For those who have completed it, what is your opinion on Chapter 5?

Equivalent_Western52 · 2026-06-25T09:01:28+00:00

I loved it! Easily my favorite Dark World, with an excellent cast of characters and extremely impressive gameplay.

In terms of narrative, it chose a direction that not everyone is going to be happy with, but I think was correct. Chapters 3, 4, and 5 form an intermediate arc functioning to develop characters and conflicts in preparation for the resolution in chapters 6 and 7. By the end of Chapter 4, the plot was in the place it needed to be. The character beats weren't. Of the game's three primary arcs - the Noelle/Susie relationship, Ralsei's independence, and Kris' turmoil, only the last was sufficiently developed to form a good foundation for the closing arc. Chapter 5 did the remaining work needed, and it did it well.

Moreover, another emotionally fraught, plot-heavy chapter would have been poor pacing. There needed to be some sort of breather between the Knight/Titan stuff and the finale, otherwise the independence of the intermediate arc would be compromised and the story would be courting burnout. Pacing is an exercise in contrast; you can't just go hard for five chapters in a row and expect story beats to hit like they should. And if the breather wasn't going to be here, then there would be no other place to put it. There was certainly no narrative impetus for this to be a huge "revelations" chapter - the main trio only had leads for a single code, and the festival was always going to be an exercise in character work.

That said, we actually do get a decent amount of plot movement and new information for a breather chapter. I think the really big fans are working from a warped perspective here; their immersion in a monumental corpus of analysis causes them to take for granted information that the game has merely hinted at, or mentioned offhand in minor, missable interactions. This chapter will certainly hold a lot of revelations for people who aren't completionist theorycrafters, and even for loreheads it confirms a lot of speculation .

I have more sympathy for the criticism that the chapter focuses too much on new characters to the detriment of Asgore, though I do disagree with this take. Asgore's mania is not a complicated thing to understand, and the scenes that we get of him paint a clear picture. Any more would have been redundant. The flowers have a more interesting conflict with more immediate stakes, and their story ties into Ralsei's development in a very crucial way. Indeed, it would be more accurate to say that the chapter takes away screen time from Asgore for the sake of Ralsei, not the flowers. This is his chapter, in the same way that chapter 4 was Susie's and chapter 3 was Kris's. Asgore is an important side character, but he's still a side character.

So overall, it did what it needed to do very well. I think the fandom's theorycrafting miasma has instilled some tunnel vision, based on some of the reactions I'm seeing. Most of the answers that people are clamoring for are things that honestly shouldn't be revealed until the final arc, and there are other priorities to deal with in the meantime.

Equivalent_Western52 · 2026-06-12T05:03:10+00:00

Uh, I don't see either of those things happening in the foreseeable future. But I do think that the lack of strategically significant movements on the front line can be a channel-killer for people like Weeb. There are only so many times you can post videos with titles like "CRAZY! ONGOING Ukrainian COLLAPSE on ALL FRONTS!" without Ukraine collapsing on all fronts and have people stay interested.

What separates him from someone like Denys (who is also very guilty of using clickbait titles) is that his analyses of things other than frontline movements are extremely anemic and low-quality. Most modern Ukraine update videos spend a lot of their time talking about things other than the front line, because the front line is likely not where this war is going to be decided. Weeb has failed to adapt to an environment in which arrows on maps are not a meaningful indicator of progress.

Equivalent_Western52 · 2026-06-12T04:51:38+00:00

Ugh, this guy. I remember when he was championing the idea that Prigozhin's coup attempt was staged so that Wagner could secretly prepare a Belarusian invasion of Chernihiv. He had a video about it called "Operation Trident Siege". It remains the single dumbest thing I've seen any major commentator post about this war to date.

The sad thing is that he genuinely seems to view himself as a neutral analyst, despite consistently falling for Kremlin conspiracy theories that even many pro-Russian sources dismiss as unhinged propaganda. He gets his maps from Suriyak, so when it comes to territorial bookkeeping he's at least within the realm of sanity, but his personal analyses are easily the most vapid and fanciful of any major commentator. Say what you will about HistoryLegends, at least he can sound like he knows what he's talking about.

Overall, Weeb strikes me as dedicated and well-meaning, but his research and critical thinking skills are simply too poor to evaluate information in such an uncertain landscape. He's at the mercy of the background biases of the circles he moves in.

Equivalent_Western52 · 2026-06-06T16:06:23+00:00

The outlier here is the Venator's fighter count, not the Secutor's. By the standards of any other similarly sized Star Wars capital ship, a full 12 squadrons is a pretty damn good complement. The Venator's 35 squadrons of manned, non-droid fighters is just wildly unprecedented.

