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notsuch · 1 year

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Reading Junker lore as an Australian is like, hilarious because it's a wild ride of being so clearly not knowing what the frick it was saying THAT MADE IT CYCLE ALL THE WAY BACK INTO MAKING SENSE AGAIN. But also, that literally, whether it's Overwatch or Other Global Forces, is to blame for the Junkers being what they are, because wow.

But to start with, the problem is essentially this: Blizzard just don't know what the frick the Outback is.

SO BUCKLE UP KIDS THIS IS A LONG-ASS POST, I GOT SOME SHIT YOU NEED TO UNDERSTAND ABOUT HOW THE JUNKERS CAME ABOUT. But there are pictures I promise. I also wanna say that I am not here to say that the Omnic war, the discussions of human-omnic relationships is like X real-world thing, I'm here to look at how the world is and how they've said it develops in Overwatch, and what that implies for the world development, that's all. I was just real excited at how averagely aussie Leah is in her portrayal of Junker Queen is and it made me want to ground it more in my home okok and I thought other people might want to understand that too.

CW: for talking about war tactics, statistics and wide-scale loss of life.

TL;DR for my post on Aussie Shit: the Outback is not a defined location. You will never be able to stick it into a GPS and find it. It is a conceptual area that can be defined as 'semi-rural to rural'. But also it's an almost folklorish concept of the Australian 'heart' that can extend over what can be seen in the below map. I will advise this is actually a map of bushland types, which is why it doesn't include Tasmania, but just to be clear, Tasmania AS WELL has Outback regions, and also, this can extend further East fairly comfortably depending on who you talk to. For instance, this map doesn't reach Tamworth OR Dubbo, buuuuuut most people would consider it as being on the edge of the Outback, for instance.

Oh, you might now be saying, that's most of the country, isn't it?

YEAH.

And as you'd expect for a piece of land THE SIZE OF FUCKING EUROPE, it's hugely broad in its landscape, too. You will find everything in the concept of the "Outback" depending, again, on who you talk to. From the Daintree Rainforest (left pic) (around Cairns to Cooktown) to the Great Australian Bite (middle pic) (the bottom C curve between Adelaide to Perth) to the central Australian town with a population of 26,000+ people, Alice Springs (right pic).

Yet the wiki lists it as "The Outback omnium and its Omnics were given the Australian omnium and its surrounding land after the Omnic Crisis."

UHM. BLIZZARD. 1) WHERE IS IT, AGAIN??? MEEKATHARRA IS A PRETTY DIFFERENT PLACE TO THE MOUNT ISA and 2) THAT'S A LOT OF "SURROUNDING LAND". THAT'S IN FACT, MOST OF THE COUNTRY, IF I WAS TO COUNT IT AS BROADLY AS YOU SEEM TO BE THROWING IT AROUND? IT'S A LOT OF LAND.

It takes 4 days of STRAIGHT DRIVING, NO BREAKS, to cross from Sydney to Perth. The entirety of Europe fits inside of Australia, the main block of the united states, bar Alaska, is basically comparable in scale from Washington to San Fransico. Or the furthest East Coast of Brazil to the West Coast of Peru. YOU GET IT.

This then leads to the second problem, Blizzard keeps saying that the only people out there were "a few solar farmers and people who wanted to be left alone".

WITH A POPULATION TOTAL OF 600,000 - 700,000 THOUSAND PEOPLE IN JUST REGIONAL TOWNS, NO, THE OUTBACK REGIONAL DISTRIBUTION IS NOT "JUST A FEW PEOPLE WHO WANT TO BE ALONE AND A COUPLE OF FARMERS IG".

NOT TO MENTION DARWIN. It's the little dot at the top of the Northern Territory and is a Capital City of the region. Sometimes called Australia's "Outback City", HAS A POPULATION OF 130,000 ALONE. Across it all, this map barely scratches the surface, there are over 60 Outback Towns or Settlements in total. We only have a total net population of 27 million. THAT'S ACTUALLY A WHOLE ASS 2-3% OF OUR WHOLE POPULATION.

