KobaCumTribute

Like seriously, let's look at this: in Mass Effect the player is a high-profile military careerist who's about to become space James Bond complete with the license to kill, starts hallucinating weird portents of doom after finding an inscrutable alien relic, gets their legal murder license, follows their hallucinations to find more weird alien shit, has to chose which of their crewmates dies in a hackneyed false dichotomy, and ends with revelations about what's going on and an elaborate multi-stage boss fight.

In Starfield the player is just some random asshole who's decided to take up space mining for no clear reason, hallucinates something cool and neat after being told to grab the weird thing by their chortling coworkers, gets to join a country club of amateur astronomers who think those weird artifacts are kind of neat, goes on an adventure to look for more sort of neat artifacts and hallucinate some more, has to chose which of their fellow country club members dies in a hackneyed false dichotomy, and ends with the revelation that everything going on is fucking stupid and pointless and there's an elaborate multi-stage boss fight that's buggy as absolute fuck.

Meanwhile the aesthetics are just Mass Effect blandness taken to a whole new level of blandless. If Mass Effect was oversanitized corporate slop Starfield has been further boiled into a completely flavorless mush. Same for the overall plot: Mass Effect had a generic eldritch horror plot that pivoted from being a climate change allegory to just being "so yeah turns out the eldritch robots are just really stupid, like absolute buffoons, and their whole mission is literal nonsense and even they know it but because they're just big dummies they don't know how to stop doing galactic genocide, whoopsy!" thanks to corporate meddling, but Starfield skips the pivot and goes straight to the vapid "so yeah it's all just meaningless accumulation of pointless nothing, nothing's going on here and there's nothing at stake at all, just lobotomize yourself and join the race to accumulate meaningless accolades!" which uh, framed like that actually reads like a call for help from the writers.

So, obviously the whole thing is one big surreal allegory for the queer experience and homophobia, but it's deliberately ambiguous what any given thing literally means. With that in mind, I'm taking a drunken stab at it:

The first thing: literal, explicit romantic love is used as an allegory for platonic friendships or one-sided unrequited crushes on friends. It's the socially acceptable relationships and a subversion of the trope where queer relationships have to be dealt with euphemistically. A clear example is the relationship between Kureha's mother and Yurika, which is portrayed with unambiguous romantic terms and symbolism but is narratively clearly not an actual romantic relationship despite Yurika wanting it to be, with Reia clearly seeing her as a friend and having an (unseen) straight relationship which is a driving factor in the story's overall conflict.

Second: the bears are an allegory for openly queer people.

Third: literal death is an allegory for the fear of ostracization or for that ostracization itself. When the bears eat someone, that's fear. When the hunters kill a bear, that's ostracization.

Fourth: all the "exclusion" and social acceptability stuff is 100% literal and not allegorical at all, it's the story textually and explicitly portraying homophobia and the pressure to conform, just in a slightly stylized and more honest form.

Fifth: the ending is Kureha coming out and being ostracized for it, but her open act of resistance emboldened others to follow suit.

There's a lot more to unpack but that's all I've got. I'm not qualified to pick it apart in any greater detail than that though I have the strong suspicion that there's a lot of references or wordplay that I'm just not getting.

Turn every living thing on earth into a catgirl? Lmao sure.

Every building is now a cactus of an appropriate size and shape? Sure, why not.

Give me complete ontological power over creation? Hell yeah.

Drag the very stars from the sky to fall upon us, releasing us from hellworld? You can not imagine how hard that button is getting slammed.

A deathnote that only works on redditors? Not a button but sure, sounds fun.

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I was just given a big pile of sweet potatoes and while I've got recipes like "chop them up into sticks, soak in salt water, and then fry them until I think they're done" and "cube them and boil in curry or other heavily spiced stews for ~15 minutes" that all work very well, that's sort of the limit of what I know for them and I want to actually get use out of them before they can spoil.

So I started wondering about making bread, but every recipe I can find seems to just be "this is literally a cake that's being called bread and it's almost 50% table sugar by volume," but that can't be the extent of options can it? There have to be some savory recipes that just rely on the sugar of the sweet potatoes themselves, right?

