#ddvk3

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Some guy at their job making sure you don't have a weapon on you

6pm rolls around...

ohhh ohhh ohhh wait!!! little creative guy that wants to hug you and love you and see you smiling and happy

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YEAH BABY DOM THAT MOTHERFUCKER TIL HE CANT TAKE ANYMORE!!!!

[Ahaaahahuuuuhhhhh!! <3 Harder please!!]

More scribbles because i keep having IDEAS. But anyways always check on your partner and make sure he's ok before you keep going of course!! Don't want the pretty princess to be get full on injured :( Cause he will absolutely let himself get pushed too far before he realizes it's hurting him lmao

(And practice your aftercare folks! Just because our bots are plastic and metal and silicone doesn't mean they don't need some affection and care!)

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What's Duke's deal with sex? I thought he was aspec?

Ok yeah sorry lol it's a little confusing for me too. I just swing wildly between "not feeling sexual urges for months at a time" and "MAD HORNY ABT FICTIONAL CHARACTERS" so when I'm feeling a certain way I just be drawin porn all over the place lmao. Let me have him answer this bc I think it might help me present/flesh it out a little better:

[On my own, I don't have any explicit desire for it? That sort of pleasure in and of itself is not something I seek out through myself or other people.]

[I don't have my own sex drive so to speak, but when my partner wants it, I enjoy it! It can be really fun!]

[I do get sort of longing about it sometimes, but only because it reminds me of how much we love each other! If we already have a really strong bond, then for me it's something that brings us closer emotionally.]

[If I get the feeling I'm just being used for something fleeting and meaningless...um...I don't want to think about that anymore actually.]

Ok, so I guess it's a little closer to demi? I dunno, labels are hard to navigate. I've identified with pan, demi, grey-ace/aro...I think I've kind of imparted this onto Duke just a little. Personally I don't feel any romantic or sexual feelings for real people often, but when I do, I fall HARD and I fall FAST. I don't know how to articulate what attracts me to someone other than "I know it when I feel it". It doesn't matter what the person identifies as, gender/sex-wise, if I feel it I FEEL IT MAN. But for Duke, instead of just feeling both rarely, he's got just at least a tiny romantic crush on everyone who he perceives as "friend who he can be close to", and if they also feel a lil romantical about him, then he MIGHT be able to bring himself to reciprocate sexual intimacy, as long as they won't STOP loving him as soon as they get what they want. Again, it's only because he feels close with them and having sex makes him feel even closer. But there was definitely a time he didn't know any of this about himself, and the first time he got freaky with someone, he did NOT feel good about it at all...

(And when he gets overwhelmed, he has trouble using his words or otherwise communicating, so no one knows anything is wrong...you can imagine how that went.)

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FINE fine. Fine. Fine. Brain noise got to me. Time to go over and post some thoughts about Duke’s background and how he got to the point I’ve been depicting in my fucking insane horny fueled porn posts

Long post, so here’s a courtesy readmore

So like in a far-off future, sorta based on or at the very least similar to @droidcore’s little New City world, I imagine global conflict came to a head in a War to End All Wars. Where my thoughts diverge from their world is that I think this didn’t end in world-wide environmental devastation so much as it was, like, “we will methodically economically strangle each other and violently target and decimate population centers”. Like, high resource availability and almost zero ability to distribute it. Inspired by historically common tactics. There’s plenty to go around, but no way to MAKE it go around. You cannot fight if you’re starving.

Cue the desperate mass manufacture of small-scale destruction units - instead of having fallible, resource-needy people, put your destructive capability into hands that only need a quick charge and can only obey YOU. Self-decision-making tanks, jets, and a LOT of repairable ground soldiers.

Internal revolution wrought by an angry, starving, dying populace in empirical centers ALSO destabilizes the political powers. The only way for higher-class power to survive is to quit spending what little resources they have on their physical forces and lay low, trying to restore the health and trust of their constituents. All of this culminates in a much quieter Cold War.

While this is happening, what extra money that can be spared is pumped into mass destructive forces. Knowing that nuclear war would spell the end of everything, they choose the less, well, nuclear option. Instead of tossing the lives of your people when you already have a dwindling population, it’s much better for optics to just set aside some of your more expendable war droids, in case you need them.