This comes to the second point and often the hardest for people to get their heads around: whilst our population is not as high, THAT DOESN'T MEAN WE AREN'T USING THAT LAND AND IT'S NOT CULTURALLY AND ECONOMICALLY IMPORTANT TO US. No, we don't have massive inland lakes and rivers the way other places do, to have huge cities out there, but WE STILL HAVE TO SUPPORT OUR AGRICULTURAL AND MINING SECTOR THAT DOES USE THAT LAND. AND IT'S ACTUALLY. VERY. EXTENSIVE.

How extensive? Man, our largest by-land Cattle Station is Anna Creek Station, coming in at a cool 2 million acres (which is as big as the whole of Israel apparently???), or the most densely populated-by-cow one currently, Brunette Downs, which at present has 110,000 head of cattle. Don't care about cows? are you a monster cows are just slow puppos who want love omfrg WELL I BET YOU CARE ABOUT IRON, AND GUESS WHAT, WHATEVER IRON YOU HAVE IN YOUR HOUSE RN PROBABLY CAME FROM AUSTRALIA, GIVEN WE PROVIDE 90% OF THE WORLD'S IRON. Oh, also we have a shitton of uranium as well, btw. just. putting that out there.

Here is JUST PASTORAL STATIONS, you'll notice HOW MANY ARE ACTUALLY IN THE SAME AREA I JUST SHOWED:

AND HERE ARE OUR MINES, this is not just iron, we also dig many other minerals, and including the world's largest opal mine:

These cattle stations and mines stretch across the inland regions for miles upon miles, fuelling our jobs and our place in the world economy. Which I ask you this: If you're Cattle Hand Tinny Rogers from central Queensland who's gotta take care of Jenny the Cow whose due to give birth soon, you aren't driving 13 fucking hours to Brisbane City to get a pack of smokes, are you? No. Tinny Rogers just goes to the Longreach general store only 1-2 hours away, doesn't he? Then goes back to his property and tells Jenny it's going to be ok, sits his ass down with his smokes for the night, relieved he only had to go a little while.

And all those people were actually the first wiped out.

This is where this gets real freaking awful. AGAIN, CW: for talking about war tactics, statistics and wide-scale loss of life.

Now the only battle in Australia we are shown, is Sydney and that initially also made me go 'huh?' Because if the Omnic Core is in the Outback, wherever that might be, this is an overland invasion, internal to external, as opposed to an external invasion aka coming from the sea, why would you attack Sydney?

Don't get me wrong, Sydney is important. To our international position most especially. It's a financial centre, like New York is to America, it controls a great deal of our actual "economy" in the like, perception of 'if it falls, our economy tanks' kinda sense. It's also a manufacturing centre, meaning that raw goods from the rest of the country are turned into other goods there, and then shipping it out, Tactically, if you are trying to park ships, Darling Habour is ideal, as it's one of two 'natural' harbours in the world (the other being in Hong Kong), meaning its VERY DEEP even close to the land which makes it ideal for ships to come close. So someone attacking from the sea wants it. Lastly - probs why Blizzard picked it, is it is the identifiably 'Australian City'.

But it's not our capital city, that's Canberra, which is where our House of Parliament is. It's not where our military is, no, 40% of the Australian Army is based in Brisbane, and the largest naval base is in Perth. Darwin and Cairns are actually the biggest ports that are more directly connected to Asia in trade given it's a hop, skip and a jump from there to Papa New Guinea, which are actually our closest neighbour and with it, connects us to the whole of South East Asia. The very tip of QLD, to the bottom of PNG is more like the space of the English Channel, btw, for how close they are.

In the Omnic Crisis, the economy has ALREADY collapsed. It did the minute the Omnics attack, basically lmao. Then secondly, this ISN'T EXTERNAL, this is internal. Whether the Outback Omnium is in Kalgoorlie or Birdsville, it is in the middle of the country, and it is sending its forces from a regional location. They aren't attacking by sea, so they don't have to care about a landing bay.

