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entering--hyperspace · 4 years

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Game questions or smthn

Tagged by @mimabeann

Rules: Fill in your answers below and tag some buddies!

Games

First game you ever played: Okay not counting my educational games on the V-Smile.. Pokemon red! the original!

Favorite game:hhhhhhhh Fallout New Vegas really solidified my dream of becoming a game dev. God I love that game SO MUCH. Also Journey...and Destiny. but FNV is the #1

Game you’ve played through multiple times: I replay a lot of games (mostly my favorites) multiple times so there's too many to list. However, I do play Fallout: New Vegas every year because its my favorite video game of all time and I CANNOT shut up abt it. I also really enjoy playing Pokémon soul silver. I’m currently in the process of replaying the entire DA trilogy, and Pokémon white.

Game you hated at first but now love: Apex! God I did not enjoy apex when I first started playing it bc yknow battle royals were new and do have a bit of a learning curve to ‘em. I fucking love Apex now though

Game you used to love but now hate: I may joke abt hating games but I rlly don't have any I used to love but hate now. wait I lied. I remember really liking DA2 but now I'm dragging my feet along replaying it. I don't HATE it, but its certainly not one of my favorites.

Your favorite game atmosphere/setting(s): Journey. hands down. That game captures it’s atmosphere absolutely perfectly. I do want to give special shoutout to these games for this question ;Never Alone, Abzu, what remains of edith finch, Oxenfree

Game with the best group/companion(s): Dragon age: Origins had the best cast of companions hands down. They all had incredibly interesting motives and created such interesting group dynamics. DAO remaster when

A game with your favorite ending: Subnautica. GOD. SUBNAUTICA. CHEFS FUCKING KISS. I haven’t gotten emotional over a new game in a fucking WHILE.

A game with the WORST ending: HMMMM. Hm. hmmm. Fallout 4 hands down lmao. I won’t get INTO it but man I did not like that game’s story.

Best character customization?: The newest monster hunter game. I dont even own it but I’ve watched its cc. puts my hand against the glass wall.

Hero and Companions

Your favorite playable character: HMMM protagonists. oh protagonists. I’m gonna go with Arthur Morgan from RDR2 on this one. ALSO. Clem (TWD2/4) Javier (TWD3) Lee (TWD) The Inquisitor (DAI) Delsin (Infamous: SS) Shepard (ME tril) The Commander (GW2) The courier (FNV)

Your favorite companion(s): CRACKS KNUCKLES. Dorian Pavus, love of my life, (DAI) Theron Shan, Lana beniko, Tau Idair, Blizz, Mako (SWTOR), Alistair, Wynne, Zevran, Leliana, Shale, Sten (DAO) Anders, Sigrun (DA:A) Cole, Varric (DAI) Varric (DA2) Wrex, Liara, Tali, Grunt, Garrus, (ME tril) Vetra, Jaal, Liam, Drak (ME:A) Veronica, Arcade, Rex, Lily, (F:NV) Mccready, Preston, Cait, Piper(F:4)

Relationships

Favorite game friendship(s) (im excluding pc/char just to make it shorter): Alistair/Wynne. yknow what? Wynne and anyone, she adopted the whole group. Charles/Arthur (RDR2) Freya and Kratos (rip) (GOW) Mirage/wraith(Apex) Theron/lana, Tau/Braga, (SWTOR) Varric/Merril, Isabela/Merril (DA2) Varric/Cassandra, Cole/Varric, Leliana/Josie, Bull/krem (DAI)

Favorite game relationship(s): The inquisitor/Dorian bc im very very gay. anyway.... Achilles/Patroclus, Zagreus/Thanatos, Orpheus/Eurydice (Hades) Theron Shan/pc Lana beniko/pc, UHHH I cant think of more rn

Favorite companion banter: Wynne/Alistair, Sten/Shale, Leliana/Wynne, Alistair/Zevran (DA:O) Varric and anyone (DA2) Cassandra/Varric, Varric/Cole, Dorian/Sera, Bull/Solas, Dorian/Varric (DAI) When I think abt companion banter I think out in the world walking/talking so not a lot comes to mind.

A relationship you weren’t sure of but loved:

A character you wish you COULD romance: RATTLES MY HANDS AGAINST THE BARS. Varric. Do you think a Straight Man would walk around with his tiddes out in the open like that? NO. if he was romanceble in da2 it would’ve made the game significantly better. ALSO GARRUS FOR M!SHEP??? HELLO???? ALISTAIR FOR M!WARDEN...ALSO HELLO? I’ll stop now but a lot of these is just God I Wish MLM Got More Options In Video Games

Fun

Shoutout to a random NPC: BLIZZ I FUCKING LOVE U.

