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chikkou · 2 years

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do u have any controversial™️ lisa takes

- brad did pretty much everything wrong, but given the foundation he had to go off (in terms of not only being a parent, but just plain being a person), he definitely was better than he could have been

- buddy is completely in the right for wanting to secure her future for herself, even if she did hurt innocent people in the process (which BRAD DID TOO)

- the majority of lisa fans (particularly the ones from /v/) are literally unequipped to understand the complexities of the story because of the subject matter. i think austin handled it in probably the best way possible given the context, but for some reason most fans prefer to be like I Do Not See It when they discuss the games lore

- not sure if this is really controversial, but the joyful posited so many fantastic ideas and doesnt get the chance to fully realize them due to its length. as it stands, that game is probably a 7/10; if it was fleshed out to the same length as the painful, i think it could have not only matched its quality level, but maybe even surpassed it.

- brad should have given buddy to rando when he first found her and arranged some sort of deal where he and the uncles could have been her guards/caretakers/whathaveyou. this is suggested pretty much right off the bat in the painful, but brad shoots it down because of his desire to redeem himself from what happened to lisa, and i think that thats extremely selfish. i dont discount the fact that he did love buddy by the end, but that love was borne from a desire for atonement & to prove to himself that he wasnt like his father, not a real desire to care for a child. i find this doubly selfish because its not like brad cant fully trust rando either - thats HIS ESTRANGED SON, who HE abandoned. he knew that he was a very gentle, kind person, and would never have let harm befall her. he also had the backing of AN ENTIRE ARMY UNDER HIS CONTROL TO PROTECT HER, so it really feels like a horrible decision to not reach out to him.

- related to the last one - rando fucked up big time by orchestrating buddys kidnapping, like to the point that it kind of confused me because it felt a bit OOC and unnecessary. he does get pissed off at his friends for tying her up and knocking her out, and literally drags himself to her room to make sure shes okay, but i just dont understand why he did this when he didnt need to. buddy already trusted him, and he had proven himself to be protective of her while not completely restricting her, which is the balance she always wanted. hell, in both endings she clearly still loves him, maybe even more than brad - she buries him in the "leave them" ending and keeps his body with her in the "join them" one, but with brad she only keeps him alive in the "leave them" ending. again, i think having the game be longer would have given austin ample time to explore randos reasoning here, but as it stands it just seems really weird to me.

i probably have more but this is all i can think of for now LMAO

#anya's replies #untestified #lisa

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tanadrin · 6 years

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Mars has hung in Earth’s sky since time immemorial, a wandering red jewel, a sign of war and pestilence and blood. Its ancient connotations belied its true nature: when the science of optics and the first space probes opened up the nearer heavens to thorough inquiry, Mars proved to be the most Earthlike of all the worlds we might hope to reach in a single lifetime. Temperate and mild compared to the other bodies of the Solar System, its surface is nonetheless barren, its air gasping thin and bitterly cold, its soil alkaline, its gravity weak, and its skies choked by dust. Earthlike, then, only because our other twin world, Venus, has a crushing, blisteringly acidic atmosphere, hot enough at the surface to melt lead--and every other body within easy reach is utterly airless, choked with ice, or both.

Yet Mars is not. Its soil is red, its sunsets blue, its moons tiny and swift, yet nonetheless in the first images from orbit, and those that followed taken from the surface, we have always recognized in the terrain of Mars something familiar. True, the best analogies are to the coldest and ugliest parts of Earth, yet just as we marvel at the ways in which the lower animals prove to be humanlike in their inclinations, however ugly those inclinations prove to be, we have marveled to see the ways in which we recognize the common chemical and geological processes which have shaped the Earth shape this foreign land. And where every square kilometer of sea and soil on Earth we have trod for tens of thousands of years, letting our names and our history and our struggles seep deep down into the bedrock, until even the most unremarkable river-bend or distant island has ten pages of history to its name, the ground of Mars is to our eyes and to our hearts entirely empty. Without a soul to stand there, the stones and dust are silent: nameless provinces, kingdoms without form, histories inscribed only by meteorites and thundering outflow channels and patient, implacable volcanoes, ungathered and untestified.

