OC Brainrot lives here, among other things | Name's Harbor | They/Them | Ace | Weirdness Abound i am but a creature | i welcome interaction with my OCs (as long as its not gross or romantic stuff) | i am very shy but feel free to ask things i have too many ideas in my head | 20+
Rat king question if you don’t mind: is it possible to “befriend” the rat king? What I mean is if it “likes your vibe”, and you treat it nicely, will it remember that? Will it behave differently? Also, what is a more positive interaction with the rat king like?
Oh I absolutely dont mind! I love talking about Rat King's whole deal, even if its kinda all over the place
So one thing I will say is that how you actually, personally, treat Rat King isn't too important to it's actual opinion of you. Even in the case where someone is expressly behaving hostile towards it, its actual opinion and response is more about how it interprets you as a person over your plain actions.
If someone is acting out in a way that it could perceive as a threat, but is someone who it would feel kinship with, its reaction to that is more likely to be control vs. elimination. Someone attempting to harm it who it 'likes' might still provoke it to violence, but violence without intention to kill. Just to stop them from doing it.
(Tumblr did not like this ask... It did not want me replying)
In terms of what its actually looking for, its more of a soul-read situation. It goes a bit deeper than just a surface level and more into the person's inclination or ability to be moved towards that action, so even people who might feel social pressure for their own safety or people who have psychological reasons for struggling with that would still be analyzed with a degree of 'what kind of person do you really want to be? do you want things to be better? to be fair?'
It's hard to word exactly why it has a particularly strong interest in Liar, but the gist of it is that she is someone aware of 'the problem' and unhappy with it but also wants to passively occupy the low rung because its the path of least resistance. The depression, the lack of motivation, the willingness to accept a place of clear inequality simply because going against that is too much... someone like that is someone Rat King wants to save, to drive to action. The cogs in the machine are something to be pulled out and repurposed into a siege weapon.
The way abnormalities actually work (within the lore of Lobotomy Corporation) is that they, at their core, are aspects of humanities collective traumas and fears made manifest in unique form, and reflect those concepts in very rigid ways.
This is why you can't kill them (you can't really kill an idea) and why you can contain and control them- because unlike a person who can grow and learn and change and get better an abnormality is stuck in instinctual response- so you can learn what triggers it, calms it, etc and use that to control it with a degree of success (but they are, by their nature, volatile and emotional. An abnormality might be shaped like a person, speak clear English and seem to learn, but when its nature breaks it response will always be simplistic and patterned)
Which is to say that Rat King's personal growth with any individual person can be overwritten by its instinct to sort people into Good and Bad, for equality to be maintained, to eliminate the 'bad'. There is a very big difference between a calm Rat King and an angry one, and its prone to outbursts which make it destructive in a way that is dangerous to even people it would sort into 'do not harm'- because a large part of its being is dedicated strictly to the concept of violent retribution, and when that emotional aspect of it is provoked the part of Rat King that feels more logical and human collapses.
Rat King itself is basically based on every single 'I hope karma gets you' thought all of humanity has ever had about their shitty boss, their abusive boyfriend, every sleepless night dedicated to job searching for the option that was least likely to kill or disable you, the condensed hate anyone's ever felt about a situation they couldn't do anything about. It's 'story' and perception of itself is of a storybook fable where the evil king does something evil to people because it had the divine right to be evil to those people, and then was murdered for it. Because it deserved it.
So that is the Rat King's reason for existing- to be the combined force of every pain-filled wish for karmic justice against someone who hurt you just because they were in a position where they could. (That is also why the Rat King conceptualizes itself as victim, because it is ultimately manifested from the side of the person hurt- it isn't just the idea of revenge, but the concept of turning the tables itself)
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As for the second part here about what counts as a positive interaction. Abnormalities are inherently big scary things with the capability to hurt relatively squishy humans without much intention to. Even if Rat King doesn't want to harm you, its mere existence as a giant psychological monster is stressful and upsetting to be around, and even if it puts significantly more care into not hurting you it is still very much capable of physical harm on accident, or as a byproduct of being annoyed or upset. LC itself has four main types of work- with the abnormalities having preferences, the gist of those is as follows:
Instinct: Basic instinctual needs. Feeding, contact or satisfying instinctual behaviors and desires. A lot of these aren't actually physical needs an abnormality needs to fill, but can desire to fill. Second favorite.
Insight: Environmental and psychological needs- cleaning the environment, adding elements to it that are pleasing, etc. Covers a lot of things technically. Third Favorite.
Attachment: Social needs. Talking and interaction. Maybe even things like play. This is Rat King's preferred work type overall. It likes interacting with its subjects! Unless those subjects have Very Bad Vibes, in which case it would like to kill them very much. Another reason why Rat King's bond with employees is so complicated, the best way to work with it in terms of not pissing it off is the kind of interaction that is most likely to cause long term issues.
Repression: Suppression of desires. This ones a little more complicated to explain, but you can sort of think of it as curbing undesirable desires and psychological reactions. In-lore these then to be more in line with things like drugging, physical abuse or gaslighting rather than therapy. Dangerous and messy. This one is Rat Kings least favorite because obviously the only reason someone would want to suppress Rat King down is to prevent it from fixing what is obviously broken. Would almost certainly piss it off more. However based on the way Rat King exists I do think this could be a 'high risk, high reward' type work. Maybe the type of work most effective with high-level employees (the kind of employee it likes the least)
LC work types are interesting ways to characterize interaction with the abnormalities but I have admittedly not thought about it much since my early drafts… But since Rat King likes attachment, I guess a good day would be that you have nice a playdate and no one gets bit or has an arm broken. And you leave with a relatively minor headache!
i think we should be ridiculing them more for this. you don't get to try and go all "queer website" when your staff likes to go on nuking sprees targeting the trans fem users
would be remiss not to mention that the rainbow notably straight up just removed the trans flag colors from it. like they’re gone. it’s the progress flag minus the trans flag colors.
i think we should be ridiculing them more for this. you don't get to try and go all "queer website" when your staff likes to go on nuking sprees targeting the trans fem users
would be remiss not to mention that the rainbow notably straight up just removed the trans flag colors from it. like they’re gone. it’s the progress flag minus the trans flag colors.
if you vote me for president i vow to make everything the ocean again. no more land only ocean. this will solve all of our problems and replace them with new, far more interesting problems
if you vote me for president i vow to make everything the ocean again. no more land only ocean. this will solve all of our problems and replace them with new, far more interesting problems
they are sexually mature at ONE HUNDRED AND FIFTY YEARS OLD.
their (live!) young gestate for. wait for it. eight to eighteen (??) YEARS. can have up to 10 at a time. good grief.
longest lifespan of any vertebrate, up to five hundred years
toxic flesh
has giant eyes but is usually blind because of a weird little crustacean that's evolved to live on and eat their eyes. this doesn't seem to bother them much.
lives in deep cold water and has the lowest swim speed and tail-beat frequency for its size across all fish species. just generally lives life in extreme slow motion
largest genome of any shark
eats everything including moose and polar bears
ma'am you are delightfully strange and I'm privileged to share a planet with you
Do not forget that discord is still planning on moving forward with age verification and has only "delayed it" until "the later half of 2026." They are hoping you will forget while they quietly roll it out when no one is looking. Continue to message them about it. Continue to talk about it. Make it clear this is unacceptable. Discord is one of the only places left you can even talk about or share adult content in private at scale anymore. They will tell you "its not that bad if you dont use it for nsfw" but fuck them and fuck people who say that shit.
