ASM Cores
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ASM Cores is a TinyMUX and DeviantArt-based Roleplay group that involves anthropomorphized cores (corrupt or otherwise) from the Valve game Portal. These are more or less Ridiculously-Human Robots. It started out in a Livestream by the artist forte-girl7 on DeviantArt. Since then it has approximately a dozen active members. The main storyline has diverted from the actual theme of portals and puzzle solving, with story arcs that weeks, and sometimes months long involving action, drama and mystery. There is also one official Alternate Universe, the Dungeons & Dragons-based universe.
Tropes used in ASM Cores include:
- All Girls Want Bad Boys: Tenacity's a pretty popular guy~
- Ambiguous Innocence: MAC and Nina had a moment of this during their infected state. This happened during the Black Mesa story arc.
- Balance Between Good and Evil: This has been less true since the truce, but the basic theme still remains in most of the plot arcs.
- British Accents: Proper Core has a British accent. Tenacity, less so. (Americanized British). Subverted with Indecisive who has a Welsh accent which is practically a British accent, but with different vowels enunciated.
- Crapsack World: Considering that this takes places after the events of Portal 2 (and during the events of Half-Life 2), it's to be expected.
- Dysfunction Junction: And how!
- Face Heel Turn: Tenacity's quite skilled at provoking these.
- For Science!: This IS Aperture Science, folks.
- Grey and Gray Morality: Subverted. With the exception of the child cores (and MAC the special snowflake), both sides of the conflict aren't all bad, but aren't all good either.
- Hive Mind: The Black Mesa Entity was this.
- Killed Off for Real: Spy Core. The first and only permanent playable character death in the Mesa arc.
- Legal Jailbait: All the children are only aesthetically minors but even so, they act and are treated as such.
- Older Than They Look: ROBOTS. This even technically applies to the humans.
- Real Life Writes the Plot: Surprisingly often, actually.
- Red Eyes, Take Warning: Inverted with Medical Core, played straight with The Controller and Eve.
- Reset Button: The reassembly machines are reset buttons in a physical sense.
- Ridiculously-Human Robots: We even have artificial nanobot lipids, and possible muscle cells. This means that core's weights and musculature can change.
- True Companions: The Darksiders are this.
- You Gotta Have Blue Hair: Mostly averted; the majority of Cores have natural-looking hair colors.