#instance exocolonist

[theomenroom]

as the sole mental health professional on a spaceship light-hours from earth for years, literally everyone else on the ship was a current, former, or prospective client of besk's, from launch day forward.

given that the ship was full of traumatized people already (look at the life on earth timelines, or, hell, just the fact that flulu lost a leg in combat), and that they were doing something stressful and isolating and new, probably every adult on that ship had been through besk's office at some point in the first few years. sooner, if they had any process of regular psychological screening that wasn't delegated to congruence.

if she was going to have a social life, it would be by befriending her clients in a way that stretches the bonds of therapeutic ethics. if she were to have a love life, it would involve sleeping with a client.

no wonder she was lonely! no wonder she was pining after someone she left behind on earth!

she thought having the twins would make her less lonely because that way there'd be a person (two people, but judging by their names i think she found out she was having twins after becoming pregnant) she'd have a pre-existing relationship with so that they couldn't be her clients.

her very obvious cries for help (developing a drinking problem, naming her son after depression, and that's just the ones that are visible in hindsight to people who were five or six when she died) went unheeded because she very likely didn't have the kind of close friends that anyone else on the ship had, and everyone else was used to delegating mental health to someone else. and she was that someone else.

speaking of, i don't really buy the popular interpretation that besk and instance were close (either as a couple or as friends). i get why people ship them; instance is the person who talks the most about besk other than the twins, and they're tangent's two parental figures, but i think the second explains the first. besk looms large in instance's mind because the child she is mentoring/raising is besk's. instance doesn't need to have been close to besk to be what she is to tangent (a thing i've explored my opinions about elsewhere). it makes more sense if instance and besk had a mutual professional respect, but the version of besk i'm suggesting looking for here didn't have any friends on board.

the twins take after her tendency to isolate; dys by running away and tangent by pushing everyone else away, but in both cases they're isolating and in both cases they want someone to find them (dys shows this when he shows sol the drainpipe; tangent has her tendency to seek instance's praise).

dys's tendency to be unflinchingly consistent in his ethical stance toward vertumna's natural world might be him taking after her, but without the social bonds leading him to relate to other humans in the same way (he was kinda abandoned after tangent came under instance's influence), leading to the events of glow 18.

besk was under an entirely unique kind of stress. her former clients (every other adult on the ship) would remain her former clients even if she retired (and that's assuming they accepted her retirement). she couldn't take a break from the fact that everyone around her were her clients. from looking at her kids' friends and wondering how many years she had until they'd be crossing the door to her office.

the vertumna group set her up for failure by choosing to have only one mental health professional around without a lightspeed lag measured in hours for a group of any size at all, and again by selecting someone who didn't bring any family or partners with her for the job. and she paid the price for it, tang and dys got left to pick up the pieces, and the lesson the adults seem to have taken from it is "don't be a counselor"

[pandorisnova]

When you talk about your dreams too much in Exocolonist

[iamverprost]

pov: your daughter just started a relationship in the workplace (deep down you think she made a good damn choice but you have to keep up your appearance)

i'm sorry to repost this but tumblr messed up with my acc :(

[vertumnanaturalis]

Tangent, 35

Tang, 35: Something is wrong but you don't know what

“It’s normal to feel a certain level of confusion after being unconscious for so long,” Is what she started with, motioning to turn off the screens of the medbed. “, especially combined with all the sudden changes in your daily life.

"However, I’m not seeing anything unexpected, medically speaking; your cranial injury appears to have healed without complication, and you aren’t displaying any physiological or neurological signs that have me worried.”

Tangent nodded along to the conversation, but she was having a hard time paying attention with her usual gusto. Everything around her was tinged in a lingering haze of half-familiarity that was hard to ignore. 

Instance must’ve noticed, because her voice grew soft, uncomfortably unusually soft, unfamiliar-familiar, the feeling of wrinkled hands soft around hers, telling her something true and awful and inescapable and she didn’t WANT it to be real and it made Tangent’s eyes start to water and-

“... My suggestion would be to focus on resting and recovering right now - Body and mind. I know you won’t enjoy it, but…” 

-And it wasn’t real. A ghost of a memory of a memory, gone before she could even begin to guess what she could be remembering. But it wasn’t real. 

Not real like the seat underneath her, or the too-bright ( unfamiliar-familiar, comforting, but annoying, but warm, but- ) light pouring in from the alien suns, or the look of steely concern barely concealed on her mentor's face.

“I…” Tangent had a hard time remembering how to use her tongue. Was her voice always this high pitched? “... I understand, Chief Engineer Instance, thank you.”

