Exactly what it says on the tin. Deep dives into disasters in fiction (books, video games and tabletop games, TV shows, anything and everything imagined) using knowledge of real-world events, scenario analysis, and more. Currently on hiatus.
The Doomed Hometown FAQ, CW/TW, and other info pinned:
The Doomed Hometown (name taken from the trope, obviously) is a project I started because I find disasters and response to them an interesting field of study, and because I enjoy overthinking and worldbuilding for fiction, and at least a few other people do.
The point of posts here is to take a given fictional calamity or disaster from anything (a book, a video game, a movie, a TV show, an anime or manga, whatever) and give it an analysis and in-depth deep dive with research, knowledge from real-world disasters, application of known scientific knowledge as of 2025, speculation on causes and effects, and more.
Along the way, hopefully, you will have at least read something moderately interesting. Ideally, you will have learned how to flesh out calamities and disasters in a way beyond how much fiction often handwaves them/doesn't deep dive them enough ("oh yeah, an atomic explosion happened in my backyard, now to the NEXT episode where we care more about the budding office romance filler!). Maybe, even, you'll have learned something that might save your or someone else's life if Shit Hits The Fan where you are in real life. (And to meet that quotient right here right now: Never stand near a glass window in high winds, during an active shooter event, or if things are exploding nearby.)
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CW/TW for every post: the very nature of this tumblr blog means that there will likely be frank discussion of calamities and disasters both natural and manmade, injury, death, violence, greed causing human suffering, and almost all things related. Posts will have specific TWs/CWs if they go above and beyond that.
Real events will often be referenced but will be specifically tagged, and I will do my best to be respectful around referencing them (e.g. I will not post pictures of real dead bodies or real gore etcetera, though there may be textual references to such or reference links might show such if it is inescapable)
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Almost all content here aside from the event being discussed itself - which will obviously be a 10 on The Scale of Canon/Headcanon Likelihood will range from 3 (canon neutrality, not contradicted directly except, possibly, by "it's just a ____, who cares") to 9 (implicit canon, with proof). Average range however will be a 4-7, as the point is to death of the author the event and be "if I was writing this disaster with research, how would that happen."
On that note, if you are literally angry that someone is doing this and devoting time to it - I cannot help you with that except by advising you to block this tumblr and move on rather than get angry that someone cares Too Much about something you don't.
On the other hand, constructive, researched commentary, questions, and criticism (and participation via comments or reblogs) are very welcome! I only bite the heads off of trolls.
Political leaning by me (the only current poster) is leftist minarchist/socialist. Disasters are often inherently political both in real life and fiction, so that will be addressed and handled. That said people of almost all political leanings are welcome to read and interact, except fascists and nazis, who will be banned on sight for obvious reasons. Being an asshole to other people (including the use of slurs or blaming real marginalized people for any disaster *because* of who they are rather than any specific actions) will also get you a block.
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Finally, the Suggestion Box is named that because it's a place for you to suggest things for me to cover. Of course I may not (and I might do stuff out of order, or I might just not feel like it etc). If I don't really know or care about a specific thing enough to cover it and you do, I am potentially open to your submitting a post to be linked/reblogged. (For example, I'm not a Marvel superfan so if you want the Thanos Snap covered, I might ask for you or someone else to cover it, then link or RB your post.)
You can also comment on posts I've made myself there, if you don't feel like adding your input in a comment or want to keep it private. That said, anons are OFF because I want to keep feedback on topic and constructive, something anons are notoriously bad at.
Anyway, that should be all, and now for my poll on what you want to see me cover. This will name some events, mostly from video games and one anime, but there's an Open Poll slot for you to choose and comment with something you would rather prefer.
What fictional disaster should I deep dive?
Chrono Trigger: Lavos/the planet (Asteroid Impact + Supervolcano With Verneshot)
FFVI: Doma (Chemical attack/exposure)
Star Ocean: The Second Story R: Kurik (Earthquake, generated tsunami)
Cowboy Bebop: The Gate Incident (likely Kessler Syndrome/space junk, possibly?)
Sims: FIRE (admittedly a localized disaster, an excuse for a fire safety lecture
Open Choice - comment something since my brain is fried from this long post
I'm entirely unable to continue with the Chrono Trigger analysis/post. I kind of just hit a wall with it. Would anyone still be interested if I just tried to move on to other stuff for a while? Like writing tips on writing disasters, trying to analyze other events in other games and books etc?
The thing about the naming of incidents is that it's a linear trade-off between crypticness and ominousness, and where you are on that spectrum depends entirely on the number of words in said name. "The Noodle Incident" is wonderfully vague, but if you're hearing about "the Sandstone Valley Incident of 1922", you know some Shit Went Down.
Planet Eater Drops In (Chrono Trigger, Lavos - Part One, The Beginning)
So I'm going to lead here with some disclaimers and prefaces to address some possible problems with this event analysis - because they're things I've been working around writing it.
