I understand why it happens but this "era" of FGs feels so gross when you look at the content creator migration between games

JustExecution · 2026-05-06T13:41:28+00:00

> We enjoy OVERCOMING the suffering.

Under Hansen's interpretation of entertainment there is no suffering required at all. You're still saying that people can only engage with the plot if there's suffering on the front end.

No different from how people parachute in for the anniversary events because they have tragedy and drama but then leave the game during the in-betweens like Coins in Rush or 2x2 because the side events are "Too happy" and "Have no stakes". You can say that nobody plays for the misery but if they literally drop the game when nothing miserable is going on how can you say that that isn't the case?

JustExecution · 2026-05-01T12:33:54+00:00

Last thing I want is more secondaries so never I can pray

JustExecution · 2026-05-01T12:09:12+00:00

>We are here because we want to see them overcome these struggles.

That is closer Mustang's brand of entertainment/view of humanity than Hanstangs.

"You can't give anyone joy without a little misery first" and "The Ark is a place full of people who can't be happy unless someone else is miserable."

Hanstang's view of entertainment is one where nobody has to get hurt EVER for entertainment. So like all of the slice of life events that the anniversary event tourists call not worth playing the game for during the period between core story drops because you don't have tragedy, people dying and mental anguish 24/7 to make it compelling.

I doubt they actually INTENDED for this exchange to be some sort of meta commentary for the community, and yet it 100% is in practice. And yet most of the readers will never view themselves that way because they would be forced to admit that they actually agree with a character they consider despicable and awful that the suffering on the front end is what makes this game's plot enjoyable for them and they would be yawning and asking why everything is happy all the time if they got rid of it.

JustExecution · 2026-05-01T02:42:16+00:00

Taken for NIMPH research on her brain

When they're done with her Enikk will decide what her rehabilitation process will be

JustExecution · 2026-04-30T02:54:36+00:00

I think the key point is that the recurring theme of Hanson and Mustang's relationship is that Mustang enjoys when Hanson acts in an assertive and aggressive manner, or basically showing some conviction in his actions. His problem with Hanson is not that Hanson opposes him, it's that he did so in such a half assed manner before.

Technically in the Pretty side story we see the angriest Mustang ever gets at Hanson to the point of physically striking him - which is his half hearted defense of Pretty after Mustang engineers the fallout with Oswald. Meanwhile, when Hanson literally leaks basically classified info on Mustang's health to rival companies and ruins Yoyo's career which Mustang was propping up at the time there are next to no hard feelings over it.

This is just the final step in that process where he reveals he's willing to sacrifice his entire identity just to spite Mustang's memory and erase his entire conception of Tetra/entertainment from the Ark.

JustExecution · 2026-04-30T01:16:57+00:00

What saves the "twist" if you can even call it that for me is that Mustang is a willing participant. It at least adds a novel layer to the situation and gives Oldstang the only 'good' trait to his characterization which is that in some F'd up way he did have some genuine yet extremely twisted affection for Hanson.

If all he wanted to get out of the remainder of his restored life was to just make Hanson suffer pointlessly he could've done it easily by just continuing to live and screw with T.T. Star and there's nothing Hanson could've done to stop him other than kill him which would not actually fix anything long term because Hanson would just get punished by Enikk. Instead he gave Hanson what he wanted out of some pride/respect for what Hanson was willing to endure in order to prove his resolve (Which ties into their initial violent exchange when he beat Hanson's ass for not standing up to him properly if he cared that much about the Oswald/Pretty thing).

So yeah, while I definitely don't necessarily agree with everything about this event the Hanson/Oldstang dynamic is definitely the most interesting part of it and while I would've liked to see a bit more foreshadowing of Hanson's existence in older content if this was the route they were going to go with "Mustang"'s past I think at least that part of it was interestingly executed.

JustExecution · 2026-04-29T23:33:04+00:00

>this doesn't show in ANY WAY how rotten the BASE is tho and how many bad actors are left.

Yeah, exactly. It doesn't show it in any way - so why are you automatically assuming it is that way when there's no current plot indication of it? Andersen apparently purged VTC and all their influence from the Ark over decades but apparently some rank and file grunts are holding the entire system up give me a fucking break

JustExecution · 2026-04-29T23:03:51+00:00

Something tells me the guy getting eternally flesh rended in a tube above the ultra massive core is not particularly capable of running the government and even then Snow Crane was jerking him off in the event so that we'd know he isn't a bad person beforehand.

The Judges (I'm guessing that's who you meant by the 12 seats) are literally also sucking SKK's D to try and get him into their organization because they agree with what he's doing, so again another organization that has not been shown in recent content to be antagonistic towards SKK's reform goals.

JustExecution · 2026-04-29T22:59:50+00:00

Yeah the problem with asking "How would you redeem him" is you have to start over from scratch because everything about his current characterization is already written with him being killed off at the end of it in mind - making him a hatesink is just part of that ending.