It is not by chance or a quirk of culture that Mars captured the human imagination. Mercury, Titan, Europa, Venus--these worlds are beautiful, but were too alien and too unreachable for too long. Mars remained just within reach, or so we might tell ourselves. Certainly, the bare technological ability to colonize Mars was present at least from the mid-20th century; it was only the staggering expense, the impossibility of any real economic return, and the utter impracticality of constructing a spacecraft that might reach it and return that prevented a real effort being made then. Only these three little, insignificant things. How could we be so petty as to let them stop us? By the close of the 22nd century, when the first permanent research bases had been founded on the Moon, when a steady trickle of precious metals and rare earths were coming from asteroid mining operations back to Earth, Mars had been visited by humans only a handful of times. There was worthy science to be done there, but almost all of it could be done by robots or simple AI. It was thought that it would take a technological breakthrough, perhaps something that would drastically reduce the fuel costs associated with the Martian gravity well, or the transit times to and from Earth orbit, to enable permanent human habitation there. In any case, the risks remained high, the rewards doubtful. Mars, some said, will never be settled. The dreams of Robinson, Lewis, Bradbury, Burroughs, Roddenberry, Weir--all dead, dead as the boreal wastes. By then we knew that Earth was not alone in the universe. We knew there were more temperate worlds, even among the nearer stars, and we suspected, with good reason, some of them bore carbon-based, oxygen-producing life. Why shudder and shelter in flimsy domes or dark caverns on Mars, when we could set our sights on warm skies under distant suns? No, the increasing agreement of the thoughtful, serious students of the future affirmed, we will never settle on Mars.

What the thoughtful, serious students of the future failed to anticipate was that the human imagination is not easily satisfied by careful, rational consideration. The broad sweep of history is indeed informed, shaped by such pitiless forces as the laws of general economics, the principles of politics and game theory, the implacable feedback mechanisms of environment and ecology. But it takes only one mad prophet, one fulminant vision to ignite a fire which will carry a thousand thousand souls in a new direction. Could Neolithic Mesopotamia anticipate the consequences of the first monuments at Ur? Could Rome have anticipated Christianity breaking over the Mediterranean like a tide? Could Europe have foreseen that one Corsican artillery officer might sweep away the old order of the continent forever? I think not.

The mad visionary in this case was Iolana of the New Root, the reluctant arch-priestess of the Pacific Conclave, an informal network of leftists, hippies, transhumanists, engineers, and science enthusiasts scattered throughout Japan, Indonesia, Australia, Hawaii, and Cascadia. So the histories go, she was a biologist of uncommon genius, gifted with a quick wit and arresting gaze, who nonetheless eschewed any kind of leadership within her community. Yet she had these things thrust upon her at the beginning of the 23rd century, at a time when, still reeling from the collapse of the Cascade Federation and the ensuing Californian Anarchy, those desperate to be able to imagine a future of peace and human flourishing once again discovered her essays on how one might, in her opinion, best undertake the colonization of Mars.

For Iolana, these essays began as an interesting problem-solving exercise that reappraised what had heretofore been seen as an engineering challenge--either small-scale, in the construction of durable habitats on the Martian surface, or large-scale, involving wholesale terraforming of a planet poorly suited to supporting and Earthlike atmosphere. Iolana rejected the essential premise of the Martian dream, and put forth another: why change the environment to suit humans? Such a strategy worked on Earth, where the difference between any single living ecology and any other was, in the universal scheme, quite narrow. But the extraterrestrial ecology (and, she insisted, “ecology” was the correct term, for the harmonious processes of the Martian environment, devoid of life though they might be) was too different. Instead, the human animal must be willing to adapt itself, as much as or more so than it previously sought to adapt its environment. This principle transformed from a novel approach to certain technical issues to a general ideology in Iolana’s latter essays as she described her vision for the society of the future that was contingent on such adaptability. It is no coincidence that her heirs were among those most ardently in support of the UDHR Part 2; she recalled and anticipated many of the same ideas that inspired the Archipelago Treaty, and the creation of a durable, pan-human identity.

The Renewalist movement dates its founding from 2263, when Iolana was martyred in Sarawak, at the hands of the Pure Thought government of that territory. Emerging from within the Pacific Conclave with Iolana’s vision of the future as its rallying cry, the Renewalists channeled all their energy into the Great Work, despite opposition from all quarters. They flouted bans on heritable genetic modifications, on extreme bioengineering, on so-called “irreversible brain tissue alterations.” When suppressed, they fled, first to South America, and then the Antarctic colonies. There, for almost thirty years, they managed to keep their most extreme experiments in altering the human form hidden, from authorities who did not care to know, and were uninterested in enforcing the relevant treaties. But eventually, rumors of “Queen Maud’s Monsters” became too disruptive. Observers expected the Renewalists to scatter when the crackdown came. Instead, to general astonishment, they managed to procure spacecraft, and fled to high Earth orbit. Three years later, having completed the necessary conversion of their vessels for interplanetary flight, they set out for Mars.