1: This event is two events we do NOT have very much observational or living experience on - (asteroid impacts and supervolcanic eruptions) - one that is a possible hypothetical only within the context of either (a Verneshot) - and one that's purely video-game logic/a wizard did it (alien invasion/sentient planet eating creature).
So while I will try my best to focus on what can be explained or described or compared - at times (especially wrt the 12000 events) I will just shrug and go "a wizard did it" because, spoilers: a wizard DID do it. At the same time, even the disaster caused by purely impossible means shows us something about what often causes/worsens disasters, so I'll discuss that in those contexts.
2: I'm going with the timeline in Chrono Trigger and ending it with the defeat/non-defeat of Lavos in that game. If it's incongruent with Chrono Cross, that's why.
3: There will be spoilers for Chrono Trigger. I cut the post at this point for that reason: this entire post is probably a big spoiler.
A planet-eating creature encased in a large shell capable of surviving atmospheric entry lands on the planet in the game Chrono Trigger, impacting and burrowing into the planet in an effective asteroid impact, at the game's date of 65000. Humanity on the planet is changed, as are its climatic conditions, shifting tropical conditions to an ice age.
While the calculations don't exactly work as they would for Earth, I would assume the asteroid/Lavos shell would have been slightly smaller than the Chixculub impactor, because a) we only see one small area/one side of the planet in the game and b) the humanoids, which in the game's context, coexist with the dinosaurs and reptites, survive. So the impact must have been big enough to induce an ice age/nuclear winter, but not big enough (as Chixculub in reality was) to wipe out everything aside from fish/small lizards/the smallest mammals.
A couple of other unique factors for the planet in this particular setting is that it is both relatively new despite being over 66 billion years old and it is itself a living organism per the Gaia Hypothesis, plus what we see of the planet is only one side if we take Chrono Cross as canon, where its El Nido peninsula appears to be on the other side of the world. The planet is, due to this, very geologically active with a very close to the surface volcanic system and an accelerated rate of continental drift (e.g. with continental drift and weathering happening within 600 years)
When Lavos falls from space, it penetrates the atmosphere at a very fast rate - possibly due to a guided approach rather than the randomness of real-world impactors - and smashes into a mountain in a volcanic field, instantly sinking into the ground there (though unrealistically, obviously, your party can be right near that without being vaporized ;) ) - which might have possibly reduced the damage from a water impact or land impact, as it seemed to sink instantly, itself consumed in the soft rock and magma, which enveloped it akin to some materials in the superheated ball experiment genre, which would have reduced its immediate impact to that of a local/regional ice age from the ensuing eruptive activity, over an atmospheric breakup or the amount of debris thrown into space. (I could be wrong here, but it does seem an equally valid explanation for why as well as "magic," so I threw it in.)
As depicted in the game, the initial impact of Lavos is definitely not as dramatically world-ending as the real-world Chixculub impact, its only seeming actual damage (at least before we see the entire side of the world at 12000 in an ice age) being the defeat of the reptites and large dinosaurs, while the humans (which, in this setting, were co-existant with dinosaurs, unlike real humans which were not) and an abrupt end to a tropical climate. The caldera in which it landed seemed to contain the worst of its immediate effects, essentially mitigating the disaster in a way.
That's why I would consider the Lavos impact itself at the time not to have been the problem, as much as what it crashed into - a supervolcanic caldera, which would build up around itself as time passed, an accretion of rock layers and magma layers that slowly embedded into the planet.
And here's where I want to introduce a very important concept, and one that anyone needs to understand regarding disasters of any kind: often, it is not always the initial event that causes most of the problems/damage/illness/injury as much as what that event leads to. Every disaster that cuts power will then lead to all of the consequences of a sudden, unexpected power outage, which will itself lead to other problems such as water/sewage failures, failures of life support machinery, etcetera. The number one cause of death in many disasters is diarrhea as a result of food poisoning or heat stress or bacterial infection. There are very few disasters that are "clean," e.g. one single incident that has no follow up or connected events for anyone involved, that all that needs to be done is a bit of cleanup and moving on.
Sometimes an event that seems like nothing at the time/a small problem at the time can become something, or a chain of somethings that expands well beyond the initial problem.
And that is what the next posts for Chrono Trigger's triple disaster will go into: what happens when human greed meets the capacity for something that seems to offer it encouragement? What happens when a long-forgotten disaster decides to pop itself out of the planet again?
Started writing the Chrono Trigger post, realized it's basically three different disasters if not more, it's in drafts with a little done. Apologies for making everyone wait longer for it, I just hit some major writer's block + this is actually way more complicated than Doma was.
As a side note… I am really annoyed by one thing about Star Trek.
“Replicated food is not as good as real food.”
That’s ridiculous. In Star Trek, replicator technology is part of the same tech tree as transporters. Replicated food would be identical to the food it was based on, down to the subatomic level.
