#uncharted meta

[cuntcharted]

love him but nate telling sam they had nothing to prove when sam was literally in PRISON & then working fruitlessly with rafe for YEARS while nate had a generational legendary career as a treasure hunter is crazeeeee...drop the hennig cut and lemme see crashout sam drake

[veryfalsedocuments]

The Drake-Fisher Residence, New Awlins Edition

There are lot of cool photos and meta regarding the house that Nate and Elena live in at the end of the game, but what about unnecessary information about their residence in New Orleans? We don’t know much about the way that Nate and Elena interact with the environment in which they live, in the sense that we’re not getting flashbacks to walking down Bourbon Street and immediately regretting walking down Bourbon Street, no one should ever walk down Bourbon Street or anything, but we do have context both in the environment of Nate’s workplace at Jameson Marine down by the Mississippi River warehouses, and in the buildings surrounding the Drake-Fisher residence in New Orleans proper.  I return from my last architectural analysis of the orphanage/Boston setting to talk to you about bridges, preservation ordinance, and THE SHOTGUN HOUSE. (This is about to get really image-heavy.) I’ll preface all this by saying that nowhere in New Orleans is there a truss bridge that looks like something between a Parker truss, a Pratt truss, and a Camelback truss, but fine, Naughty Dog, I’ll accept your bridge discrepancies. (I have outlined the truss shape in little red lines so it’s easier to discern. For you bridge-lovers. I KNOW YOU’RE OUT THERE.)

The layout of Nate and Elena’s house is pretty simple: a rectangle, with smaller rectangles inside of it. It’s small but comfortable, with an insulated attic space originally intended for storage and relatively tall ceilings. The latter is a hallmark of many Southern houses built before the advent of air conditioning, because heat rises and you can’t sit around sweating all damn day. Seriously. These ceilings are tall.

For convenience I’ve provided a basic plan layout I mocked up in AutoCAD, aka Satan’s Architecture Program, of the first, second, and attic floors, respectively. For those unfamiliar with reading floor plans, thinner lines at the border walls represent window openings, of which there are very few. This is not uncommon for shotgun houses, which I will talk about...now. The shotgun house is awesome. It’s a piece of Southern vernacular architecture that has become synonymous with Creole culture the closer you get to the Equator while wandering away from the Mason-Dixon line, and was the most popular style of housing from the end of the American Civil War through the 1920s. Traditionally, the shotgun house is a narrow residence that is basically one long, skinny rectangle, with rooms arranged one after the other in a line. The only hallway, which provides access to each room, starts at the front door and runs all the way out the back door. Here are a couple great examples!

There are some academic arguments about the origins of the name: I always heard it was called a “shotgun” because you could feasibly shoot through one door and out the other without hitting anything because there are no doors between the other rooms. Other scholars have suggested that “shotgun” is actually an Anglicized interpretation of “to-gun,” a Dahomey Fon term meaning “place of assembly,” thereby tying its roots to the housing of Afro-Haitian peoples. Blacks have historically outnumbered whites in New Orleans and it is entirely possible that they brought their housing arrangement traditions with them. Shotgun houses can also come in two-story versions, or “camelback” versions, the latter of which basically adds a second story to the rear of the house, thus giving it a “hump.”

Anyway. ONTO THE ACTUAL GAME SCREENCAPS. Let’s start at the top, and work our way down!

The A-Frame gable (that triangle shape) of the attic space is pretty typical of two-story shotguns, as well as the window set into the gable, an element which can be seen in every shotgun gable photograph prior to this section. The window in their house is an oculus, or “eye” window, pretty popular during the Victorian period of building. The window is partly decoration, because a flat facade is incredibly boring visually, and partly for ventilation, though less so with air conditioning. Based on the insulation tacked between the ceiling joists and around the oculus (but the lack of visible ventilation duct work), this space is at least mildly cooler than the outside, which honestly isn’t saying much if you’ve ever been to New Orleans in the summer. I don’t know how Nate is wearing long sleeves up here and not sweating bullets. Down on the official second floor, we get a good look at the fenestration arrangements (window shapes, sizes) and also the outside! Which gives us really great environmental context.

Behold! A classic New Orleans gallery house, complete with side-door, flanking lanterns, narrow columns and chimney, and those tall-ass windows. But how do you access the second-floor porch? The tall-ass window is your door! It’s also used to circulate air by pushing the lower sash up to the middle, and the upper sash down to the middle, letting the hot air out and the cool air in. You’ll notice that the difference between the two-story shotgun and the gallery house is that even if the two-story shotgun has a second floor porch - which they often do not - columns do not run from floor to ceiling on the second level. Outside the Drake-Fisher master bedroom window, you can pick up elements of New Orleans vernacular styles on the other buildings in the neighborhood.

