#anthurak rambles

[anthurak]

So because I’m currently doing a playthrough of Mass Effect again, I thought I’d engage in an interesting thought-experiment regarding the inherently flexible narrative of the RPG plot structure.

Namely, is there actually a way to pin down a ‘canon’ choice for the Virmire survivor between Ashley and Kaidan? Specifically, by trying to eliminate the bias of the player and using aspects of the mission and Shepard’s character that aren’t controlled by the player to determine a most likely scenario for how the events and choices Shepard makes might likely play out.

To that end, let’s look at the Virmire mission leading up to ‘The Big Choice’. If we try to remove the x-factor that is ‘player bias’, thinking of Shepard not as a player-avatar but as an actual character, I think we can actually get a good idea how Virmire actually would have turned out.

To begin with, let’s establish a few qualities that we can assume about Commander Shepard when we ignore possible player biases:

Shepard is an exceptionally capable and experienced soldier and leader, and will thus be making decisions that will give them and their team and allies the best chance at success at this mission.

Shepard cares about their subordinates and allies and will likewise be doing everything they can to get as many people out alive as they can.

Shepard is NOT openly racist towards aliens, nor overtly distrustful or antagonist towards the Council and their agents. Or at least not so much that they would allow such distrust/antagonism to overly interfere with their judgement over the best way to accomplish the mission.

Shepard does in fact care a great deal about BOTH Ashley and Kaidan and does NOT actively want one of them dead.

With all that in mind, let’s look at all of the choices that affect the outcome of the Virmire mission and consider what the most likely choice that Shepard would make is:

First, which squadmate goes with Kirrahe and the STG team, and which one is relegated to bomb duty?

This one’s actually pretty easy when you think about it for more than five seconds. We have Ashley, a hardened frontline soldier with training in all standard alliance weaponry, and we have Kaidan, one of our team’s go-to tech-experts. Heck, Ashley even points out herself that Kaidan should be needed to arm the bomb when volunteering for the mission. Again, when we remove player bias from the equation, I think we can all agree that Shepard would send Ashley to help Kirrahe’s team while having Kaidan work on the bomb.

So with that choice locked in, let’s move to the next big choice: Does Shepard take the necessary steps that allows Kirrahe and much of his team to survive the mission? IE: Completing side-objectives and not diverting security forces towards the Salarians.

Again, removing player-bias from consideration, I think there’s no reason to assume Shepard wouldn’t do everything they could to assist the Salarians. It’s certainly in their best interests to support the Salarians so they can support their team in return. It’s also worth noting that Shepard would have an interest in depriving the Geth of resources by destroying their facilities to make their own task easier. While it may be true that completing the side-objectives doesn’t actually affect the difficulty of Shepard’s own mission, that’s only information that a PLAYER would know, not Shepard themself. And of course, Shepard has one of their own people (Ashley) with the Salarian teams, giving them even MORE reason to assist them. In short, we can assume that Kirrahe and his STG team ARE still alive by the time the bomb is armed.

So with Ashley fighting alongside the still-alive STG team and Kaidan planting the bomb, we now come to the big choice:

Does Shepard press on to the AA Tower and save Ashley or double back to the bomb-site and save Kaidan?

And with everything we’ve established thus far, I wholeheartedly believe the most likely scenario is that Shepard saves ASHLEY.

Because Shepard’s choice isn’t actually between ‘Save Kaidan’ or ‘Save Ashley’. The choice is between ‘Save Kaidan’ or ‘Save Ashley AND the STG Team’.

Yes, it’s true that in the game if you fulfill the necessary side-objectives, Kirrahe and his team are picked up by the Normandy regardless of your choice to press on to the AA Tower or double back to the bomb-site, but I think we really have to ignore this fact.

First, it is a factor that positively reeks of ‘arbitrary game logic’. As in, Kirrahe and his teams are AT the AA tower, so if Joker picks up Shepard and their squad at the bomb site with only a minute or so before the bomb goes off, how exactly can he also rush over to the tower to pick up the Salarians too?