In a blind taste test, nobody, but nobody, can tell the actual difference between replicated food and “real” food. (Think back to our youth and the New Coke vs. Pepsi taste tests, only worse.) BUT, humans being What We Are, the human Starfleet members insist that “real” food is better than replicated food for reasons including, but certainly not limited to:
1. Hipsters have survived even into the 24th century. “No, you just can’t make good curry from a replicator! You gotta toast the spices yourself right before you cook it or it’s not the same, maaaaaan”
2. All military and para-military members everywhere always grouse and bitch about the food and sigh over What We Get Back Home. It could literally be the same replicator recipe you use at home when someone has to work late or just doesn’t feel like making the effort to cook, but people are people everywhere so they’re going to complain about it.
3. Humans tend to think we’re smarter than we actually are and we can totally tell when something is going on; as a result, human crew members insist they can “taste the difference” because their minds are making shit up, as our brains do.
4. One could presume that, generally speaking, a replicator recipe programmed into a starship or base replicator database would come out the same every time. This is perhaps the 24th century equivalent of mass catering. (I won’t try to account for the nuances of replicator tech that might allow for variances, and leave aside for the moment the fact that some people probably tinker with the standard “recipes” to suit their own taste.) The single thing that would be different in this case about “real” food is the variation, since of course the “real” dish will have slight variances every time due to the whims of the cook, the oven temperature fluctuation, freshness of ingredients, etc.. And since we are an easily bored species who really, really hates boredom, I bet people would jump all over that to lament the lack of “real” food when they’re out exploring strange new worlds and new civilizations and whatnot. (This is the only reason I can think of that might hold up to scrutiny.)
The Vulcans in Starfleet (and Data), of course, remain baffled by this human insistence that “replicator food isn’t as good as ‘real’ food”, as it defies all known forms of logic.
Hmm. This is a fair point. It occurs to me that I once met a Texan who commented that the chili in a restaurant I worked at was not as good as what they made in Texas, and when I pointed out that the cook was a Texan and the chili was his personal recipe, for which he had won awards in Texas, just said “Doesn’t matter. Wasn’t made in Texas.”
I gotta be honest, Replicator technology is one of the things I am SUPREMELY jealous of, and I’m… okay, I’m not a great cook, but I can cook and there are several dishes I do very well. I think if I had access to the technology I would cook a lot less, though, and I would for sure use replicated ingredients.
Okay so, we’ve missed a few things that I think are relevant here:
The replicator or replicator + holodeck combo can’t recreate the experience of cooking, nor can it recreate the experience of being cooked for. And that experience makes food taste better.
Cooking is what makes us human. No other species on this wet rock cooks its food–only us.
First: if you’re making lamb stew, or phở, or mole, or curry goat, you spend hours puttering around the house doing chores in a cozy sweater, periodically petting the cats and playing with the kids, waiting an anticipating the hour in which you get to eat the soup. All the while: your house smells like lamb stew, or phở, or mole, or curry goat.
You get a tamale from the replicator: it’s pretty good. You wish it came with a green olive with the pit still in like the kind your abuela puts in her tamales.
You get a tamale from the tamale lady on the way to work on a clear, crisp fall morning. It’s so hot from her steamer that it nearly burns your fingerprints off and it smells divine; you use all of your Spanish to tell her how good it is and how grateful you are that you pass her every day. On a whim, you buy 30 more tamales to share with the office; they’re still warm at lunch and they taste like friendship.
You get a tamale from your abuela. It’s Christmas Eve, your entire family has spent the last seven hours making them, your tio Juan just busted out his tuba and it is definitely too hot outside for the fake snow your baby cousins have started throwing at each other in between begging to open just one present and if you don’t hurry up you’re all going to be late for mass.
The tamale tastes like home.
You get a tamale from the replicator. Its neural network reviewed your order against every known tamale recipe and variety and decided that your addition of “green olive, pickled, pit in” was a mistake, and omitted it.
Your tamale tastes like homesickness. You ball-up the corn husk and
Second: The replicator is probably not accounting for regional variations in ingredients for its base foods.
The ingredient library may have jalapeno, red; jalapeno, green, jalapeno, (color slider), (heat slider). It probably does not have: jalapeno, Hatch new mexico, USA, earth, sol system; or jalapeno north face Olympus Mons Mars, sol system. Replicator Parmesan is very likely a scan of a Parmesan and doesn’t duplicate regional variations between, say, a Parmesan from Mantua vs a Parmesan from Parma.
Did your grandmother use san marzano tomatoes that were actually grown in san marzano in her red sauce (, canned, peeled, whole in juice)? Sucks to be you, the replicator scanned a hydroponically grown plum-type tomato which environment was carefully controlled for optimal nutritional value and “pretty good” taste.