It was a bad lie, one Instance clearly didn’t believe, but at least it was a bad lie she wasn’t challenged on.

Her arms and legs still felt too small for her body.

[wilting-fl0wer]

hi hello! for the request thing: I guess technically not a ship but tang and dys after they patch things up would be neat! or rex and cal platonically?

it's the depression twins

inspired by this event

[catchitori]

Rehearsal has been giving me so much time to draw bc I have nothing to dooooooo.

[ppenguinpperson]

instance and flulu divorce selfie

shes liveblogging the divorce to geranium

[rxj-the-punk]

They could never make me hate her.

[cannot-kill-the-sun]

Suffering! I want to go to sleep because sleepy but i keep coming up with more fucked up conversations for Besk and Instance to have

I can't fix her/i can make her worse but its medical eithics violations 💕

[incorrectsmashbrosquotes]

Chapter two is up. Hope you like it!

[theomenroom]

Tangent and Instance thoughts/my Tangent theory. Spoilers for my two friends I just got into exocolonist; wait 'til you've seen the whole women's wrongs plot and then come back. @dillypillars I'm tagging you since you asked to hear my Instance thoughts.

Tangent is an abused child. Before anything else, before she's an amoral scientist or a workaholic genius, she's an abused child.

She's also brilliant. She is capable, at nine years old, of sometimes, if she overstretches herself, gives up even the little sleep she still needs with her augment, producing results on the level of an adult scientist, a habit which becomes lifelong and eventually kills her.

The only praise she cares about is Instance's, and overstretching herself like that is the only way to get that. She's taken on responsibilities most adults spend years of dedicated training to get ready for, as a preteen.

She's isolated from her peer group. In the bar arc, Dys outright tells you that since she started her gene therapies with Instance, she's thought herself smarter and better than her peers to the point that the only ones who try to keep in touch with her are Marz (who's immune to anything Tangent might say to push her away) and maybe Sol (who, if they tried to keep up with Tangent aboard the ship, is also a nerdy science kid, although not (yet) on the same level).

That her isolation is because she thinks she's smart and mature for her age (because she's being held to adult expectations and sometimes succeeding) doesn't make it any less isolation.

Instance encourages this isolation. Instance sometimes even orders it (there's a line when you approach Tangent in late-game where she's like "Instance says I'm not to be distracted by visitors").

Instance also tramples her sense of scientific ethics. Tangent comes to Sol about the engineered plague with ethical concerns about deploying it, but she's not going into that conversation with an open mind at all. She wants her friend and peer to tell her everything is alright; if Sol instead echoes her ethical concerns back to her (or comes at her with new ones), she throws up the same defenses and excuses about how she would do anything for Instance (🚩🚩🚩) that she's doubtless used to suppress those concerns for herself before.

As an aside, I also don't buy that Instance didn't start research on the Engineered Plague until ordered to do so by Lum. Tangent has mad scientist "this could change everything" moments years before in the Strato colony, when you're researching the Shimmer. It might not have been a research priority before Lum, but I don't think the evidence supports Instance not having considered inventing bioweapons to exterminate inconvenient Vertumnan species.

Then there's the epilogue; I've never seen Tangent keep the chief engineer job for more than a year despite everything Instance has done to groom her for the position (wording intentional). She's put aside a lot of her own wants and ambitions to fulfill Instance's goal of having a worthy successor, and then without Instance she realizes she doesn't even want it. If she almost built the plague, that experience is a life-defining trauma for her. She wasn't even 18 yet when she worked on that, but she trusted Instance to know what's best, did as she asked, and suffered a life-defining trauma from the moral dissonance.

One of the most glaring "something is wrong here" moments for me was one of Tangent's colony dialogue blurbs when she was like "only Instance truly respects me," she says to Sol, who she is dating at the time.

I think on some level she really believes that. There's probably some cognitive dissonance between recognizing what she has with a Sol who's approaching her on her level, for the most part, and what she has to believe for Instance (which is what she says out loud), but she navigates that anyway.

At the risk of running off even further into unpopular opinion territory, I think Tangent and Instance's dynamic is actually the better depiction of abuse in Exocolonist (which is surprising, because it's not mentioned in the game's content warnings at all). Anemone and Vace's relationship is a power fantasy of being a bystander to an abusive relationship; you catch Anemone when her heavily-armed, hyper-possessive boyfriend with anger issues is giving her the silent treatment once, tell her she deserves better than that, and she's like "you know what, you're right, I do!" and leaves him and everything is good. Tangent's is more realistic. You might not even see it unless you really focus and look. Sol doesn't see it, across multiple timelines, even if they're dating Tangent in some of them. There's nothing you can do about it; intervening even to echo thoughts she's brought to you just pushes her away. Tangent is getting an emotional need met there that she doesn't think she could get anywhere else. That's more often what it's like.