Worse still, if the Normandy is somehow able to pick up the STG team at the tower, then why can’t they pick up Ashley/Kaidan too?! Seriously, if you choose to go to the AA tower and fulfilled the side objectives, you find Kirrahe and the rest of the STG team fighting alongside the squadmate you sent with them! If Kirrahe and his team manage to survive, why can’t they? Looking back, I really feel like going to the AA Tower SHOULD have been a requirement for saving Kirrahe and his team.

And second, this detail of Kirrahe and his team surviving regardless of Shepard’s choice is entirely IRRELEVANT because there is no way SHEPARD could KNOW that!

Yes, the player might be able to know that this pivotal choice comes down to just ‘Save Ashley’ or ‘Save Kaidan’.

But as far as Commander Shepard knows, standing at that railing, weighing their options in this pivotal moment, this is a choice between going back to the bomb site to save one of their squadmates, and pushing on to the AA Tower to save one of their squadmates AND the Salarian STG team. This isn’t a choice of ‘one life weighed against one life’, this is a choice between ONE life, or about a dozen lives.

And again, if we’re removing as much ‘player bias’ from the equation as we can, I think we have no reason to assume that Shepard wouldn’t choose to save as many lives as they can. And since we established the most likely ‘in-universe’ choices are Ashley going with Kirrahe’s team and Kaidan on bomb-duty, I think it’s pretty clear that all things being equal, it’s ASHLEY who has the much better chance of being the Virmire survivor.

I’d say about the only especially plausible scenario where this doesn’t happen is if Shepard is romancing Kaidan, which might (emphasis on ‘MIGHT’) drive them to make the choice to save his life over those of Ashley and Kirrahe’s team. But again, that is only one specific scenario. In any other instance, I’d say that Shepard choosing Ashley over Kaidan is the most likely option.

And looking forward past ME1, I also can’t help but feel that Ashley works just a bit better than Kaidan in terms of what ME2 and ME3 expect the Virmire Survivor to actually do. Namely, how the narrative expects them to be VERY distrustful of Shepard starting in ME2 and eventually being entirely deceived by Udina in the leadup to the Cerberus Coup in ME3.

Now the thing is, does anyone else feel like this arc doesn’t exactly fit Kaidan all that well? Namely that he seems to be just a bit smarter than this?

Throughout ME1, we see that Kaidan is generally one to keep a cool head, and is well-experienced and savvy to the possible faults of his superiors, and generally one to be more thoughtful about a situation.

So I can’t help but feel like when they reunite on Horizon, Kaidan would be more willing to hear Shepard out and give them the benefit of the doubt, rather than becoming so immediately hostile. While I don’t see Kaidan outright joining Shepard’s team on Horizon, I do think he’d nonetheless be more open to reading between the lines of what’s going on and trusting that Shepard knows what they’re doing.

Now, that’s not to say that a super-distrustful Kaidan is entirely unrealistic. Namely, I think a romanced Kaidan feeling that Shepard has betrayed his trust by seemingly not reaching out to them in the two years and taking it pretty personally is a reasonable reaction. But other than that situation, I get the sense that Kaidan would mostly just be happy one of his closest friends is still alive and while he might have his reservations, is willing to give them the benefit of the doubt.

And given Kaidan’s experience, I simply do not see him getting suckered by Udina THAT easily in Mass Effect 3. Unless Shepard has been deliberately blowing him off and/or antagonizing him, the moment Shepard came out that door with their squad and Udina starting spouting ‘Shepard must be with Cerberus!’, I have to imagine Kaidan would’ve started smelling bullshit and that whole standoff would NOT have happened.

By contrast, basically everything ME2 and ME3 expects of the Virmire Survivor I can ABSOLUTELY see Ashely doing. For good or ill, Ashely is THE hotheaded emotional one of Shepard’s original crew, so her taking Shepard’s disappearance and apparently not getting in touch with her very personally feels pretty in-character. And her being a very loyal and committed Alliance soldier makes her being extremely distrustful of Shepard working with Cerberus feels likewise understandable.

And as for Udina’s shenanigan’s in ME3? Yeah, I’d say Ashely is exactly loyal, unquestioning and gullible enough to fall for his bullshit. Especially after he made her a Spectre.