Is the replicator cilantro a kind bred or genetically engineered for maximum palatability across the broadest spectrum of individuals? Is it missing the gene that makes some people taste soap when they eat it? Is that gene the one that makes it taste good to you, so that the replicator chimichurri is always missing something, some particular specific type of freshness, a unique vegetal taste that you can’t put your finger on, and it’s not important enough to track down when you just like the chimichurri you make at home, from cilantro your grew yourself, much better?
Third: The recipe database is probably sourced from hundreds of thousands of recipes written over centuries’ time – and then averaged using a combination of median and modal averaging to come up with something that’s Pretty OK to most people, but which is going to leave others wanting–no matter how much they tweak it.
And then you have many, many people in a state of, “yes but I like my/mom’s/spouse’s/grandparent’s/aunt’s/uncle’s/best friends better”. And that’s OK.
I mean, really. Think about this for a minute.
Fourth:
You go to get a cup of tea from the replicator, because everything is terrible. You know in the darkest depths of your soul that everything will still be terrible with a good cuppa in your hands, but it will be terrible and you’ll have tea, which is a marked improvement.
The replicator gives you a glass of brewed, iced sweet tea.
It takes you three more tries to get a cup of hot earl grey. You decide you’ve finished pressing your luck with this positively infernal machine today and don’t even bother asking for a lemon wedge.
If that doesn’t indicate that the replicators were programmed by an American, I don’t know what does.
holy shit boo this is fucking AMAZEBALLS and I miss the tamale ladies at Stone on the way to the Target so much right now but also you *hugs you tight*
Also, regional recipes are calibrated to work with the local tap water. That’s why pizza from New York and sourdough from San Francisco taste better–the micro-organisms in the water enhance the flavor. The chili that wasn’t made in Texas probably did taste subtly different than it would’ve back home.
There are lots of things that would change with replicators because they take out the human factor.
Maybe you really wanted that one meal from that one restaurant except the restaurant doesn’t release their recipe so it’s slightly off and always will be.
You programmed the replicator with your mum’s favourite mac and cheese recipe, but you didn’t know that your mum always added a little more salt and a little less mustard than the recipe called for, so it’s just not the same and it’s not as good.
Pretty much this. Also I think we cannot overstate the degree to which “the food always comes out exactly the same” would end up bothering people over time.
Important point is that these are “military grade” food replicators and military food is never really great. Hence the difficulty with the tea. Food replicators in private homes and restaurants are more controllable and may have programming for varieties of chilies or tomatoes or even carrots. There are 4 basic kinds of carrots but only one is available commercially, the others need to be grown at home. With a programmable home replicator one can have chantenay carrots… all the infinite varieties of foodstuff ingredients will be available with the right programming and therefore civilians in the 24th century in star trek will have perfectly customisable food. My mind is boggled now…
For a real-world example, but in the other direction:
When I was a child, my mother used to make chili using “Carroll Shelby’s Texas Chili Mix.” It made… okay chili.
When I was in college I found a book called “Chili Madness” at a local used bookstore, that had the winning recipes from the National Chili Cookoff for the last 30 years. It included Carroll Shelby’s actual recipe. So I made it. (Had to get one of my apartment mates to source beer for me, as I was not of age to purchase it yet.)
Wow. What a difference. Adding the spices at different times rather than as a blob of “spice mix”. Beer instead of water. No masa. So good!
So the bagged mix would be the replicator mix in this scenario.
The process of creating it is removed, along with all that entails: this spice left to simmer for the entire cooking time, that fresh leafy thing added in just at the end, a tiny bit heat-wilted.
The quality, not in terms of “is it good” but “what characteristics does it have,” the difference between grass-fed beef and corn-fed, mast-raised pork and commercial feed, how much sunshine did the animal get, what breed is it, how much exercise did it get.
What soil microbes mingled with the roots of that plant and what was planted next to it and how many rainy days did it get and how much sun? You have wine connoisseurs talking about how this or that year was “a good year” because of how the patterns of temperature and sun and rain hit the vines, and everybody has a memory of getting a really good batch of blueberries from the store ONCE and wishing they could all be like that.
When I was a kid we picked strawberries at you-pick fields that don’t seem to be around anymore, and they tasted so much better than anything I’ve ever gotten from a store.
One of the things that screws up my suspension of disbelief in Star Trek is how weirdly specific and intuitive the computers both are and aren’t, at the same time. Picard always has to say “Tea, Earl Grey, hot!” at the replicator so there’s obviously no means of personalization where the replicator knows if it’s Picard asking for tea, he wants it Earl Grey and you can just jump to that unless he specifies otherwise, but also that one time he was able to pull up the musical recording of HMS Pinafore on the working screen of a shuttle by pressing just two buttons, and there weren’t a whole lot of buttons on either screens, so what the fuck?
Anyway there’s probably a shitload of data storage in a Federation starship, but are they really going to fill it up with enough molecular data to store
every extant cultivar
of every food plant
at every stage of edible ripeness
prepared every way it’s commonly prepared
in combination with every other ingredient whose presence or absence affects its taste?
