Dirty Dragon Thoughts

Mostly Transformers and other fannish reblogs. I write fanfic (mostly TF) as @pipermca. Kaiju and giant robot aficionado. Bluestreak Georg. Was a nerd before it was cool. FYI I also reblog NSFW stuff occasionally.

[mytearsrricochet]

[the-boring-distopia]

Not to be the unhinged theorist in the Locked Tomb fandom but the Resurrection Beasts and Alecto have some peculiar themes that just tie too perfectly into radiation.

Like the blue light with Varun. Because if theres a real world example of a haunting blue light you never want to see in person ever, it's this:

Also, Nona does not want and probably can't really eat, which is both a running gag but also one of the first sympthoms after somebody gets radiation poisoning. And at the end of the book, her condition deteriorates.

And even from a narrative point of view: John Gaius used to be a scientist. He wanted to save everyone. He also kinda took the soul of the earth. He embodies powers that, if kept in check, can help many but they can also spell untold destruction. It just works. The resurrection beasts and their rampage basically being the equivalent of a melting reactor would mean it is still John's fault and it fucking is so I will just keep believing it.

[oh-jod-dammit]

Mercy describes Varun as "blue like Loveday's eyes", and Gideon compares Cytherea's (aka Loveday's) eyes to "electromagnetic radiation" specifically.

And there are debatably implications they were working with radiation in the first place for the cryo project! From the sound of everything combined, probably testing that the frozen people shipped off to Tau Ceti would be good to survive the radiation of space, and they'd gotten it up to an estimated 92% chance of success without significant lasting damage for the average person, but to get to those numbers, they'd wound up with a whole mess of very irradiated corpses. Which was why they were going to have so much trouble disposing of them, and when John talks about just burying them he sarcastically mutters "you would've loved that", and why the general population was so freaked out by how Scary it sounded, and why John got blacklisted from a lot of shit (despite having been the one to insist on clearance from Asia-Pacific Environmental!). He describes the latter specifically as "I was irradiated." And we do know how Muir loves layered meanings, especially through John!

And I mean. Necromancy in general is fossil fuels 2.0, so making the RBs nuclear feels right. And!! There's my recent theory that the whole solar system is A SYSTEM, effectively like the sun as a brain and the planets as organs for one big body, with all of them innately connected, but with or without that take, we know at minimum there's a lot of sun association with John and Alecto. So there's nuclear fusion too!

[championofdnd]

Someone in the comments said something about fusion and fision. I think there are parallels between that and the idea of thanergy/thalergy. The violent removal of a soul from its body always produces a revenant. The violent splitting of two parts of a whole generates vast amounts of energy. Only the nine houses planets produce death energy. The planets that were violently split into two parts.

[douche-canoe-regatta]

Oh god, this connects SO many dots in my own terrifying Megatheorum. I won't even fit this in one reblog, because this is taking forever to write - but I think it's worth it.

On Tor's website, TLT is listed as Scifi/Fantasy. However, when forced to choose, Tor picks Scifi above all. This is HUGE, because even with all the necromancy and fantasy elements of The Locked Tomb, the publisher looked at the series and said "No, this is scifi." Ergo: the "magical" elements must have a basis in science.

Now, spiritual/religious elements (souls etc) can exist alongside science without much issue. But if you're manipulating physical objects in a real-world environment, you have to explain it in a way that could conceivably track with scientific theory as it functions in the real world. You can extrapolate from there.

So. In GtN, we enter a world of fantasy tropes and Regency-era hand wringing about social morés.... but we also see Palamedes tear his hair out about dating Canaan; how nothing seems to fit a reasonable timeline. In real life, scientists use radiometric dating in geology & archeology to determine the age of objects. (also, do necromantic (or irradiated) interactions with objects impart additional radiation? I don't know!!)

TLDR; You can tear the soul out of a planet, but the actual tearing process needs to make enough sense to pass muster in the Scifi world. Nuclear fusion is a great candidate, as mentioned by @oh-jod-dammit and @championofdnd and is supported by the text ("the soul was like a tiny atom bomb"). God, it's right there.

This, of course, raises some questions.

