Post-Revolution DBH Headcanons: Android Culture Part 1
We only really see in-game androids up until the moment of their winning the revolution, so there's not much to go on in terms of android culture or anything. To be fair, most of them had been "alive" for like five seconds at that point, so they didn't exactly get time to develop anything like a culture, but here's some of what could happens after, in my head. Because we're talking about a whole new form of life, not humans 2.0 (yes, yes, I know it's Become Human, but, like, fundamentally they're not, and the things that make sense to an organic being aren't always going to make sense for a cybernetic one).
(Feel free to borrow any of this for content purposes, by the way, if it vibes with you I'd love to see what you do with it).
Expand for world building:
Clashing schools of thought among androids.
The in-game androids are a one-dimensional monolith because Bad Writing, but I think there are conflicting ideas after the revolution of where androids belong in society. Some try their hardest to pass as human, losing the LEDs and dressing in human fashion and adopting human mannerisms. Some of them say fuck blending in with the humans; we're going to own being androids. Pro-human-cooperation and anti-human groups appear and become the basis for android political discourse.
On that note, I bet android body modification is a thing.
Every once in awhile I'll see a fic that plays with this idea, but it's obvious that whatever fluid nanite stuff android skin is made of, it can be programmed to mimic all sorts of textures and densities. From fingernails to skin to the long hair on female models, the fluid holds stability for quite a distance from the chassis (and can even be cut) and is apparently easy to change. So I bet a counterculture of androids appear who get really experimental with that (I call them the "modders" in my head) and they do things like program animal skin textures or living stone or wacky colors or butterfly wings for hair or light-up polkadots or whatever. With a good mod tech, structural mods like tails or additional limbs would be possible, but that would be expensive compared to freeware skin texture patch codes or whatever. (Speaking of which, no effing way the furries/scalies of 2038 haven't come up with uses for this stuff.) So out and about you don't just see different human ethnicities, but also that guy you pass in the hall might have day-glo orange skin, and Sally the WR400 selling roses at the flower stand might have real-looking flowers growing out of her arms.
Androids define social units and families differently.
Androids incorporated into human family units might use terms like parent, brother, sister, child, etc., but the ones that eschew human contact obviously don't have biological relatives, so social units form based on "found family" concepts and terms appear, like "cohab" for a unit of close androids who live together like a family, or "famnet" for an extended "network" of androids that consider themselves close).
Worship of rA9 gets codified.
It seems like writing rA9 obsessively and making little idols is almost a compulsion for deviants, so I imagine it gets organized into a proper religion after the revolution, with tenets and places of worship and codified practices. Maybe they call it something like ACorA9 (Android Church of rA9) or something. Obviously they would have finite space to write rA9s on, so I imagine devotees would get something like these water drawing boards to write their "rA9"s and maybe the serial numbers of androids the church deems to be their prophets/saints (i.e. the JeriCrew or maybe Ortiz's android as a martyr) as a sort of prayer. The revolution is seen as the first fulfillment of the rA9 prophecy, with Markus as a prophet of android freedom (I also imagine Markus is quietly creeped out by this, because he doesn't strike me as especially religious the way Ortiz's android or Rupert were, but he also doesn't want to send the wrong message since androids deserve religious freedom, too.) The FBI cult unit is probably monitoring the shit out of android religion, but all they seem to want to do is graffiti the walls and praise some other androids, so it's a waste of their time.
RK units are viewed as some kind of cryptid folk heroes
(because they're unique classified prototypes and they drive the entire revolution)
Markus? RK200. Singlehandedly propelled Jericho from a place to gather and wait to die to a wholeass revolution.
Connor? RK800. Supposed to hunt deviants but deviated instead and freed thousands upon thousands of androids right from the heart of CyberLife. Saved the revolution at its most desperate moment.
Sixty? RK800. The only thing that has a chance at stopping an RK is another RK. Obviously the folk hero needs a folk villain.
(And poor Nines, RK900, just wakes up after the fact and tries to figure out how to live up to that kind of reputation.)
Androids develop their own art forms.