Plus every cut of every food animal
with all the variables of how it might have been raised, and then
with every variable of preparation?
If you bake bread it will taste differently based on how you let it rise, at what temperature, if you put it in the fridge overnight and then let it rise, if you use a starter or a pre-ferment, as well as what yeast you use and how you knead it and what flour and what water and the temperature and shape of the oven and the atmospheric pressure and humidity of the day and the altitude you’re doing your baking at and
that’s
ONE
type
of
food
and you can’t just reduce all that into “bread, artisan, sliced” or whatever
don’t get me started on the butter
or the absolute multitude of things that you could mean when you say you want “chili”
and even if you go into the Settings menu the first time you take a Starfleet posting and spend hours on end going into detail about what varieties of peppers should go into each of your favorite Mexican dishes and how much crispiness is The Correct Amount Of Crispiness in your bacon (and how thick it should be and how it should be smoked and seasoned) and how big and numerous you want the holes in your sandwich bread to be
you’re still gonna find yourself missing the taco truck and the tamale lady and that one bakery and the sort of fried rice you get when you throw six days’ worth of leftovers in plus whatever spices feel right at the time.
i always figured they’d have a gourmet chef produce a dish, scan the pattern, store the pattern in a database, and there you go. same dish every time, until the end of time. just have a masterclass chef who had this one dish they’re passionate about and have them make it.
but then you’ll run into the problem of ‘it’s a great dish but it ain’t what pappy used to make’. and that’s that.
look, you can get a gourmet chef to make you some artisanal mac n’ cheese, and it’d be great mac n’ cheese, stellar even. and the computer will even reproduce it indistinguishable from the masterclass chef’s creation- but sometimes the palette of the common folk don’t want the 12 layers of flavor in a masterclass chef’s fancy mac n’ cheese, you just want mac n’ cheese.
sometimes we do be wanting that uncultured stuff.
look, with all the minecraft builders of today, i highly doubt there isn’t some dedicated ensign or other, mucking around in the ship’s library, trying to reproduce a taste of home.
and they’ll probably frankenstein a pretty good approximation that they’ll be so proud of, they’ll have it served at their funeral.
forget that one time i saved a planet’s civilization from radiation poisoning, i finally got the mac n’ cheese right. and it’s just the generic box store mac n’ cheese with butter and cheddar.
fuck the gourmet chef’s 12 layers of flavor, some butter and cheddar? that’s where it’s at.
I don’t know shit about Star Trek but I can tell you:
As a child I loved the hard, crumbly, springy, salty feta cheese that was sold at the deli in Market Basket. (Tell me you’re from NE without telling me-) The deli clerk would pick up these great blocks of feta and put them in a plastic container full of brine. In the UK i was startled to learn that this is not Greek feta cheese, and that feta cheese is actually soft and sweet and sour and smeary, and I don’t like it at all. The closest thing to the experience, “my” “feta” cheese, is Apetina (sold as salad cheese - it isn’t legally feta) when cubed and sold in brine. And it isn’t it. I read pages trying to understand what Apetina is, and it isn’t Feta because it comes from Denmark, not a specific area of Greece, but that doesn’t explain why Market Basket feta and Apetina are both tasty and brittle and dry and briny, and Actual Real Feta is like failed chèvre. “The terrain on which the animals graze (in Greece) is very different from that of Denmark,” one website offered hopelessly. I don’t think a work cafeteria is prepared to deal with this, I really don’t.
Annie’s macaroni with white cheddar, in the purple box with the bunny on it. Smartfood popcorn. Smartfood popcorn! I crossed an ocean not realising I wouldn’t eat it again. People have, with the best of intentions, have heard my grief about this tried to tell me how to make Mac and cheese from scratch as if I don’t fucking know. This is not a bechamel, sir, this is not a roux-based sauce, this is white cheddar powder and if you don’t know then you don’t know. Operating under wild cravings, I bought a packet of UK-produced cheddar powder from apparently the only company in Europe that makes it - apparently as a protein supplement - and cannot explain what is wrong with it to my own family, let alone a computer. Let alone a catering company. Let alone a work canteen run by a catering company’s computer. “White cheddar popcorn,” you say, and it gives you popcorn covered in cold grated cheese. We can’t even reconcile this between friends on a planet let alone the vastness of all spacetime.
Those Maruchan creamy chicken ramen noodle packets - did you know they stopped existing? They never will again. Do you remember them enough to teach a computer?
When my husband moved to the US he just could not get sausage. He was astonished by American sausage: sweet breakfast sausage, fennel sausage, hot sausage - but could not get back bacon (“Canadian bacon?” “No, back bacon”) or sausages for a fry up. He found an English butcher in the USA that would ship the right kind on ice, and had a fry up and was happy. Now I think suddenly of hot sausage, Market Basket again with those twelve-packs of weirdly red sausage. If we can’t argue these distinctions with people then what can we do?
