#IWATEX spoilers

[begonia-shade]

These two had my brain in a chokehold for like 3 months last year and this is how I decided to cope. take it. hold it in your hands if you dare

[angeloflightandsunshine]

You know, I think the most heartbreaking thing that I've experienced in I was a Teenage Exocolonist so far is that despite being able to remember your past lives and saves, despite being able to save so many people that died in previous lives, despite being able to go out of your way to save people and kill a faceless.

There's no way to save Kom. Kom's jersey will always be retired in the rafters before he was ready to hang it there himself. Anemone will always lose her brother and become susceptible to the human supremacists' idealology. Anemone and her family will always be hurt. All this cosmic power and intervention, and still some deaths and tragedies are inevitable. No matter how hard you try and how badly you just want everyone to be okay.

[penguin--person]

jack stauber - milk

[alexthedragon190]

Glow Season wallpaper! yay! wahoo! yippie! wooo-

[bfdreaming]

Something that does unsettle me is that the best ending of iwatex has humans being eternal subjects of entities that largely regard them as inherently inferior, with no hope of ever being treated as equals, sentience only ever barely and begrudgingly acknowledged by one of the main entities in charge of managing them.

The old Sol at the end talks about how rare it is for humans to submit to a higher power, which is? Weird? At best? The Gardeners are very much Not That. They're just an AI network that is really easy to outsmart tbh. Unless you mean "higher power" as an authority figure in general, in which case we... do exactly that very frequently??? Authority is a standard element in human social structures???

What are you talking about, old Sol? Did you buy into the Gardener's propaganda that they are an inherently superior existence that is automatically justified in ruthless subjugation or something? Because their subjugation is pretty ruthless even after you talk them down from genocide.

Like I get that they have a blue and orange morality thing going on. That's fine, that's expected. What I don't care for is like... framing the end result as being some kind of paradise, and framing submission to an entity that sees you as inherently inferior as something admirable.

This might just be another example of this game's really confused politics, ethics, and ecology, but it's the most uncomfortable to me. (That and Cal's victim blaming that you can't call him out on.)

[theomenroom]

exocolonist stuff about the green forever ending and the shimmer

Lum's bioweapon works because there's a fundamental weakness in vertumnan ecology because it isn't actually a wild ecosystem. it's a Garden in facsimile of the ecosystem before the Convergent Domain rose, and the Gardeners run their overlay on everything, and the Gardeners have spent 20,000 years alone on a planet without anyone even capable of conceptualizing a deliberate attack. Sym all but tells us as much, that Vertumna's ecosystem is all one thing that reconnects every Pollen and Glow in a way that real-world ecosystems aren't.

And it is Lum's bioweapon. Instance may have developed it and used Tangent to help, who in turn used Sol, and Instance was almost certainly doing bioweapons research before the Heliopause landed (certainly, Tangent says some unhinged things about their research that foreshadow the bioweapon from an early age), but Instance had more reason than ego to be against deploying this particular bioweapon.

Instance is such a complicated character, really. If you try to convince her to support Marz's bid by saying that Lum's war on nature is stupid, she says she supports it, even if she thinks Lum is an idiot and "war" isn't the right way of understanding what she wants to do. She almost certainly is in favor of deploying bioweapons targeted against species they want to remove (again, I'm nearly certain she's been researching bioweapons at least as far back as when they were researching the Shimmer); she opposes this particular bioweapon because it's too indiscriminate for her tastes, perhaps, and a bit because Lum is calling the shots and she has reasons to hate him personally.

I think it's likely she was dragging her heels, too. There's an event if you assist the governor where you can (with very high Organizing) eavesdrop on her trying to control the access levels granted to nameless Helio scientists assigned to her department (there's a whole essay in how the Helios are treated by the narrative as a mostly-nameless mass right up until the narrative needs them), where Sol speculates that she's trying to keep them from uncovering the engineered plague, if they know about it, and that doesn't make sense on its face (or several other levels). Researchers who spent 20 years conducting research in a military environment would know how to act when someone in the lab next to you is working on a classified project. She's not scared they'd find out that she's working on a bioweapon for Lum, she's scared they'd find out she's not doing her best work.