Finally, going back to the first game, I can’t help but feel that Kaidan making the big heroic sacrifice while Ashley gets saved is altogether a bit more fitting to their respective arcs and the narrative as a whole rather than the reverse.

In ME1, Ashley’s main defining character trait is that she basically has a martyr complex. She’s desperate to ‘redeem’ her family name after the ‘dishonor’ brought on it by her grandfather surrendering Shanxi during the First Contact War. Because of this, she is entirely willing to get herself killed if it would help the mission. She’s looking to throw herself on a sword to redeem her family name. Because of this, I feel like it’s more narratively fitting for Ashley to NOT get the big heroic death she’s partly looking for. Heck, Shepard will flat out call Ashley out on her martyr complex after Virmire if she’s saved. It feels like saving Ashley on Virmire gives her a real arc as a character.

By contrast, Kaidan doesn’t really have much of a character arc in ME1, or at least not one that is furthered by him being the Virmire survivor. Instead, because Kaidan starts the game already friends with Shepard, I’d argue that him being the one to die on Virmire has a bit more of an emotional gut-punch than Ashley’s death does. I mean, think of it like this; Kaidan is the first of your party members in the first game. Out of all their companions by this point of the story, Kaidan has been with Shepard the longest. Sure, Ashley has known Shepard second longest out of their companions, but I’d argue Shepard knowing him before the start of the game gives Kaidan’s death just a BIT more tragic punch.

All in all, after I started noticing all this a number of years back, it’s been one of those things I can’t really ‘unsee’ so to speak. Because my go-to ME1 route is FemShep romancing Liara, I tend to weigh Ashley and Kaidan fairly equally in terms of ‘who I like more’. So because of all this, I now view Ashley as more or less the ‘canon’ Virmire Survivor. Now that’s not to say I think other people who chose Kaidan over Ashley are ‘wrong’ in any way. Just that when we think of Mass Effect as its own self-contained narrative, rather than an interactive experience, it’s Ashley who is just the bit more likely to survive Virmire over Kaidan.

[jen-iii]

Do you ever think about Della and Lena interacting? Like Lena had to put up with Magica friggin' DeSpell her whole life. She DESERVES an awesome mom/mom-friend.

God I want it SO badly, I actually think they would get along great because Lena needs a real positive adult figure in her life and I also think it would really highlight some of Della’s parenting skills shes been learning if she can employ them on someone who hasn’t had any positive parenting EVER really 

they are also very similar in the sense of the ALWAYS up for mischief and shenanigans but also VERY much the protective streak for those they care about, it would be great!!

[anthurak]

Yes, I am fully aware of The Owl House finale airing today. However, due to my current hyperfixation on the ongoing psychological and emotional breakdown of Ruby Rose and the likelihood of an epic throwdown with one ice-cream lady, Red Like Roses Part III, and the possible appearance of Ruby’s not-actually-dead mom, I will have to put TOH on the back-burner for now.

Sometimes you just have to pick your battles.

[anthurak]

Soooo, to those who may have also grown up with the Cartoon Network shows of the 2000s...

Anyone want to hear my idea for an Ed, Edd n Eddy/Kids Next Door crossover special which also takes the form of a broad parody of the Bourne Identity that I’ve been putting WAY too much thought into over the past few years?

[anthurak]

Concept: The Edd Identity

So here is a more comprehensive look at that idea for a hypothetical Ed, Edd n Eddy/Codename Kids Next Door crossover special I brought up a few days ago. XD

--

Titlecard: The Edd Identity (or alternatively ‘The Edd Ed-entity’ or ‘The Edd Ed-en-Eddy’)

We open with Double-D groggily regaining consciousness, waking to the aftermath of yet another of the trio’s scams. Not something as crazy as what kicked off the finale movie but rather something more standard for the show. Eddy is trying to placate a pissed-off Sarah and/or Kevin while Ed ambles about in his typical blissful ignorance.

