#Wake of vultures

[chamberlilium]

Our first VN since Absolutely Perfect Specimen is here: Wake of Vultures, the first part of Hopeless Divine. 🌻🌻🌻🌻🌻🌻🌻🌻🌻 despair, hatred, violence 🌻🌻🌻🌻🌻🌻🌻🌻🌻

a story about reunions, trauma, hatred, life and death, and the end of the world.

[a-ramblinrose]

JOMP Book Photo Challenge || December 12 || Transgender Character:  Wake of Vultures by Lila Bowen

[kdmerchant]

Okay, I'm halfway through this gem.

I love how Bowen describes things. If you like Supernatural but you want more southern cowboy era with a strong female lead, this is for you. I can't wait to see how it shakes out.

Poor Nettie can't catch a break.

[qbdatabase]

Nettie Lonesome lives in a land of hard people and hard ground dusted with sand. She’s a half-breed who dresses like a boy, raised by folks who don’t call her a slave but use her like one. She knows of nothing else. That is, until the day a stranger attacks her. When nothing, not even a sickle to the eye can stop him, Nettie stabs him through the heart with a chunk of wood and he turns to black sand.

And just like that, Nettie can see.

But her newfound sight is a blessing and a curse. Even if she doesn’t understand what’s under her own skin, she can sense what everyone else is hiding—at least physically. The world is full of evil, and now she knows the source of all the sand in the desert. Haunted by the spirits, Nettie has no choice but to set out on a quest that might lead her to find her true kin . . . if the monsters along the way don’t kill her first.

(note: MC quickly switches to he/him pronouns and male name but questions until book two)

[g1deonthefirst]

what the ninth house did to wake's body — presumably picking her apart for resources and then perpetually enslaving her bones — must have been one of wake's greatest nightmares. the nine houses kill you and then they use each part of you and puppet your bones in service of them forever.

[petterwass]

Really love how all the EX stage names for Come Catastrophes or Wake of Vultures, a event that ends in a climactic pistol duel, describe the process and consequences of deciding to kill another human.

[viperra1]

— despite everything, it's still you.

[fylwertastic]

JESSICA THE LIBERATED

[bobbile-blog]

Okay so I've finally gotten to Jessicalter's Oprec and now feel qualified to talk about Come Catastrophes or Wakes of Vultures. holy shit. This went straight into my list of top Arknights events. Fantastic event, spoilers will be under the cut so I HIGHLY RECOMMEND reading the event first. It's really good and worth your while.

Anyway, what follows is a scattered mess of thoughts about this event and things that stuck out to me.

First off, plot stuff! I'll probably cover this when I do my next plotline recap post, but what I took away from the end is that Clip Cliff seems to want to make Blacksteel independent, or at least more self-determining than it is now. He seems to be gathering resources and assets like mobile city plates and investing in long-term infrastructure like merc training, so he definitely has a long game he's pushing for. I don't think we know enough go speculate about his goals, but we'll definitely be coming back here again. After all, Tila has an infection monitor in her art, which probably means she's going to be playable at some point in the future.

Next, having looked into this a little on my own, I was interested in some of the previous places Raythean has shown up. Specifically, the ones that stood out were the drones in the Kazimierz Major and arming Silverash's forces in Kjerag, which might be referring to the Tschäggätt��. It's not just notable for their apparent level of technology, but also as a faint connecting thread between three separate capitalism plotlines. I don't know if that's going to be meaningful in the future, but I found it interesting enough that I thought I'd bring it up.

Now on to more narrative things. While I love Liskarm and Franka, I do think it was the right choice to give them less screen time in this event. They're both (for the most part) fully-realized characters who understand their own motivations and morals. This is above all else an event about Jessica learning to stand on her own as an adult, so it makes sense that they're more here to support her than they are to play their own roles in the story.

Speaking of said roles, I liked the event's commentary on cops. It pointed out an interesting distinction that I wouldn't really have ever thought of, that between mercenaries and cops. To start: cops exist to protect property, not people. The police exist to protect things and do not have an obligation to err on the side of people over things, and in fact are supposed to do the opposite. This event understands that, and that role os the core of how the bank treats the Blacksteel mercs. CV, however, raises an interesting point that mercenaries are bound by the letter of a contract and not the larger obligation to property cops are, so they can actually raise moral objections and point to their contracts, sort of a Lawful Evil/Lawful Neutral to cops' Neutral Evil. The independence of their position with respect to cops allows for more of an independent morality than you'd get in a cop story and I like that, I think it's a really smart direction to take your writing in.

On a (mostly) separate note, holy shit Arknights is really good at writing cowboy stories. Between this and chapter 9 (and I would argue An Obscure Wanderer), Arknights has repeatedly made it clear that they Do Not Fuck Around with their cowboy stories and I'm surprised I haven't heard more people talking about it. It kinda has everything:

- It takes place in a rural, working-class setting undergoing a larger imminent societal shift that can inform the larger narrative, and deals with a semi-mythologized past that is rapidly disappearing.

- It has a protagonist and an antagonist that serve as foils, both very heavily affected and defined by the (same) violence in their past that they've both had different reactions to. Our protagonist has come to terms with the violence as a tool to maintain order, while our antagonist has used it for personal gain and in some ways lost control of it.

- It's a story about community, and heavily emphasizes local and personal community over larger artificial corporate "community". That's my reading of the recurring motif of the cold btw, warmth represents the close, personal community Davistown used to have and the cold that now pervades it comes from how the bank has systematically dismantled that community.