The windows in their house on the second floor on the front and rear of the house are probably not original to the building, probably replaced before or during the rehab process, because they are of a style not indicative of the area: a wide central pane of glass flanked by two smaller, movable sashes. This style looks a lot like the windows of the Chicago style school of architecture, popularized in the early 1900s (below).

Based on the views available from every conceivable angle in both the master bedroom at the rear of the house, and Elena’s office at the front of the house, they live at the corner of two streets in a historic neighborhood.

Now to the first floor door! A great Central Door Look (TM) is the kind that incorporates sidelights (those little stacked windows flanking either side of the door) with a strong Classical lintel over the door itself. Crown molding on the ceiling. Hardwood floors. Nice. Doors in most shotguns typically do not have sidelights (as they take up space) unless the door itself is centered.

Also literally no one but me cares about this but they have an antique door knob fixture and that’s cute! Older knobs were much smaller with slim, narrow plates. 

Based on the central placement of their door and its door surround/sidelights, as well as the placement of the stair on one side of the house, it’s a pretty safe assumption to make that they live in a shotgun. BUT ALEX, you cry, WHERE’S THAT ONE LONG HALLWAY AND THOSE SUBSEQUENT ROOMS? I’m super glad you asked, because it’s also not at all uncommon for shotgun houses to have their interiors gutted and rehabilitated to better suit modern needs! This is especially prevalent in New Orleans, where the majority of their historic preservation ordinances apply to the exterior of a building, rather than the interior!

This ordinance is most heavily used in the French Quarter, where you can subdivide and alter the interior of historic building to your hearts content, provided you maintain the exterior’s character-defining features (trim, paint color, cast-iron balconies, et cetera), but is also often applied to the houses in New Orleans’ other historic neighborhoods. I hope this was edifying and/or interesting for anyone who is not historic preservation-inclined, but as a preservation specialist I was really delighted to see the amount of detail put into a space so small!!!

[effervescible]

PLEASE share with me your thoughts on Chloe's mindset pre &/or post uncharted 2 re: Harry. I feel like that relationship was a big growing point for her and I'd love to hear your opinions on it

Ohhhh man I love this /cracks knuckles

In a word, how Chloe feels about Harry afterward is: complicated. But it can’t really be summed up in just a word. And I think part of that comes from thinking that she didn’t do anything especially wrong but still feeling like there’s something she could have done to make things turn out differently.

Between the game and the comic, Chloe strikes me as being similar to pre-Elena Nate in that she’s not a total love-’em-and-leave-’em type with no regard for her lovers’ feelings, but she doesn’t pretend to be in it for anything more than she is. So if someone gets too attached or is hurt when she takes off...well, that’s unfortunate, but she didn’t give them a reason to think it was going to last. It applied to Nate when she took off after their first night together and it applied to her “mostly professional” relationship with Harry—I do think she liked him and found him attractive, because she’s not going to sleep with someone just because he happens to be there, but that’s all it was. She was aware that he’d be pissed that she took off with Nate, but genuinely didn’t expect it to become A Big Thing.

I’m endlessly fascinated by the fact that Nate and Chloe explicitly planned to give Harry his share of the money and take off together. They were doing him a little dirty, technically, but he was still going to get his fair share. I think a certain level of double-dealing and screwing over is just expected in their line of work; see how Nate interacts with Eddy Raja in the motion comic and in the first game, and a late-UC2 line from Flynn indicates that Nate possibly screwed him over on something as well, and Nate was thrilled to see him at the start. There’s antagonism but still a level of friendliness as long as it doesn’t go too far, and what Chloe had in mind for Harry was in line with that.

Afterward, did Chloe blame herself for what ultimately happened to Harry, or should she have? imo no for both, because Harry began making really bad decisions well before he knew that she’d double-crossed him and also because he was kind of a dick in the way that he treated her a bit like property, but you can recognize that something is not technically your fault and still feel guilt about not being able to avoid it. It’s all in the way Claudia Black delivers that “oh, Harry” line when she recognizes that he’s been shot and is likely dying.