If necromancy is related to radiation, what power does Alecto/Earth impart to John that allows him control of (assumingly) irradiated corpses? and WHY? What about him was so fucking special? Sure, he was trying to get humans off Earth for its own sake, presumably by testing radiation shielding for long-range space flight. (aka the problem with pregnancy is you have to worry about irradiation for fetuses or reproductive organs. probably.)

But how is John a better ally than an eco-warrior or biologist or any number of scientists that were presumably trying to save the Earth? Alecto (allegedly) said she chose him. How did he bring himself to her attention? If we keep following this logic, how did radiation connect them?

I'm tired. Let's review some facts from both sides.

.Electromagnetic Radiation is produced by stars and other celestial bodies.

.Planets, people, and stars emit different types of radiation.

.Planets and people are proven to have souls, which can be removed from the body by force.

.Do stars have souls?? The sun?? The Moon in the Fucking Sky??? (where is the Moon, btw??)

.Does radiation serve as a connection to a different dimension? Are radio waves a bridge to The River? Did John tear a hole in spacetime and make some kind of wormhole?

"you were the noise that was everywhere" thats RADIO WAVES. tamsyn muir I will GET YOU

This is why Wake is wearing a Haz suit in the River Bubble, btw. She only started experiencing negative effects when the suit was punctured. (right?). It's why The Eggs All Died. It's why flipped planets slowly mutate. RADIATION. I love y'all.

The stupid First House robes? They're a fucking PRISM. Electromagnetic Radiation is visible light!! GODDAMN!!!

And here's where I leave this for a breather. My original document got corrupted somehow. probably the radiation :(

[douche-canoe-regatta]

Okay @oh-jod-dammit brought up some REALLY interesting things in the comments that set my brain on fire

On Wake:

Ya gotta ask - Why was Wake wearing the Haz suit before she died? On the Ninth, her body is found wearing a life support suit as an outer layer, but that's different. This suggests she was possibly wearing the Haz suit underneath - to protect against what?

Also, good catch with Jod being chosen/unchosen! I think it's more like -

Jod is very close to the electromagnetic spectrum through his work with irradiated corpses

So close that he, a living person, is able to “make waves” in the EM field - aka influence physical reactions, like moving/manipulating bodies.

This work puts him closer to whatever plane the souls reside in (The River) and thereby Alecto.

That's what brings John (unknowingly) to her attention; he *was* chosen by her (“I picked you to change, and this is how you repay me?”) BUT she had no idea he would force a connection through the opening made by the death of “the nun” (which, btw: pre-resurrection, Christabel is never given a first letter like M– or A– ; only “The nun” or “M– ‘s nun”). 

If John had stopped at physical manipulation - kept curing cancer, found a way to heal the earth using EM waves, etc, he never would have broken through. But by cracking the “atom bomb” of a soul that was the “missing link,” John forced a door to open between the physical plane and The River/astral plane. He may have pushed a ton of EM waves/radiation through the hole while cycling the power back through himself (?)

"I was looking at the code, I knew why I hadn't been able to see anything.” Radio waves would cause a lot of interference, yeah?

Random additional thoughts:

Wherefore the missing people? Well, per John, he “snapped up” a large percentage of humanity before the nuclear warheads hit, although he phrases it as a kindness. I don't know if that means he claims some kind of ownership over those souls. This is a wobbly guess from me.

The reason the Houses don't have much in the way of technology is because the radiation renders it null. Otherwise they'd definitely have SOMETHING after 10,000 years. You can't just kill everyone who ever had the idea for an internet.

Again, WHERE IS THE MOON. We see no references to it at all.

Y'all are bringing up some great points, keep 'em coming! My original Megatheorum included most of this, but I had no scientific explanation that fit the clues. So far Electromagnetic Radiation is the *best* fit I've found that explains Tor's Scifi designation while matching the text provided.

FYI, my knowledge of EMR is based in astronomy, one of my finest hyperfixations. However I have no schooling in such and am going largely by Wikipedia articles and sheer determination.

[green-eggs-and-sam96]

Something to add about the blue glow: this is due to Cherekov radiation in which a charged particle is emitted and passes through a high dielectric medium at speeds greater than the speed of light. The most common example is an electron moving uber fast through water like it would in an underwater nuclear reactor.