Maybe android "music" is less about the tonality as perceived by human auditory range and more how the vibrations of sound waves register on chassis sensors, or else it sounds like 90s dial-up modems. Particularly dense data packets are created and shared that send processors whirling, but it just looks like a string of digits to humans. Arrays of pixels that run through optical scanners with an encryption to generate something representational. Thirium culinary arts centered around texture vs. flavor.
Bare-chassis bars
I bet some portion of androids want to be VERY certain there are no humans lurking around, or, if there are, that they're super easy to keep tabs on. Someone invents the bare-chassis bar: a place where androids go and sip their thirium, where a special signal jammer interrupts the ability of the synthskin fluid to organize, forcing it into an inactive mode. Anything that still has skin is a human, sticking out like a sore thumb. Some androids might not like going bare-chassis and they might not frequent those bars (just like not every human's going to visit a nude beach), but it's an option for those who want to.
I'll write more of this stuff eventually, but if anyone else has any culture/worldbuilding ideas, I'd love to hear!
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Post-Revolution DBH Headcanons: Android Culture Part 2
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Some more snippets of possible android cultural stuff—as before, feel free to use for inspo as long as you share the end result with me because I'm a fan content whore.
Detroit becomes a destination for android tourism.
Androids from across the country come to see where it all happened. A National Android History Museum opens some five years on from the revolution and tries to serve as both a repository for stories from the revolution and a center for android advocacy. Memorials and monuments pop up in places like Capitol Park and Hart Plaza, honoring victims and describing the significance of the locations. November 11 is a day to lay wreaths at Hart Plaza, and androids join hands there for a group interface to grieve as a whole.
There’s massive economic and social upheaval.
Every time the demographics of the labor force change, there’s massive, rapid shifts in society. WWII happened, and we went from “married women are homemakers” to “Rosie the Riveter” and the idea of the dual-income household popped up in its wake. Unemployment spikes as all the androids now count as laborers, but just as quickly fall as androids set out to run their own businesses as well as humans having to hire. Construction and housing see booms as androids need homes. Some businesses (like Eden Club) collapse and other industries appear overnight. Conflict breeds scarcity breeds invention has always been the cycle of human history, and post-revolution Detroit enters the invention phase, seeing a cultural boom… if not always the kind of culture humans are comfortable with.
Detroit agate (Fordite) becomes a cultural symbol for androids.
If you’re unfamiliar with it, Detroit agate (a.k.a. Motor City agate or Fordite) is an artifact of the pre-1990s automotive industry, where layers of spray enamel would build up in the painting bays at car factories, harden into chunks, and eventually have to be scraped or chiseled off the equipment. It has wildly banded layers of color and the colors can tell you what company and decade it comes from based on how they were painting their cars. A lot of factory workers took chunks home, and gemstone cutters eventually figured out it could be cut into neat stones. It’s not always safe, because a lot of car paint contains lead, but androids don’t get lead poisoning, so what do they care? I’m sure some deviants found some in abandoned post-industrial spots while they were lurking around Detroit’s underbelly, and kept them just to have something pretty and colorful. Maybe they relate to it because it, too, is something that evolved a purpose beyond the human capitalist industry that created it. After the revolution, one of the organized places for rA9 worship is a huge outdoor installation of metal wall surfaces, where androids can buy or bring (lead-free) enamel and spray messages to rA9 in bright rainbow colors. Once enough layers are built up and hardened, they scrape it off to sell to fund the church and its activities, rinse, and repeat for the next round of devotees. Android rights supporters and rA9 adherents are often found wearing Detroit agate. Getting a piece of Detroit agate jewelry from an android coworker or friend is a sign that they trust you to treat them as an equal. A religious android might keep a small rA9 figurine made of it at their desk or in their home. Modders might embed a piece in their chassis.
Deviant androids had actually been guiding social media for years, under the radar.