AND HERE IS THE LAST IMPORTANT PART, OUR ARMY IS SMALL. It's only like 80,000 armed personnel, compared to the US and it's insanity of 1mill+, but we're bigger than uh,,, New Zealand I guess? Uh,,, yeah our numbers don't even rank in the big three armies of the world, or like, beyond our little bubble of Oceania. We also do have a pretty good navy but if you've been following along so far, uh, yeah, THAT'S going to do fuck all for Alice Springs, isn't it? Don't get me wrong, our forces are all well trained and highly specialised because of it but like, we don't have the numbers to be splitting up over many fronts, lmao.

By virtue of it all, they are in the middle of the country and will have STEAM ROLLED across these regional areas because some are big, sure but they are just towns with no defences against a rampaging robot army, are you kidding? Let alone if Anubis is suddenly using every robot, I can't imagine how many different kinds are incorporated in all the different mining regions and digging sights?! Some of them were clearly as big as the Titan Bots we see, judging by this shit still being left around years later -

Rolling into somewhere like poor fucking Meekatharra?!

also, seriously: what is the ever loving fuck is that thing on the left why are its arms made out of the BODIES OF OTHER OMNICS JFC WHO LET THE OMNICS PLAY BLOODBORNE OR SOMETHING, I S2G.

THESE POOR BASTARDS ALREADY HAVE TO LIVE IN MEEKATHARRA, THAT'S HARD ENOUGH, LET ALONE WHEN SKYSCRAPER-BOT THE MIGHTY ROLLED IN FROM THE DESERT.

This means that they now control all regional supplies anyway to go and target those places because they say one consistent thing about Anubis' attacks: they were efficient and direct.

"The Omnics Advance" is what they call this so from the wiki as to the state of places the Omnics leave behind, uh, yeah, BYE MEEKATHARRA, MY MUM'S STORIES ABOUT YOU WERE NICE IG?

o ok,,,,, sure, what does all this have to do with Sydney then? Where does it fit in?

I don't want you to think Sydney wouldn't be attacked. Of course it would be, eventually.

Because it's the last populated place in Australia. They can just leave Sydney because it is somewhat tactically the hardest to attack, overall, if it has support from the others, so you leave it till last where you've cut off the support, wiped out supply lines and it is now flooded with refugees from the rest of the country.

They call it the Battle of Sydney but that's not actually what you do to cities?? You siege them, because they take time, and they're certainly implying that yes, it would have taken time. Yeah no, I am not making that up, the Battle of Stalingrad for instance took five months. I make the distinction because sieges aren't about individual aspects in conflict, it's a game of chicken between the two sides of who can hold out longest. Who can sustain the constant chipping away? Sometimes it's a matter of just starving each other out, but in others, it's a constant bombardment.

With everything I just laid out, you can probably have worked it out: Australia can't sustain itself, at this point. We are cut off from our supplies, and we are unable to get actual international support because they're all, ALSO, dealing with this, and now are flooded with escaping refugees. Perth, Adelaide, Darwin, and Brisbane are gone. Which Australia's population of 27 million, is now down to, if I'm being kind, to 10-11 million (5 million in Sydney + then escapees from Melbourne, Canberra, and maybe some from Tasmania too if they could manage it, I can't say I would have much hope for those poor buggers in Perth). Sydney could not feed all the refugees because again, it does not produce raw supplies itself, and it now no longer has the numbers to keep up the fight.

It'd be incredible if they could keep it going for a month because by then, we're not facing 'this is war and people will die', Australia is now at 'we will be annihilated and there will BE no Australian people'. 60-70% of our population is dead to the war, and the rest are getting killed every day from THE TITANS LITERALLY JUST STOMPING THEIR WAY THROUGH, starving or getting sick from bad food and water.

And Australia never had a very big population, to begin with, our army isn't big if it even really exists anymore. We cannot sustain those losses. What the Omnics were hanging over Sydney at this moment is so much worse than just 'we screwed your economy for the foreseeable future'.