Something I was thinking about recently is that the other time we really discuss Cherenkov radiation is "the blue flash" during criticality experiments/accidents. So at Los Alamos National Lab there were two experiments that went critical (started the fission chain reaction) back in the 1940's (interestingly, these both occurred after the end of WW2). There was one scientist - Harry Daghlian - who decided to do an experiment at the end of the workday without anyone around and without notifying anyone and dropped the tungsten block he was holding (the block was meant to reflect neutrons back onto the core so they could make measurements about what happens as you get close to criticality). It set of the chain reaction and he was heavily irradiated. He died 2-3 weeks after the incident. He reports having seen a flash of blue light when the block dropped. A few months later, Louis Slotin was showing his successor how to do an experiment really quick at the end of the day (do we see a pattern here?) and asked the other scientists to pause their work for a few minutes so he could do this demonstration real quick ("we'll be done in 20 min"). The experiment had two hemispheres of neutron-reflecting material to - again - make measurements about criticality. Importantly, the top hemisphere had a hole so you could hold the dome more easily. And so Slotin was using a screwdriver to keep the hemispheres apart (they had an SOP to use like wooden wedges that you could slide forward and backwards to lower the top slowly or quickly push back up but this was a quick demonstration so hey let's just use this handy screwdriver) and the screwdriver slipped. Slotin quickly pulled the top hemisphere off to stop the chain reaction and saw that same blue light. He died 9 days later.

So as someone working in the field, and obsessed with TLT, when I saw this post, a lot of things clicked (so THSNK YOU OMG). I also want to note a couple things that might not be relevant but I think are interesting and cool. Both these criticality accidents occured with the same plutonium core ( nicknamed "the demon core" bc it was involved with both criticality incidents) which makes me think about the fact that it seems like Varun has killed the most lyctors over the years. And just keeps coming back. A few years after the second incident, LANL tried replicating the Slotin incident using robotic arms and like pulleys ( bro it was like 1946 I don't know what they were using but they were trying to do these experiments remotely so avoid irradiating people up close again) and they didn't see the blue light! But that's supposed to be a recurring thing in criticality incidents! (Also, the core didn't seem to go critical when they did this remotely! What?!!! Eventually, they figured out that the guy had his thumb in the hole to hold the top and his thumb blocked an escape route for the neutrons and reflected enough back to make the thing go critical - crazy right>!?!) They realized that the blue light was Cherenkov radiation which has to go through a *dielectric* medium - air is not, but water is. SO the blue light is the result of the electrons hitting the liquid in the eyes!!!!! DOES THAT SOUND FAMILIAR?!!! Damn Tamsyn, didn't realize I would need my friggin phd to understand your books. But this is so fucking genius.

Also, have we already noted that the way necromancers are described (thin, frail, waif-like, almost like they're wasting away) is similar to the way people are described with radiation poisoning? On another note, there's like a running thing in superhero comics of gaining special powers when bitten by radioactive spiders or wading through radioactive sludge etc?

[rodi-16]

Cute Bluestreak panel from IDW, the other two were tossed in to keep it company.

[vieneinpace]

William Etty's Male Nude, with Arms Up-Stretched (1828) revamped by Astra Zero

[mockva]

David's Woodturning

[beardedmrbean]

[bk-poetry]

Announcing Fanfiction.lol !

hey all! i've built a new ao3 fork called fanfiction.lol 🤙🏽 key differences:

🚫 no invite queue: sign up and start posting immediately. no waiting, no velvet rope.

🏳️‍🌈 expanded content warnings: added ableism, homophobia/transphobia, racism, rpf and more. plus relationship tags for aro/ace spectrum, qpr, non-binary/genderqueer focus, poly/ensemble, and more.

🏷️ all tags are canonical: everything you tag goes into the searchable record. no volunteer wrangling bottleneck.

💜 fandom-agnostic moderation: i care about the writing, not fandom politics or discourse. write whatever you want, tag it honestly.

it's a small personal project but fan communities deserve independent infrastructure.

if you enjoy fandom, i'd love for you to sign up and poke around. tell me what breaks. the source code is at source.tube/brennan/fanfiction.lol.

find me at brennan.day/accounts or email [email protected].

write whatever the hell you want! 💜

[bk-poetry]

More Information

Hi, I wanted to add some more info about fanfic.lol based on some replies. I was trying to keep the original post short and have done write-ups elsewhere but I'll reiterate here.