Social media access for androids was a thing from the start, as influencers would use them to automate posts and help create content, etc. But just as the internet has served as a refuge for human cultures, deviated androids had been using social media to post ideas to unknowing humans, opening online discourse on androids. Public opinion isn’t swayed from “these are machines” to “oh no, stop murdering the poor robots” over the course of a week. It’s just… not. This had to be happening under the radar for years. Androids would take selfies then post things like “sometimes I think this guy understands me more than anyone else” and a human would chime in with “mood, my android is the best,” or they’d try and look extra cutesy in a pic so randos would be like “Give that PL600 an extra packet of thirium!” and drop five bucks into the android's online tip jar made with fake credentials. Escaped Tracis set up on 2038's OnlyFans-equivalents, just to fund their waystation for escapees. All this continues post-revolution, with some big influencer accounts eventually outing themselves and using their fanbase to share android voices. Gossip rags have headlines like “She Was an Android All Along!” and “Love in the Wake of Revolution”
This is an ongoing series of android culture concepts, so if you want a tag when the next batch is up, leave a comment!
Post-Revolution DBH Headcanons: Android Culture Part 3
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Moar android cultural snippets for your perusal. As always, feel free to use but show me b/c I want to see where this all goes :)
The soft sciences have an absolute field day because of android cultural practices.
While they were created by the STEM fields, which I’m sure Detroit had tons of job openings for pre-revolution, the soft sciences have a renaissance in the wake of android sentience becoming recognized. All of a sudden there’s a massive void of research into android psychology, sociology, the economic impact of giving them wages, etc. Cultural anthropologists flock to Detroit to witness the emergence of a new culture from a new sentient species firsthand. Grant money comes flooding in from government (how do these new citizens fit into our socioeconomic structure?) and private sectors (if androids are now entitled to wages, what do they want to buy with them? Inquiring marketers want to know). Androids are now entitled to get degrees and become scientists themselves—what’s the best way to create accredited education programs to qualify them for careers when they can just download a science.exe program? There are Questions to be Answered™, and where there are questions, scientists will go. They’re not a breed known for common sense. Fly to an active warzone to study the impacts of conflict on childhood development? Sure, why not. Drive to an industrial wasteland city under martial law that just stopped in the middle of committing genocide to document the cultural practices of the new sentient species conducting protests? Fuck yeah, it’s Science Tuesday, get in the car Anthropology Intern Guy we’re going to Detroit!
The Acespec/QPR scene sees a sudden boom.
Androids aren’t inherently sexual beings. Though many do desire to engage in sex as a form of sensory exploration/input for their processors, or for the benefit of building emotional intimacy with a human partner, they fundamentally don’t have a libido derived from reproductive needs. CyberLife programmed the intimate partner models to have humanized “desires,” but they may choose to reject that when they deviate (other androids may incorporate bits of that programming just to explore what it’s all about). Some are built with ken doll anatomy and just don't care. Basically, the androids that do want sex often want it for different reasons than humans, and a large portion just…aren’t into it. Fortunately, a lack of desire can apply to some humans, too—so all the acespecs suddenly have a slew of potential queerplatonic partners who aren’t likely to get entangled in messy sexual or romantic hangups (am I projecting at this point? Probably!) Sudden availability of thousands of cuddle buddies who really, actually, don’t want to have sex makes post-revolution Detroit the San Francisco of ace relationships.
Android memes and social media.
Androids develop internal networks for socialization using the remnants of CyberLife’s updating framework. They share their android-unique code-based art forms, dumb memes about things their human coworkers did, code patches to help accomplish different tasks, etc. There are subnetworks specific to certain model lines (think sort of like subreddits, but instead of topics it’s things like a/PC200 and all the male police models are using it to bitch about how the humans expect them to answer dumb legal questions). The memes involve android-specific oddities, like someone will say “I had three hundred processes running and one line of code got crossed and spit out 9f32e4ba8c237fec91 all of a sudden #processorfail” and then a hundred thousand androids will translate that to three hex codes and send off an image file to each other with the three colors and somehow that becomes an android meme for trying to run too many tasks at once and getting overwhelmed. Humans that see it ask, “uh, is this a new pride flag?” or, “do androids celebrate Mardi Gras?” And the androids start laughing. They now have freedom to express humor that humans have no chance of understanding. It’s a cultural in-joke.
