I was talking with a friend earlier today about what his villainsona would be, and the conversation moved to "if you were a cartoon character, who would you be". we decided on him being a skateboarding warforged in a dungeons and dragons type high school ("High Fantasy") and I'd be the teasing AI in some kind of raunchy star trek type thing ("NebuloUS")
- I was the ship's AI, the Generalized Recurrent Artificial Cogitation Engine
- the captain's name was Twinkleton Somethingorother but I'd keep calling him "Twink"
- I could project a hologram of my fursona to kinda interact with the crew
- our ship was the Nebula Princess. I was scavenged from the last ship the Nebula Queen, which was destroyed and only a few of my memory chips remained
luckily, I saved all the tapes of Captain Jade doinking every intelligent species she came across, including several that were previously thought undoinkable
"You know, Captain Jade would let me open the airlock for just a minute to get the smell out."
convincing the ship doctor that this guy would look better with a tail
the series takes place in the future, so "twink" is archaic terminology by then. at some point, I explain to the crew that it's the same as the then-modern term "fweembus" and everyone agrees the captain totally has fweembus energy
mst3k nights where we get together and riff on the cap'n jade porn tapes
proving some space guy's space innocence in star court because the ship he was allegedly on was in the background while Jade was having her historic first conquest of a Gorblodinax
"Look, I know I said some hurtful things, and I meant it, they're all true, but I shouldn't have said them then. I'm not even sure I'm allowed to lie to organics. Hang on."
(down the hall) "Hey! Twink! I respect your intelligence!"
"Huh, turns out I can."
I get a robot body in one episode and mostly spend it bullying the crew until I have to sacrifice it to save everyone whose brain isn't backed up on board
also, everyone on the ship is gay
There's one hetero on board who lied to get through space school
G.R.A.C.E, being a spaceship, has never really spent any time with a straight person, and she's always saying things like "Don't let the heteros threaten you with their venom sacs"
If she gets to make first contact, she's absolutely introducing the captain as "Captain Twink" because it's bad diplomacy to correct her and act like the ship's AI is a liar
captain twink is absolutely the most vanilla person on this ship
G.R.A.C.E does care on some level about making cap'n twink better at captaining, both in the "please don't get the ship exploded" and in the "alright, alright, I can't bully you all the time" sense
The occasional tender "Cap'n Jade had a hard time with this, too" moment or even the "That was pretty good" goes a long way.
episode where captain twink gives me the silent treatment until I apologize for something, and at the end, he has to forgive me because you gotta go back to the status quo and my holofursona sits on the arm of the captain's chair, swishes her tail, winks at the camera, and says "I didn't learn anything! Ain't I a stinker?"
holograce is, well, a hologram, and can't physically interact with stuff, but she still manages to thwap captain twink with her tail when it would be funny
there's a tense moment when he's about to get sucked out the airlock and I grab my tail like a bat and home run hit him outta here*
*harm's way
*baseball voice* buh nuh nuh NUH nuh NUUUUH! *thwack*
also, kabedoning someone against a wall is extra powerful when they can just walk through you at any time and are too intimidated to do it.
captain twink is fresh out of captain school, but the rest of the crew is seasoned enough to have the kind of weird kinks that you can only get through long space voyages with holodeck access
"Hey, captain, we loaded up the vore routine in the holodeck if you wanna come with us. It's Queezax's fursona this week."
"Wh-what's a vore"
if you ask a question like that too loud, G.R.A.C.E shows up and explains things with a lot of visual aids
learning about all the cool animals they have on alien home planets through their fursonae
"anthropomorphic" means something different if you're a slime person or a race of space bugs or whatever.
like, imagine you're a race of space crickets, and there's this really cool species of six-legged compound-eyed wolf thing on your planet. is your fursona a cricket-shaped wolf thing?
or is having a fursona a distinctly human thing that the other species find weird and endearing
do slime people have blob-shaped sonas, or do they think it's kinda silly
what if fursonas are a human-only thing, and the rest of the galaxy thinks that earth is populated with giant muscular, well-endowed animal people, but we only see the squishy humans in space for some reason
corvids
@BestGirlGrace well, obviously the humans are both incredibly hard to kill And they fit in small spaces better so they can do the maintenance stuff more efficiently (and using less energy, too)
@BestGirlGrace i love that the base assumption is "they're aware of the fursona and they think it's real" and not, like, "this is first contact" or anything
@autistikai I've been assuming that it's a star trek style thing where humans have been spacefaring for a long time and are part of whatever space government there is. So while you might make first contact as part of an expedition, like our crew is on, there's also a bunch of species that already know about humans and vice versa.
But we haven't bothered to correct them on the fursona thing.
@autistikai they think that humans have some kind of pair-bonding going on with their fursonas, hence the carrying pictures of them. They miss their loved ones/trusted partners.
@BestGirlGrace tbh it's probably pretty hard to correct if they get the idea that's an Actual Real Thing. there isn't....exactly language to express that which wouldn't just as easily be interpreted as some kind of joke
@autistikai Plus, there's some civilizations out there that would probably invade Earth if they didn't think it was inhabited by giant, muscular animal people.
Plus, yeah, it would be kinda like explaining the concept of fiction to a civilization that doesn't have it. like in Galaxy Quest
@BestGirlGrace i'd honestly like to See the civilisation that thinks a planet full of humans is a good target for invasion. surely they have Some sense of self-preservation
@autistikai The standard story is "They tend to shed, which clogs the oxygen systems, and have claws, which are a liability when you can't have space suits getting punctured"