The specific example that made me start thinking about this was how AC Odyssey has a sidequest where a slave doesn't want to be freed because he thinks being a slave is cool, actually, which is both absurd apologetics but also misses that in Greek and Roman systems manumission was a form of social control that both rewarded and indebted slavers' most loyal collaborators. That turned into thinking about how just absolutely absurdly shitty classic Greek society was in general, and how AC Odyssey made it this weird wholesome egalitarian slaver dictatorship where everything's cool and good except for the bad mean guys who are indistinguishable in methods or goals from anyone else.

That's also one of the things that pisses me off about Starfield so much, how the "good guys" are a pair of far right colonial empires: one is literally just the fascists from Starship Troopers, and the other are a bunch of feudal ancap dictatorships. Even the villains are just saturday morning cartoon villains who are bad and mean but don't really ever do anything distinct from the "good" factions except be ontologically opposed to you, the main character.

Someone else pointed out recently how HOI4 ends up effectively doing Nazi apologetics the same way, where in trying to avoid giving their worst fans a holocaust button they just outright remove all the actual horror and material actions the Nazis did altogether.

And I don't think I even need to get into how rampant this problem is in liberal fantasy settings, which are always full of apologetics for monarchism, because that's well tread ground for criticism. It's enough to make something like how the original Mount and Blade handled the in-universe nobles as being inherently sexist and classist pieces of shit who were obstacles for a female and/or commoner PC to fight against and overcome almost refreshing, instead of it just being like "yeah these awful pieces of shit who are all definitely mass murderers and worse are actually cool and nice to you and not really all that bad really" like so much feudal apologia media does.

And yeah, there's a point to be made about not wanting to grapple with problematic themes and all, but where there's the line where that just turns into apologetics for the very problematic thing you're trying to avoid dealing with at all?

I'd been thinking for a while now about the very worst quest in Cyberpunk (yes, I'm talking about Sinnerman and its questline) and just what makes it so awful. For anyone who doesn't know, in that mission a man hires you to get revenge on a murderous ex-con whose been mysteriously released from prison, and wants to be there to watch; following a 100% scripted car chase (since this predated the vehicle AI they eventually added) the cop car transporting the target stops under an overpass and the driver gets out; your client gets out of the car, charges the cop, is unavoidably scripted to die after a few lines of dialogue; and then the actual questline begins as the ex-con is revealed to be a born again fundamentalist lunatic who's intent on being killed in a corporate produced crucifixion BTL and for no discernable reason has decided he really wants to hang out with the player character to the point that the studio exec responsible for his release from prison pays you to come hang out with them.

Everything about it is awful, from the premise to the heavily scripted execution and the way that you literally cannot make it go any way other than it does even if you stop time and try to kill the target and driver before the conversation can happen: they're all locked to not go below 1 hp until the conversation finishes. But despite this, you can just take out the target as soon as that initial dialogue has finished, and the dialogue if you accept the contract to go and hang out with him does let you criticize the whole absurd farce, call the target a lunatic, and just leave, ruining the whole mad plan. That "but" is relevant for the sake of contrast: that questline was the absolute lowpoint of writing and quest design for that game, and even it let you go off on the characters or just outright kill them and leave.

Now let's compare that to Starfield. In true Bethesda fashion, quests are usually heavily linear with a single branching end of "do good thing (for money)" or "do bad thing (for more money, maybe)" that don't lead into anything else most of the time and (at least so far) never actually matter beyond their own little self-contained questline. They're also bland and full of brainworms, with only the occasional hint of decent writing hiding somewhere in there.

For example, in the one I'm on now you have to serve as a liaison between an ancient slower-than-light colony ship and the corporate owners of the planet they were headed towards. Both parties are insufferable, but the corporate resort is actively monstrous and proposes three solutions: you can pay the resort to enslave the colonists, buy the colonists a jump drive and get them to fuck off, or kill the colonists. The executives that give you these choices are flagged as essential and can't simply be killed, and those are your only choices for resolving the situation. Your options for dissent are little more than saying "gee that sounds mean" as a side option that just directs you back to choosing one of those three resolution paths.

