They're Persona characters, very powerful ones, and the whole "Definitely not your average WARP train" thing indicated a willingness to investigate crossovers.
I uploaded this to my Reddit page because the Deltarune sub are so obsessed with fake internet points but anyways I can’t decide for shit where to place this soul for an art piece I wanna finish eventually involving the Vessel I’d like some help please since I am indecisive and tired-
Also sorry I haven’t posted much here… I’ll try to be more active, once I do what I gotta do IRL
Baffled there isn't any variation of a helldiver's song with the Deltarune Freedom motif out there despite the fact they say freedom constantly in helldivers
Helldivers makes their world the smidge more horrifying with the realization that no one is in on it. Everyone, all the way to the top, is saturated with the coolaid. Whoever built this system is long gone and the fools they left running the circus have done so because that some accidental, secondary effect that their blind, cruel, vain actions perpetuate the system. There is a man behind the curtain who also waits for Oz.
We only see the helldivers' universe through their eyes so there might be people on worlds who have foresight and know the truth. But they aren't going anywhere near the billions of disposable shocktroopers being shuttled from one war zone to the next.
I'd say we do get a few peeks behind the screen in the specifics of the machinery and protocol detailed around the player with examples like the manually aimed, automatically firing planetary defense guns and how you upgrade your turrets to be held together with glue instead of what I can only assume was friction, the missions to raise a flag without observation or even recording. They all seem to show that the person(?) making these decisions are fervent believer priests of this cargo cult
It's like a blender. Sure, the orange is gone, but the chemical makeup is still there, just rearranged. The shock towers, pacemakers, and tourist family come to mind.
"The presenters for the next Splatoon game should be this, the presenters for the next Splatoon game should that" I think the presenters for the next Splatoon game should textually acknowledge the game-mechanical conceit of gender as a fashion statement and sometimes be an idol group and sometimes be a boy band, and the closest anyone ever gets to remarking on it in character is a running gag where one of the group members will show up as the wrong gender and catch shit for being out of theme.
I was worldbuilding two bog standard fantasy species, wise old tree dudes and impulsive little rat guys, when I realized it was far funnier if they had each other's personalities.
The rat guys think fast and talk fast, but they're incredibly conservative and like to cover all the angles before they take any action. This comes with being a prey species: their ancestral environment had lots of clever traps and devious hazards, so you get rat councils wisely working the problem.
The tree dudes speak and move slowly, but they will propose and then do the most insane things you can imagine. They can slot together a rocket in an afternoon and will then use it without so much as a test fire first. They test new potions by quaffing them down, sometimes not even waiting for it to cool (though they're tree dudes, so I guess quaffing a potion just means pouring it over their root legs). This comes from the ancestral selection process too: the tree dudes that won were the ones that took big risks, that grew faster, stronger, and tried new things without worrying about consequences. The tree dudes evolved in an era when they had no natural predators and their only competition was each other.
And this is, of course, initially confusing for any human who makes contact with them. If a giant bearded tree nods at you solemnly and tells you to go through a portal, your first thought is not that he's curious about what will happen to spacetime. And if a hyperactive little rat guy tells you with some urgency that you must accompany him into a ruined city, you won't immediately think that this is step 11 of his branching 27 step plan.
The secret facility that I work in has holes in the ceiling. We don't know how to get them fixed.
We tried asking the government to fix it, once. We told them that the holes in the older parts of the facility had gotten large enough to fit birds through, and that birds were getting through, and that, perhaps, a Soviet Spy could fit through as well.
After all, it is well known that Soviet Spies and pigeons are approximately the same diameter.
Our hope was that that this vague and nonsensical threat would put a little fire under Uncle Sam's feet. If the fed couldn't be bothered to give a shit about the giant gaping holes in the roof of our facility, perhaps they could be persuaded to give a shit about... Soviet Spies.
This attempt at manipulation 100% blew up in our faces.