Did you know that Old El Paso spice mixes, those cheap “Mexican” ones, have the same names and packaging but the ingredients vary by country? Just like Coca-Cola, thought to be the universal American import, actually being made from the cheapest sugar source in the country of manufacture.
I don’t know anything about Star Trek. I am absolutely starving.
I hate to be the one to tell you this, but converting poop to food is a thing we’ve been doing for a while now. In point of fact, it’s pretty much one of the building blocks of agriculture, along with converting corpses to food.
The simplest answer is that it’s like frozen food, it’s the blandest thing that they can make because you’ll eat unseasoned food. But a lot of people won’t eat food if it’s got salt, pepper, garlic et cetera et cetera.
So it’s deliberately the most basic form of that particular dish.
Oh, it’s just a really low power version of the transporter, so while it’s safe to eat, the texture is kind of weird. Like eating food from the Minecraft universe - digging into your chicken and it’s voxelated.
My third, comic theory is they didn’t licence the replicators with good food…
It’s always optimised for nutritional value. It is not optimised for taste. That’s canon, that’s Deanna Troi asking the replicator in canon for don’t give me the nutritionally optimised chocolate I need the junk food.
(There is a difference between Pepsi and Coke but only when they’re not both kept at fridge temperature. Coke is better off cold and Pepsi is fine with it and they taste the same; Pepsi is better off room or near temperature, which Coke doesn’t like much and they taste different).
I love all of this. But now I’m also picturing some poor newbie joining a crew. They aren’t a particularly picky eater, but the replicators on the ship have had YEARS of crewmembers demanding hyperspecific things and someone even programmed them to ASK.
The newbie asks for a slice of cheese pizza. OK! What kind of flour? From what region? What kind of oil? What species of egg? From where? Type of cheese, region, texture, age? The sauce is its own nightmare. The newbie is in tears. They just want a slice of cheese pizza. Maybe something simpler? Oatmeal! Oatmeal is simpler, right? ahahahaha….
Chrono Trigger, with the disaster being Lavos: an asteroid impact and the living being within the asteroid emerging billions of millennia later, creating a supervolcanic eruption and a verneshot (displacement of material into the upper atmosphere, for it to rain back down equivalent to an asteroid impact/meteor storm)
I'm going to be brushing up on research on this and writing it up as best as I can over this week - like some of our disasters (e.g. the close runner up of Xenogears' Disc 2 with nanomolecular gray goo/mutation zombie apocalypse) this is one that's mostly speculative/hypothetical - even the closest analog we have in real life (the Chixculub impact) is something no one living thankfully experienced, although there's smaller impacts that have been (Tunguska, Chelyabinsk) and a lot can be inferred from those and calculations from nuclear weapon yields and the like.
Similarly, no supervolcanic eruption has happened in the real world since Krakatoa, so while it's somewhat more easy to model from living memory than an extinction level asteroid (and we do know more about volcanoes and how they work than asteroids and comets) there has never been a true verneshot within human existence (which would require a lot more power than even Krakatoa provided, it would likely need at least a level of the Toba catastrophe)
Congratulations to the people who voted for Chrono Trigger, and I shall have this up sometime within the week: I'm going to do some more research, update what I know from what real events and science we do have, so while I'm obviously speculating, I'm not JUST regurgitating something like Supervolcano or History Channel Doomsday and covering the same territory they did but for the setting of Chrono Trigger. (And unlike Doomsday, I promise there will be NO CGI butt plugs presented as Balanced Rock at Arches National Park. Not even joking, I just saw that episode again...)
Also, to be truly pedantic, since Lavos is a "living being," this would also qualify as an "alien attack," but I'm going with "asteroid, supervolcano, and verneshot" since that's the apparent effects and how it did its damage - it didn't say release armies or biological substances, didn't intentionally terraform aside from the results of its arrival, didn't take over existing power structures (but did get found/used by them) and seemed to do most of its damage just from being an impacting object and then from coming out from the ground.
Although that might be an interesting point for the write-up about true accidents/purely natural disasters/competing access need events: e.g. disasters that no one could have prevented because everyone/everything involved was operating exactly as intended/just as it does, and the bad consequences could not have been reasonably foreseen/were foreseen way too late, or it wasn't really anyone's specific fault but just one of bad placement for population/competing needs - e.g. in this fictional scenario, a planet devourer that just needs a solid meal, unfortunately the place is populated.
Reminder to vote in the poll! 3 days left and we have a solid tie between
Xenogears Disc 2 (a Gray Goo nanomachine consumption/replication disaster combined with a genetic mutation/zombie apocalypse with the Wels transformations)
Chrono Trigger BC 65000 with Lavos impacting as an asteroid + 1999 AD if the future did not change with a Supervolcano/Verneshot disaster)
The runners up also at 7.1 percent each are
Star Ocean: The Second Story R's Kurik (An earthquake and generated tsunami disaster)
If the poll stays where it is (the 50/50 split of Lavos and Deus) I will flip a coin to choose which goes first, then follow up with the other, then poll again after writing the posts on both.