[hirokiyuu]

i do often think abt the fact that instance is the only medical professional on the ship bc besk is dead. i often think abt how between them the burden of the colony's health was on their shoulders and then besk died and now it was just instance's job. now she's got a fourteen year old talking about aliens and a twelve year old having a breakdown and shaving all her hair and it's up to Her to deal with it. her, of all people,

[iamverprost]

the worst exo ship was confirmed. love wins.

[vertumnanaturalis]

yknow there are a lot of throwaway lines in this game about things in the background or backstory of this game that make you go "wait what" that are never revisted or reexamined in the course of the narrative, and while theres been plenty of takes on many of these one that really hit me like a pipe to the head was Marz's dads talking about having been together since before they got on the ship and then you look at their profiles and realize they were 12 and 16 respectively at launch

[implausiblyjosh]

I'm Not Like Other Wholesome Games, But I Won't Tell You Why

I read a pretty bad essay, i was a teenage exocolonist (and so can you), and now I'm making it your problem.

Let's start with my issue with "wholesome games" as a concept. Personally, I think the entire concept as a marketing term is like nails on a chalkboard. The "wholesome games" directs, that game during The Game Awards being marketed as a "wholesome game", it's just a filler phrase that means nothing to me. While it can feel pretty useful coming from a friend whose tastes I understand who can actually explain what they mean by "wholesome" in context, as I said on bluesky, "it feels very overwhelmingly corporate when said out loud during several hours of gaming ads."

So a couple days after hearing about "wholesome games" during a long advertisement with occasional awards thrown in, I see a medium article from Doc Burford passed around on bluesky. Now, I already dislike this dude's writing style in general. At the end of 2023 he got main charactered on Twitter for arguing that JRPGs aren't RPGs. While I won't get into "if I think JRPG is even meaningful as a genre", and while I think he and I come to genres and their categories in two different ways, I said on Twitter that he's got "forum poster brain, where you're just an unshakable, in your mind always correct, asshole and it means any message you write is muddied by that tone." I stand by that still, he writes like an asshole who thinks he's better than anyone who disagrees. He acts as if he is not talking down to you, while the tone he takes online is actively talking down to people who disagree with him.

With all that being said, I still read the article. And it fucking blows.

When I initially read it and reacted to it, it felt like he was arguing that "wholesome games" uniquely attract shitheads to be shitheads. This felt silly because he only gives one instance of "wholesome media fandoms being little shits" with a Steven Universe example, and the rest are examples of people being awful to Doc Burford in other, non-wholesome-games contexts. In fact, at one point in the essay he says:

I’ve watched people go “no! you can’t criticize this! it’s wholesome!” come out in droves to defend a game that sucks just because they tied their consumption of the product to it.

Which clearly tells me there isn't a unique issue with "wholesome games", but the actual issue is deeply tying your consumption of something into your personality. And honestly it's more broad than that, where when you tie external things into your personality it seems like an attack on those external things become an attack on you. Synder Cut fanboys, Fandom "elder" goobers who want to be percieved as very principled and smart and anti-racist, Harris voters who filmed TikToks ordering Starbucks and McDonalds over her loss... there's an obvious throughline of tying outside perseption, outside forces, and the like into your own personal identity that is not healthy.

I made a threat, to which one Doc Burford himself chimed in. This made me think about the essay again, about wholesome games and how it ties into I Was A Teenage Exocolonist, the game he's supposedly supposed to be writing about, and then it hit me.

He doesn't even talk about "wholesome games".

The back part of the essay is about I Was A Teenage Exocolonist, and how it's not like other wholesome games. It's all giving off a very pick-me energy, trying to make sure this game stands out from all the pitfalls and negativity and fascism that can come into wholesome games fandoms... but he never actually talks about another wholesome game to compare this game to. The closest we get is the Steven Universe situation he uses as an example but, and I hate to tell you this, Steven Universe is a television show and not a "wholesome game". Despite opening his essay with "it’s easier to find ten games that are an example of something", he provides no examples of "wholesome games".