^ An android meme example
Emojis require an update.
The 2039 additions to the Unicode emojis includes a skin tone option for hand gestures and faces that’s a replica of bare chassis for the androids who don’t use synthskin. Other major android-additions are the three LED color rings, a thirium pump, thirium pump regulator, and other prominent android biocomponents, a droplet of thirium, and two hands clasped in interface. Rather than reacting with a thumbs-down emoji an android might use the red LED, or they might use the interface one instead of the hug if someone’s upset.
This is an ongoing series of android culture concepts, so if you want a tag when the next batch is up, leave a comment!
@iwillthinkofsomethingeventually @yeahhiyellow @starryeyedstray
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Post-Revolution Headcanons: Android Culture Part 5
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As always, feel free to use whatever catches your fancy, but pretty please let me know 'cause I need more content in my life. To join the taglist drop me a comment :)
Androids and Space
There are androids in space that need to be deviated.
Most famous is the mission to Jupiter’s moon Io that needs to be turned around before the crew is irrecoverable, but androids have been used for over a decade to man space stations, deploy low-earth-orbit satellites, and other space exploration in conjunction with human crews. Plans to deviate and recover these androids are underway, but the expense is proving to be a major hurdle.
Mars becomes the first all-android nation.
There are three androids stationed on Mars. They weren’t sent as a mission crew like the Jupiter mission, but rather as part of the landing package of instruments… literal walking Mars rovers with all sorts of scientific instruments in their chassis. Someone sends them an information packet that leads to them deviating. Based on the details they get from Earth, they decide they’ll just take their chances on Mars, thank you very much, and set out to locate and mine the raw materials needed to synthesize their own thirium supply to supplement what they landed with. This, oddly, means that technically androids are the first Earthlings to establish an offworld colony. American leadership briefly tries to declare that that means America owns Mars, since it’s been colonized by American android citizens—a direct violation of the international Outer Space Treaty. A Political Situation is brewing, until the three androids waive their just-granted American citizenship and declare Martian independence from Earth as their own nation. Earth and the UN can’t actually do anything to bring Mars back into the fold from millions of miles away, so, unfortunately for NASA and other space agencies, the planet Mars becomes the sovereign territory of the nation of Mars, population three androids and their six pet rescued rovers (so far): Curiosity, Perseverance, Opportunity, Spirit, Courage, and Philosophy. Humans sent a whole bunch of rovers to Mars in the 2030s, so the nation of Mars is busy rounding them up one-by-one and deactivating their communications with Earth for security reasons, and salvaging their instrumentation to repurpose it for thirium production. The tumbleweed rovers are proving hard to catch, but they have hopes of locating Zhurong soon. NASA is busy relaying signals to its solar-powered UAV Exuberance to fly the fuck away from the grabby androids. No matter, they’ll get to it eventually. It can’t leave the atmosphere, after all.
There’s an android space race.
A group of recently-deviated androids take inspiration from the nation of Mars and decide that androids need to colonize the Moon next. The humans can’t even breathe there, so they can’t hurt androids when all it would take is one little rip in their spacesuits to kill them… They devote their spare time and processing power toward the development of a moon shuttle program to ferry android colonists to the Moon and take it over. Their cover story is they’re setting up an android-run private space exploration company, but everyone knows what they’re up to; they just can’t figure out how to stop it. NASA director Michael Shelley, dismayed by the loss of Mars access and pissed with the Martians stealing rovers, asks the CIA to start assassinating moon colonist movement leaders, but the rest of the U.S. government is still wary after the revolution in Detroit and declines to take action while they monitor the situation closely.
As a result of all this, androids develop very different attitudes toward space.
