#lolol the whole point of this post was to say dont compare the two yet choosing between them is a comparison of sorts XD | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

atanx · 4 months

Text

Since I've been replaying Subnautica recently, I've been thinking more about Below Zero.

From what I've seen, people tend to give Below Zero more shit than I think it deserves. Now, out of the two games I would very much say that Subnautica is my favourite, but I think comparing the two games is a bad idea in general because of how fundamentally different they are.

The premise of Subnautica is that you're a janitor whose spaceship crashed on an alien planet, leaving you as the only survivor when you wake up 8 hours after the crash. You aren't prepared for this. You're all alone. And you have been infected by a bakteria with a killcount in the billions. You know nothing at all about this world. This sets up real terror, helplessness and the knowledge that even if someone were coming to save you, they would experience the same fate as the rest of your ship's crew. You're not stranded on 4546B BY CHOICE.

Below Zero however, is drastically different. You have gone to great lengths to willingly smuggle yourself onto the planet to find out just what happened to your sister to cause her death. You come very much prepared and you're more than willing to face all the risks. You can also theoretically leave at any point. All you'd have to do is show yourself to Alterra and they would probably escort you to a prison themselves. You do not get infected. You are also not alone.

This willingness and initiative in Below Zero is a huge detractor from the terror of it all. And it is why I think a comparison is unfair.

(Also, you have a Truck. In Below Zero. And Truck-kun is there, ready to deal massive damage for you! Honestly I think it's way too OP. Fucking Shadow Leviathans become nothing more than a NUISANCE. But well, it fits with the theme of the game.)

All in all, Below Zero had nice environments, nice creatures, nice gameplay, a better base building system and some pretty intruiging storylines!

In my opinion, the endgame is pretty lacklustre. Any terror I felt regarding leviathans or the like abated very quickly, even though I have barely 30h in Below Zero. Meanwhile, going to the Aurora in Subnautica still scares the shit out of me 80h in.

Although I have to mention here that some of the familiarity you build up in Subnautica carries over. You can never get the same experience as playing Subnautica for the first time ever again. Because now you've already experienced it once.

Below Zero isn't really a worse game for not being able to do this, though. It's a good game, it's just... not as memorable. Because Subnautica is truly special. From its stellar soundtrack to its satisfying gameplay and moving story and setting, Subnautica is a fucking masterpiece. Sure, it has its flaws, but they're more charming than detracting. To me.

And it's unfair to expect anything else to deliver the same experience. Because nothing can.

And when comparing Below Zero to Subnautica, so many cool things lose their shine in its shadow. I still vividly remember jamming out in the seatruck to Diving In Too Deep from Nerdout. The story of that one old wreck that managed to survive by distracting the big gun was some really good writing. The frozen leviathan terrified me so hard even though I knew it wasn't going to come alive. Robin and Al-An's conversations are genuinely interesting an entertaining. The kelp area is really cool and the oxygen flowers are such a good gameplay change! Sam's storyline hit me right in the feels! MARGUERIT. The ice worm hit me straight off of my snowfox and down a cliff so I had to run the rest of the way. The research crew are also lovely characters!

There are a lot of things to love about Below Zero and we shouldn't let them pale by judging the game with standards Subnautica lifted to the fucking moon <3

#subnautica #below zero #atanx.txt #yes im aware bz came out like 2 yrs ago but ive been replaying subnautica and its just BEEN ON MY MIND SO MUCH AHHHH #also this is tumblr so who cares #and if you havent played the game(s) and somehow stumbled on this post: theyre really worth it #and i havent really spoiled much of anything #SO GO PLAY IT its so much better when ur playing it blind!!#if you have to choose one go with subnautica tho because its just so good #lolol the whole point of this post was to say dont compare the two yet choosing between them is a comparison of sorts XD #hey i never claimed i was consistent :P #but fr i love the characters in Subnautica. my little blorbos <3 theyre all dead but hey! fanfiction exists :333 #THE SOUNDTRACK IS SO GOOD AKCKQLC IT GAVE ME FEELS AND THEN I WROTE THIS POST