Well, that's not entirely true. The few times he talks about video games other than I Was A Teenage Exocolonist is when he's talking up his own games. When he finally gets to I Was A Teenage Exocolonist he explains what makes this game a "wholesome game" in his mind, which is that it looks "twee", and how he would change it in his own games. The first game he talks about, in the third paragraph of his essay, is a game he's working on under the codename "Waifu Death Squad". The only other game I can remember him talking about is Mass Effect, and that is not in the discussion of "wholesome games" but "choices matter games". He outlines a vague sketch of what a "wholesome game" is to him, which is a game about comfort without conflict with some sort of "twee" aesthetics, but never once says a game that fits this mold. The closest we get is him saying I Was A Teenage Exocolonist isn't like other "wholesome games" because there is death and conflict.

So he talks about a handful of games but never gives an example of a "wholesome game". He never gives an example of a "wholesome game" with a bad fandom. And yet Doc Burford spends several hundred words on explaing how fascists prey upon a want for "nostalgic comfort" with a section that includes nine (9) different Nazi films as examples of how fascists do this. Nine (9) nazi films, and yet we talk about two (2) video games that are not made by Doc Burford, and one (1) is Mass Effect and the one (1) is the subject of the essay. What the fuck are we even doing here?

This is truly the biggest issue about the essay, in my estimation. We're supposed to be here for I Was A Teenage Exocolonist, and we're supposed to be talking about "wholesome games", and we're supposed to be talking about how I Was A Teenage Exocolonist isn't like other "wholesome games", but you're not actually talking about "wholesome games" in your essay about "wholesome games"! And I know you can make arguments with examples, because you showed me nine (9) nazi movies to drill in the idea that fascists appeal to comfort in their art. Could you give me any examples of a "wholesome game" maybe?

At this point, I can barely understand what a "wholesome game" is. If it's a game with no conflict and prioritizes comfort, the only game I can think of in the larger gaming consciousness is Animal Crossing: New Horizons, a game that people seemed to really wish had some more of the conflict and edginess from earlier installments. If we're talking about "wholesome games" from a viewpoint of audience perception, as opposed to a description of the game and how it plays and what it does, then that doesn't seem like a useful genre. Should I start talking about Mob Psycho 100 in terms of it being a "wholesome anime" because it has themes about growing up and being a kid and finding yourself and so on? Should I call Call of Duty a "wholesome game" because there exists a part of the fandom that wants no conflict in the game and simply wants their multiplayer matches to look like every clip-farming CoD content creators' videos? You see how useless this all feels as a description?

All of this swirls around to make for a bad essay. Because he doesn't talk about "wholesome games", and instead talks about how attachment to consuming media is the real culprit behind having shitheads raid your fandoms and audiences, he's undermined any argument around how I Was A Teenage Exocolonist is not like other "wholesome games". Because he shows you he can come up with endless examples of nazi films that prey on nostalgic comfort, but doesn't list one (1) "wholesome game" in comparison to I Was A Teenage Exocolonist or his own games, it feels like he doesn't actually have a good framework for what a "wholesome game" even is. If you then think about how he talks more about his own accolades and games he's working on or has worked on than actual "wholesome games", and the little digs at I Was A Teenage Exocolonist, this doesn't really feel like an essay about I Was A Teenage Exocolonist. The essay reads like he's jerking off about his own success and telling you how good he could make a game in this mold (again, a mold he refuses to define). It all comes off as self-congratulatory nonsense attempting to be about trying to congratulate some other game he has no real interest in talking about.

And the worst part? He's shitty about how bad this essay is. Someone made some flippant post about the essay, to which Doc Burford says the essay is actually about "wait, this is a piece where the writer says he wants to write wholesome games but is wondering why nazis are attracted to wholesome games so much because he doesn't want them as fans". When the person defends their read on the essay, Doc Burford implies they're trying to run defense for fascists and defends this by saying the person is trying to "lie" about his work. I mean, he was in my mentions for no good reason! My posts do not Do Numbers, and it's not like he came back to be like "actually, I did talk about more wholesome games", so he just came by to be a but of a shithead and move on because he didn't like that I was negative.

This is a tantrum. Even by his own standards of what his essay is about, he clearly misses the mark. But to do this in the quote posts of someone being flippant about his essay is goofy. To be in people's mentions about it is goofy. To act like anyone who disagreed with the essay is stupid, or lacks media literacy, or is someone to talk down to is goofy. And I think that person being flippant about his essay is being too kind, because if Doc Burford had managed to bring up Stardew Valley he'd at least have talked about a singular "wholesome game" in comparison to I Was A Teenage Exocolonist!