It hits every note for what made Sinnerman such an awful questline, and then manages to be even worse on top of that. And that's just the normal baseline level for Starfield: quest relevant NPCs are always invincible and the quest doesn't account for the possibility of just killing them no matter how awful they are, there's never any option to tear into anyone over how awful everything about what they're doing is, and the options are always a very limited set of choices that are usually dumb.

It's just fun all around, and it's only gotten better as I've learned it more. I've been working on S ranking all the missions now that I've unlocked everything and done all three endings and it's been great going and dunking on all the bosses I struggled with in the beginning.

I also spent entirely too long making the decals (unfortunately I stole my copy so I can't upload and share them) for that shitpost build, so I went and killed balteus with it.

The build worked better than I thought it would and I wound up with an S-rank on the run I did for that shot.

Actually, looking at the parts now its biggest problem is just that it's too heavy, mostly from the arms. That core (ephemera) is great for a medium AC, the mind beta legs are better reverse joints than the spring chicken ones but they're still ok, and the head's pretty decent for a medium AC. I went with a full electric status build with the stun bombs and stun needles, so it still does damage. The arms are the tian-qiang ones, and I'd recommend nachtreiher, firmeza, or alba arms instead because they're literally about 10K lighter, meaning you can swap to mind beta legs, bringing the whole build down to around 80K weight which opens up what boosters you can use a bit since a lot of those have ideal weights in the 70-80K region.

That's still about 20K over the light ACs I've been running, though. Some I've even carved away at enough to be able to run nachtreiher legs with them. After spending so long in medium AC builds that go about 290 it's wild running around in something that's going above 350, it dodges so much just by moving.

9/10 game, only real problem is a lot of the weapons are undertuned and a few are maybe a bit overtuned, but like with souls games some things just being worse doesn't matter so much once you've learned the game enough for that not to matter so much, like how I took stun bombs on a pointlessly heavy AC into balteus as a joke without any issues.

smdh

After my recent rant on just how awful Made in Abyss really is, morbid curiosity got the better of me and I finished watching it. I suffered this psychic damage so that you all can also suffer it with less effort. To my surprise, seeing the rest of it did change my opinion on it: despite all the odds it turned out I could, in fact, think even less of it than I already did. It is disgusting, vapid, and gratuitous, being awful both in content and in quality. In this piece I will explain what Made in Abyss is for anyone unfamiliar with it, go over how rubbish it is as a story problematic content aside, and tear into how it handles problematic themes in exactly the opposite way that they should be handled.

There will obviously be spoilers, but I feel assured in saying that anyone who wants the plot of fucking Made in Abyss to not be spoiled for them should get fucked. Anyone who wants to avoid psychic damage from learning about it should probably bow out now, however. I’ll dance around the specific details for the sake of decency, of course, and the worst stuff will be spoilered at the end with a reiteration of the CWs, but there’s only so vague I can be before I’m just saying “it’s bad, just trust me.”

To begin, so everyone knows what I’m even talking about here: Made in Abyss is basically a surreal fantasy adventure about a little girl (Riko) and a robot (Reg) trying to descend to the bottom of a 20 kilometer deep magical pit full of stupid bullshit out of what is literally an innate mystical compulsion to do so. On this journey, a key threat is that if you start to ascend bad things happen depending on where you are; in practice this means that the author has a constantly available plot device to make walking up a small hill or sitting up too fast into a deadly threat, except when that would get in the way of the story and so gets handwaved away as not being an issue right there.