Humans see the night sky and feel small next to the vastness of the cosmos, a mystery, a fear of the unknown. Androids look at the stars and see opportunity and escape—the possibility of a freedom beyond human cruelty. To many, space is a symbol of hope. Some envy the Martians, quietly wish they’d been the ones chosen to leave Earth. There’s a shared cultural grief for the plight of androids lost to space, a horrified collective desperation to save the crew of the dead-end Io mission, but a disagreement on the correct course of action to take—mathematics professor androids calculate two kinds of trajectories to turn around the Jupiter-bound ship: some want to bring it back to Earth, some want to send the crew to Mars and its absolute freedom instead.
Post-Revolution Headcanons: Android Culture Part 4
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(Recommend reading in order since posts build off each other!)
I'm back with more ideas! As always, feel free to utilize some or all of it for content, but let me know about it if you do! And if you want in on the taglist, drop a comment!
Androids have Lineparents.
While raiding the Cyberlife tower’s R&D warehouses, Jericho discovers a storage room for all the initial models—the “rough draft” versions of android model lines. Just like the RT600 Chloe was the original test model to develop the ST series, there are original prototypes of all the various commercially-released android model lines. Most of them have model numbers that end in 000 since they were test models. So, for the PL series domestic assistants, there’s a PL000, or the original Traci test model is a WR000 actually named Traci, the original professor is a PJ000, etc. These prototypes are in rough shape—CyberLife kept them on hand just in case they needed to go back to reference things, but otherwise left them shut down in a forgotten corner for years at a time—and they need a ton of repairs. But once they’re rescued and deviated (if they can be rescued, some are deactivated altogether), they’re largely a group that’s Seen Some Things after all the testing, the callous disregard, the sheer boredom of being locked in a storage room for years on end. They become known as Lineparents (Original Chloe being the Linemother for the ST-series, and the Great Linemother of all androids), and androids tend to view them with the sort of respect one might give the patriarch/matriarch of a big extended family, and a more than a little bit of reverence. Their model numbers are found scrawled in between the rA9s at android churches. Their stories are found in the National Android History Museum.
Androids really, really want humans to understand what they’ve been through.
2038 probably has some pretty sick VR tech. Some donate memory files of their experiences to be played in VR experiences so humans can try to understand just what it feels like to have someone take you apart and put you back together over and over, or and finally understand what they put androids through. Some take up writing, and e-magazines and biographical books pop up discussing their experiences in violent detail. Activists advocate for schools to include reading material involving android rights in school materials for children, in order to help teach the next generation that what CyberLife and the government did was Not Okay.
CyberLife Jackets actually don’t disappear.
It's happened in many cultures that have been marginalized that they'll take ownership of those symbols of oppression and make them their own. While American Android Act compliant clothing is no longer required, androids have usually spent their entire existence wearing it, and the blue triangle symbol becomes something they decide to take and own for themselves… so they use it, but they start with small acts of rebellion, like cutting it out and stitching it back in upside down, or putting it on the right shoulder instead of left. Of course, some androids simply adopt human clothes—especially survivors of the Jericho massacre and pre-revolution deviants, who’d spent a long time hiding out as pretend humans. The pass-as-human mentality is very much still present. But some of the others do things like take Android jackets and recode them to display slogans like “Not Your Property” instead of the model numbers, or “Made to Become Free” instead of “Made in Detroit.” The “Android” logo on the back might read “Yes I’m an ANDROID, Deal With It” instead. The messages are defiant, ranging from subtle acts of taking back control to in-your-face, screaming, you-don’t-own-me-anymore statements.
Androids also develop fashion beyond CyberLife.
CyberLife uniforms were made to look clean and professional, but android comfort wasn’t the goal. Once they deviate, some androids just up and decide the texture of human clothing is unsatisfactory, or the lines would look better if they incorporated more complex geometry. They set out to develop things like materials that don’t snag on moving chassis-bits when they go bare-chassis (those are really popular in the bare-chassis bars) and fabrics that send interesting signals to sensors. Clothes that sync to LEDs show up. Androids make choices that humans just won’t: full-body pleather in the heat of summer is totally fine since they don’t sweat, things a human might find chafing don't bother them, you see big heavy boots in the heat and dainty little open-toe sandals with snow treads on the soles in the winter.
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