They are leveraging 'there will be no Australians left.' Whether the slow eradication from disease and hunger that a siege does, or in immediate and sudden violence?

So I have no doubt, even though Blizzard had no idea what they said, that it's actually entirely possible the Omnics said "idk we want the outback" and the Australian Government went YEAH, SURE, ANYTHING NOT TO GET OBLITERATED, IG?

And what's more, afterwards, whatever chance there might have been to take some of those places back - no one, NO ONE, was going to do more than rebuild the Sydney-Canberra-Melbourne strip on the outside to allow for better distribution. But who knows Anubis might have been a dick and said YOU ONLY GET SYDNEY. For one thing, taking back even something like Adelaide requires re-engaging, and on the other.......... they have this, now, that's alright, isn't it? It's the most modern part of Australia, it certainly seems like plenty, right? Other COUNTRIES exist with LESS and THRIVE!

I can't say I necessarily blame them, at that point it has to be a pure numbers game: Mexico City, which has also been destroyed, and it has almost as many people in JUST Mexico City as we have in total population. Sydney must have seemed, well, close enough. We're rebuilding this bit which will roughly sustain you (it won't, actually), but then we gotta take the resources to other devastated places that don't need FOUR CAPITAL CITIES, 10 OTHER IMPORTANT CITIES, A MINIMUM OF 30 REGIONAL TOWNS AND A FULL RECONSTRUCTION OF A INLAND NETWORK SPANNING THE ENTIRETY OF THE UNITED STATES IN SHEER SCALE. Things as they were, at the time, it must have seemed.... well yeah. Not worth it.

Which now - hey that's pretty intense, actually that's horrific for the sheer loss of life, how can you be sure the devastation is that severe? And that in turn everyone just did what SEEMED enough with little to no consideration of its long term impact and if it had any sustainability to us? That's extreme to insinuate?

Well if not the direct implication of '30 million orphans worldwide' that means for every orphan, there are two dead parents, and then the two families next door that DIDN'T survive, to tell you the average statistics of the war casualties......

The other is simple: Junkertown exists.

Junkertown cannot exist, if there was anything left of those cities or those 60+ regional towns, pre or post-explosion of the core. Because here is the thing, if there was a chance, a single chance, we could take back that important space of the Outback, we would. In a heartbeat. I think that's why the Australian Government allowed the ALF to exist in the first place and did not stop them when they most definitely could have.

I can explain the economics of what being an island nation at the ass end of the world means as to how we are so completely fucked economically at this point, but this part is more important, even if it's often the hardest for non-Australians to wrap their heads around because they squeal about 'how scary' it is all the time is this:

We love that land. That land is our home. Yes, even with its spiders and snakes, not in spite of, but all of it, good and bad. In one sense that yes, that literally hundreds of thousands of people lived dispersed across it, but culturally it goes beyond just that direct 'my house is there'. One of our most successful ad campaigns by a freaking flight company exists on a simple premise: 'no matter how far, and how wide I go, I still call Australia home'. (The first version of it aired in the 90s, for reference, also yes, Junkrat actually has a line that echos the sentiments of this song 'I've been all around the world, but there's nowhere that compares to home' Not sure if it was on purpose but I smiled a little to myself when I first heard it). Yeah. That's it. Not fighting or glory or power. The rest of the world is beautiful, but this one is ours, and we love it for what it is. Something that is personified in that image of red sand dunes and scrub, in the arid flatness, the wattle and the gum, even to the kid that grew up in the middle of the Sydney suburbs, as his childhood home, that tugs in his heart as much as his childhood toys.

Even though I know a bunch of Aussies just read this and were like GROAN, SHUT UP, WHAT ARE YOU GOING TO DO, QUOTE BANJO PATTERSON, CAN'T CATCH ME WITH THAT SHIT,,,,

I fucking see you, I fucking know you. I only gotta say one fucking thing to you pretending you're above it:

RED DOG JUST WANTS TO KNOW, HAVE YOU SEEN JOHN? HE'S LOOKING YOU IN THE EYES, HAVE YOU SEEN JOHN?

