#i was a teenage exocolonist 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.

[twilicats]

I made this and @oh-frick-its-cinnamon said I should put it on tumblr!

SPOILERS FOR I WAS A TEENAGE EXOCOLONIST

the song is "Freeze Your Brain" from Heathers because Green listened to it while we were on vc and I was thinking of Dys

[neuro-stasis]

"Commander Rhett, sir! I made out with the security system the other day!"

[namidragons]

catch the exocolonist narrator absolutely coming for my throat 

like damn they really went “scared of vace? you should be scared of my scathing judgement instead”

[notathrowawayname]

So I played I was a Teenage Exocolonist

At first, the game sort of rubbed me the wrong way. I enjoyed playing it and the amount of detail and events that can happen depending on your choices is great. But it also felt jarring to me that runs end at age 20, like that was when every decision you've made locked in. And I couldn't get past the idea that Sol is sort of doomed to continue the loop for eternity. Sure the Transcend Time ending exists but that also means that the loop never ends. Sol has to keep reliving their life.

But having had time to think about it, and all the different timelines, having spent time listneing to the insert song "The Child that you Were" and thinking about all the characters and how you can affect their lives, I've realised there's something incredibly bittersweet about it. The game rewards you for solving a problem by making it easier to solve in the next loop. Finding the Shimmer cure, saving Tammy, your Dr Hal, your mum, replacing Governor Lum, brokering peace, etc.

But they can't make it perfect. There will always be fighting, deaths (Kom), conflict before resolution. We're constantly alluded to the fact that the kids don't really have a childhood. They become farmers, soldiers, scientists and childcarers from age 10. They are fighting for their lives and they experience loss and death far too early for any of them to keep their childhood innocence.

But that's sort of the point.

A lot of people have nostalgia for the past when they were a teenager. But the reality is that no, you can't go back. Even if somehow time went backwards and you returned to your teen years, the fact is, you are no longer the person you were back then. "The child you were will not return," no matter how hard you want them to.

At first I parsed that lyric as a source of pain or torture for Sol, but I realised that it's really no different from how all the kids think. Nem loses her brother, Tammy takes time to adjust to the planet, Tang has to reconcile with her brother and deal with her whole "weakness of the flesh" mindset. None of them think they have that innocence or optimism anymore.

But Sol knows that's not true. Sol knows what they're all capable of, how much potential there is in them. They've seen it across countless lifetimes.

And damn if they won't use that knowledge to give them the best lives possible.

And when they're older and wiser, they can all look back fondly at their childhood and think "I was a Teenage Exocolonist".

[exocolonistfeelings]

Honestly I have a lot of mixed feelings about the Gardners whole deal and the Peace Ending. Mostly cause the Peace Ending involves a tactic that’s just…really loaded for me. It’s very much less of a peace talk and more of a…coercion. The humans will die unless they submit and the only reason why they get a slightly better deal is cause Sym is there.

I don’t think it’s a bad idea to have an ending like that, I like that there’s no golden ending. But also I think it’s important to acknowledge that what the Gardeners did is an…actual colonization tactic. I know it’s weird to call it that cause the humans are colonizing Vertrumna but the Gardeners imposed strict rules (no reproduction, a halt in industry and so on)  and as much as I understand why the made those demands (the industry one in particular) this does not exist in a vacuum where real colonizers didn’t make those same demands to their colonies (usually by force, Something we know the Gardeners Do due to the Epilogue talking about how they dispose of particularly rebellious humans) 

Even though the demands were made more “reasonable” there still not great, it’s an “accept or die” situation. Which again is just…very loaded in meaning.

(I’m being unspecific since I’m most familiar with stuff from my home country and I’m a very private person, it’s an Asian country if you want some tiny specifics on the background here.)

I don’t think the game…necessarily intended this though, I obviously can’t read into the exact intent of the game. But I don’t think they necessarily meant for all that implication to be loaded into the Gardeners. Or atleast not in this way.

I don’t know, but that’s the main reason I cannot enjoy the peace ending that much…it is so reminiscent of Real World Colonization Tactics that it just immediately brings my mood down.

[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.

[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

[begonia-shade]

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

[angeloflightandsunshine]

FUCK YEAHHHHHHHHH!

*runs past vace* SUCK IT, YOU FUCKING ASSHOLE!

[leavesandbounds]

If anyone wanted to know why I dropped off the face of the planet for two days

[neuro-stasis]

ah yes, my favorite part of every iwatex run AKA when i finally get to kiss my alien bf and then he launches himself off a cliff immediately afterwards

[looseinthecatroom]

Jfc this really REALLY is the week of " I want us to be together above all else" "I do too but what I NEED is something different than what you've chosen".

LIKE

(First Higurashi Sotsu, then I Was a Teenage Exocolonist, now Good Omens.)

It has been a hell of a week my good chums. x_x Talk about a TREND.

[skyvalii]

Is this where I say that the teaser of the Gigi song: "Capitol loss, love was the law and religion was taught" alongside the "I'm not bought, and when we argue my skin starts to [...]" (I don't know the last word off the top of my head) is very mlm Vace/Solcoded? It doesn't quite matter if in a romantic sense or a platonic sense, but I know that Rex mentions that Vace used to actually be nice to him until he got involved with the more militant side of things.

(This isn't a Vace defense post, I just find his character intriguing.)

[justsalpals]

I'm loving I Was A Teenage Exocolonist so much, but the Dys/Sym/Sol poly end is my fucking white whale

Before playing myself, I saw it existed and immediately zoned in on it. Stopped reading to avoid spoilers, started up the game for myself. Wooed the shit out of Dys, but then Sol didn't want to kiss Sym? Googled. Ah, so I need to romance Sym first. Gotcha, gotcha.

Cut my end off early by setting off the bomb and running away with Dys. Take two, now armed with more information. Successfully romanced both of those beautiful boys, as well as saving several lives (though I was unable to overthrow the governor or end the war). I was a fool, stopping Dys from setting off the bomb entirely (though I did help repair his relationship with Tang, which is a win). The ending came, and although both Dys and Sym were dating me they didn't seem to overlap. Damn.

More googling. Okay, more information acquired. Restart. Doing so well. Angling to become governor, and getting as many characters as I physically can up to 100 friendship while I'm at it. Everything is progressing smoothly. Dys leaves the colony. I find him on the ridge.

And this fucker needs 3 strange devices (and crystals, but that was nbd). I have two. TWO. Because I've been giving gifts at all opportunity to make friends. I cleared out the ridge, and it's the last year of the game (so there was to be no respawning). Failed, right at the end.

I'm screaming. I'm feral. I need to change up my chosen romance next time or I'll go insane.

Also because I really wanted to see it play out in the peace route, and it would be so much repeating at this point.