A game you love watching playthroughs for and want to play: I dont like watching playthroughs unless (next question)

Love watching playthroughs but won’t ever play: I legit only watch a Single lets players and he does horror vr. its increadibly funny and the only way I can play/watch any type of horror shit

Why do you play video games?: For a lot of reasons! I play them to have fun, I play them to be competitive, I play them to relax, I play them to challenge myself. I play them to learn a story. As someone who is majoring in game design and has made games before, Video games are like a stained glass window. They provide unique glimpses into various worlds, they allow us to live our wildest dreams, and give us the platform to spread awareness of social issues to the masses. They Allow us to have fun and connect with other people. I play video games because I love them.

Tagging: @sentinelapologist @kornyo @remnantofahero @axperjan

#remember its optional so dont sweat it friends!

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crqstalite · 4 years

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so @spindlewit inspired me to pick up this trainwreck of me playing star wars again about a lana conspiracy i started a LONG time ago that i’m just now revising after they provided their own opinion on this. thank you for diverting my afternoon XD

i took it seriously, sorry.

source: https://spindlewit.tumblr.com/post/612223381785460736/oooh-whats-this-about-a-lana-conspiracy

spoilers below

my first major question: is why she can’t be killed?

lana is the only character from an expansion that can not be killed at any point in the story up to 6.1. possibly because for ds!outlanders/commanders she would be the only advisor left and logically she would have no replacement(, but why not leave theron with the commander instead, or even let the commander run things themselves?). the four characters that can be killed are:

-arcann (on zakuul, chapter six: the dragon’s maw)

-senya (on voss, chapter one: wrath and ruin)

-koth (on the gravestone, chapter three: dark reunions)

-theron (on nathema, the nathema conspiracy flashpoint)

this may be on bioware for this, but all four characters a) get replaced or b) aren’t important enough to be replaced. and, because they can be killed, bioware may not know what to do with them, because inevitably some people will feel cheated in not getting extra story just because they didn’t like a character and killed them off. i know some people have actual emotional issues with the reasoning for why they couldn’t deal with a certain character (usually arcann), so i can understand bioware’s reasoning. but for those of us who do like the characters, it’s easy to feel deprived of more content because of this reasoning. while good to cater to one side of the fandom, alienating the other doesn’t help the issue.

arcann, for example, never did much after knights of the eternal throne ended. as big a character as he was in those two expansions, you still only get one conversation with him (a personal alliance alert for everyone), and possibly a side flirt before nathema conspiracy. after that, you hear nothing from the scarred prince. absolutely nothing. so he falls under b, and because bioware didn’t focus on him, he didn’t need a replacement because he didn’t have any pull in the story.

senya, much like her son, also didn’t. she doesn’t have a story after knights of the eternal throne either. as one of my favorite characters, i don’t have an inkling of why, there’s plenty of plot in her to be used too. she falls under b as well, she didn’t need a replacement.

koth did get a replacement...kind of. if you kill him, or if he leaves on his own volition, hylo replaces him as the pilot of the gravestone. which is cool because as an ls!outlander/commander, you don’t get the option to have her quips and snips. he wasn’t my favorite character because of his need to have zakuul be at the forefront of everything he does, but after finishing khaak (ds!outlander who did kill him), i realized that you didn’t miss him, as morally dark or light that you were. you didn’t lose the gravestone, hylo just took over. there weren’t any stakes to killing him. it was literally just a moral question, and really didn’t need to have ds/ls consequences.

theron. oh stars theron.

theron doesn’t get replaced. and in a way, he needed to. there isn’t much you miss in the subsequent expansions without him by your side, gnost-dural doesn’t even mention him even though he’s oddly absent. in fact, no one does. not even lana. possibly as a plot point that everyone’s too scared of you to say anything about it, or even that the outlander + lana lied about where he was (an interesting plot point that i may write about in a while) after his death. most likely because most people who like theron kept him alive anyways, and anyone who killed him didn’t like him anwyay. the same way they did koth.

a bit of a tangent, but bioware has a nasty habit of shoving characters aside for new ones. the vanilla companions being the very first victims of this. after the vanilla story, you get voice lines, but no conversations with them until you meet them again after knights. because bioware introduces lana and theron instead as the new main characters. cytharat, katha niar and lemda avesta are also victims of this in a way, as they were quickly forgotten after the makeb arc. in jedi under siege, tau idair, arn pelarun and major anri are the characters that quickly take over during the expansion. lana and theron rarely appear if at all during this story. i understand that you were either undercover or working for a faction they might not agree with, but wouldn’t it be more suspicious if the esteemed commander didn’t have her right hand man/woman beside them during the mission?