Yeah, that's what I goddamn thought.

That we'd lose all reason to do some stupid shit like the ALF attempted to recover it? Uh, yeah. We just lost most of our population, we can't bury them, and how quickly would that landscape of our home carry that memory of them, and yet, we are cut from even that.

But to reclaim all that land you need supply chains, rebuilding as you go, AN ARMY ABLE TO HOLDING THAT SPACE AGAINST WHATEVER THE FUCK A "FERAL OMNIC" IS??? SERIOUSLY, AGAIN, DID THEY DOWNLOAD THE 'FROM SOFTWARE CREATIVE SUITE' ON THAT OMNIC??? And with that in mind, and how everyone and everything is gone for us, that would require HUGE international backing.

And if they had all of that, with all that effort, like HELL are they letting a SEPERATE SOVERIGN NATION JUST SPRING UP IN THE MIDDLE OF IT, BEING A BUNCH OF VIOLENT ASSHOLES, MAKING IT HARDER by STEALING SHIT ALL THE TIME on top of BLOCKING ACCESS TOO SOME OF OUR MOST RESOURCE RICH LAND. I know this might be a struggle, but on top of loving that space, we also enjoy idk, stability? Not dying? Junkertown would compromise that, completely. Especially the dying bit, I feel. Speaking as an Aussie, I, like many Australians, do appreciate that they will in fact die one day, and hopefully, doing so by driving a ride-on mower around hills hoist chasing a goon sack as god intended for this beautiful country, but overall, just randomly dying in a Wolf Creek-like situation because you were trying to build a fuckin road, isn't how most of wanted it to go down. Some might, I will not shame my fantasy countrymen in the post-apocalypse world of Overwatch-Australia, times seem tough for Tinny Rogers and Jenny out there, and they have a right to pick how they get by.

SO YEAH, THE FUCK NOT, MY GUYS. THEY'D SQUISH THAT SHIT LIKE A BUG.

But if they are recovering from near annihilation, unsupported, told to just deal with it because they got what they got - Junkertown can do what we see, and in its strange way: flourish.

Then it comes to how it's being handled by the rest of the in-game world as to how it's just been allowed to let slide by everyone fucking else even if clearly every time one of these desert-fuckers gets out, it's a DAMN NIGHTMARE FOR WORLDWIDE SECURITY.

You hear Zarya call it "the mistakes of this country", which given how people treat the Junkers as a whole in game, seems to be a commonly held sentiment. A mistake. There is little to no comprehension of them, or what they have been victim to. Again probably because Blizzard itself has no idea what it just accidentally implied. We don't have enough lore to really say how many countries share this fate of losing 80% of their entire nation and people, and with it, almost their whole selves? Of them, how many got complete reconstruction? Given their common theme of corporate greed, developments in post-war society and their subsequent inequality, I'd say some people get reconstruction support and others don't (the interactions of Lucio and Symmetra for instance) based on convenience, and the sentiment from many powers in history has often been 'Australia is very far away, and I don't care'.

To call it 'a mistake' then, redirects blame from those inequalities and the present-day situation having beyond anyone's possible conception.

If it's 'a mistake', it's not a self-destructive spiral of suffering people who have been pushed beyond even common sense anymore. That lash out in desperation over a loss that cannot be quantified to any sum, yet were told that a price had actually been put on it, and no one was interested in paying it, and they had to live with what they got now. Then with no other output for the misery, in some desperate bid to reclaim even a SHRED of a memory, just vent their pain for a damn second, damned themselves and their home. Everyone who was in power and authority to have stepped in at any time to give the support needed and direct it more meaningfully before this, but never did, everyone who made those choices, is now complicit in the rise of Junkertown and the Junkers due to their basic lack or inability to understand what had been lost and have empathy, has led to a situation where now there is an entirely separate type of threat in 'feral omnics' and a bunch of insane radioactive people.