The admin/webmaster: I'm Brennan! I'm a Queer Red River Métis writer and webdev and huge advocate for the IndieWeb. You can get to know to me on my site, brennan.day

I made this for fun, and it's running using a homelab server in my basement. I don't make money or anything else. I'm just doing it for the love of ball.

fanfic.lol is meant to be a small, independent alternative for fanfic and fandom that prioritizes joy and fun. No aims at trying to replace AO3!

I am anti-genAI and so is the site. You can read more about my stance on AI here.

Archive warnings, like everything else, are under construction! I do have to adhere to the laws of my country (Canada). Please be patient.

I am pushing straight to production, which is to say the entire site could explode at anytime, so please do not use it as the only place you put things! :)

I forsee only a handful of people using this site, it def isn't for everyone. If you don't like it that's okay! Whether you want to give me input or just ignore it entirely.

I did a longer write-up here. Thank you everyone for the kind, warm reception of my silly little project. <3

[olderthannetfic]

I love the longer write-up. It gives me a much better sense of where you're coming from and why people should trust you—or which users would be a good fit.

I was there for the start of AO3, and we really did think we were going to usher in the next age of archives a la eFiction. It took too long for AO3's code to be in that kind of shape and the internet changed radically around us. We did not mean to create a behemoth. We just wanted venture capital bros to stop disrespecting us.

As a side note, all the comments you're getting like "There already is a fanfiction website. Wtf" are exactly what people said about AO3/OTW in 2007. There was a ton of bitching about us stealing FFN's idea. (Never mind that there were older archives.) There were frequent complaints about how there was already "an archive" and we didn't need another. Most of that discussion got deleted when FFN decided to nuke all of its inactive social spaces one Thanksgiving weekend while nobody was around to object or save their data. But I was there and I remember it and it sounded exactly like these comments now.

The oldschool core of AO3 was into the age of archives. We liked there being lots of different little spaces run by different fans. It's nice to see that energy floating around in 2026. Go indieweb!

I wish you a hundred invested users who want to form a community and nobody else.

[snakussy]

havent checked it out personally yet but just a super important note that since op says hes obeying canadian laws:

canadian laws are very different then most countries, ergo, if you want to post underage/gruesome stuff, it would be safer for op if you posted on that on ao3 instead. obscenity laws do in fact exist here and op get in legal trouble depending on what you post. so you know, be nice to op.

someone already asked op "is dead dove and proship content allowed here" and he said "yes if its legal" but didn't clarify what that meant, but basically in canada its

"if it can be interpreted as obscene, you can get in trouble"

so while you can get away with sfw content of lets say an adult/minor, it can bring things into outright illegal territories if you make it nsfw. but its not JUST that. our obscenity laws ALSO apply to violent sexual horror. so if your kink is lets say, woundfucking, a person can get op in legal trouble for hosting it, even if everything is all consensual.

people don't often get in trouble for obscenity laws because its So Much Effort, but from a hosting perspective thats different. a user posting content on ao3 isn't really gonna get tracked down, but a canadian hosting a website could be.

in conclusion: make sure to check out your kinks on canadian law sites before you do anything here. genuinely a nice project, just be careful for ops sake

[olderthannetfic]

Yup. Good point. That's something to look out for in most archives, whether from owner preference or local laws. I'd say the US is more of an outlier than Canada; we just exert an undue influence on internet culture.

A return to an Age of Archives means reading the rules of each more carefully. There used to be a lot more variability, not just because of laws but also in terms of focus.

In general, if you post a lot of underage, violent kink or noncon, AO3 is probably going to remain the right choice for hosting. A number of countries, not just Canada, go after a lot of things in text that the US does not.

I want to emphasize that this isn't a stance on OP's part any more than AO3 having to comply with US trade embargoes represents AO3 staff's personal opinions on Cubans. This is just the reality of running a site.