If one wins out, I'll go with it, then poll again including the runner up as I did before.
Reminder to vote in the poll! 3 days left and we have a solid tie between
Xenogears Disc 2 (a Gray Goo nanomachine consumption/replication disaster combined with a genetic mutation/zombie apocalypse with the Wels transformations)
Chrono Trigger BC 65000 with Lavos impacting as an asteroid + 1999 AD if the future did not change with a Supervolcano/Verneshot disaster)
The runners up also at 7.1 percent each are
Star Ocean: The Second Story R's Kurik (An earthquake and generated tsunami disaster)
If the poll stays where it is (the 50/50 split of Lavos and Deus) I will flip a coin to choose which goes first, then follow up with the other, then poll again after writing the posts on both.
If one wins out, I'll go with it, then poll again including the runner up as I did before.
Reminder to vote in the poll! 3 days left and we have a solid tie between
Xenogears Disc 2 (a Gray Goo nanomachine consumption/replication disaster combined with a genetic mutation/zombie apocalypse with the Wels transformations)
Chrono Trigger BC 65000 with Lavos impacting as an asteroid + 1999 AD if the future did not change with a Supervolcano/Verneshot disaster)
The runners up also at 7.1 percent each are
Star Ocean: The Second Story R's Kurik (An earthquake and generated tsunami disaster)
that conversation I had in notes with @mettasing actually reminded me of something you'll probably be seeing a lot here, and that I want to include as its own standalone writing tip/writing advice for writing disasters.
In real life, every disaster has central, root causes: for example, pilot error sends a plane into a mountainside or another plane. A tornado (or straightline winds, but let's be honest, non weather people probably don't know or care especially if they've just been hit, and at a certain point the difference is academic) turns a mobilehome park into shreds of what used to be people's lives and possessions. A war breaks out because, in the end, one person or group of people decided that for whatever reason, their neighboring people did not deserve to live in peace. Etcetera.
That said, there is often a lot of contributing causes: the pilot was tired or had bad information from their instruments or the airline was trying to squeeze as much profit as possible and let safety lapse for it. People are living in mobilehomes or other substandard housing in a tornado prone area because it's the only thing they can afford, or their society decided that building earthcovered domes was ugly or not workable or whatever. An extreme rightist regime has taken over the government of the aggressor, and know war is a fairly reliable way to unite their country and shut up dissidents.
Then there's mitigating factors and exaggerating factors: the plane only has a near miss rather than a crash because TCAS works and tells the pilot to pull up, or conversely turns into a flaming fireball with no survivors when it crashes because it just fueled up leaving the airport. Instead of hitting a mobilehome park, the tornado hits an empty field and only destroys already-harvested crops, or conversely the tornado hits the mobilehome park at full strength with no warning. The regime's war plans get leaked to such intense public outrage that they find themselves removed in one way or another, or conversely, they win the war with a near-instant crushing defeat and start going on an entire campaign to subjugate every single neighbor into an empire.
These are something you need to consider the most when writing a fictional disaster - very few disasters happen in a total vacuum with nothing building up, no evidence of any sort of problem, solely being due to the root cause, and/or having nothing that in any way mitigates or exaggerates their impact. (the only ones that fall under this are typically things that are so overwhelming nothing can change the outcome - e.g. a massive asteroid impact on a society with no space capabilities at all, a black hole forming in close proximity to an inhabited planet whether Earth or your fictional setting, something happening before or after the capacity to understand what causes it or to prepare or warn for it has been developed)
Writing these and showing them to some degree (or even just implying them) but just being aware of the geography of your setting, its economies and rich/poor divide, its political status, its level of scientific knowledge, all sorts of small details like that will feed into making a disaster in your story have a degree of depth and meaning to it that goes beyond "oh no, my entire village vanished off the face of the map, who knows and who cares why, on to the next quest!"
Doma Castle from FFVI: Magical, Chemical, or Both?
The event: In FFVI, when the Gestahlian Empire decides to invade Doma Castle, a castle situated on a river moat with water running under it, Kefka decides to poison the entire castle via the water supply rather than engage in combat, therefore engaging in an act of chemical warfare.
The water of the river changes color (at least as well as we can see in pixel art), and people begin to succumb to the poison, with those closest to the river - the guards and such - falling first. Those in lower levels of the castle itself proceed to die, with effects ascending quickly but also dissipating quickly outdoors, while collecting indoors: the king is fatally poisoned, but a guard walking down through it survives long enough to die and, when the character Cyan runs downstairs, he seems relatively unaffected in that he doesn't show effects.