If she had realized he had such a serious problem with Nate, if she had realized he’d gotten so attached to her...it’s hard to say how much she’d have done differently, because not bringing Nate in on the museum job would have meant skipping out on a lot of money. I’m not sure she’d do that. (By the end of UC2 I think she would gladly lose out on the cash and skip the whole experience, but that’s more because Lazarevic is terrifying.) But she’d at least like to think she’d have done something different, to end up in a different place. And it might not haunt her all her days, but there is probably a period of time where she keeps replaying things in her mind, trying to figure out what else she could have done, before making her peace with never knowing for sure. There’s some grief there. Because Harry made his own choices and Chloe never lied to him about what their relationship was, but she liked him and never wanted him to die. I think that could well make her a little more cautious in how she approaches her next relationship or two, even if it doesn’t fundamentally change her.

[behold-the-goddamn-silver-fox]

I took a screenshot of Elena’s computer screen because I was curious to know what she was working on and I edited it a bit in photoshop to have a better view but I didn’t expected it to be in LATIN. I googled the words I could make out but with some words missing, it doesn’t make a lot of sense. Feel free to try and translate if you want.

[crychan]

vargas: if you ever cross me again--

rafe: *already crossing him again*

[heyitsthatgirl]

Small thought before I pop off to work, but do you know one of the things I love most about Nathan Drake’s characterization in Uncharted 4? There’s alot there, he’s tugging at threads to different pieces of himself. The younger brother, fiercely protective of his older brother, still looking to Sam to lead him on an adventure, to live up to the name Drake. The older, more mature man who has shirked the responsibility to his wife and immediately realizes the gravity of his decision. And how he choses the grown-up, responsible thing at zero hour when Sam is trying to appeal to their senses of curiosity and adventure to go after the treasure. There’s so much duality in Nate’s character in UC4 and I fucking love it. There’s flickers of that lonely little boy trailing after his brother on a dangerous but epic adventure, and the older, more mature man who also just wants to settle down a bit and do right by his family. And by the Epilogue you really feel like things have come full circle, which makes that gut-punch of an ending so poignant, because he has grown and changed and really does have what he’s wanted most in life this entire time. The thrill of adventure but also the love of a family. 

Nathan Drake, you guys. 

[effervescible]

Meta question: how does Sam go about trying to fit himself into Nate's life now that his brother has a weird collection of criminal misfits to act as extended family members?

Well, we saw how that went the first time around—he mostly did not try at all. And that went so well! But take two, when he doesn’t have the “you and me against the world finding this treasure” thing going for him?

I think he kind of still doesn’t, but this time it’s because he knows he has no business intruding again. He wouldn’t go no contact or anything, not at all, but it’d mostly be phone calls and e-mails at first, and he’d be SUPER hesitant about coming to visit, because it would mean staying with Nate, and he’s a little scared Elena will kill him for real this time. But of course it’s inevitable.

So he tries to relate through the experience he has. Elena can’t find a bottle opener? Sam offers to make a shank that will do the trick. (OK, probably not really this. Don’t ask me about homemade prison tools.) He tells amusing stories from past jobs, which luckily no one is fazed by. And of course the key is telling more embarrassing and/or endearing stories about Nate.

Once he’s comfortable with Elena and Sully, the rest comes relatively easy. Easier, anyway. He quickly figures out that the best way to ingratiate himself to Nathan’s friends is to tell very definitely embarrassing stories about Nate. And from there, it’s really not so hard at all.

It’s not to say there’s no friction. Sometimes Sam starts feeling the imbalance—he has the first 22 years of Nathan stories, but very little from the last 15+, and Nathan’s friends have all the recent ones. So sometimes he just needs to take a break, have some brother time, and remember that they lost too much time but they didn’t lose forever.

[effervescible]

Something I've been thinking about a lot recently.... What do you think adult Cassie's career would be? With how epic and talented she and her parents are, and all their interests, there are so many things I see fitting her, including a new job Nate and Elena haven't done at all.

Cassie obviously takes after her parents in their love of adventure and interest in history and such, and I think whatever she does as a career will be guided by those general qualities. Like she could end up doing The D&F Fortunes Show: The Next Generation, but it could easily be something totally different. Regardless of the specifics, I think she’ll want to do something that engages her mentally and physically. 

@beltsquid put forth the idea of Professor Cassie, which I could definitely see, but most likely in a field where she can do field work. I could also see her pivoting off her formative experiences into something that seems similar (even if the details are very different)—instead of digs in ancient ruins, maybe she’d end up in paleontology and dig up dino bones instead.