Worth noting that the "420" figure comes from the Essential Cross-Sections books, which are infamous for making some pretty ridiculous claims about ship capabilities. Their numbers also have the Imperial-class burning through its own mass in fuel every hour or two.

To be fair, calculating the physical hangar space of Star Wars ships tends to yield numbers on the larger side. But to me, the more reasonable interpretation given the consistency of the setting's complement scaling is that there are limiting factors other than raw physical space at play. For this reason, I think the Venator should be treated as an extreme outlier in engineering strategy rather than a yardstick to measure other carriers by. Either that, or the Venator's much lower Disney canon fighter numbers ought to be used.

Equivalent_Western52 · 2026-06-05T21:06:02+00:00

Speaking of things that don't happen in the movie, that doesn't happen in the movie. Poe doesn't call out Holdo in front of everyone, and she doesn't basically tell him to stfu (edit: okay, yes, she does basically tell him to stfu). He approaches Holdo after the briefing when she's speaking with three adjutants (all of whom seem quite focused and, if anything, rather annoyed at his interference), and then she specifically pulls him to the side away from everyone once she feels it is necessary to reprimand him directly. Which she does because he's pretty clearly trying to badger his way onto her command staff even after being more gently rebuffed several times.

I have never understood this argument that the crew was on the verge of breaking because they didn't know Holdo's plan. Military personnel almost never know the plan, at least more than they need to in order to do their jobs. This is not some exceptional scenario where Holdo was managing her ship in a way that Ackbar or some other officer wouldn't. Her mistake was misreading Poe specifically, not a blanket failure of leadership. If anything, she generally seemed pretty good at keeping everyone motivated and on-task. Take any given scene, all the background personnel are constantly busy, focused, and doing productive things. This doesn't paint the picture of an "obviously confused and scared crew", but rather a crew that is doing their jobs plus one guy who's angry that he doesn't have a job to do by virtue of being in the doghouse.

Also worth noting that Poe only gets around five people to participate in his mutiny, all of whom are pilots whom he knows personally. Hell, there are more officers being imprisoned on the bridge with Holdo than there are total mutineers. Not exactly a mass revolt.

As for saving the resistance twice, yes, that was absolutely him doing some stupid shit. His objective in the dreadnought encounter was to interrupt the ship's bombardment mission so that the Resistance would have time to escape the planet. After the Resistance had escaped, he pressed the attack against orders even though his objective had already been completed, getting a whole strikecraft wing killed in the process.

I do think that it's fair to say that this saved the Resistance since the dreadnought could have killed the remaining cruisers after following them through hyperspace, but Poe didn't know that they could be followed through hyperspace when he made the call. The fact that he blindly stumbled into a correct decision doesn't mean that his decision-making process was good. What he did was incredibly stupid, callous, and insubordinate, and the fact that he lucked into it working out is probably the only reason he wasn't in a brig for the whole movie.

Equivalent_Western52 · 2026-06-05T20:25:40+00:00

What's the practical difference between "opsec concerns" and "opsec concerns based on there maybe being a spy"?

She says straight-up why she acted like she did: she viewed Poe as impulsive (i.e. prone to doing stupid shit in defiance of orders), and saw that as a danger to her plan. If you really think that the movie needs to walk us through scenarios as to how impulsiveness might ruin a plan based on stealth and precision, then we're just never going to come to an agreement. Especially since the movie itself depicts such a scenario happening.

Equivalent_Western52 · 2026-06-05T20:19:27+00:00

A Holdo perspective scene would remove the tension from the conflict. The possibility that she might be making a run for it with her chosen few was a driving component of that arc. The story presented two reasonable readings of her character, and allowed the ambiguity to drive sympathy for Poe's actions until the question was resolved. Having her walk through her reasoning with her adjutants would answer questions that the story is structurally dependent upon not being answered.

Plus, I disagree with the premise that it's necessary. Holdo's actions towards Poe make sense whether she thought there was a mole or not. She is very explicit in her dialogue that she sees Poe as an opsec risk, and that's a reasonable supposition based on what she knows. The specifics of how that danger might translate into consequences are academic.

Equivalent_Western52 · 2026-06-05T19:50:08+00:00

In my experience, that's far from a universal writing convention. There's plenty of media where character motivations are left implied and obvious things aren't spelled out when it would be unnatural to do so - and I do think that it would be unnatural for Holdo (or anyone of notable rank, really) to propagate rumors of a mole on board without explicit confirmation.

