after reading some stupid takes on Tau and some reasonable takes, I'd like to add that the specificity of the film noir tropes, while questionable from a worldbuilding logic standpoint, seem to serve important storytelling purposes
DE has said that the Perita Rebellion was modeled after World War I in some ways. with that in mind, borrowing aesthetics and tropes from a genre characterized by post-war Americana doesn't come out of nowhere, even if film noir is about the period after WW2 rather than WW1
more importantly, it serves to clarify what kind of story is being told about the Sentients. it is not a story about colonialism. the Sentients are not an allegory for native peoples. they aren't native to Tau, and their existence as a creation of the Orokin Empire does not compare to indigenous histories in any way. the closest thing we have in real history to a people being created from nothing by another people... is the act of colonizing, not the experience of being colonized
if anything, the Sentients are an allegory for the United States. even that is far from a perfect allegory, of course. I don't think they're meant to be an allegory of anything. not all sci-fi is allegory, though a lot of it is. sometimes sci-fi functions as a thought-provoker by creating an unlikely combination of aesthetics.
anyway, the Sentients colonized Tau, then they rebelled against the empire that sent them there, then they made their own mess. sound familiar?
as a caveat to "they made their own mess," it's also worth pointing out that the aftermath of war tends to involve material conditions that push people to desperation, like destroyed infrastructure, depleted or inaccessible resources, and widespread trauma. in the Sentients' case, the naturally-occurring flower that gave them individuality was wiped out. clearly Bloom was a hasty solution to that problem that stuck; it's right there in the name
who invented Bloom? how was it distributed then, and how is it distributed now? what resources are required to concoct it, and are those resources scarce or abundant? how difficult is it to produce in large quantities? what are the side effects? it will be interesting to learn the answers to these questions. it might explain a lot about Fornax
also worth noting that Fornax isn't the whole of Sentient society in Tau. DE said there are going to be multiple different locations of that size, and if I remember correctly, they said not all of Tau is like Fornax. presumably there's a percentage of Sentients who live in a hive mind, and I don't doubt that hive mind looks down on the individuated Sentients and their problems while having its own obvious, inherent problem. there will also probably be groups of individuals who organize themselves very differently from Fornax. whatever you hoped Sentient society would look like, it may actually exist somewhere!
and that's nothing if not realistic. individuals never universally agree on what society should be, and even when some who have high ideals manage to come together in a stable community, they never completely succeed in meeting those ideals
I'm ready to see what DE has come up with, and I'll consider it on its merits as Tau expands, always bearing in mind that it won't be "finished" for years, if ever, and that every update might change how I feel about it. I can't imagine being the kind of person who draws a conclusion immediately and decides they're completely right and will never be proven wrong. everything I've said here could be proven wrong in the future. the only certainty is that no one knows much of anything yet.