- And, I'd argue most importantly, it understands the narrative power of a bullet. The Showdown at the end of a cowboy story is powerful because we've spent the entire runtime of our story with these characters, and they are now facing each other down with the intent to end one of their collective two stories. The entire weight of the narrative so far comes to rest on a single moment of tension. It's really hard to gather up the kind of narrative momentum you need to make that hit like it does in CV. For example, it requires a really light hand with actual action in the story, so that it really does feel like it's an even standoff between our protagonist and antagonist. On the other hand, though, you do actually have to establish the relative skill of both parties and actually sell the danger of the moment to the audience. It's really hard to toe the line between tension and actual action in a way that makes for a satisfying resolution, and CV does it extremely well.

Honestly, Arknights just seems really good at getting the vibes of American media right. This is something I noticed in DV and Lonetrail too, and I haven't really been able to put my finger on what it is about them, but the vibes are just really on-point. I want to write more about this at a later point once I actually figure out what it is that I'm feeling, but maybe it's the setting, maybe it's the cast, maybe it's the plot points, maybe it's something in between — it just seems to understand the spirit of period cowboy stories in a way that I can't describe. Good shit.

Finally, I wanna end this with where Jessica is now. The events of CV take place In between the events of Loneterail and Ideal City, so the current "now" of the story is a few months ahead. Jessica left for the frontier along with Woody, Helena, and Miles. They live together in a small new settlement, building the place from the ground up with Woody and Jessica acting as town sherrifs. At the point we're at now, rhe town is fairly well-established and Woody has temporarily left on other business, leaving Jessica the sole sherrif of their new settlement. However, she's risen to her new station, and is growing into a stronger person than she ever was before.

[burstfoot]

Cyberpunk key art edit by おーちゃん

[n-i-v-a-d-a]

Honestly, I think this is one of Arknights’ most underrated events. The atmosphere of the town was one point, as we saw it being destroyed by the banks, perfectly represented by a fantastic cast. It was great to see Jessica’s journey to breaking into banks, and the final scenes got me feeling emotional. It felt like a reminder of how Arknights can take any theme or genre they want and excel at it if they so choose.

[yamaylander]

just a suggestion what if we all blew her up

[kdmerchant]

Wake of Vultures, Lila Bowen

I love the way Bowen writes. She has such a fun bouncy cadence. Can't wait to see how this all shakes out. 👀

[stelladess]

A detail I like in Come Catastrophe or Wake of Vultures is how Clip doesnt actually have a real answer for what he even gets out of doing the horrible things he does. He is already mega wealthy. He claims pragmatism but really, he could just quit and go enjoy a retirement with his mountains of cash and no strings attached. It almost seems more like he has just gotten so used to what he does and cares so little for the people hurt by it that it just does not even occur to him that he can just quit. Does making even more money when he is rich enough to be able to have a friggin landship for his organization (note that Rhodes Island was dug out of the rubble and was only made operational cause Closure is a genius, Fort Barron seems like it was just constructed for Blacksteel) I still have a tiny bit left of this side story but so far it has been one of my absolute favorites up there with Lone trail or What the Firelight Casts.

[lemuenic]

Thoughts on Come Catastrophes or Wakes of Vultures

I really appreciated Come Catastrophes or Wakes of Vultures for how grey it is. While conflict between Idealism and Reality has always been a reoccurring theme for Arknights, and is indeed a strength of its world building, typically the furthest the writers'll go is to have the protagonist organization choose lesser evils while having good intentions. Think Silverash’s faction staging a coup to industrialize Kjerag. Blacksteel is handled in a far more interesting way because a mercenary company carries a far heavier ethical baggage than say a violent resistance movement. Unlike other storylines, here Reality triumphs over Idealism and the game takes pain to say that the inherent evil of having your tool of the trade be violence will inevitably erode away whatever ideals carried you into the recruitment office. It matters little if your goal is to make a buck or find glory or world peace, you’re still going to be protecting parasites and evicting people because this dirty work is what violence is used for, you will get your hands dirty because this is your job. Franka and Liskarm and Almond are still complicit, even though we know they’re good people. And Jessica’s coming of age is realizing that you’re not going to find inner-strength or a sense of self-accomplishment coercing people, so she chooses to undergo self punishment / exile through pioneering in a very Crime and Punishment way which I really liked for all the reasons I like Crime and Punishment. Furthermore the premise is fantastic, a rust-belt town being suffocated by finance capital so they can do gentrification taken down by the wronged and a local who ascended to the private-managerial class only to be disgusted by her work and fights back is relevant and fantastic, the fact that despite everything capital succeeds in destroying the town and sends all residents into either crime or debt-slavery enforced suicidal exile makes it also realistic. And thankfully, they didn’t find a way to inject Rhodes Island into a story they don’t belong in, which I’m sick of because I’m tired of angels. This is up there with Break the Ice for me, if only they didn’t try to add the slight positive twist at the end for Blacksteel like they always do, but anyways this is truly a great work of proletarian literature, all hail Chairman 海Mao.

[petterwass]

This event really felt like a western movie to me in so many ways

I doubt it's a coincident that Woodrow's hat looks a bit like a confederate hat and Cliff's like a sheriff hat.

Or that they are both men broken by the very same war that dealt with it in completely opposite ways.

Or the fact that we're dealing with a bank taking over a impoverished mining town, which is a very Western setup.