See, the government does not need to be persuaded to give a shit about Soviet Spies. It still wakes up most nights, drenched in cold sweat, terrified and confident that a Soviet Spy is hiding in their nightstand. If it sees a rock on the ground, it flips it over, pistol drawn, ready to shoot the Soviet Spy it fully expects to slither out from underneath. Which is to say: The government is crazy. So when we dropped those two words - inflitration risk - in the repair request, they came in guns-a-blazin'.
Does that mean that they fixed the roof? Of course not. Don't be stupid. No, instead of performing basic maintenance, they installed a state of the art alarm system throughout the facility - lasers, sonar, the works - and told us to always be on the guard. Because of the roof holes.
Then they left.
So now we had an extremely good alarm system... and birds. Which have combined in incredibly obvious and predictable ways to produce an unending fountain of problems.
For Example: About once a month, someone gets called in by the local airforce dispatch because AAAAAAAAAAA a Spy is in the Rad Lab! We're all gonna die! Except every time, it's a bird. And I get why we have to check, but every time, the dispatcher is panicked and the person going out has to be like listen, listen: It's a bird. It's always a bird. It's been a bird every month for the last fifteen years. It will be a bird next month. All this stress? Bad for your heart.
Second Example: Sometimes, birds get in while we're actually working. And when it's in the morning, you know, it's a nuisance, and it stops testing (we are not going to risk irradiating a bird) but it's not an all-hands-on-deck situation because it doesn't take ten hours to get a bird out. But surprisingly often, the bird gets in riiiiight at closing time, and in that situation, everyone goes feral because nobody can leave until the alarm is set, and we cannot set the alarm while the bird is there, because the bird would immediately trigger it and then we'd have to stay another 4 hours to confirm that it was not a Soviet Bird.
So in order to go home, everyone's top priority is Get That Bird. And we have a system for it.
Step 1: The test stands tend to be located in rooms with 30+ foot ceilings. We can't catch birds in places like that - so we have to lure the bird into the relatively low ceilinged (8 feet only) upper offices.
We do this by turning all the lights off in the test rooms, then putting floodlights by the exits. I don't know why this works - some kind of evolutionary brain fragment shared by both Bugs and Birds - but work it does. The birds almost always follow after the lights. From there, it’s just two guys moving the floodlight and a third guy to turn off the lights.
Step 2: Everyone else has been waiting for this step. There is this long stairway up from the basement level into the offices, and in the final stage, the floodlights are brought to the base of the stairwell to bring the bird up. At the top of the steps there will be a group of tennish people, waiting for the signal. The light guys will set up the final transfer, everyone will tense, and then, swish...a bird will flit up the stairs and into the offices.
It's like watching werewolves on a full moon. Before the bird cometh, we are engineers. Nerds. Pale and skinny things, trembling under the fluorescent lights. After the bird, we are beasts. Feral, gnawing things, glowing under the orange sunrise of the 70's halogen floodlights.
And like all beasts, we cannot help but give chase.
Step 3: The were-engineers begin the hunt. The goal at the start is not really to catch the bird - just exhaust it. So the pack simply does not relent. Because the stakes are going home on time, the group is basically given free reign to go anywhere in the building. If someone's door is open, and the bird goes inside, they're going to have to deal with ten sweaty panting maniacs leaping around their office. They don't get to say that they're busy, or remark on how all this movement is a terrible distraction. They are allowed to sit in silence during the chaos, and perhaps thank the war party for chasing the bird while they sat comfortably on their ass. This has been explained several times, and it will continue to be explained until cooperation is achieved.
Anyway.
The chase can go on for quite some time. Sometimes, the bird will get tired and find a crevice to hide in, where it can then be reached through standard cornered-bird catching techniques.
Other times, it will slow down enough that someone can actually yoink it out of the air. But this will go on until someone catches the bird and triggers Step 4.
Step 4: The Finale. This is the get-the-bird-out-of-the-building stage, and it requires someone to adopt a specific role: To Become the Sacrificial Vessel of Bird Removal.