I go back to what I said about his writing before, which is that he's got forum poster brain. This is being argumentative to keep up appearances online. There is almost no actual defense of the words he wrote but instead being mad people don't vibe with his words. He wants so badly to receive no pushback for his words because he believes no one could argue against him. I mean, look at how high his pedestal is for himself:

But several people suggested that by not liking the popular art they had consumed, I “just didn’t get it,” which was funny, cause I have multiple critically acclaimed games under my belt, have been brought into help people in AAA make their games critically acclaimed, and I have multiple degrees in storytelling and art. I am quite literally an expert in this field. These people were mostly just young adults who’d bought a $70 game that had been advertised very heavily and polished into a generic AAA paste. Like, you wanna argue with me on the points, go for it, but “you would like this product if you were smart” coming from someone with no qualifications to an expert in the field is just silly.

The people who disagree with Doc Burford just "don't get it". He's a self-proclaimed expert in the field! And when you do argue on the points he handwaves it away as being a defense for fascists, or that you're stupid, or that you don't have media literacy, or you're reading it in bad faith, or or or or or. It's frustrating and it creates for a bad reading experience because you know if you disagree too loud in public he comes in and stomps his feet and demands to be taken seriously. He's an expert after all and, no matter who you actually are or what you actually say in in relation to the essay, in his eyes you're just some dumb kid who bought a video game and think you're entitled to sit with the big kids.

This post was made as a synthesis of lots of different posts I made around the internet, like my bluesky. Thank you to my friends who I talked about this with to help me clarify my thoughts. I hope you enjoyed all my words!

[deusexlachina]

Cheeseaged Exocolonist Year 19 2/2: Cement my power by letting people fuck

The finale to my perfect life, in which I reconcile Tangent and Dys, civilization and nature, human and Gardener. And rule over all of it with an iron fist.

CW for discussion of ecofascism. The villains are pretty foul.

My first act as governor is to immediately fire Seeq for attempting to bribe themselves. I install Marzipan in their place. She jokes that she intends to be leader of the opposition, which is funny, because this is a one-party state.

She is actually not joking; the ending confirms that she leads the opposition. I can only assume that her insincere levity is to make herself look nonthreatening; the last politician to oppose me, Lum, was last seen dragged off by soldiers. He is never mentioned again in this visual novel.

On my inauguration, the council advised that I spend individual time with everyone. Naturally, I do this in the form of barista therapy, because Tangent needs it and so does Dys. I warn Dys about the dangers of drugs, which he dismisses, presumably because I am telling him this while giving him drugs. Just because I'm a hypocrite doesn't mean it's not good advice.

In between these sessions, Instance comes in to vent about Tangent facing too much pressure, perhaps because she is queen-consort of the most powerful human on this planet. I tell her not to push Tangent too hard. This reduces Helped Tangent even more. This has no mechanical effect, because Tangent doesn't even have enough time to be a supervillain. But it's still sweet to see Instance realize the error of her ways and stop pushing Tangent too hard. Before she kills all non-terrestrial life on the planet.

Having narrowly achieved 90 Friendship with Vace, he texts me that he's going to go to therapy and apologize to Rex for bullying him for being a furry, redeeming himself a literal month before the end of the game.

At the end of the year, the Gardeners amass a vast army of animals and genetically-engineered monsters, with the intent of wiping out humanity if we cannot reach an accord. A responsible leader would prepare either for war or for negotiation. However, I am drunk on my own power, so I decide to spend the final month of the game reconciling my wife and brother-in-law.

They share that they've missed each other and felt terrible. Tangent recommends an antidepressant implant. Dys refuses, because I have taught him well and he says no to drugs. Then he sips his second cocktail of the night.

Having reconciled a decade-long grudge by plying each party with drugs until they are intoxicated enough to talk about their feelings, I am now in a good headspace to negotiate on behalf of humanity. The negotiations go smoothly until Nocticulent demands that we stop fucking.

I know my people will not stand for this. How will Tammy engage in her favourite pasttime of being pregnant? How will Rex be able to sire a wave of children like a furry Ghengis Khan? As leader, I step forward and renegotiate. This requires a social, mental and physical check, each of which I complete effortlessly because I have a fidget spinner and am stimming constantly, unnerving Nocticulent, who must be unsure if this is some kind of alien sorcery.

Nocticulent is impressed with me, because I have learned a lot "in ten years." I do not correct him that I am trapped in a timeloop, with the combined knowledge of countless lifetimes. He cites my learning as a sign of human potential and thus cause for peace. He does not say whether this decision was informed by my godlike powers or by my wife being a supervillain who can turn his own plagues against him to destroy him at the genetic level. You decide.

Grateful that I have ended the war, and, more importantly, preserved the right to fuck, my people rejoice, and bow to me as I rule this planet for my long life. I have it all: power, women, fulfillment.

And my mom is finally proud of me.