Double-D for his part is left rubbing his head where something clearly knocked him out, looking at the remains of the contraption he built for Eddy’s latest hare-brained scheme with what seems to be a curious new perspective. Absently, he starts tinkering with some of the scattered parts…

Back with Eddy, negotiations have unsurprisingly broken down, and Sarah and Kevin and perhaps Rolf are fully prepared to deliver an expected ass-kicking to the three boys. Eddy decides this is the opportune time to cheese it and grabs Ed and Double-D to beat a hasty escape, maybe on some cart or other vehicle left over from the scam, with the other kids in hot pursuit.

However, this is where things start getting a little… strange.

While Eddy has his standard bravado going on and Ed is just having a good time, Double-D is oddly calm and composed, seemingly unperturbed by their current danger as he works on something.

Not only that, but when the trio seemed poised to wipe out and face the usual retribution from the other cul-de-sac kids, Double-D manages to save them with some quick-thinking and some hastily-assembled gadgets to throw off their pursuers. Like a hastily assembled rocket-booster made out of tin-cans for their cart and a smoke bomb combined with some soda and bubblegum that obscures their escape and leaves their pursuers temporarily stuck.

Needless to say, both Ed and Eddy watch all of them play out in fairly abject shock.

Having successfully escaped with their hides intact for once, the boys regroup at their houses. Ed is mostly gushing about how cool Double-D was while Eddy is both amazed at what just happened and also wondering since when to Double-D’s gadgets work as advertised.

However, Double-D has nothing to say as he’s already going inside his house, basically slamming the door in the other two Eds’ faces

Needless to say, Ed and Eddy are confused/miffed respectively and immediately start trying to either get Double-D’s attention or get into the house. When they finally manage to get inside, they find Edd holed up in his room working furiously, having already assembled several more seemingly random gadgets and drawn up several more plans stuck to the walls or scattered on the floor.

Eddy finally asks Double-D what is wrong with him, only for Edd to suddenly grab him and with a wild look respond; “I DON’T KNOW!”

Double-D then launches into a frantic rant about how all this stuff suddenly CAME to him after he got that blow to the head, how he suddenly KNOWS all this stuff that’s now just pouring out of his head and he doesn’t know why.

He frantically shows Eddy a few of the plans he’s drawn up, such as a schematic for what looks like a complicated fishing rod but what Double-D calls a ‘high-orbital space-hook to assist spacecraft in achieving escape-velocity’, or a blueprint for a ‘deep-sea covert mining/refining facility for converting raw-coffee deposits into hot chocolate’. All of the designs seemingly cobbled together from random bits of junk yet all looking to be quite well thought out. All the while Double-D keeps rambling about how he has no idea where all this is coming from or how he learned all of this but it feels like he always knew this but somehow forgot.

Eddy of course can’t make heads or tails of any of this and is mostly wondering how they can turn one of these into another scam, while in the background Ed seems oddly fixated on one drawing in particular…

All this is halted however when the boys suddenly hear banging and yelling at Double-D’s door. It seems Kevin and Sarah have found them. They’ve also recruited much of the rest of the cul-de-sac kids to help, or just watch the show.

And while Eddy and Ed are freaking out and trying to find a way to escape, Double-D simply grabs something he’d been tinkering with and heads to the front door. Cracking open the door, he tries to talk to Kevin, politely asking, in his normal diplomatic tone, to please come back later, as he’s dealing with a few things right now.

Kevin’s comedically put off by this for a moment but quickly makes a retort related to his fist in a dork’s face. Double-D simply sighs, and opens the door. Meeting Kevin with a rather familiar contraption that looks like a rifle with a couple of magnetized planks of wood.

And with one shot from a S.P.L.A.N.K.E.R., Kevin is sent flying.

From there the Eds make another escape while the rest of the kids are too shocked/dumbfounded/unconscious to give chase.

We then pull out to reveal a small drone observing all of this from afar. Cutting to a dark room, we see a monitor showing a view from the drone zooming in on Double-D. And a couple of mysterious figures comment how they’ve ‘found him’ and to ‘call it in’.

We later find the Eds now hiding out in the junkyard. Double-D is brooding while Eddy rails on how crazy this is and what is even going on while fiddling with the Splanker. Of course, he only succeeds in ‘splanking’ himself in the face. For all of his ranting, it’s clear that Eddy simply has no idea what is going on and has no idea how to react to all this.