but theron, in my opinion, desperately needed to be replaced after his death. it left lana as the only advisor to the commander. this makes her often the sole bringer of bad news, and she has most of your information you’ll ever have because of this. that’s just odd to begin with, as more often than not lana is just infodumping exposition when it should be shared with theron or some one else. and some empty spots that they try to fill during jedi under siege and onward where theron is supposed to be. there’s even a scene at the end of onslaught that if you romance lana and kiss her at the end, you hear and offhanded cough and the camera even pans to where he should be. (i assume). coding issues and whatnot aside, it brings us full circle.

why can’t lana be killed?

it sounds very dark, i know. but everyone else can be, and our darling lana has plot armor the entire six expansions to 6.1. the uprisings that spindlewit mentioned, i’ve never done. that is extremely interesting, and i’d like to definitely run a couple when i can. here’s also this from their post:

“based on what Jonas Balkar tells a trooper upon his return, Lana fielded his attempts to contact you. from what else have we been isolated?”

i have yet to run a trooper past disavowed, so i wouldn’t know but that is very odd. it’s plausible that lana hasn’t only done this to balkar, but to others as well. who’s to say that lana has conviently put a blindfold over your eyes? what else has she skillfully covered up? skirmishes between the republic and empire during the fight against zakuul? pleads from either faction that she simply didn’t want the commander distracted by? she’s the one who found out about iokath and told you first anyway, and as spindlewit says:

“her omnipresence in the story and plot-protection. she’s always on/by your side and can’t be killed, is your primary source of all information.”

possibly, this is because iokath got so out of hand that she finally had to call it in. who’s to say that imperial and republic forces in the alliance haven’t been rats and haven’t been feeding malcom/acina facts about the new alliance and their territory on iokath to make the invasion easier? by this time, the eternal alliance (by swtor’s “official” timeline [courtesy of torcommunity.com]) is only three years old up until iokath. still extremely vulnerable, and haven’t picked a side yet or a fight with either faction. other than the eternal fleet, they’re just another upstart group and haven’t gained much traction up until that point. yes, they brought the eternal throne down, but they’re still recovering from that fight as well. morals or intentions or otherwise, malcom and acina would need whatever allies and supplies they could get to take out the other. taking iokath would be one of their very first steps. it’s mentioned even in-game that supplies across the galaxy are dwindling, so it isn’t just us that’s suffering from this either.

theron was a rat, yes, but who’s to say he’s the first one? we only know that iokath was just being invaded at about the same time by both factions, who’s to say that the republic and empire hadn’t already had small task forces on iokath before we’d been alerted, and theron’s scheme had only added to the problem? acina and malcom, depending upon who you side with, seem to know exactly what they’re looking for when they hit iokath. this could be after weeks of scouting, or this could be because of their spies on the inside of the alliance.

time is also shit in swtor. until others or star wars themselves tries to plot out the timeline, you’ll notice that it’s anybody’s guess how long it’s been between certain events. i personally believe it’s been maybe a week since the republic and empire touched down on iokath to when we make our decision/end up at their base.

there’s nothing we learn later that can prove otherwise. and there isn’t anything to prove that lana hadn’t already found out about this and hid it accordingly. it’s also possible that shit finally hit the fan, and to keep from looking like a failure of keeping iokath strictly neutral, she’d have to fabricate a story to keep her in the limelight of the commander’s eye.

we only get one cutscene before war on iokath, and it sounds like we haven’t personally been to iokath for a very long time. lana may have information she’s been withholding, and without anyone else on iokath, she could very easily have many secrets that no one would know about.

because in all, lana needs to stay at the right hand of the commander.

if you haven’t already noticed, lana, unlike theron, often isn’t phased by the things you do. quinn and elara remain somewhat bad examples, but theron had a very emotional reaction to the death of his father. whether because it is family or not, lana doesn’t blink an eye at all no matter who dies on iokath. even if acina dies, she isn’t any more or any less disallusioned than she was before. on an imperial saboteur? you can kill every darth possible and she will still support you anyway. hell, senya, koth and theron can die. all people she recruited to your alliance and had ties to in the past. watching them die, even fighting senya, not even begging the commander not to leave theron, had some emotional toll we aren’t seeing. because she’s pragmatic.

pragmatic: adjective

dealing with things sensibly and realistically in a way that is based on practical rather than theoretical considerations."a pragmatic approach to politics"

that’s how she’s always described, isn’t she? a pragmatic sith lord who doesn’t care for titles or achieving a better or newer status among her peers.

