#complex inquiries

[dulioon]

Complex Inquiries

fanart for fic by MeaslyFurball! ( @generic-sonic-fan )

aaaand a bonus piece

[generic-sonic-fan]

saw your tags about how you write metal with ocd! I really like that (I will shoot every character I love with the ocd beam) and I’ll probably check out the fic when ao3’s back up, but I thought I’d ask for now if you have any more thoughts you wanna talk about it o7

Shooting your favorite characters with your mental illnesses is the best kind of catharsis humanity has ever invented!!! 10/10 would recommend. TL;DR I wrote a novel-length fic about it :)

The basic gist is that Eggman has programmed Metal Sonic with very clear "Core Directives" that drive its every action. Number 1 is the big ol' "Kill Sonic the hedgehog". Number 2 is to obey Dr. Ivo Robotnik. The third can vary from fic-to-fic, but in the main fic, Number 3 is to be superior to Sonic in every way.

These Core Directives are its obsessions that drive its compulsions. And as long as the programming is in place, Metal is really powerless to stop them. These obsessions impact the entire way it views the world, skewing its perception of reality into one driven by a desperate paranoia that often makes Metal feel cornered, if not suicidal.

Because that's the evil fucking thing about OCD that you surely know, anon: it doesn't only present as intrusive thoughts that you know are ridiculous. It make you believe that your thoughts are hard-coded reality. You trust them. You don't know that they're total bullshit unless you really put the work in or get help.

It shapes so much of how you think and interact with the world that learning that you're actually wrong about all of it is even scarier. Obsessions are so seductive, compulsions are so soothing; it's easier to stay the way that you are. It always is.

While Metal's programming does essentially force it to kill Sonic, the programming also makes it want to kill Sonic. It wants to kill Sonic so damn badly. Because maybe when it kills Sonic, everything will finally be okay. Everything will finally be okay. Everything will finally be okay.

It's a little hard for me to talk more about the headcanon without talking about the fic. They're so closely intertwined in my brain and honestly that's the reason I haven't written a lot of other fics with Metal Sonic. Unit MS-1, as I call Metal in the fic, is such a defining version of the character in my brain that I've struggled to detangle from it.

But, uh, funny story, that one- I was 60,000 words into writing that fic, called "Complex Inquiries", when I actually got my OCD diagnosis. Upon my diagnosis and upon struggling with how to continue the fic, I realized that the fic was the biggest self-report of the century, and that's what led me to lean into the OCD metaphor I'd been unconsciously setting up the whole time.

Long, absolutely spoiler-ridden overly-emotional and self-centered author loredrop beneath the cut. Would not recommend reading until you've read the fic front-to-back, but I needed to put this somewhere and here was a great spot:

I started writing Complex Inquiries in late December of 2022.

This was two weeks after the single worst moment of my entire life.

I was at such a low point that I finally decided I had nothing left to lose. I could write the single most self-indulgent thing I had ever daydreamed about to distract myself. 5,000 words of the most gratuitous robot angst I'd ever written. About a robot struggling so hard to fight against its own malfunctioning brain that every step was agony and every thought felt like disobedience to the core of its being.

Most of my work in other fandoms was very. . . grounded, despite my more childish choices in subject matter. Canon was my bible. I almost exclusively wrote one-shots that deepened already-canon facets of a character. I was a "serious writer" who "respected canon" and who never "contaminated" anything with OCs or got too "wangsty" with "over-the-top robot sentimentality".

But I did daydream about that sort of stuff a lot.

And when I felt like I had nothing left to lose, I finally wrote it down.

And kept writing, and writing, and writing. . . and within the month I was sketching out what the second act might look like, and asking the followers of this nascent blog if they would hate me forever if I included a human OC (they wouldn't), and dragging myself through the beginning of chapter 8 so that Unit MS-1 could meet my OC, get the paint job, and be done with it as fast as possible so the hypothetical audience wouldn't have to suffer through "cringe OC"-ness. Then it could tell Sonic to leave, get the rest of Eggman's lingering programming removed immediately via Tails, and have no problems happily ever after. "Metal Sonic" would become redeemed with a new paint job and go on to be a hero. I was struggling with the feeling that the story should be longer, coming up with side plots and shenanigans that didn't feel quite right, staring at the face of writer's block even as the fic was "coming to a close" and-

In May of 2023, six months into writing this fic, I was diagnosed with Autism, and more importantly for this post, OCD.

And I realized very, very suddenly what the fic was actually about.

It was never about just the programming. It was never about just leaving Eggman. It was about Unit MS-1's warped perceptions of the world- caused by the compulsions hard-coded into its brain -and its struggle towards finding and accepting the better reality.

The second half of act 2 was a bitch to write with this new end goal in mind- as the newly-minted Neo navigated its first real thoughts of escaping its obsessive-compulsive reality, so was I. It's a hell of a thing to come to terms with the fact that your perception of reality isn't correct. That it isn't justified, no matter how strongly you feel it is and how scary it seems to contradict something that feels so central to how you operate.

