Indigenous, whatever gender you feel I am || 🇵🇸 || Aroace until i decide otherwise || San Jose Sharks fan, no matter what || Askarov's #1 Ride or Die || PWHL Hamilton Fan || Gwyn Philips Vengence Tour 2027 || CJ Jackson Starting 2027 || ARD hater since May 20th 2026
"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
Punct was asking me to explain what makes Bethesda's Fallout games different from Obsidian's, and I went on a huge spiel when i could have just linked them this segment of Noah Caldwell-Gervais' retrospective.
"Even the lowliest NPCs have a sense of dramatic naturalism to them, they feel casually true, people with dreams and fears and strong personalities. Something as small and frivolous as finding new sex workers for a Freeside brothel can lead to this long conversation with an old gigolo about his life of fame and fortune on the Strip before it all came crashing down on him. Your offer isn't much but if you pitch it to him right, maybe it can be one last grasp at the luxurious good life he lost so many years ago.
"Lesser writing would get hung up on the "gigolo" part, it would be played for laughs, but instead here you get a small history of the Strip's culture from an insider's perspective at the same time as the dialogue humanizes what could be a totally unimportant role.
"Ultimately, it is an unimportant role. It doesn't affect anything to put so much effort into such small characterizations in the script, but the cumulative effect of putting in all that complexity so constantly and so regularly in so many settlements scattered across the map makes the Mojave Wasteland feel plausible in a way that Fallout 3's self-conscious fourth-wall-breaking simulation never can.
(transcript continues under cut)
"The fourth wall is there for a reason: this is the window through which the audience peers in at the world. The world feels real because the audience is unseen and unacknowledged, it progresses as if we were not there and under the assumption that the characters are as human as we are, and not simply delivery vehicles for the script.
"Breaking the fourth wall can feel clever and sometimes it can be, but there is a fragile barrier between belief and disbelief. Often all it takes for an artistic work to break that barrier is to acknowledge the barrier is there in the first place.
"Characters treat each other with sincerity and belief in Fallout New Vegas. If you treat your own protagonist that way, if you engage with the illusion and believe in your place within the illusion, New Vegas becomes the most concrete and complex game world of the franchise.
"Good roleplaying is being able to choose between meaningful options. Great roleplaying is having choices meaningful enough to make the player question their own assumptions and motivations, to feel the weight of choice.
"Fallout 3's wasteland had a believability of tone and aesthetic; it felt casually true based off what was directly represented in front of you in the simulation. New Vegas has a naturalism of character and a complexity of motivation.
"These are not representative things, they are unseen things, they are imaginative features invoked by the writing.
"Fallout 3 is best wherever you are in the moment in the game world; it exists in the present tense. New Vegas is telling a story, and a story is nothing without the rising and falling action of a true narrative arc. New Vegas is not best in the present tense, but in the big picture, looking ahead to where you're going, looking behind to tally your accomplishments, identifying imaginatively where along the dramatic arc you happen to be.
"In the present tense of presentation and gameplay, New Vegas does struggle. Meeting it halfway becomes critical to enjoying it, because if you approach New Vegas in a purely representation way, you're confronted with the undeniable fact that if you take away the words of New Vegas, the rest of it is shockingly flat and brown.
Relistening to Noah Calswell-Gervais' phenomenal retrospective on the entire Fallout franchise, and was struck by this observation he makes of the Legion, but of fascism writ large. I isolated the audio, but here is a transcript.
In classic totalitarian fashion, the Legion is misogynistic by law, prohibiting women from serving in the army and reducing them to a commodity, less than human. All homosexuality is outlawed in the Legion.
Fascism is always scared of women and gays, and with good reason. Totalitarianism constructs masculinity as being willing to die for country and very little else. Power matters. There's a utility for fascism in constructing the feminine as weak because that's handy as a diagonal opposite, although, there's a lot more to it than that.
Put in the simplest possible terms, the fear of women and homosexuality by authoritarian movements exists because nothing erodes devotion to the state like devotion to another individual. There is nothing more individualistic than love. Love pulls the soldier away from the unit, it disconnects them from their nationalistic obligation, it makes them not want to die so much anymore. It makes them want to live instead.
But outlawing homosexuality on top of dehumanizing women, the state criminalizes any opportunity to find love outside the cisgendered binary. And the suffering of the self-repression caused by the Legion's subjects having to closet themselves for survival strengthens what Theodor Adorno called, "the death drive" through spreading despair.
Totalitarianism only works if it can keep people lonely and fearful on a pretty much permanent basis. Caesar's Legions is a parody of this push and pull between the fascist death drive and the suffering in fascism's wake, a self-reinforcing wheel of agony and pain that cannot be stopped if it can just keep rolling.
At the Hoover Dam though, that wheel has slowed to a stop. Now the situation is volatile, fragile, the fledgling nation a powder keg just waiting for a match.
So what we have is satire, wherein the worst dressed army in the Mojave is also the most dangerous and cruel. And that is precisely the joke. Autocrats and fascists never seem to understand how goddamn stupid they look to everybody else.
A Major Personal Update by Noah Caldwell-Gervais on Patreon. Join Noah Caldwell-Gervais's community for exclusive content and updates.
worth reading the entire thing. has some really good thoughts on why transitioning is worth it even in this day and age + when you're older, and is also genuinely wonderful
ID: A screenshot of text reading: "Ultimately, that's the reason I'm writing this at all: it's a common thing to say that transitioning saved my life, but it did. I have been looking for a version of myself I could actually live with and enjoy all my life, and just doing girl stuff worked better than a truckload of sertraline and hundreds of hours of therapy ever did. I hated myself for thirty-five years, and when I decided to just send it and trans my gender, that all evaporated. And evaporated for good.
For two years straight I've enjoyed being me immensely, and throughout my entire life before that point I struggled to make it through a single week without a depressive episode."
ceej, come to hamilton, we'll take care of you, we'll put you on starter, almost the whole season i swear (pls god put them on the starter, i don't care which team, i hate seeing talent just sit in backup forever 😭)
will who decided to leave college a year early after the sharks won the first overall pick so he could play with mack. cherny who bought out the final year of his contract in moscow when he was drafted to the sharks because he wanted to join the team as soon as possible and called mack the best player in the league before he even played a single game with him. and ivar who was asked what swedish hockey players he looked up to and said he really liked macklin celebrini then immediately looked mortified, realizing what he admitted. macklin what crazy pheromones are you putting out into the world, all these other boys were hooked on you from the start
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