#coding discourse

[cookies-from-nj]

I know this is a bad-faith argument but whenever I hear about "Astarion is gay coded" discourse I can't help but imagine someone saying

"Actually Astarion is not bi, I know this because I am super progressive and not problematic tm and I can clearly see that he acts like a fa-"

[tabby-shieldmaiden]

I will say this, I think I get why people would find coding discourse offensive. In that “you see an evil person as this group and therefore you associate negative traits with the group even though they have barely any relation” sort of way. So like, for example. If you say a person who is always blunt and rude to others, is logical to the point of never considering other’s feelings, and is inconsiderate of people’s boundaries and personal space is autistic coded. This draws on stereotypes that autistic people are rude, hyperlogical, and creepy. Some autistic people would find that offensive because they don’t act like that and therefore saying they’re like autistic people is offensive and perpetuating stereotypes which make their lives more difficult.

But on the other hand, I do kind of see the other side of it too. From what I can gather it’s the fact that people see traits in themselves in certain characters. And the fact that people with those traits are always portrayed negatively. So, to use autism as an example again. Say we have an autistic person who can be quite blunt, is more hyperlogical, and genuinely does have difficulties in determining how much personal space they should give others. If they see other people in media around them who act that way, and notice that people who are like them are always portrayed as the punchline or the villain, they’re likely to get offended. Largely because, well, they do genuinely find it harder to be tactful or to grasp how much personal space a person needs. That’s how their brain was wired. They slip up more in those regards. So, by portraying all people with those traits negatively, they feel uncomfortable.

Like, I don’t fully know how to discuss the topic largely due to the divide in thinking that generated. Because this isn’t a conversation that can go anywhere on soundbites and scapegoats alone. Which unfortunately, I sometimes feel like it has grown into soundbites and scapegoats. What I do know and did learn from following the discourse however, is that I think what needs to happen more is 1) for everyone to begin actively listening to others, and 2) for more and different types of stories to be told from all sorts of different perspectives.

[the-final-sif]

Just my two sense on the discourse b/c why not I hate myself enough to get involved.

Coding, as far as we know, is the transformers equivalent to our brains. They’re machines, coding is how they know what to do, much like us humans know what to do because of chemical signals and brain shit. That being said, I’d like to say this:

It would be literally impossible for a transformer to do something/anything without the “coding” to do it. (or another living being I suppose)

Wanna take a step? You need coding to run those calculations for hard/long/far to step, you also need coding to communicate to all the right places what to do where and to activate all the parts needed. That’d be “step coding”. Things don’t just magically move on their own, someone’s gotta tell them what to do, and for transformers that’s coding. 

Want to figure out what the hell is going on? You’ll need to run situational analysis code for that, pattern tracing codes and codes to recall memories related to the situation, as well as coding for your eyes to look, coding to figure out + translate those results, and coding to figure out your best course of action given all those results. 

Why do you think it’s so fucking hard to build an AI/andriod irl, because they need so much fucking code + space it’s insane. I think the last count for Watson was something upwards of 750 servers and 2000+ processing threads running around the clock and he’s still a very basic form of AI compared to transformers.

So going back to the discourse, let’s talk about “medical coding” since I recall that one coming up, yes, all medics would have to have medical coding, and no it isn’t ableism to say “medic builds have natural medic coding”, because guess what, they’d be fucking inable to do their jobs without it. You can’t do something if you don’t have code for it. You can acquire/build up your coding via learning or download but if a transformer doesn’t have the code or the means to get it, then it’s impossible for them to do the thing. 

Going back to people, let’s put it this way, if you don’t have knowledge of how to apply a medicine in anyway, including how to move your hands, how to get your hands to move in the first place, how to read the directions if you have them, how to not hurt the person you’re apply it to, etc, all the basic processes that are required to do something like apply medicine correctly, you can’t fucking do it. Because in this scenario you’d be lacking the knowledge or even ability to do guesswork on how to apply it, down to your ability to move your hands/whatever you’re using to apply it in order to apply it. You’d be completely unable to take any action to apply that medicine because you lacked the “coding” to do so completely.

Now that’s not how things work in real life of course, most people can read the directions/have some basic knowledge of how to basic medicines and have the ability to move in order to do that, not everyone, but most people. But we don’t all call ourselves doctors, that’s a title reserved for the people who are really really good at applying medicine, who have gone to education for quite awhile and thus have built up the knowledge, neural pathways and “coding” to do so. Likewise, Medics in the transformers universe either went to some sort of academy, or were built with their “medical coding” depending on the cont.  And that make sense, if you’re going to build someone with the intention of them being able to fix others, and you give them a bunch of tools/sensors to do it, you’re going to give them the fucking coding to do it as well, you’re not going to be like “lol have fun figuring that out bitches hope you don’t kill your patients.” Now this isn’t to say that a non-medic build couldn’t pick up the coding as well, quite the opposite, much like any human can acquire medical knowledge and become a doctor or at a doctor’s level as long as they have the mind to do so could any transformer with the memory capabilities. 

Tl:dr:

Coding is basically neural pathways + the nervous system, nothing can be done without coding because that’s how the brain works. Authors saying “Ratchet’s medical coding kicked into gear” is no different from saying “Dr. Wilson’s medical training kicked into gear”

[derseprinceoftbd]

If I had a nickel for every Fandom I was in where a small contingent declared that the character with the name pronounced Mina, with an inhuman skin tone, horns, and an association with the color pink, was Black-coded...

The main difference, of course, is that the MHA Fandom is *wrong*.