17 notes · View notes

isitandwonder · 5 years

Note

i go back and forth with, yea the dude is dating this girl, so what. to wow its kinda funny all this is happening now right around the release of their movie. and the editor or whatever of cmbyn says that yesterday and today theyre wandering around together and shes wearing his shirt. idk, maybe its both their together and their playing it up. or its all fake. or its real. dont get it lol best to keep it light tho and realize the only real love is btwn him and armie lolol

Oh,nonnie, you asked (or maybe not lol):

What is truth? That question is keeping philosophers going since the old Greeks. Can we ever know what another person truely thinks and feels? What do we really know about people we interact with personally? We live in our cave and stare at shadows. So how can we assume anything about people we really don’t know at all?

Well, there are a few approaches. One is that you admit that you know nothing, that everything you believe (not know) is made up in your head anyway, so you can built YOUR OWN FANTASY. And it’s nothing wrong with that, as long as you stay aware that IT IS A FANTASY. You can’t prove or disprove a fantasy because it’s all in your head anyway, it’s highly subjective and made up.

And we are not curing cancer here, this is fun, so believe what you want if it helps you getting on with your life.

And isn’t it nice if you write or draw about THIS FANTASY and post it in fan spaces and find likeminded people with similar FANTASIES and you share them and a fandom grows and everyone has fun and is happy?

So, if, in this regard and context, for you, A&T are the greatest love story that ever happened, or LRD&T are the greates love story that ever happened, or Tim is secretly a shapeshifter, or a vampire, or is boning Glen Close - FINE! Knock yourself out. Believe what you want. Only, don’t insult or ridicule those who SHIP/dream/believe something else. Because no ship (aka FANTASY) is better than the other and there’s no truth to be found in a FANTASY. You either believe it or not and believe something else. It’s totally subjective and - as a FANTASY- there’s nothing wrong with that.

Trying to prove a fantasy is what leads to insanity. Believe me, it’s not that I wasn’t tempted at one point. Only, you know, I’m a scientist. And in science, when we start an experiment, we have a question or an assumption that we want to prove, not already an answer.

Because I don’t have to prove something that I know is true. You still with me? When I start to look for clues that A&T are together, lead by my knowledge (not assumption or question if) that they are together, of course I will only prove what I started with in the first place and ignore/disregard everything that speaks against my knowledge because I’ve known the truth from the beginning and will produce a narrative accordingly. This is called confirmation bias.

In that context, even the absence of proof is proof for something - and at this point, you can’t argue with people who work like this because they have made their mind up long before they entered the argument. They had the answer before the question. For them, there isn’t an argument at all, because they KNOW. End of story.

True, sometimes the dog NOT barking is evidence. But for that to work there has to be a dog in the first place. If you don’t know that there is a dog, it not barking proves nothing.

So, again, can’t we know anything about anything? Well, there’s a thing called probability. Not all arguments are equally valid, some are more reasonable than others because we have experience, context, and from that we draw conclusions re the probability of things.

But lets first look at the evidence presented in favour of certain theories. I’ve been on this train for over 2 years. I saw a lot of the things going round in fandom and taken as proof for or against something now as it happened - and I have to say, many things got taken out of context and were blown up to much more proportian and meaning than at the time things happened. Pics have been cut in certain ways so people have been removed to make them look more intimate. Things no one has ever seen or knows anything about are suddenly taken as facts (a marriage contract, for example) just because they’ve been repeated so often by fans that they’ve been talked into existing.

These proofs are often photographic ‘evidence’. But pictures lie. And can be manipulated. What we see in them depends on lighting, angels etc. If you take a pic or vid out of context it can look as if it shows something totally different than it originally did. So never base anything solely on a single picture you didn’t even take yourself. Always ask for the context it has been taken in. Is it a fan snapshot? Is it a directed photoshoot? Has it been made during an official promo event? These things matter to determine the validity of the things show in these pictures.

For example, look at this:

Isn’t that a lovely pic of A&T? Doesn’t T look totally shagged out, bathing in the afterglow while Armie tells the world: ‘Look, he is mine!’ This is the photo as I saw it on tumblr.

