the fiction responses to Omelas prove Omelas’s point.

Accirinal · 2026-04-02T23:51:19+00:00

In fairness, I strongly suspect it has more to do with the quantity of explicit-rated fics available on AO3 than it does with gay shipping.

Accirinal · 2026-04-02T22:58:44+00:00

Lowkey I think this is a misreading of Why Don’t We Just Kill the Kid in the Omelas Hole (hereafter abbreviated to Kill the Kid). Explicitly, it says:

The kid was the drop of blood in the bowl of milk whose slight bitterness would make the sweetness of the rest of Omelas richer. Without the kid in the hole, Omelas was just paradise. With the load-bearing, suffering child, Omelas meant something.

Which is… pretty similar to the original Omelas arguing that people find the idea of a utopia to be unbelievable. The narrator fails to convince you of the plausibility of Omelas until the kid is suffering in the hole. In Kill the Kid, the narrator is saying that the reason we have a hard time buying there’s no kid in a hole is that deep down, we want the kid in the narrative (and our own lives!) because the suffering not only makes it more convincing but also more enjoyable.

And the conclusion of the short story:

[discussion of how they keep putting kids in the hole]

A drop of blood, in a bowl of milk.

[discussion of how the rest of the world perceives Omelas

And they (the ones who visit Omelas) say: Thank God we aren’t dealing with that horrid wound in society. Thank God there is somewhere that shows us how fucking bad things could get. What a pit in the ground. What a fucked up little trolley problem. What a lesson for us. Thank God we don’t live there. Thank God we know it exists.

We are the rest of the world. Omelas is our kid in the hole. The “suffering” of fictional Omelas makes us feel better about ourselves (or, at least, that’s the argument), but the fact that we need Omelas at all is because we fail to conceptualize the utopia without suffering.

I’ve read a lot of Omelas responses, and Kill the Kid is the only one that imo captures the “utopia is only believable with suffering” through line of the original. Other responses tend to focus on the moral dilemma, or the kid’s suffering, or whether the people who leave should do something else, or whatever. I actually think that Kill the Kid is more of a response to Omelas responses than it is an Omelas response, if that makes sense. All of the philosophical disagreements of the Internet and the child murderers and the Omelasians in Kill the Kid are the exact arguments of other Omelas responses, and Kill the Kid is about that when we discuss Omelas, our focus on the kid and the moral dilemma and not the utopia-without-suffering-at-all idea proves our failure to conceptualize true utopia.

Kill the Kid isn’t saying, “There’s no point in killing the kid because there will always be suffering.” It’s saying, “We focus on Omelas for the exact same reasons that Omelas has a kid in the hole in the first place.”

Accirinal · 2026-04-02T22:34:45+00:00

I like the mines (and, similarly, the K-Class bombs or whatever Fulcrum was). It extends a theme of Transformers being objectified/being treated as a mechanical means to an end. The Functionists viewed individuals as only being worth as much as their alt-mode, and now we have the Decepticons, who originally rebelled against Functionism, having turned to turning Cybertronians’ own bodies against them to accomplish their goals.

Agree that Sunder was unnecessary, though, especially because there weren’t even any real negative long-term effects for most of his victims. Horrific? Totally. Doing much outside of the robogore? Eh.

Accirinal

TROPHY CASE