The analysis: First, let's just get the simplest Occam's razor out of the way, because that's not the point of this kind of analysis, but I'll acknowledge it once again for the sake of those who somehow missed the pinned post, the description, and everything else, to save you the effort of leaving such a low-effort comment and looking like a troll
Simplest Occam's razor: "It's only a game, a Wizard Did It , it was just magic, and Cyan had plot armor because him dying would have meant the end of the game."
Bad-faith Occam's razor: The above, but add "and it says SOMETHING about you that you'd put this much thought into it"
I am fully aware of both arguments, and I recognize the validity of the first as a possible and indeed probably the most likely interpretation. (it is, indeed, a game and a piece of fiction, the writers probably didn't care or if they did didn't expect anyone else to, it was just magic to advance the plot).
That said: if you're still here reading this, I assume you came for the deeper analysis. Then join me below the cut, to take apart the events of Doma Castle, as described above.
The geography alone is the first clue we would be looking at here: a moat of water likely connected to a water system of some sort, and the water color was changed. This would point to whatever substance/action was involved being capable of reacting with water. While the pixel depiction is purple, we'll just assume the color change could have been to any color because depicting simple muddiness or cloudiness would not have been able to depict well.
That contact with the poisoned water or consumption of it was not necessary to kill points to the next point: whatever went into the water had to be a substance that converted to a toxic vapor when combined with the water, or that displaced breathable air and created dead air.
Also, the deaths progressed inward and upward, yet dispersed quickly. The only character that died from exposure at the highest point indoors was the king, who was already older and weaker, and Cyan was either unaffected or less affected. This shows that whatever was involved was something that collected at ground level, blew through the castle, and dispersed with ventilation as it did, only strongly affecting weaker persons indoors once it reached height.
Generally, this would mean the substance either created dead air at low heights but didn't wholly displace oxygen the higher up and more indoors the characters were - similar to carbon dioxide in the real life disaster of [TW: graphic descriptions of real human death due to asphyxiant gas exposure] Lake Nyos's limnic eruption
OR
was a chemical substance that reacts with water, similar to the chemical "accident" due to utter negligence at [TW: graphic and very traumatizing depictions of real human death due to toxic chemical exposure, racism, corporate greed so bad it is indistinguishable from malice, enraging content] Bhopal, India involving the reactive chemical methyl isocyanate. [Interestingly enough, I wonder if, seeing with the name of the character involved, Cyan, this was actually partial inspiration if any of the canon writers knew of it? Although that is super speculative, and I do not have any proof of it!]
And this brings me to something to a theoretical way the characters could have survived the disaster -aside from having gas masks or other proper PPE - if you want to do an alternate take - those at the top of the castle should have moved indoors and sealed off the outside as much as they could immediately, and those already indoors should have moved upward and inward to the last of the safely breathable air for the time being, waiting for the concentration to disperse enough that moving down and out away from the water would be safer.
The geography was also probably what helped contribute to the survival of anyone who made it out and downward after such as Cyan - the flowing water and wind would have both contributed to dispersing either carbon dioxide and restoring survivable oxygen levels and/or dispersing MIC to a survivable level of immediate exposure, which, as time passed, would have made the source area that he ran past safer than the inside of the castle for a long period of time, where confined spaces would have remained "dead space" or toxic levels of MIC would have collected in less ventilated areas. By choosing evacuation rather than continuing to hole up in the castle once the outdoor amount had dispersed to a less-fatal level, even if inadvertently to go join the fight against the troops following up after the poisoning, he likely saved his own life.
So one takeaway I want to offer here is that even sometimes just the few smallest clues in your writing of a disaster can indicate what it is, what caused it, and what it does. You don't need to do an entire infodump like this analysis - just pick a few consistent things, a few consistent threads that can be picked out under examination. For example, the detail that the water changed color pointed out water reactivity as a component and that the guard near it died first followed how exposure generally works - e.g. had the king died first, or characters at distance died first like some random on the other side of the planet, that would have made this just "who cares, a wizard did it" rather than something that, the more you look at it, becomes an even deeper and more horrifying thing just because even a few, possibly research-informed, details were included, just enough to make it make a degree of sense.]
And because I want to offer some advice that might help you if you ever are unlucky enough to suffer a Bhopal or an East Palestine or [TW for lots of descriptions of human suffering and death] any of the other innumerable chemical accidents that have happened in the real world (since in the real world, you are FAR more likely to be the victim of corporate greed and unsafe practices than a psychopathic clown supervillain who won't stop at anything) OR if you're writing the survival or aftermath of a chemical-related disaster in a story of your own:
If you see/smell something unusual or see a mist or fog or smoke - especially after a nearby explosion or fire or in a closed, confined space - and/or if you feel suddenly, overwhelmingly ill, or you see other people who seem unconscious or dead especially in a closed confined space or near it - Move as far away from the dead/dying/more severely ill as possible, do not go to help them because you will likely join them rather than be of any help. ideally upwind and into the closest, tallest indoor space with clean air, turn off HVAC systems, and wait for instructions on when/if to evacuate.]