Double-D finally starts talking, revealing that he was never actually sure how he knew everything he did about building the various contraptions for their scams. He just… knew how to do all of it. But he was never quite sure HOW… And now he’s thinking this might be the missing piece to all of it…

Eddy of course has no idea how to take this. Meanwhile, Ed is playing with the Splanker, though curiously, unlike Eddy he seems to immediately understand how to use it…

Any further discussion is halted when Double-D hears something. It sounds like someone is poking around outside. Eddy waves it off, assuming it’s just Kevin, Sarah or one of the others, confident that they’d never find this hideout, but Double-D isn’t so sure…

That’s when the explosions start.

Massive holes are suddenly blown in the walls and ceiling, smoke and flashbang grenades are tossed in, and numerous dark figures rush in. All three of the Eds are tazed, roped and tackled to the ground immediately. Eddy’s previous bravado evaporates as he starts freaking out in abject terror, assuming it’s the fuzz come for him for all of his years of scams. But his terrified screaming only gets him tazed again.

As the smoke clears, their attackers are revealed as numerous kids in uniform, including one boy with an orange hoodie and blonde bowlcut who tazed Eddy, and a girl with long black hair wearing a green sweater sitting on a now-trussed-up Ed. Out of the smoke, another figure enters: A boy in red with a bald head and sunglasses, flanked by another boy in blue wearing an aviators goggles and cap, and a girl with a long braid and red cap.

The boy in sunglasses, clearly the leader, approaches a now-prone and tied-up Double-D and addresses him in a grave voice:

“You’re a hard kid to find, Numbuh 2R20. We have some questions for you.”

-----

From here, my ideas for this whole thing get a lot more loose and free form, but here are some of the highlights I’ve come up with:

Double D, or Numbuh 2R20, used to be one of the top engineers and R&D specialists in the Kids Next Door, but vanished after the top-secret, deep-sea facility he was working as was destroyed in a mysterious accident. An accident that some surviving surveillance records imply that HE might have caused. He also turns out to be an old friend of Numbuh 2’s, as they worked together on a number of high-profile projects.

As should be pretty obvious by now, this whole idea takes the form of a broad parody of the Bourne Identity, though with one twist being that Double-D isn’t so much an assassin or secret agent, but an engineer and researcher, which leaves him far less capable of simply fighting his way out of situations. However, the whole ‘conspiracy thriller’ angle is fully intact.

Speaking of fighting, one fun concept for this whole idea is showing what the Kids Next Door look like to ‘civilian’ kids. As in, while they may have their bumbling moments from an insider’s viewpoint, from an outsider, these are in fact a bunch of secret agents/spies/commandos/assassins running a world-spanning underground organization.

Like whenever this crossover focuses on Eddy or any of the other cul-de-sac kids, it’s clear that he is ENTIRELY out of his depth in this situation. Like if we’re talking movie parallels, Eddy is basically the Marie to Double-D’s Bourne XD

Also, the big twist winds up being that Ed is ALSO an ex-KND operative. Specifically, he’s the product of what was essentially a secret super soldier program that Double-D was working on. And yeah, this would be a way of explaining why Ed is so freakishly strong and durable.

[anthurak]

Sometimes you just got to sit back and appreciate the weird little reasons that get you into a show/game/series/etc.

Like how I’m currently playing Assassin’s Creed Valhalla pretty much entirely due to the fact that you’re kinda-sorta playing as a genderflipped Odin.

Because after four years of obsessing over Odin!Ruby theories, that concept is quite appealing to me XD

[anthurak]

So I’m playing Control at the moment, and I realize something I really want to see out of one of these ‘everything’s gone to shit in this secret facility of wonder/unreality/horror and adventure/mystery/trauma and we need your help to repair/resuscitate/unfuck the place’ type of games is to, well... actually fix the place up to how it was prior to everything going to shit before/when my protagonist entered the story.

As in, you know in so many games where you beat the main bad guy and save the day but then your npc-buddies tell you that there’s still a lot of work to do and still a lot of stray mooks lying around and when you look around you find that the place is still at least a good 20% trashed or so. And it all just... stays that way in perpetuity? I realize this is all for gameplay purposes so the player still feels like they have stuff to DO in the post-game and has unlimited re-spawning enemies to still kill and whatnot, but I really wish it was possible to permanently clear out these areas and allow them to be repaired so you can explore these areas when they’re NOT permanently overrun by enemies.