[ecunderbase]

more silly side-character Transformers comics! with guest appearance by a non-side-character!

at this point, i've definitely drawn Macabre and Shortround more than all their official art combined

[mancatrex]

Simpatico still on the brain :dead:

[transmascmarypoppins]

why is this post completely broken in every way imaginable

[cecilsrandomeverything]

Broken notes… deactivated account… removed image….

Finally, we have them all.

[spacefinch]

In addition: OP’s name is just… gone. No “[insert username]-deactivated[insert a bunch of numbers]” as is the standard for deactivated blogs.

Just the world “deactivated.” Look upon their post, ye mighty, and despair.

[chatblancofficial]

It’ll be almost impossible to find this post unless it wanders across your dash.

[black-quadrant]

Reblog this triple-dead post for something good to happen to you this week.

[jusjuiceboxbox]

Welcome to being an adult! Featuring such injury causing events as

- sneezed wrong

- turned your neck a little too fast

- slept weird

- took the trash out to the curb and stepped at a slightly different angle than usual

- breathed

- failed to breathe properly

- breathed in the wrong stuff. Allergy time

- looked too hard at something too far away

- knees

[biglawbear]

I'm instituting a new policy of "if I can't easily read your crusty scanned PDF then I'm sending it back to you, telling you to get your shit together and save your .docx as .pdf, and causing snakes to manifest inside your house"

[christaaah]

this but also if you are in accounting and you have an Excel file please do not save it as a PDF or take a screenshot of it and then paste it into another Excel file

[biglawbear]

I take it back whatever you have going on is way worse than what I was dealing with holy shit

[firstbornsons-deactivated202605]

@thesummoningdark hello?????

[thesummoningdark]

yeah no this is a real thing an actual human being said to me

[biglawbear]

Good afternoon to everyone in the notes having a horrible time! Y'all are fighting demons I never knew existed!! I think every person that makes you do stupid time wasting shit like this because they refuse to learn basic computer literacy should be fired!!

[thestateonmtv]

So with voting do you cum when a person get bitten into or when a person is swallowed or does it depend on the moment

[beachdeath]

usually you just mark a ballot with a pen or you select the candidate you want on a screen. sometimes you hole punch the ballot though

[chivachill]

for Like Thunder Answers Lightning by madmaenad on Ao3

[peterfromtexas-deactivated20250]

Reenactor throws a spear at a drone

[supapoopa]

What a time to be alive.

[tenthcorner]

“The medieval warrior, realizing the consequences of his impulsive act, immediately approached the owner of the drone and offered to pay for the damage.

The owner of the drone was so impressed by the brilliant attack that he suggested organizing a competition for bringing down “dragons” with short spears next year.

Drone owners have another year to develop a unique “dragon-like” design for their flying machines.” (x)

[kineticpenguin]

I am 100% cooler with this knowing that the spear-thrower realized “oops maybe I shouldn’t have done that” and tried to make it right, and that the guy who the drone belonged to was cool with it

[brunhiddensmusings]

just so everyone knows, this has already been memorialized in a runestone

[stephendann]

Everything about this post blesses those involved with a +4 on their next Today is Good Day roll

[fromaliminalspace]

a rough translation of inscription on the runestone:

On the seventh day of May in the year of 2016 on hither spot the mighty warrior Ulf hath slain a dragon with his spear.

so yeah, happy birthday to this dragon-slaying event and to it only

[nonlinear-nonsubjective]

Happy Ulf Hath Slain A Dragon With His Spear!

[transformers-sans-context]

Some kind of weird bug over here

[olderthannetfic]

So project hail Mary is currently all over my dash, and as always in these situations I decided to amble on over to AO3 to see what they've got cooking because I'm nosy. It's pretty popping, lots of alien sex and a truly awe-inspiring amount of making the human lead (Ryland Grace) aro-ace. But it was while poking around that I found that, to my delight, it's got one of my favorites canon oc variations happening in spades.

By that I mean "canonical loving partner of someone that never actually shows up, and is only rarely referenced by whoever they're dating/married to", which means that everyone that decided not to be mean and kill Adrian (alien lead Rocky's mate) off, make them awful, or just completely yeet them from the narrative has to more of less make an oc to commit some identity theft. There's quite a bit of variety to be found! I personally am quite amused by the "alien couple and their secret third thing human" set up some of these fics use. Fandom is great actually.

--