The story so far has the pair descending at a breakneck pace through surreal fantasy landscapes, meeting the victim (Nanachi) of a serial killing mad scientist (Bondrewd) who joins up with them, meeting the adopted daughter and grooming victim (Prushka) of said serial killing mad scientist who wants to join up with them (she dies and turns into a magic rock that imprisons her soul instead), then defeat the mad scientist and then let him go before using the magic rock to descend further. At this point they find more surreal fantasy landscapes to gloss over and instead spend the entire second season in a village of babytalking ancap blob monsters who are just the absolute worst, and I am not exaggerating when I say there is literally no point to anything that happens there at all: the place is awful, Riko thinks it’s neat and explicitly endorses it, the show revels in all the gross awful shit they do there, we learn it’s literally built on unfathomable horror and suffering and must end, Riko and Reg try to stop it from being destroyed, the story waffles back and forth a bit, then the village is destroyed and they move on as if none of it had even happened.

Now that we’ve covered what’s going on, let’s really dig into the problems it has that aren’t the extremely revolting ones, which I’ll save for a spoiler at the end with additional CWs as a reminder. Now, the story basically has two modes of pacing: a breakneck sprint past the admittedly somewhat interesting world, and bogging down interminably while basically nothing happens. However, in neither case is there ever meaningful progression and at no point is there character growth. Stuff happens, the party grows and gets new tools now and then, but despite this fundamentally remains static. Despite going through training montages and overcoming obstacles the main characters never grow in any way, they don’t become more competent or powerful and any power boosts are temporary and costly solutions to the author writing them into a corner. Further, despite suffering horrors, serious injury, and in one case literal dismemberment they don’t become diminished either, never being traumatized, becoming jaded, or having their abilities decreased by what they’ve suffered.

The whole experience is that of a sort of cargo cult imitation of a dark fantasy adventure story by someone who is fundamentally vapid and brain poisoned. It’s basically just mimicking genre tropes and trying to bring out emotion through showcasing horrific things, but it fails horribly because to put it bluntly the author is too twisted in his perspective and too aroused by what he wrote to do anything but revel in and whitewash the horror.

Often with problematic content there is raised the excuse that simply having bad things happen or dealing with dark concepts doesn’t constitute endorsement or exploitative spectacle. Here I say without an ounce of exaggeration that Made in Abyss is not only creating an exploitative spectacle but is, in fact, endorsing the horrible things it involves. Every antagonist of the story is narratively treated softly while being the most evil piece of shit you’ve ever seen, to the point that I can’t even call them “villains” because that implies at least some degree of narrative condemnation that just isn’t present. For one example: Bondrewd, a mass murdering vivisectionist whose entire perspective is “I love doing abjectly evil things for selfish reasons and I will keep doing them forever lmao,” basically gets treated by the narrative as a sort of menacing but very polite guy who’s just doing his thing and who comes to an understanding with the party where he sees them as his equals who he likes, and they decide they understand him and just leave instead of destroying his fucking body stealing relic that he uses to be immortal and unkillable, never to think another ill thought of him again; other characters who know exactly what he was doing describe him as “a bit of a scoundrel” or just shrug and don’t care.

That last bit is a running theme: everything about the institutions in the world is evil and horrible, and the story revels in it and not so much as once tries to make a point that any of the rampant abuse is at all a bad thing. And before anyone thinks “well, can’t a story just have something bad with the understanding that it’s bad, and not need to become some polemic condemnation of it?” rest assured that while I do in fact think authors should actually make overt polemics against the bad things they portray since anything less will go over too many consumers’ heads, Made in Abyss goes the opposite way and simply includes this vile shit as matter of fact details that are narratively treated as nothing to worry about.

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Fuck, why did I think this was a good idea? I’ve gone and written two thousand words about a horrible anime series that makes me angry and nauseous just thinking about it, and there’s not even any catharsis to this. I watched it in the first place because I couldn’t imagine it was really as bad as everyone said only to realize it was even worse, and I kept watching just so I could authoritatively write all this down. Now that this polemic against Made in Abyss is written I can’t say it was worth it.

Well, if I dissuade anyone from going and watching it themselves maybe it was, but I can’t help but think some of you will go “oh well that sounds so ridiculous, surely something as awful as this couldn’t get published and become so popular! I must confirm it for myself!” And to that I can only say: enjoy your psychic damage, you'll have earned it just like I did.