youve previously spoken about i was a teenage exocolonist and its confused politics, and i agree, and now im thinking, how would one revise the story so as to improve them?
i think the game would have to either not be so proudly About Colonialism or would have to revise its story so that the theming actually matches the events. like imaginining that my proposed rewrite aims to 1. make the game's politics coherent while 2. changing as little as possible and 3. keeping the game's intended themes, i think the things that are most dissonant and jarring are:
the game not understanding what colonialism is but wanting to very much assure you that It's Bad
the game not understanding what fascism is but wanting to very much assure you that It's Bad
the game not understanding what capitalism is &c. &c. &c.
the bizarre unexamined eugenicist elements
so let's start on the first thing. you would want to lean much more heavily on the colonists as 'refugees' rather than 'colonists' -- the game treats 'colonizing' a place the exact same way as 'living there', and that kind of sucks (a common problem when using 'Space Colonization' as a 1-1 metaphor for actual colonization). so while we want to keep the weird culty aspects of the colony's society we'll ditch most of the colonial intentionality until the Helios arrives. secondly, we need to have the planet's indigenous people, like, actually present and not secretly hiding away as supercomputers.
so, like, let's keep the Gardeners as artificial life forms dedicated to protecting the ecosystem, but let's make them biotech. let's make them giant, imposing trees that reach up into the sky, with root networks that span the whole planet. then, rather than the colony being colonialist because it straight up doesnt know indigenous people exist (because they're secret computer people), we can make a much more interesting conflict by having the colonists be ignorant (and, as the game progresses, willingly ignorant) of the gardeners' sentience. have the raids start after the colony fells one of the trees (killing a Gardener) to make room for their own expansion, maybe really lean into the nasty parts of the colonial metaphor by having the Gardener's wood be the construction material of the new wing of the colony.
then Lum arrives as part of an intentional colonization project from the Earth we fled, assumes military command as in the current story, and immediately ramps up existing exploitation and destructive enviromental practices. his administration deliberately suppresses information of the Gardeners' sentience and spreads propaganda about them being 'monster trees'. have Lum clearly backed by Earthbound corporate interests, seeing the colony as an excercise in extracting value and using fascist dictatorship (usurping elections and the council with a permanent state of emergency and martial law) as a tool to maximize that value.
instead of defeating Lum at the ballot box, you can remove him in a coup. you can keep the getting-the-councilors-on-side minigame, you can even make it a bloodless coup if you don't want to put revolutionary violence in the game (but considering how much other violence there is in there, including terrorism, genocide, and murder, seems like a strange omission tbqh). and dont make him your fucking tiktoker put the guy in Jail. hes killed people sol.
have Sym still have his humanboo interests but also hint at an internal power struggle within the Gardeners, make it clear that there is a real and thriving culture among these indigenous gigantic environmentally networked tree-ecosystem-people, make his motivations for seeking peace more multifaceted.
then make the peaceful resolution to the whole colonialism issue to integrate the settlers into Gardener society rather than the weird siloed reservation thing going on in the base game. the head of the settlement or an ambassador (probably Dys) gets to go to the big fancy Gardener meetings where they decide things, the settlement gets permission from the Gardeners to farm and expand sustainably and is integrated into the ecosystem rather than neatly separated from it. the excolonists stop being colonists and become citizens of the planet.
as for the capitalism stuff, you can just drop that from marz' character, honestly. or if you want to make it make more sense without having to get into What Capitalism Is (which i think would be outside the mission statement of these proposals), make her thing wanting opulence and excess (it already kind of us, the game just keeps saying 'Capitalism'), have her excited when Lum starts giving people the opportunity to have that, then have her moment of excitement turn sour when she looks into Earth history and realizes how destructive this kind of extraction is in the long term.
and the eugenics--i think the simplest case here while still keeping all the cool genetic mutant character tics is just to make the genetic mutations a random glitch in an artificial womb system the refugees were using to have kids in space. this lets you keep the weird and wacky stuff going on with tangent and dys without raising questions like 'hey isnt this society insanely fucking dystopian'.
that's my in-a-nutshell rewrite of the game. obvsies an actual rewrite would need to change some more in-depth things, but i think off the top of my head these are the changes to the narrative that would make the heavyhanded attempts at political commentary work for me (that said, you could also go the opposite route, stop trying to draw parallels to colonialism and fascism and keep all the weird shit as is. but i think that's less interesting and more like stuff that already exists)
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According to NBC here in the US, the missing titanic sub has been found. As debris. Off the bow of the Titanic wreckage.
And it looks like the sub suffered what we all suspected, and what was undoubtedly the more merciful of the two options: a catastrophic implosion from the pressure.
Also, more info has come to light about the fishing trawler with the hundreds of migrants that sank cataclysmically off the coast of Greece, indicating that the greek coast guard knew about the vessel AND how much trouble the vessel was in, and were towing it at a speed that made it capsize, at which point they unhooked the tow line and watched the trawler sink without helping the passengers to safety. Despite a bunch of other ships trying to help as well throughout the whole ordeal.
So a lot of people are dead, all because of regulations (and the lack thereof) regarding sea-faring vessels and rescue protocols. People shouldnt be allowed to make a business charging a ton of money for a ride on an uncertified, unsafe, un-seaworthy ship going deep into the ocean with no distress beacon or tether to the mothership. People also shouldnt be allowed to enact laws that criminalize the ferrying of refugees, which then force the refugees to hitch rides on fishing trawlers, and which also prevent people from helping those fishing trawlers full of refugees due to fear of legal consequences.
Hopefully BOTH of these events spark changes on an international scale in terms of what is legally allowed to be sailed, who is legally allowed to be the passengers, and what the rescue protocols are in the event of disaster for any seafaring vessel, illegal or not. It shouldnt be just the global 1% who get 24/7 search parties and remote-operated submersibles helping rescue them.
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