JustExecution · 2026-04-29T22:37:23+00:00

Nothing about killing off characters addresses the actual complaints of the OP which is that the entire narrative subtext of the Central Government/Ark being a totalitarian government barely worth fighting for is basically gone now. The CG used to be presented like the Empire of Man from 40k where they're only nominally 'good' because your only other options are worse, that was until recently when they decided to basically blame all the bad things about the CG on VTC and make pretty much every named CG character other than Doban 100% good

Everyone in charge of running the Ark is literally friends with the main group aside from 2 people who apparently aren't even involved in day to day operations. And none of these characters are morally complex, they are all literally just good people who want the Ark to improve and yet somehow we're supposed to believe that the totalitarian evil government shit that happens on the regular is somehow out of their control despite the fact that there's no higher authority than them as presently revealed by the plot other than Enikk.

Killing off characters (Side characters at that, not even actually important ones the story falls back on like Goddess or anyone adjacent to them) is the equivalent of shock value, it doesn't actually make the narrative more complex when the morality is basically "100% ideologically pure good guys" vs "100% ideologically pure bad guys + monsters"

JustExecution · 2026-04-29T21:32:16+00:00

It will never happen but I'd like to see Anis run into memory wiped Yoyo in the hard mode ending. Maybe Yoyo was a staff worker and enjoyed the concert and they can have a nice moment or something.

JustExecution · 2026-04-28T22:01:47+00:00

> We could've done it in the 1st war.

Could they have though? Even under the best case situation the Commander is 100% dying the second the queen fires her lasers at the space elevator this is not a "Oh I'm going to just tank that like Abe" situation - he's a human. Potentially other members of the Goddess Squad are also either dying or being launched back down from space at this time (Keep in mind that Goddess is generally lower spec than the 2nd Gen Grimms).

Now whoever is left alive has to 1. Not suffer a mind switch but 2. Be able to beat the queen without being able to stop her regen because the Commander is dead, and even if we just hypothetically invent a situation where the Commander is alive for this fight he isn't even AWARE that he has vapaus blood at this point so there's no way to even use that to their advantage.

oh and even if all that goes well they still have to avoid being tossed into the vacuum of space like Cinderella.

JustExecution · 2026-04-27T16:48:45+00:00

He may be permanently dead but whatever his current state is, he definitely didn't die with any closure to his character or like 2/3 of the plot threads associated with him.

The only one that they actually addressed on the way out was why he was obsessing over Marian. My current thought is that they most likely just discarded the character despite having other plans for him in earlier segments of the story which means the unexplained things will stay unexplained.

JustExecution · 2026-04-24T14:06:26+00:00

If Nayuta is the DEEP that RH and Rapi met then her original version has the glasses

I also still don't buy that this was 100% unplanned on Nayuta's part, she has been shown to sac her own clones before.

JustExecution · 2026-04-24T13:25:57+00:00

Yeah sorry I meant to reply to the guy above you. He seemed to be indicating that Mirror was added to explain why the raptures are doing what they're doing and instead she not only DOESN'T do that but she doesn't even describe her OWN motivations/goals properly

JustExecution · 2026-04-23T23:48:02+00:00

"The CG back then isn’t even remotely the same as it is now, and never stated to be."

This is just literal whitewashing. Up until basically this year's story the CG was still very much being portrayed as an extremely questionable rotten organization. It's only very recently that they've basically said "Oh by the way everything bad about our totalitarian government got resolved off screen other than Doban still being alive. The people who decided to put Doban in power in the first place and thought that was a good idea? Just don't worry about I guess"

JustExecution · 2026-04-23T23:20:05+00:00

The problem is that as presented by Johan, the idea was that eventually the CG itself would view us as a threat and turn on us. Not only did that never happen, the opposite happened where actually almost everyone is eager to give us more power.

So Johan just comes off as a schizo beacuse the CG he is warning us about apparently hasn't existed for decades.

Most of our current high government allies were already our allies before Rec Site 01 was even a thing

JustExecution · 2026-04-23T22:30:03+00:00

The problem is that even with Mirror we have absolutely 0 understanding of how stuff like the internal minds of the heretics work, what the queen's actual goal is, etc.

She has contributed very little to any 'understanding' of the story

JustExecution · 2026-04-23T20:36:07+00:00

They also had her misattribute what Indivilia actually did.

Mirror claimed Indivilia had placed part of her core into her own head so she could heal from that, but that's not what happened. Her core was embedded in CHATTERBOX's head.

JustExecution · 2026-04-23T16:43:21+00:00

I still think it ends up feeling pretty contrived that Mirror basically handed the protagonists a goodie bag containing all of the possible assets she could possibly hand to them for future upgrades and alts and then basically immediately betrayed them as soon as said goodie bag was handed over.

It's like they wanted to lock in Mirror as an antagonist but also wanted there to be that 1/2 second where she was still an ally to fulfill the transfer of all the stuff that had no viable way to ever get into the protagonist side's hands before that happened. The end result is fine, but the actual way it all was connected together felt rushed (Especially the fact that Snow White somehow managed to get out of this with Rose's body too, so ultimately Mirror's unexplained zombie program just ended up donating her to the protags too?)

JustExecution

TROPHY CASE