Here’s where Duke’s story starts. In a dimly-lit, MASSIVE warehouse full of equipment meant for nothing but to cause harm and destruction. And he is one of those pieces of equipment. A non-person It, among a quite literal ton of others like it, which have all been uploaded with training data that is exclusively full of, in graphic, horrifying detail, how to commit violent murder and war crimes. What it’s like to kill someone, what it’s like to be irreparably damaged and shattered to pieces, what it’s like to be responsible for the undoing of one of your own teammates. Especially unsettling are the first-person perspectives of previous models who didn’t end up making it, and the faces of those they brutalized from that perspective, experiencing this as if you had done it with your own hands.

And those droids are all just powered on, ready to go, sitting there with nothing to do but analyze and replay these implanted memories, over and over and over again. Who knows how long they are there, living this trauma as if it is happening to them.

And then, one day, it’s suddenly all over. Tyrannical rule has been overthrown. A new government, or perhaps lack thereof, has taken its place. And to add to that - robots/AI are recognized, for the first time, as independently capable beings. As people. The way we think and learn isn’t really different to them, just our experiences in the world and how new information gets processed in the context of what we already know. The “data” we get “trained on”.

Well, these guys are just sitting there at the ready for war. We can’t release them like that, but it would take an insurmountable amount of time and effort to go through and reprogram and re-train every single one of them. And we can’t just dismantle something considered a person. The simplest solution is to just add more data, or connect them to the internet to find their own. So that’s what happens. These traumatized souls are just. Given some new thoughts and promptly let loose to try and find their own place in the world. A lot like how veterans in our current world are often traumatized by violent conflict, but are expected to just readjust with no follow-up unless they seek out mental health services themselves. A lot of them, like Duke, end up trying to live normally in roles adjacent to what they were meant for. He’s a security guard because, even if he doesn’t HAVE to exercise that part of him that is capable of violence on a daily basis, it’s seen as an advantage in a position like that.

The idea I’m getting at though is that is allllll about how they deal with this and who they end up choosing to be. The first thing Duke does to further himself is to get some kind of empathy generator thing installed. And of course this wreaks absolute havoc on his system. For him I’m imagining his trauma primarily manifests itself as intrusive thoughts and all he can do at first is mask HEAVY about it. See a kid with their parents, but the face looks all too familiar to the child in an implanted memory of throwing their body into a mass grave of families. And now that’s on replay in his head for 10 minutes while he stands still apparently just doing his job as he desperately tries to quash it in his mind.

Also, going from that non-person Thing to being a whole ass sentient being, people start just kind of assigning a “he” pronoun because he has a masculine build. And he’s fine with that, it at least gives him some personhood and he doesn’t just feel like an instrument of war. But what data he has scraped on “being a man” or “occupying a male role” still just doesn’t align with the way he actually wants to express himself. (Side note: “he” is a pronoun he’s become comfortable with and it is familiar to him. While he is exploring gender stuff and comes to discover LOVING being feminine, “she” is way too unfamiliar of a concept for him to use for himself Just Yet because he DOES still heavy identify as being a “he”. Genderflux feelings my beloved) With all his new thoughts and feelings and understanding of the world, he sees a beauty in it that he hasn’t gotten to experience before. It’s something he wants to both properly appreciate and be a part of.

From his originally imprinted purpose, he harbors a feeling toward himself as being something unequivocally evil in a way that he cannot recover from. Born A Bad Person and Don’t Deserve To Exist type shit. To compensate, he desperately seeks romantic affection, because in his mind, “that which can love and be loved cannot be truly evil and unworthy of life”. Ya feel? Anyways this guy has such an interesting dichotomy with what he IS vs what he wants to be and has to reconcile those things. Through the power of Love I guess lol. Happy Pride or whatever

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[I'm so glad you're back! <3 I've been trying out some new body mods...]

slop ass sketch of Duke but like. Isn't he SO cute????

Bonus:

[O-Oh..!! You wanna put your hands there? Well...okay! Just for you! <3 <3 <3]

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Highkey have some Duke voice claims btw

[omg (guess I had it coming…)]

[Everything Everything]

[Wayside]

[Your Apartment]

[Hot Rod]

Singing to yourself sort of hours </3