Like to use Control as an example, after you finish the main story, turn off the evil projector, saved Dylan and stopped anymore Hiss from entering, everyone tells Jesse that there’s still a bunch of Hiss infesting the Oldest House and the lockdown needs to kept up. And there’s just... nothing you can actually DO about that.

I want there to be a way that Jesse actually CAN clear the last of the Hiss out from the Oldest House, and let all the places they messed up get repaired and all the creepy floating bodies cleared out and all the mess cleaned up and get these areas populated with friendly FBC npcs that AREN’T trying to kill her. Have more of those fun sidequests where Jesse does surreal but mundane Director stuff and maybe go on a date with her cute head researcher. And by the end, actually lift the lockdown that everyone’s been so stressed about for the whole game.

The point is, the game said that Jesse is the director, so I think it would be fun if by the end of the game we could have her actually DO director things and also go on a date with Emily.

[jen-iii]

Hey Jen, do you know where Carole and Tuesday is streaming? It looks AMAZING but I'm not finding it on Netflix or Crunchyroll.

it’s only airing on Netflix Japan currently and we’ll have to wait till we finish the season for it to go to the other netflix domains BUT! I watch a fansub of it at animefreak.tv! It’s usually my go-to site for animes lol

[jen-iii]

Seeing how Yang would up playing such a huge role in Blake's struggle against Adam, you think Ruby will end up doing the same for Weiss against her father?

ABSOLUTELY

Ruby made a promise to Weiss that they won’t leave her side for a second, and with someone like Jacques who wants absolute control and to isolate Weiss, He is DEFINITELY going to test that resolve

and I for one, can’t WAIT for Ruby to kick his ass alongside Weiss

[jen-iii]

...Do you ever think about how RWBY is basically what if you took the protags of a four-cute-girls life-of-life anime and made them the protagonists of a shounen battle series? Because I just did and I think I've seen beyond the looking glass :O

IT’S SO FUCKING FUNNY TO LOOK AT IT THIS WAY VHBUFECVBUEHCNVUBEHC

[jen-iii]

Her name is Penelope, a pink-haired vampire girl who is able to wield both PB's and Marcy's magic gem-bracelets. She's shown up a few times in the comics. Also, if you weren't aware, the comics also show that in the (relatively) near-future, Bubblegum and Marceline will be the co-ruling Queens of the Candy Kingdom . And yes, the specifically call themselves the Queens :D

vuwxbhnxwdygvxubhswdbu SHE HAS A RAINBOW TIGER-CORN LOLOLOL

[jen-iii]

By any chance, have you read the Adventure Time comic with one of Finn's future reincarnations who is HEAVILY implied to be PB's and Marcy's daughter?

NO WHERE IS THAT?????

[jen-iii]

So, your Bumbleby 'Yin-Yang' art is AMAZING, and also made me realize that in just about ALL of their fights together, Yang ends up holding the other end of Blake's ribbon at some point. I like to think that trend is building to something XD

The Red String Black Ribbon of Destiny :3c

[jen-iii]

Basically, the AT comics have been more or less treating Bubbline as canon for a while now and pretty much any time they are together is SUPER gay :D

MMMMMMM FANTASTIC

[jen-iii]

Hey, thought you might like to know that the Vol. 5 soundtrack is out on iTunes. Also, 'Ignite' continues the 'Yang is the Baddest Ass there Ever Was' trend, 'Smile' is basically the Belladona's warpath theme, and 'All that Matters' is literally 'Yang's gay feelings for Blake: The Song'. XD

ITS FINALLY OUT????? FUUUUUUCKKKK YEAH IVE BEEN W A I T I N G

[jen-iii]

Have you seen Princess Principle? I just finished binging it and it is amazing! It's kinda like Izetta except with Victorian Steampunk Spy-Drama, but still pretty gay :)

oh my fucking god HELL YEAH I LOVED THAT ANIME. it was so good