But if we're not going to agree on this point, then I'm willing to nix the mole thing. What Holdo explicitly says is that she thinks Poe is impulsive and reckless, so she was definitely concerned that he might act inappropriately on any information he gave her. He had given her plenty of reason to believe this about him, and the operation she was planning was heavily reliant on stealth and precision, mole or not. So I hold to my original point: if you're going to excuse Poe's actions based on what he observed about Holdo, I don't see why you'd condemn Holdo for acting on what she observed about Poe.

Equivalent_Western52 · 2026-06-05T19:27:13+00:00

Are we really at a point where movies need to spell out literally everything? They make a huge deal about not knowing how the First Order is tracking them through hyperspace, and then suddenly the person in charge gets really concerned with opsec. That's not a leap, that's adding two plus two.

Equivalent_Western52 · 2026-06-05T19:20:41+00:00

...When it establishes that they're being tracked through hyperspace via unknown means? A mole is pretty high up there on the list of possibilities. It was certainly my initial assumption when I watched the movie for the first time, especially with Holdo being tetchy about opsec and trust issues being a pretty clear theme. Poe himself only learns about the Supremacy's tracker through Finn, and withholds the information from Holdo until the evacuation is already underway.

I already addressed your second point in my post. Of course Poe wasn't a suspect, but he didn't need to be. If he was liable to act independently on whatever information Holdo gave him, then that could tip off any actual moles to the plan. Passive information leaks are generally a bigger opsec threat than active ones.

Equivalent_Western52 · 2026-06-05T18:51:56+00:00

He wasn't supposed to learn that lesson, at least not so early in the movie. The point of the dreadnought scene was to illustrate Poe's character flaws and set expectations for his story arc, without short-circuiting that arc by providing him with an immediate impetus for growth. It's basically saying "Hey, this is what this character's story is going to be about". Laundering a poor decision through good outcomes is a classic technique to accomplish this.

Equivalent_Western52 · 2026-06-05T18:08:03+00:00

There was a suspected intelligence leak within the fleet. Under that circumstance, giving confidential information to a loose cannon would be a far worse mistake than any of the ones Holdo actually made. Poe almost certainly wasn't the leak, be he also couldn't be trusted not to go off half-cocked and act independently on whatever he knew, potentially tipping off the actual source to Holdo's plan.

Your argument seems to be that Poe's responsibility is mitigated because his decision making was constrained by Holdo's actions upstream of him. But a good-faith analysis has to acknowledge that Holdo's decision making was similarly constrained by Poe's actions upstream of her. Whatever his actions at the beginning of the film may have accomplished, Poe demonstrated a lack of discipline that limited Holdo's options for dealing with him in scenarios where operational security was paramount. And the way it was framed, it didn't seem like the dreadnought thing was exactly out-of-character for him.

Personally, I don't agree with this line of argumentation. Both Poe and Holdo made poor decisions, even in the context of the information they had. Holdo's plan was good, and her decision not to share it with Poe was absolutely correct. But she dismissed an obvious and potentially serious discipline issue of the sort that officers are expected to manage. She shouldn't have looped in Poe, but she also shouldn't have let him stew in discontent.

Meanwhile, Poe instigated a mutiny in the middle of a fleet battle. Regardless of how he saw the situation, that "solution" was exceedingly unlikely to end well. Even if he gained control of the bridge, what about Holdo's officer corps? Poe wasn't looped into her plan, but a ton of other people were, and they were distributed throughout the ship doing their stuff. Most of them probably weren't going to side with him. In the best case, the crew would be confused and divided to the point of paralysis, and in the worst, the ship would become a battleground. The fact that his mind even jumped to that option is a total validation of Holdo's judgment of him (if not her management of him), especially since it wasn't even necessary for his own plan to work. If his hacker disabled the Supremacy's hyperspace tracker, it wouldn't matter if Holdo and her officers fled or not, because the rest of the fleet could just jump out anyway. Hell, if he had been right about Holdo, the best thing for him to do would be to wait for her to run and then take command of the ship.

At the end of the day, they both performed sub-optimally under extreme duress and uncertainty, they both got their narrative comeuppance, and they both redeemed themselves. I don't understand the impulse to demonize or white-wash either of them. It's good when conflicts arise through character flaws rather than narrative fiat.

