I couldn't settle on a photo, so have them all!

my first visit to art party yielded a fiery Malva the Furnace for @nyoka-gorefell! thank you! it was fun making edits of another person's character for a change C:

brewing intricate backstories for my diablo 4 characters that will live in my head forever

*clang* *CLANGG* *clang clang KLINK* *CLANNNNNNNNG* oh sorry i didn't see you there i was just hitting my sword against things

been feeling a lot like him lately

REBLOG BAD APE FOR GOOD LUCK

War for the Planet of the Apes (2017) dir. Matt Reeves

ORDEN - reluctant revenant and challenger of the Sons of Svanir. Unwillingly channels the spirit of his younger brother, whose icebrood corruption has trickled through the Mists and clung to Orden -- only halted upon Jormag's death.

☆ Rin's 1k Horror Celebration ☆ Top 5 Final Girls as voted by my followers ⤷3. Laurie Strode - Halloween (52%)

V/H/S/85 (2023)

-it makes my poor European brain hurt just considering trying to cover that much territory, so how come the Brotherhood has outposts everywhere and, with a few exceptions, seem pretty unified in terms of ideology/general nastiness to everyone who isn't them.

Ha. :) The Doylist answer to this is that The Brotherhood are your last minute allies of convenience against The Master in the original Fallout, which means they've cemented themselves as essential to the franchise and have earned themselves at least a cameo in every game since. That, for example, is why they bent over backwards to ensure a version of them appeared in the original plot of Fallout 76 even though there was no practical way to get Roger Maxson's crew out to Appalachia that early.

The Watsonian answer is three part: the first is that they actually aren't unified at all. They're some of the most cantankerous bastards in the entire wasteland. They're incredibly dogmatic, and adhere to a sacred "Codex". Of course, being people, they immediately come up with different interpretations of their sacred text. And, being the Brotherhood of Steel, they can't agree to disagree on the matter – so they have schisms. So many schisms.

The funniest one is in Fallout 3. They have no means of high speed travel at this point, so the group calling themselves The Outcasts schism their way about four streets over to sulk in an old fort and utterly fail to get an old video game working. They also wear darker power armour to show how rebellious they are. I really have no words for how pathetic all this is. It's also really important to them that you understand that you are a wastelander and they are superior beings.

In this case, the argument was that their boss, Owyn Lyons, decided the Super Mutants then overrunning the Capital Wasteland constituted an existential threat to humanity itself and that he should probably do something about that. The Outcasts, led by Henry Casdin, contended that Lyons was way off mission: they're supposed to be hoarding anything you could put a battery in, not saving people from Super Mutants. The sad thing is that, in terms of the most commonly accepted version of Brotherhood dogma, Casdin is probably in the right here.

But usually the groups go further afield than that. The Mojave Brotherhood, in New Vegas, exists because their particular leader, Elijah, wanted to try to research new tech instead of just putting every laser rifle they can find in a broom cupboard (unfortunately Elijah is also a terrible person, so I can't endorse his research - but that's a whole other conversation). The Brotherhood could not handle the conflict, so - schism!

Then there's the big question: do we talk to other people or not? The whole thing is laid out pretty well in the opening of Fallout Tactics, which I found for reference on Youtube. Now I should note that a lot of the stuff in Tactics has been pretty thoroughly retconned. The Brotherhood are not descended from Vault Dwellers, and while I don't know if Vault 0 is still a thing – Vault 31 seems to have replaced it in practice. But the business with the Brotherhood's internal conflict regarding their isolationism seems to now be canon: Roger Maxson, the Brotherhood's founder, references it in Fallout 76.

The main Brotherhood, in California, has traditionally been very isolationist, and just periodically kicks out anyone who doesn't agree with them. It's interesting that they're shown as definitely recruiting outsiders in the TV show but everything in California is pretty clearly on fire at the moment, so it's unsurprising that they're desperate.

Lyons's Brotherhood was sent out, in part, in search of the group they exiled in Fallout Tactics (who are in Chicago, if they're anywhere, not Washington DC, so that mission is going about as well as expected) and are less isolationist.

Which leads me to part two of the Watsonian explanation: the bastards can fly. You probably guessed this if you sat through the eight minute video: they've got airships and vertibirds. The airships aren't surprising if you remember they hail from California: that area has, until recently, been clawing its way out of the apocalypse, so there are resources available to build fancy machines. They've managed to crash them all by Fallout 3, because of course they have, but by the end of that game they (probably, unless the player sided with the Enclave and blew them up a lot) control most of the Capital Wasteland, so they've got the power to hoard and steal their way into building the monstrosity that is The Prydwen.

The vertibirds are, I regret to say, The Chosen One's fault: you steal the plans for them in Fallout 2. This has zero consequences in that particular game so there's no reason to think it's a problem. It's just something you kick yourself for later.

So the Brotherhood gets everywhere because they are one of the few groups with the power to travel relatively easily in the post-apocalyptic world.

And the third part, which builds on that, is that sometimes they're just the same guys.

The Brotherhood of Steel you meet in the original Fallout have cameos in some small bunkers in Fallout 2. They've built a few more installations but it's all still their original stomping ground.

Likewise, the Brotherhood that rolls in in Act 2 of Fallout 4 are the same people you'd have met in Fallout 3: Arthur Maxson appears as a child in Fallout 3, and has brought his chapter in to wreak havoc in the Commonwealth.

The original Appalachian Brotherhood is a dead branch: they were genuinely new people who were wiped out by the Scorched Plague. But their commander, Lizzie Taggerdy, was in direct contact with Roger Maxson. He was the only guy she could get on the phone post-apocalypse, so she signed up with the Brotherhood because it's not like she had anything else planned. Their ideology, in that case, came straight from the original source.

So, there you have it. Brotherhood everywhere, whether you like it or not. And probably Brotherhood everywhere for the foreseeable future, since Bethesda seems to love them.

Todd Howard’s brain is equal parts American idolatry, stupidity, and a pathological need to lie

The Lion King (1994) dir. Roger Allers and Rob Minkoff

thinking about how when you experience a lot of shame in your formative years (indirectly, directly, as abuse or just as an extant part of your environment) it becomes really difficult to be perceived by other people in general. the mere concept of someone watching me do anything, whether it's a totally normal activity or something unfamiliar of embarrassing, whether I'm working in an excel spreadsheet or being horny on main, it just makes my skin crawl and my brain turn to static because I cannot convince myself that it's okay to be seen and experienced. because to exist is to be ashamed and embarrassed of myself, whether I'm failing at something or not, because my instinctive reaction to anyone commenting on ANYTHING I'm doing is to crawl into a hole and die. it's such a bizarre and dehumanizing feeling to just not be able to exist without constantly thinking about how you are being Perceived. ceaseless watcher give me a god damn break.

akira 「アキラ」 (1988) dir. otomo katsuhiro