Seized by their urgent, unquenchable vision of the future, the Renewalists have indeed transformed this world. They have used the byproducts of heavy industry, even sometimes burning the soil itself, to thicken the atmosphere and push its temperature up to Antarctic levels even in the middle latitudes. They have scattered genetically engineered lichens and algae over the highlands, and created strange new symbiotic organisms that are half-plant and half-nanotech. The depths of the Valles Marineris now support chemosynthetic fungal overgrowths and thriving microanimalia found nowhere else in the Solar System. Yet true to their word, they have permitted the new world to impose itself as much on them as they have on it: there are now more than a dozen novel human subspecies on Mars. Each is at once dependent on the complex technology integrated into their bodies, the environmental protections that imbue their tall, graceful forms with the essential characteristics of something mechanical, yet also freed by it: it is the Renewalists who walk most unencumbered across Mars’s high deserts, who can stroll even to the summit of Olympus Mons without any kind of pressure suit.

In the centuries since Renewalist settlement, Mars has taken in many millions of other souls. They have for the most part built their own cities, in the low-lying temperate regions and along the equator. Some have hoped to amass the power to transform Mars according to their own vision, even to terraform it fully, against the will of the Renewalists. Although their philosophy prizes peace and openness, this is one of the few things the Renewalists have emphatically demonstrated that they will not abide: any attempt to destroy Iolana’s Garden, the carefully tended biosphere they have created to exist in harmony with Mars’s unique seasons and geology, will be fiercely--violently, if need be--resisted. In legal terms, all Mars exists under Renewalist law; the Archipelago exists here, but any new communities must conform to its essential principles. I am aware of no other body of the Solar System where that kind of constitutional principle prevails globally. Even if, as seems likely, the Renewalists do not remain a permanent majority on Mars, I doubt it will be repealed. There are too many of us living here who understand the beauty of the Garden, even if we cannot appreciate it quite as they do.

As I write this, I sit in the garden of my summer home on the Olympus Rupes. I am quite alone; I believe the nearest other human being to me is currently passing overhead, in one of the ships decelerating in the upper atmosphere to land somewhere in the Tharsis Plateau. The nearest permanent settlement is approximately three hundred kilometers away. From this domed garden, which imitates the warm equatorial forests of my homeland, I can look out over a vast expanse of the Martian highlands. There is a dust storm rising in the west. Streaks of dark brown on the volcanic plain below indicate a summertime algal bloom. I built this garden because I am not so far divorced from the habits of life of my ancestors that I can be entirely happy without the presence of green life, without the sound of flowing water in the middle distance, or the songs of birds. So why, then, did I come to Mars? Why have I made it my home these lasty forty-three years; why, when I die, do I want my remains interred in the great shrine on the caldera, tens of millions of miles from the little fishing village that my mother and father called home?

I remember when I was a little boy, and I stood on the shore one night, looking up at the sky. I saw Mars, red and baleful (as it seemed to me then) hanging in the sky, an ill omen. This was before the Solar Fitna, before my homeland was scoured by fire, before the deaths of my brothers and sisters, and all the pain of intervening years which I would do anything to forget. I have spent my life studying the history of our species, dear reader, in part as a way of coming to terms with my own. How could I understand the grief that has befallen me, if I cannot understand the griefs of our tens of thousands of years of civilization? But I also knew then, that strange as it seemed to me, there was beauty in that far-off star. How much, I only came to appreciate later, when I saw the pictures of its surface, the video of the first human steps on Chryse, heard the sounds of its winds. Barren in its way, yes. Alien, yes. But beautiful in equal measure. And if I can find beauty in the alien and desolate landscape of Mars, may I, one day, not perhaps find comfort in the sorrows of a lifetime? May I not rejoice to live, however painful it has been? Like my strange, semi-alien neighbors, may I not permit this world to change me, too, and so come to terms with my place in the incomprehensibly wide, unutterably wonderful thing that is the universe in which we live?

No doubt you, too, have your own sorrows to contend with. To be human is to sometimes suffer. If this history offers you no understanding and no comfort, I am sorry. Perhaps you might like to visit me in my garden. We shall gird ourselves with the things necessary to withstand the freezing winds outside, and we shall stroll along the scarp that plunges down to the cratered land below, and speak of the things that weigh heavily on your mind. Or, if you prefer, we shall go in silence, and together contemplate all the things that we have lost.

--From Tjungdiawan’s Historical Reader, 2nd Edition

#tanadrin's fiction #maaaaaaaars #tjungdiawan's historical reader

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