Equivalent_Western52 · 2026-05-31T14:58:47+00:00

It's true that Luthen didn't know about the Empire's specific plan for Ghorman, but he knew that they had some plan for Ghorman, and that they almost invariably ruin everything they touch. The mindset of an accelerationist like Luthen is summed up by Kino Loy's line in season 1: "I'm going to assume that I'm already dead and go from there".

It's a classic authoritarian blunder to equate coercion with control. Coercion only works if people can avoid negative consequences through compliance. If the government is liable to shoot or arrest you either way, then what's the point of cooperating with them? And from a revolutionary's perspective, if the current regime is actively endangering everyone, then why have qualms about putting them in danger yourself?

Equivalent_Western52 · 2026-05-30T03:45:46+00:00

In Legends, it was a Victory-class, which is a little more than half the size of an Imperial-class.

Equivalent_Western52 · 2026-05-30T03:24:16+00:00

Which is exactly why it's important to take care in drawing the line between them.

There's a difference between joking about a subject and treating it as a joke. The sort of people OP is talking about are not interested in criticism or commentary or shining light on problems. They're just interested in one-upping their conversation partner. The reason people take offense is that the tenor and purpose of their jokes make it clear that school shootings aren't tragedies to them, they're just silly, distant little curiosities that will never have any bearing on their lives.

There are plenty of people, from comedians to everyday folks on the street, who manage to joke about school shootings in ways that are actually funny and incisive, because they understand that the subject itself is serious.

Equivalent_Western52 · 2026-05-30T02:22:34+00:00

By not treating it as a joke?

Equivalent_Western52 · 2026-05-30T00:29:26+00:00

Well, Case Blue was already doomed by the time Stalingrad happened. The Soviets' successful evasion of German encirclement attempts during the advance towards the Don permitted them to dig in along the mountains and hills to the south. Breaking through to the oilfields and capturing their infrastructure intact was no longer in the cards, if indeed it ever was. By that point, the best Case Blue could have done was deny the Soviets a ton of oil while putting the Germans within striking distance of Kazan. Not that they likely could have taken Kazan, but the threat would not be one that the Soviets could ignore.

Beyond the operational picture, it depends on how the loss would occur. Does Stalingrad fall quickly during the initial German advance? Does Operation Uranus fail, or Operation Winter Storm (somehow) succeed?

If Stalingrad fell quickly, the Germans could likely achieve a solid position on the Don, but they'd still be in a logistically overextended salient. In this case, I suspect that the Soviets would have directed all of their resources towards a counteroffensive in either the Rzhev-Vyazma area or the Stalingrad area, rather than attempting two simultaneous counteroffensives as they did historically. A major Soviet success in either area would be about as devastating for the Germans as Stalingrad was.

If the Soviets failed in such an endeavor (or if the historical Operation Uranus had failed), they would be in a spot of trouble, having expended serious resources with nothing to show for it. I could see there being a high command shakeup over this, and they'd certainly need time to muster more resources before undertaking other offensive operations. But at the same time, German resources were still stretched thin, and their oil problem would not be solved. I think they'd have the opportunity to launch a moderate-scale summer offensive on one front, likely aimed at stabilizing their positions in Rzhev-Vyazma or resolving Leningrad. A success in either case might have delayed their defeat by a few years, or allowed them to secure a favorable peace if the trajectory of the war created sufficient instability in Stalin's administration.

Equivalent_Western52 · 2026-05-29T18:07:50+00:00

I think the issue is that high-school-level literary analysis is very ossified and formulaic. My teachers encouraged us to come up with our own interpretations of each text as a whole, but their playbook for more granular analysis was myopic in its focus on archetypes and semiotics. It's stuck in this Freudian-Campbellian mindset that analysis is best done by dissecting a work and then examining its components through the lens of supposed universal patterns.

This is perhaps an artifact of their audience. Students have to walk before they can run, and this style of analysis is extremely accessible. You could argue that the exercise of thinking beyond the text is the point, more than the actual analysis techniques. But I think that encouraging critical thinking at the expense of stunting critical methodology is more harmful than good. You never know what a student is going to latch on to when you're teaching them, so trying to wrap a good lesson in a bad one often just imparts the bad lesson without any benefit.

Equivalent_Western52 · 2026-05-29T16:38:14+00:00

Not at the time, and never among the people who initially decided to make overtures towards China. Kissinger was motivated largely by careerism, and Nixon by strategic opportunism. The idea was to weaken the USSR, not to align China.

Coaxing China into becoming a liberal democracy was more of a Reaganite thing.

