"why can't they just be friends?" not in the homophobic sense, but in the "in your need to center romance in everything you are missing the whole point of the media in question" sense
am i just hallucinating character traits or does hoops seem a bit...angrier in grounded 2 compared to the first game. like she's got some aggression going on. but i can’t blame her i guess i would too in that situation
What's your opinion on Sloane? I go through waves of being like 'nah, something is up with you' to 'she's so silly, what if she's nice' even though in my heart I know she's probably not
Excellent question!!
She's very funny, but I don't trust her.
Some spoiler-y stuff under the cut (it's also a LOT of words, you asked this to someone who has no one else to theory craft with) but it's my thought process. Prepare to read.
The ORC tech is Ominent's, just hijacked by the Stranger. Yeah, it was briefly in Grounded 1 (really only noticeable in the JavaMatic fight) but the Stranger (who I'm 100000% sure is the 5th teen) was most likely not in the backyard when they attacked. SO Ominent was using these devices to control the park at least somewhat. We don't know how long the Stranger has been in the park, but we do know she's taken over the ORC tech. To be fair, that doesn't seem very hard (see the MIX.Rs being able to mess them up as told by Solane), but the Stranger is clearly a tech genius. My guess is that the Stranger traveled to the park, either by foot or buggy, saw the ORC controlled bugs, got mad (because she has anger issues), took over one of the ranger stations and used what was in there (see the pine hill ranger station, it's secluded and clearly didn't have much of a crew manning it) to take the bugs away from Ominent. In the process, she probably found out some information that Ominent didn't want people finding.
Ominent is still ACTIVELY spying on the teens. There is no way the Stranger was able to get the items in the statue relating to the teens outside of maybe Max and Pete. We don't have a map of Brookhollow as a whole, but there's no way something like a medical bracelet from a hospital is somewhere outside of someones house. Soloane knows all of the teens names, and enough about them to try and get along with each one. Who is the spy? I'll get to that.
Let's not ignore the fact that Soloane is actively trying to kill a teenager that they most likely had a major hand in shrinking. She's not trying to find a peaceful solution. She wants the teens to take down all of the transmitters to (supposedly) weaken the Stranger's influence. Major problem with that: those bugs she's controlling? What's going to happen when her base full of hostile bugs suddenly isn't controlled by her anymore? Dead teen. I think that it's mostly because The Stranger knows things Ominent doesn't want exposed. They have a shit computer network, and they're so cocky they just leave info disks around the park with no backup plan if something bad happens. The Stranger knows everything Ominent has done, good or bad. She's in their system, in their files. She could cause them to get in major trouble again, right after Ominent (and by extension Soloane) has done everything they can to look good to the general public.
Ominent killed an unknown amount of teenagers, did something with the bodies, and never gave closer to their families. They're still doing sketchy shit in the park, still experimenting on people, still doing bad things. But now, there's a rouge kid destroying their shit. They're lucky that the teens want to help Burg.L and that the Stranger has his head and is in the way of fixing him. The Stranger isn't evil, she warns you when she's about to attack, and if you look like you're going to fail she pulls back. WE are the ones aggravating her based off information from Soloane. Soloane sends us to steal her milk molars, sends us to kill her bees and steal (what I'm assuming) a major food source from her, sends us to disable the things that are probably keeping the Stranger safe from the bugs she's controlling. She's strong, but not invincible. She couldn't take down Axl, and since we kill Bandit (which COME ON that was clearly her pet and friend. IT'S NAMED for gods sake.) she's loosing allies left and right. We are slowly but surely taking away any help The Stranger has, all because Soloane is asking us to. The Stranger; starting off distant but slightly hopeful that the teens would be on her side, is being hit by attack after attack and replying in kind to try and buy herself some time to expose Ominent before its too late.
Then theres the thing about Tully acting weird, probably from an ORC device. My guess is that it wasn't the Stranger who put a receiver on Tully. She's small, it probably takes months if not years to get places, how in the HELL is she supposed to stick something on Tully? BUT Ominent? They're still working with Tully to some degree (Soloane mentions it offhandedly). I think they stuck a receiver on him, not expecting The Stranger to hijack it once he was in the park and either freed him from Ominent's influence or put him under hers. Burg.L just accidentally got caught in the crossfire. OR Burg.L (who still has some ties to Ominent, they had his data and parts to fix him) is actually the Ominent spy being used to keep an eye on the teens (he's trusted by them, beloved by them, they want to protect him) and The Stranger knew this, used a controlled Tully to disable him from most of his parts but not enough to actually kill him. She kept the part with his memories, but not the part that Ominent has the ability to control to some degree. As for Tully working with her; I think she showed him the information she'd gathered. He's smart, he came up with the shrinking tech, came up with raw science, he can help her find a solution to whatever info she has.
Most of my theory is more on Ominent then Soloane herself, but remember, she's complicit in their business. Its her voice on the welcoming software, her office in the statue, her plan to do an operation out of the park.
So while she's funny, and she makes me laugh, I don't trust Ominent in the slightest and Soloane IS Ominent.
i'm intrigued and maybe a little wistful at "small/dead fandoms" that are less of a collective community (be it then or now), and more just a one-way record by a genuinely tiny amount of people in constant turnover. unfortunately i can't think of a less dramatic metaphor for it than that idea about how aliens are rare because by the time our civilization pops up and inherits the universe, the other ones are already gone but maybe we can still find their relics
Does anyone else really hope that Sloane Beaumont absolutely does not turn out to be a full-on twist villain or have some simple secret ulterior motive or anything. I literally love the weird gray area where she has just taken over a company still managing a lot of horrible things it committed and ultimately still looking out for itself first, but she herself isn’t truly straightforwardly evil at all and genuinely wants to help the teens, even though it’s only because that’s also what happens to be good for her/the company. Meanwhile the story’s villain has way more in common with the teens and an entire seemingly tragic past to justify it but is also doing some pretty explicitly evil stuff along the way to her goals.
The entire premise of the teens who were kidnapped, abused and abandoned by Ominent now working with a “reformed” version of that same company, against someone who went through all of those things at Ominent’s hands too but didn’t get the happy ending the others did…not to mention how it was the Ominent employees that first spared the teens and the Ominent employees who are harmed by the stranger’s efforts now…just come on man it’s too good
I am such a fan of the Max Willow Pete Hoops quartet like as an actual character dynamic. I need more grounded fans who are into it for the characters and story specifically
The fact that my new fav character last year was JLo/Oh the boov and this year it’s apparently Zev the kua-tin is so funny. I guess I just like little amphibious aliens stuck in a bad situation under their species' authoritarian order-obsessed society all while their only allies are a human survivor and a cat from the planet they just invaded
What do you do when you have an OC in your head and you literally think of them all the time but they still have no name and no design and no dialogue and no money and no future
germansingergirl
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izzy806
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