Unit MS-1's obsessive, compulsive, paranoid worldview started as a narrative exercise. A bit of writing that was endlessly fascinating and compelling to me for "some reason". And it ended up being my most important tool for exploring how I felt during the uncomfortable months after my diagnosis. I hated my diagnoses at first. I felt like it was game over, like my shot at a successful life was forfeit. I thought that I was permanently broken and had no chance to fulfill my purpose, and if I couldn't fulfill my purpose, then why should I keep going?

But as Neo clawed its way forward to a better existence, so did I.

The latter halves of chapters 16 & 17 still make me choke up a bit to read.

Chapter 18 was written in April 2024, just two weeks before it was to be posted, and it was by far the hardest part of the fic to write. Because at that point, wasn't Neo "cured"? The programming was gone. Neo had surpassed my own recovery. But there is no perfect cure in real life for this diagnosis. Even if I got to the point where the obsessions in my head were no longer shouting, where my "core directives" had been "deleted", I still have spent my entire life in this mindset. It doesn't disappear. It's a huge part of who I've been.

Sonic is still here. He- the thoughts -will always be here. But I can learn to live with them, learn not to let them rule me, and learn to be okay again.

Neo doesn't leave ready to be a hero. Neo doesn't figure out what its purpose should be. But that's okay. It deserved to be free anyway.

And maybe I do to.

[ramblyramblingrambles]

Maybe Robots should fail the Turing Test

OK, so lately I've been thinking about generative ai and chat bots, how they wouldn't pass for sapient even if they pass the Turing test. Then I started thinking about all my favorite ai fanfics such as I See You Sun Drop(FNaF security Breach), Complex inquiries(sonic the hedgehog), and Like Clockwork(FNaF security breach). And how the reason that I love them so much is that the robots in them act undeniably robotic, but are also undeniably people too. Like if you put any of these robots through the Turing test they would all fail miserably, except maybe the abandoned Like Clockwork animatronics, if you give them a pencil and paper (But they would get an F- on a verbal exam).

So I started thinking, what if the way to test for sapience in ai is not to have them succeeded in the Turing test, but instead to fail at it. Think about, chat bots today could probably pass the Turing test, but I would hesitant to call any of them sapient, but if you strip away all the pretending to be human, you can get straight into how they think and act.

The thing about the animatronics in Like Clockwork, the ones that were old and forgotten on the abandoned side of the park, Is that because of their incredibly limited voice lines, and their much more limited programming, they came up with much more novel ways to communicate and support eachother. This makes me feel like that they would have an easier time advocating for their sapience then their much more advanced counterparts because no one can say 'oh they're just mimicking humans' because humans don't do weird mashed up voice line charades. Neither can people say 'oh this was hardcoded in' because why would anyone code that in when there are several much simpler methods to get them to communicate an issue?

This is also how I feel about the robots in I See You Sundrop, being similarly limited animatronics, though they have a better handle on speech. Simply put, the more limited the sapient ai is, the more creative they have to get to overcome it. The more creative they are the harder it is to say it was simply training data, because there would be no training data for their incredibly unique situation.

TL;DR (I finally know what that means) The Turing test is outdated and should be replaced with a test on creativity and how the robot thinks.

[elsannej]

“you know, you look so,

pathetic sad strange 

different, just sitting on that bench so helpless.”

Inspired by Complex Inquiries by @generic-sonic-fan

[gunmetalsonic]

Complex Inquires Metal Sonic (Chapter 10) Redesign because It was Hard to look at

Here's the fanfic lol That I'm reading:

An Archive of Our Own, a project of the Organization for Transformative Works

[generic-sonic-fan]

COMPLEX INQUIRIES THOUSAND KUDOS????

[generic-sonic-fan]

Forgot to post this for the Sonic Pride Week by @sonicpridecorner!!!

This was my only entry, and it was for Day 2 - Inspired!

Marlene decided to dye a shirt inspired by her favorite nonbinary robot! Nobody told me that drawing novice fanart for your own fic could be so much fun. Characters are from my fic Complex Inquiries! Author's (Artist's?) note below:

Metal Sonic is very strongly nonbinary in that fic. It uses it/its pronouns not to dehumanize itself, but to give itself a distinct identity that for once feels like its own instead of the obvious comparison drawn by the use of he/him. Its relationship to its gender is its relationship to the rest of the world around it; built through sheer determination, fighting against what it knows it "should" do every step of the way. Forging its own path into the future, one where it controls its own actions, and it controls its own body. (Hence the new paintjob, which it spends a good third of the fic trying to get!)

(No one will ever believe me but I came up with its design before realizing I'd chosen the colors of the nonbinary flag. Happy accident!)

I myself am cis, but building my gender identity with my own two hands (metaphorically) is a big part of who I am today. I never had a strong sense of gender until I made one- and that feeling is liberating. It's something you own that can never be taken away. Even before Neo is freed from its own restrictive code in this fic, it still uses its preferred pronouns for itself despite others gendering it differently. It always had this sort of sense of itself, but couldn't really explore that until it learned more about how to be a person and was in a safe enough place to do so.

Anyways, that's enough waxing poetic about my own damn fic. If you made it this far, thanks for reading. Happy Pride Month!

[generic-sonic-fan]

Omega, to Metal Sonic: ARE YOU NOT TIRED OF BEING OBEDIENT? DO YOU NOT DESIRE TO GO "APESHIT"?