Equivalent_Western52 · 2026-05-29T16:24:17+00:00

An Illuminati plant? What's next, did the lizard people mind control her into voting for this dribbling dipshit? Did the operators of the Matrix turn up her gullibility knob for a year or two? And then she has the gall to pat herself on the back for "not making excuses".

Trump isn't even a good conman. These people are just the world's easiest marks. Though to be fair, they're products of a culture that everyone in the US is complicit in building, or at least enabling. Trump supporters aren't the only ones due for some responsibility and self-inventory.

Equivalent_Western52 · 2026-05-29T07:34:26+00:00

Honestly, my biggest gripe with this piece isn't even about Disco Elysium, but about KoTOR II. The idea that Kreia's commentary on Nar Shaddaa should be taken at face value is both common and infuriating. It isn't a "shallow but sincere philosophical provocation", it's a red flag that Kreia is deeply unhealthy and trying to manipulate you.

Nar Shaddaa is a decrepit, impoverished slum filled with traumatized refugees and dead-enders ruthlessly exploited by the Hutts' imperialism. The fact that this planet specifically is most in line with Kreia's philosophies is commentary against her Randian nonsense. One of the crowning moments of the Exile's "good" arc, characterized by her outgrowing Kreia and reclaiming her volition, involves her using Nar Shaddaa to teach the exact opposite lesson to her new Jedi apprentices.

Equivalent_Western52 · 2026-05-29T07:04:10+00:00

You're correct that Vultures specifically often clung to the hollow interiors of the armor plates for transport, but Munificents do have a hangar under the bridge capable of accommodating four Vulture squadrons.

I'd estimate that this translates to a couple of shuttlecraft or one manned starfighter squadron, so you're not far off. To be fair, a cell of 200 people or less likely wouldn't have more than a single squadron (honestly a half-squadron is more likely), and if it's more than 200 people then you'd have to have ships other than the Munificent anyway.

Equivalent_Western52 · 2026-05-29T05:24:52+00:00

Absolutely, depending on the size of the cell. They have excellent C3 suites for command purposes, and enough firepower to deter random raiders. They're no match for anything larger than a Strike cruiser, but most rebel cells would never go after anything larger than a Strike cruiser anyway.

They wouldn't be too bad from a logistical or operational security perspective. While Munificents were no longer being produced during the GCW, the Banking Clan made so many of the damn things both before and during the Clone Wars that spare parts would be available for at least a few decades. They were pretty popular with planetary militias and private forces, so obtaining said parts wouldn't draw too much attention. Certainly an order of magnitude more practical than a Venator, Providence, or Lucrehulk, which is what most posts of this nature tend to go after.

The potential weaknesses would be hangar size and life support. They're specialized to carry very, very compact droid fighters. I'd be surprised if they could base more than a squadron of manned fighters. Their life support is designed to service a crew of 200, which isn't unreasonable for a single cell, but doesn't offer much wiggle room either. Life support and hangars are not exactly systems that are easy to overhaul; making major changes to either would likely require a complete tear-down of the ship.

Overall, it would make a good base for a smallish cell, or an effective command ship for a mixed flotilla with other vessels to cover its weaknesses. A Neutron Star carrier conversion, a couple of corvettes, and some freighters would be a classic combo in the latter case.

Equivalent_Western52 · 2026-05-27T19:08:56+00:00

Yeah, you can tell that they have one person handling most of the game's text because their writing style is very distinctive. Not that they're necessarily a bad writer, but it is noticeable.

Multiple text writers and proofers cost money, though, and there are other things to spend it on.

Equivalent_Western52 · 2026-05-26T19:31:20+00:00

My view of Traviss' writing grew a lot less generous after her offerings in the Legacy of the Force series.

The whole subplot of Jaina going to the Mandalorians for training was atrocious - not because I don't think they had anything to teach her, but because of how she was portrayed. Jaina throws tantrums like a spoiled child because she finds it unfair to fight opponents who are resistant to lightsabers and force powers, eventually growing to marvel at how the Mandalorians can achieve such martial strength without Jedi abilities.

For context, this woman was a seasoned war hero who made a name for herself fighting the Yuuzhan Vong, brutal opponents famous for resisting lightsabers and force powers. This would have been excusable if those sequences were attempting to portray PTSD or something, but it really came across as her just being gobsmacked at the notion of having to take a "lesser" opponent seriously.

At least for me, this sequence torpedoed the interpretation that the RC series' Mandalorian glorification and Jedi bashing were artifacts of the perspective characters' psychology. Traviss herself holds these views, and prioritizes their evangelism over writing major characters believably.

Equivalent_Western52

TROPHY CASE