This job is both coveted and feared. It's coveted, because holding a wild bird in one's hands is a precious thing. To feel how small, and fragile, and scared it is, only to free it from the building? That is what it's like to be a benevolent God. But the cost! Oh, the cost. The entire time the Vessel is in motion, the bird will be biting the hell out of their fingers. And I cannot emphasize enough just how painful bird bites are. Their entire face is a set of needle posed pliers, and they know tricks the even the cartels haven't figured out yet. So there's always a little hubbub about who shall be The Vessel while onlookers, stranded outside The Office of Bird Capture, can only look on. Quiet arguments and pleas are heard, little fragments of fear and pride and glory trickling out of room like the silver dust left behind in a bag of well shook quarters. The sound of concensus is silence, and the argument will go on until that's all that's left. And then, from the darkness of the final office, the chosen sacrifice will step forward: Hands gently cupped, tears streaming down their face, fingers trembling from the pain of the ongoing bird chomps.
And this scene is what organizes people. Not leadership, not truly. No one can think and coordinate a crowd while their fingers are being attacked with a combination nutcracker/ear piercer. But the crowd sees the suffering of their annointed, and it is driven to do everything poossible to make the process flow. People instinctively flair out, finding the fastest path outside. Doors are held open. Paths are cleared. Someone, somehow, always knows the way forward and can describe it to the sufferer. Left, left, forward. Corner closet. Yep, there's a hall in there. Forward. Two-hundred more feet man, you're doing great. Just hold it together a little longer. You're killing it.
Then the final door swings open, and the bird flees out into what remains of daylight. And yet, even here, the deed is not yet done. I cannot explain it in words, but the crowd that helped is never content until they can see and speak on the Bird Vessel's wounds. They all have to pull the fingers back and see what was given. Estimate the price: One day to get better - No, three - No, a week! Are you blind? Do you see that blood blister? -Yeah, that's not going away anytime soon - Damn, can you believe how feisty those things are? Like wolves without teeth.
(They cannot help but touch as they go. It has always been this way. Even Thomas was not content until he felt the wounds in Christ's hands.)
Only when the last of the helpers has seen, and commented, and commended, will the engineers scatter. It is their return from the underworld that announces to the sun living surface dwellers that they too can go home.
(@somerunner tolja it needed to be a post.)
Just saw a post that said Kojima games have no symbolism or meaning beyond, "It looks cool".
Kojima is the worst fucking creator you can apply that logic to because characters will sometimes break the 4th wall to tell you what it explicitly means
Solid snake looking directly at the camera: genetics do not dictate one’s life, nuclear proliferation is bad, the advent of advanced technology is making it more and more difficult to differentiate truth from propaganda, borders and nations are fake, the war economy is a blight on the earth, the military industrial complex is a meat grinder that targets children and my dad’s boyfriend is a whore
A billion guys on Twitter for some reason: how apolitical and extremely heterosexual of you
Death Stranding, holding the camera to its' face: We have to love each other. Even if it destroys us or alters us the only thing that makes us human is the bonds that tie us together. Love with abandon, serve with grace. Higgs and Sam were so unheterosexual with each other it killed the last three angels left in gods' blighted heaven.
Average Gamer™️: Well this game sucks because Mama kept her shirt on the whole time.
Imagine a Prehistoric Documentary that starts with a hunched over, knuckle-dragging Fur Loincloth Caveman pointlessly banging two rocks together while the calm-voiced narrator keeps going on about how back in the stone age, people did not have the advantages of modern technology like we do. Neanderthals, like this one here, did not have a written language, never invented the wheel, never progressed to agriculture or animal domestication. And as they never built permanent structures for habitation, they never had villages. They, however, made do with what they had. Without villages, naturally never had an official village idiot, but they did have a nominated Clan Idiot. Like our friend Grog right here.
Then the camera moves away from the Caveman Banging Rocks Together to reveal a neat and civilised, well-dressed fur clad tribe of hunter-gatherer neanderthals, wearing bone jewellery and expertly crafted stone tools, looking at the first guy in disgust. One of them is eating a mix of nuts and dried berries from a woven bag like it's popcorn.