This is the original:

As you can see, Tim is probably laughing at something Petra Collins says to him. This changes the whole context. And these things happened quite often in the early days because we were shippers, we knew that we were wearing our shipper goggles, we spun a FANTASY, quite aware that what we were doing was playing freely with the facts. It wasn’t about proving something, it was about illustrating a fantasy. Taking these things now as proof for anything is absurd.

Same goes for interviews. These can be cut and edited in certain ways. Watch a whole press conference, not just the part your shipper heart loves if you want to get the whole picture (or live in the one sentence that makes your shipper heart flutter if this is just about your FANTASY).

As said in the beginning: no one on here knows these people and their circumstances. We didn’t even go to school with them, worked with them, or are their neighbours or in any direct contact with them whatsoever. So we base our judgement solely on currated content provided by them or people close to them, and public appearances that happen in a certain context like a movie premiere, and on very random public sightings by people we also don’t know and whose statements we can’t verify.

We can’t really built anything about their private lives upon these things, can we? It’s all highly speculative.

Okay, after having discussed the reliability of our evidence, lets move on to how to sort it. There is this thing called probability. In theory, everything is equally likely over an infinite period of time. But in reality, humans are able to learn from experience. And experience teaches us that some things are more likely than others.

Then there are facts. Facts are things we know to be true because they haven’t been falsified yet. For example, Armie is married. I know, there are many rumors going around about the state of his marriage, but as long as he’s not publicly divorced he got publicly married to EC and that’s the only thing we can work with. Otherwise, our already pretty sketchy footing slips away completely if we only work with hearsay, specualtion and gossip, and we end up with a fantasy again.

So, in our case: do we really think that friends, family, spouses, girlfriends, colleagues, ex-colleagues, ‘the press’ and random people on the internet are all conspiring since June 2016 together to hide that two actors - who to large parts of the world are totally unknown - are in a relationship, when, on the other hand, we have photographic evidence from multiple independent sources - and in Armie’s case even a marriage certificate and 2 children - showing that they are both with someone else?

Okay, but we’ve discussed the unreliability of photos. True. But it’s not just one cropped pic showing T with LRD. There are many, taken over a long period, by different people, professionally and privately. That makes them being a fact much more probable because why should all these people, who took those pics and reported sightings and don’t know each other and do gain nothing from their lies, lie? Isn’t it much more probable that what these pics show us is the truth?

On the other hand, what solid evidence do we have that A&T are a couple? We don’t even have one photo showing them kissing outside of a movie they made together 3 years ago. Compare this to pap and private pics of T&LRD kissing, that have been taken over a period of a year by different people. What does probability tell us here? That something we’ve never seen is more likely to be happening than something we’ve seen on different occasions, documented by different people independently for 12 months?

Isn’t it more likely that a man who’s never been seen out in public romantically involved with another man, who is married for years and has 2 children - is straight?

Isn’t it more likely that another man, who’s never been seen out in public romantically involved with another man either, who’s only other relationship the public knows of was with a girl, who - if he talks about his private life at all - talks about kissing a girl or wanting to impress a girl, who’s been photographed at different occasions by different people kissing a girl - is straight?

Leave aside what you want them to be and look at the facts, as sketchy as they are.

If you look seriously at what little facts we have - there is nothing reliable connecting A&T romantically that can’t be explained by them being friends and having filmed a movie together over 3 years ago. Everything else is subjective, projection, hearsay, wishful thinking, a fantasy, shipping, gossip, rumors.

Documented facts show us that their reality is incongruent with our ship. And if we start to disregard those facts it leads to sending hate to these very people because fans who took a ship for something real feel betrayed. So, please, sort facts from fantasy, take a look at the facts (not at projection, hearsay, wishful thinking, a fantasy, shipping, gossip, rumors) and draw your own conclusion.

What do you think is more probable when you look at proven facts? Probable, not true. There’s the possibility that I might get proven wrong someday. But, to me, all real evidence points towards T&LRD and AH&EC.

64 notes · View notes