(and if the Heliopause did have a bunch of "earth's top researchers" on it, why is it that under no circumstances can Lum put one of them in the second engineer job over an eighteen-year-old? she's a prodigy but earth has a huge population to draw top researchers from)

It's unlikely that the pre-Gardener vertumnan ecology had the same symbiotes as the current one does. It doesn't sound evolutionarily advantageous. It reminds me of how a cultivar of bananas have gone extinct, wiped out by disease, because that entire cultivar were clones, so they had exactly identical immune systems, so one parasite just swept through them. I am not a biologist, but parasite resistance is heavily-speculated as a driver for sexual reproduction according to wikipedia. There are pretty strong evolutionary pressures against being uniformly susceptible to the exact same parasites across a population.

So I kinda have to conclude that the Shimmer isn't a natural phenomenon. It's a fungal technology, part of the Gardeners. It's the way it is because they are the way they are.

[eclipsinggod]

HE'S ALIVE????? WOOOHOOOO!!!!!

EDIT: He won't make out because he doesn't remember much.

[queerforscience]

autism be damned my boy can build a bomb

[bug-the-chicken-nug]

iwatex but it lets me do a secret extra thing where i can keep the overseer alive, but also FURTHER bully it into being less annoyingly high and mighty and less paternalistic about its peace deal with humanity. like just tear the fuck into it, but like, constructively.

like bitch. a few hundred people with an AI are capable of devising more than one way of killing you. you aren't more special than us. you aren't god. you're *important*, but you're not really *more* important or righteous than anyone, not with a campaign to skip straight to aggression against sapient beings without even thinking to send Sym FIRST.

i know for a fact that the planet's biosphere survives without you. you're still artificial. you're still just doing this because it's your purpose. is it really so special and lofty to preach about that when you fundamentally didn't really *choose* to save the planet?

you can be our friend, our *partner*, but you can't be our *boss*. because in your own way, you're just as selfish as any human ever was.

and i functionally have eternity to keep coming back to bug your stubborn ass about this, so what's it gonna be?

[begonia-shade]

I still need to learn how to use this site. Anyways. Silly ! <3

[thingwildcoyote]

this will probably be the most niche post i’m ever going to make like i don’t even know who it’s for but yesterday my sibling got me to play through the first year of I Was a Teenage Exocolonist and first of all it’s a really good game, i haven’t played any further but i plan to and based on what i’ve seen so far I’d highly recommend it

the game covers some pretty dark and disturbing topics, so if there are themes that you would rather avoid, the game has a list of of content warnings available for you to view at the title screen or you can look it up online (your mental health and wellbeing should always come first) but otherwise i would suggest jumping in with as little knowledge as possible

anyways minor spoilers ahead, nothing to do with the actual story itself but still

when i got to glow season i was instantly reminded of that scene from Unicorn Wars where the bears start tripping on psychedelic slugs and it left me with this visceral dread but honestly i think really added to the experience

if you’re unfamiliar with what Unicorn Wars is, it’s an animated antiwar film directed by Alberto Vázquez it’s also a lurid splatter film that fucked me up so badly i had trouble sleeping for about a week after i watched it

if you’re into that stuff knock yourself out but if you’re even slightly unsure then i would give this movie a wide berth because i promise you it does not pull any punches with the message its trying to convey and be so careful if you plan on looking into this film

but yeah that’s all

[vergess]

Do you by any chance happen to have the text for if one goes for the prolific parent ending but only dates Sym? I'm curious but I also don't really wanna go through an entire game just to check if I can at all avoid it.

You would think that living with your alien boyfriend would be weird, but... you've already shared everything of yourselves by interfacing through the Array.

The intimacy of accidentally using the same toothbrush is nothing when you've lived inside his memories of being a mushtree. You move into a Gardener-like abode where Sym can form a connection to the Array, glowing pool and all.

He delights in your small army of children - but, of course he would. He loves you, and all of humanity.

Surrounding him with smaller, even less predictable humans is one of the greatest gifts you could ever have given him, and he proves to be a wonderful - if a little eccentric - co-parent.