or she’s willing to do whatever necessary to remain in power. defecting from the empire entirely, allying with the republic. making the hard decisions, allowing what she had to fall apart so the commander could rise, along with her. her position has never been threatened before, so of course she wouldn’t need to rise in power. she doesn’t want to lead, she doesn’t need to lead. she just needs to be close to the top.

because if she did continue to remain in power, that’d mean she had all the confidential and redacted knowledge in the galaxy, if not more. when the commander’s back was turned, she would have information they never would. she even advises us to watch everyone after iokath, and the commander would never even know about the ability to do this before, emperor/ess or otherwise. and you receive some pretty in detail things about both theron and lana. nothing that would raise too much suspicion. i don’t have those emails on hand, but its still rather concerning. and since lana was the one who wished to procure these examinations, who’s to say she didn’t edit her own from what the program sent in?

think, the worst callout post in the galaxy is at the fingertips of lana beniko.

so why doesn’t lana have her own betrayal arc?

well, that’s just it.

she should...but she doesn’t. a) bioware knows that most people don’t have a problem with lana, in fact most do like her character. with koth, people didn’t like his character. senya + arcann, some people had issues with arcann and in turn his mother. theron? some people just had problems with theron from the beginning. it wouldn’t serve a purpose to have the ability to kill her. b) she doesn’t have any reasoning to...yet.

lana isn’t as covert as theron. she doesn’t have a past in sis, or imperial intelligence. but she’s a very quick learner and her patchwork of knowledge has become an entire blanket. hell there’s even a throwaway line in shadow of revan where theron and lana banter back and forth. she very clearly picks up things very quickly, claiming to slice through four layers of encryption to shut the jammer down.

theron’s right to say, “i’ve created a monster”. he’s partially the reason she’s able to slice so well anyways.

yes, she was minister for a period of time. she saw the effect of theron’s treason, how unplanned it was and just about how well it went for him (spoiler: it didn’t go well). she would know that to attempt the same thing, she’d have to bide her time until she was in a position to do so without minimal knockback. before she can betray anyone, she needs to know what will hit hardest. that means not breaking the commander’s trust and being the person that we can lean on. someone we’d never question because they were always there for us. even the wookiepedia says this:

“Lana Beniko had a very unusual personality for a Sith Lord. She spoke in a very serene and considerate manner, and possessed a keen mind with a preference for analyzing a problem rather than charging in head on.”

lana beniko could destroy the alliance from the inside out. if she really wanted. yes, a romanced theron could as well, but he didn’t want power either. he never needed it, and was even willing to accept he might not be accepted back into the alliance after what he did. but a romanced lana would be even worse, knowing even more about how to tear down the commander, and make it hurt. she would analyze us just as a computer would, storing every tic, every outburst, every decision to use against us.

but she doesn’t want to. logically, she doesn’t have a reason to. koth did, he wanted justice for zakuul and a ds!outlander didn’t provide that. theron sort of did after his father died, and to keep the order of zildrog off our backs. lana has no responsibilities anywhere. no one is clambering for her to come back to empire either (as far as we’re concerned), so she’s happily at the top of the food chain with no prior relationships to her faction. there’s no agenda for her to serve. to say it safely, while a betrayal arc would be cool, the motivation for her to do so just isn’t there yet. it’d make just as much sense as theron’s, and it would be even more of a let-down.

at the same time, i can’t label a time lana ever asked for help in game. no one really does, but it’s very clear lana thinks she can handle everything. and in a way, she does. even moreso than theron, though possibly in other areas than him. after jedi under siege/onslaught without theron to help her with day to day or even the bigger issues, she could very quickly become overwhelmed, just as she did on ziost. she could have a plan to betray the commander if the commander does set their sights on killing her or lost trust in her, a copout if you will. if the commander were to turn on her for any reason, she’d have blackmail against them. a way out to yet again prove that she was in the right. with the support of the alliance (that she built), she could become commander herself or more likely find the next one among a pool of canindates, continuing to puppeteer it all. even if the alliance didn’t want a new commander, there would still be a major fallout with the commander either gone from the picture entirely or the alliance decaying from the inside due to trust issues.

because lana beniko is pragmatic. lana beniko will always survive, no matter what it takes. and rising from the ashes of the fire that she set, isn’t above her.

this took me an entire afternoon and there’s still stuff i want to talk about. especially how a betrayal arc would look with theron by your side instead of lana.

she could also just be a good character without any bad intentions, but that would be really boring, wouldn’t it? ;)

#swtor #star wars the old republic #star wars #theron shan #lana beniko #betrayal

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