Or just say it was 'a mistake'. Then it's just their fault, isn't it? It's just a small, negligible little choice that WE won't make. We can all pat ourselves on the back and say that at least because Australia is so far away, whatever is happening there, is now just isolated to them, and you can't expect help NOW that the desert is irradiated, it was ALREADY unfeasible, it's SO expensive, WHOSE going to fund that, for what gain, especially now you made this silly little 'choice'.

Acknowledging, even to stop the Junkers, means bringing their own failings to the spotlight when rightfully it comes back to 'why the fuck did these bastards exist in the first place? What made them so fucking stupidly, mindlessly, suicidally angry as to lash out like this? Why weren't they thinking, then, and why do they stay, even now? .... and why do all of them appear to be goddamn giants?'

So easier to just... let the Junkers do their thing, out in the desert. Make them the scapegoat for the tensions, a fixing point for even the Omnics (rightfully, obviously in their case) to hate, blame and fear, over more active, influential systems that have far more ability to affect the world. Especially when compared too: the bunch of crazy people in the fucking desert, who probably all die at 50 from that ambient radiation everywhere, getting new types of diseases that no one has ever HEARD of before and are apparently are like barely connected on networks to the rest of the world. WHAT KIND OF POWER TO AFFECT WORLD CHANGE DO YOU THINK THEY ACTUALLY HAVE?

Rather than acknowledge that people like Odessa Stone got their hatred probably from watching half her under 12 siblings die to omnics, and the other half to the situation in the Wasteland created by others' indifference. (And the reminder that, Odessa's mum in the first shot, is holding an infant, and the second moment of her flashback, Odessa is still roughly the same but all the kids left are too big for a 1 to 2-year-old, and Mama Stone isn't holding an infant anymore.) They do what often happens and put all the responsibility of moving on, ON the people who are literally in the middle of dying in a now 30-year war, that everyone ELSE keeps trying to desperately pretend it's over and stick their head in the sand. Thus just invalidating their pain and making them even MORE resistant. Especially when you contrast the rest of the world is getting influential people like Mondatta and Zen making changes, real strides forward, and they get......... lbr, just more graves while they're just being called crazy.

Akande says 'the world is designed to be this way', and I think part of the reason Odessa doesn't mind him, is that yeah, yeah she probably knows after she's seen other parts of the world now and its reconstruction efforts, compared to theirs, found them pretty wanting, and it's nice to hear someone else say it for once.

No WONDER Roadie says 'this isn't a city' about Junkertown, when he remembers when Australia had more than three cities total, it must seem like a mockery. But why people like Junker Queen and Junkrat have pride in it, inversely. They were children when the apocalypse came to Australia or were born in Junkertown itself, they live in the memory that must now only feel dead and impossible to recapture the life of. In many ways, their bookends to Ramattra, their first moments were taken into a life of roaring violence the world wants to pretend isn't happening, but this is all they ARE now. So they have done their best with it, even if no one wants to be reminded of what their sheer existence represents.

Yeah. 'Mistake' is much easier to swallow, isn't it?

So yeah, given ODESSA STONE IS OUT THERE IN THE WASTELAND BECOMING FUCKING GENGHIS KHAN OR SOMETHING, UNITING ALL THE WASTELAND FACTIONS, AND NO ONE IS NOTICING OR EVEN SLIGHTLY TAKING IT SERIOUSLY, whenever that blows up in their face and they cry HOW DID THIS GET SO BAD, WHAT HAPPENED, AUSTRALIA?!

Yeah. Ain't that the fucking question.

Or maybe all of this is complete nonsense and everything I just said will one day be shown to be entirely wrong as often happens because ultimately again, I don't think they MEANT MOST OF THIS LMAO, BECAUSE ONE MORE TIME: STOP SAYING 'OUTBACK'.

#junkertown #overwatch #junker queen #junkrat #roadhog #junkers #overwatch 2 #talon

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