[samthecookielord]

Rough doodles of what if Sunny was in I Was A Teenage Exocolonist

Thoughts but there is no cut bevause tumblr keeps exploding when i try to do that

With his reduced hunger, he probably gets pressured to work harder during the famine since he feels its effects the least (uhhh on the bright side, lots of hangout time with basil in geoponics probably! yaaaaaay)

I'd imagine his card is something like. Sunny's Patience or Sunny's Solitude, mental, value increases the less cards you play or less cards you have in your hand maybe?

Yes i put a tulip in his third stage design

Because of his reduced hunger he can basically just hibernate lol . so basically just what happens in omori route hfssyrgsrh

Despite how similar he looks to Dys, he is actually terrified of him but in a sort of respectful way

[manaquartz]

Woohoo! Just got the Governor ending! So here’s Masc!Sol’s Governor ending card! I love the outfit a lot lmao.

[fiercestpurpose]

i just got the 'astronaut' ending on a life where i was romancing dys and i think that's SO interesting because the astronaut ending is all about you & vace and your relationship and vace's compulsive need to escape is actually so similar to dys's compulsive need to escape, just with kind of the opposite attitude towards the planet itself. and like the idea that dys, the love of your life and the only person who knows the truth about you, forsakes you to become a gardener and you like keep exploring with vace and pilot your spaceship straight into the heart of the wormhole because you're also trying to escape, trying to escape the time loop you're trapped in

[arionwind]

Hello there! Saw your reblog, so I guess for tonight, I'm gathering info on Besk 😅. Anyways, what are YOUR personal opinions on the twins' mom, Besk? Any headcanons or speculation about her? I know she was totally heartbroken after leaving a guy on Earth aaaand that's as much as I know about her backstory.

That's about all the direct canon I have to go on as well, but various bits of the twins stories and a little bit of other character stuff has led to just. So many headcanons, lets see if I can post them in at all an intelligible format. Obviously massive spoilers follow.

So one other thing we know is that she was the ship's therapist for this Vertumna Project. Which is wildly irresponsible of the group, there should not be only one therapist for this many people - for one thing, each therapist should themselves have a therapist who is not a client in order to head off this exact circumstance - so I'd have to assume that either Besk was just not great at her job (which is possible I suppose? but I feel is unlikely) or more likely the situation back on Earth was dire enough that the one therapist was either all they had or all they could afford to send.

Because of that, I am of the opinion that it wasn't really or at least not just heartbreak that led to her suicide, but survivor's guilt. Leaving him behind would have hurt enough on its own, but leaving someone she loved behind in a living hell that we know was dire enough the Group felt it proper to build bombs? That would wreck anyone's emotional stability hard. On top of which, unlike many of the others, she'd ahv eno one to vent to and help her process in a professional manner all while helping them leave that life behind and look ahead. It's really a wonder she actually held on long enough to have the twins at all.

Relatedly, the twins augments. I think she saw where her mental state was leading, knew what it would likely result in, and chose augments for the twins that would hopefully help them avoid going through what she was. The kind of terror and insomnia that kind of depression/ptsd combo gives out is a nasty blend that makes taking steps toward recovery incredibly difficult, even if you know what to do. I'm betting she figured the kids would have some kind of trauma and chose Fearlessness and Sleeplessness to mitigate the side effects on them that were messing her up so much.

A little more of a stretch is that I think she and Instance were, if not dating, at least circling around dating pretty hard. The way Instance talks about Besk and her secrets implies to me a more than average level of intimacy, as does the way Instance talks and cares about both twins.

Obviously she has that special bond with Tangent that they both go on about (and we will come back to that in a bit), but the way she talks about Dys - especially in the Barista storyline - feels to me like someone who is a) trying to do right by one of her kids that she just fundamentally cannot relate to and b) can't bring herself to get too close to because he reminds her of a lost love. I am betting that Dys takes after Besk in appearance even.

Relatedly, I like to think with basically no evidence that Tangent looks like she does thanks to genetic meddling with appearance either in the womb or as part of transitioning to make her look more like Instance. Not because Tang and Instance had that bond, but because Besk wanted her bonus child to look like her bonus lover and not the one she left behind.

That's all that comes to mind for now, but if any others wind up surfacing I will probably add on to this post further, whew.