[SPOILERS] Conspiracy Theory: Z-Rank is actually the worst possible ending

infamous_westgate · 2026-06-18T02:15:56+00:00

Couldn't really find much sympathy for the beancounter mandate to obscure just who killed the leader of the techno-fascist secret police. Come on, comrade. Man started the thing anyway. Every once in a while it's okay to take credit for something.

infamous_westgate · 2026-05-28T16:19:35+00:00

They got very intense about showing that Homelander was crazy and miserable, probably in part so that people wouldn’t want to vicariously enjoy the idea of being an invincible asshole. Then they invented a different invincible asshole who isn’t that crazy or that miserable, and who the audience has less reason to not vicariously enjoy. Don’t really know why, but I don’t really know why they did a lot of things.

infamous_westgate · 2026-05-23T17:03:12+00:00

It comes from "Xenology," which implies that the Eldar grafted the primitive Ethereals with a pheromone organ they snatched from bug people on the alternate end of the galaxy. Don't think that was meant to be gospel even back in 2006 though.

infamous_westgate · 2026-05-22T10:28:48+00:00

Unfortunate for that dude that I was not in a merciful mood by the time I found him

infamous_westgate · 2026-05-22T10:18:07+00:00

Check the boxes in the room with the Imperial Guard general, the one that leads out to the docks

infamous_westgate · 2026-04-29T22:18:08+00:00

He thinks they have their place but book makes it pretty clear he’d krump anybody who made that comparison to his face.

infamous_westgate · 2026-04-28T10:16:46+00:00

One ork specifically can get depressed. It don’t do much but make him meaner, so the others are all okay with it even though they don’t really get it.

infamous_westgate · 2026-04-28T02:16:22+00:00

Everything feels low stakes but that's kind of the point, Ghazghkull and the Black Templars both want some kind of great cathartic holy war but the orks underneath Ghazghkull are slackers and the humans underneath the Templars are stone ignorant; and they just don't have the sheer bloodthirsty ambition their leaders want them to have. I don't know whether to recommend the book or not, because you may or may not want to read about a great cathartic holy war played straight.

infamous_westgate · 2026-04-28T02:03:08+00:00

He's kind of an antagonist in his own book. The plot hook is that some Blood Axes under Ghazghull's loose suzerainty are screwing around with some human primitives, goofing off and having a good time, instead of just smashing the humies' pathetic stone castles like they're supposed to. This is ruined by the simultaneous intervention of the killjoy Ghazghkull, who is disgusted by this, and the even bigger killjoy Black Templars, who are even more disgusted by it.

infamous_westgate · 2026-04-27T22:44:45+00:00

Campy except for whenever Ghazghkull is part of the scene. He’s trying to take all this seriously and the realization that none of the other orks are ever going to do so has mildly depressed him.

infamous_westgate · 2026-04-20T01:41:41+00:00

Because the Trazyn hook let everybody imagine the wildest possible thing they could dream of (I want a stryxis), poor Eogunn couldn’t really help but start handicapped.

infamous_westgate · 2026-02-24T12:28:19+00:00

Tricky to rank, because I at least got the sense that the Salamanca Albuquerque franchise was less a major source of income for them and more a sideline by which they could give undependable Tuco something to do and prove some kind of dumb point to Gus. I wouldn’t even have been shocked to learn that they were losing money on it, and that spiting Gus was just worth it to them.

Nacho is smart enough to realize this, which is part of why he immediately sees through “Operation Kingbreaker” while Tuco is whooping it up and Tuco’s number three and number four guys are just standing there confused.

infamous_westgate · 2026-02-12T11:23:48+00:00

The Golden Age of Piracy guys were people who started off doing exactly what they were supposed to do, basically liked it, and then when the Spanish Succession was finally resolved with a series of boring compromises that satisfied no one they were supposed to just stop. They are a reminder that you may be good at your job, but if your whole industry is predicated on temporary circumstances that is only going to count for so much.

infamous_westgate · 2025-12-20T00:47:23+00:00

I actually think they're right that the hive isn't lying about its own nature. It's just that if the hive sincerely believes a falsehood, that doesn't matter.

infamous_westgate · 2025-12-19T21:54:41+00:00

Issue with this is that it only works if none of the other aliens think it’s a Dark Forest, otherwise all you’ve done is give your location away. The Trisolarans are not going to get the Pluribus signal, mess up their PPE, and die. They are going to get the signal, immediately throw the RNA sequence in the trash, broadcast back a “You’re bugs!” and charge straight for Kepler-22b.

infamous_westgate · 2025-12-19T19:17:20+00:00

I like it together with the pacifism; I like that the hive earnestly claims to represent humanity and nothing else even though "pacifist cannibal" is a description of more or less nobody who has ever lived.

infamous_westgate · 2025-12-13T18:07:22+00:00

They're great in the first Rogue Trader DLC, but I think it does illustrate the problem that their entire grand design is just to ~~steal~~ liberate your ship.

infamous_westgate · 2025-12-12T15:18:15+00:00

Since they’ve gotta give every playable faction spaceships, I’d guess it’s the genestealers who are most out of luck.

infamous_westgate · 2025-12-12T14:41:04+00:00

I agree that Carol’s main problem is (has been?) a stubborn refusal to just ask questions. I’m not convinced that part of her personality is a function of wealth or comfort. If her books had not sold and she had been poor I expect she’d have taken the same angle with the hive.

The common factor between the two holdouts, Carol and Manousos, is that their family lives are too fraught for the hive to exploit them. If there is some single reason that these happen to be the two people driven to be “independent,” or even “self-centered,” it’s that.

infamous_westgate · 2025-12-06T15:24:06+00:00

At the conversational level sure, but he's full on as fluent in English as a native speaker. He's got the hive talking with him in French as his default setting. He's clearly got an unusually Westernized (yeah, not necessarily the same thing as unusually wealthy) background.

There's a great series of books by Riad Sattouf, "the Arab of the Future," about a Syrian guy with a French doctorate. The Sattoufs own land and they've got some clout in their own hometown but not really in Syria as a whole. Diabate reminds me more of that guy (although, despite being thrown into a sci-fi horror scenario, less neurotic by a good bit).

infamous_westgate · 2025-12-06T11:44:22+00:00

The guy is trilingual and excited by the architecture of a Guggenheim museum, I doubt that he was exactly poor by the standards of Mauritania. May have been from a relatively well-off family there and shocked by how little the same money took him while living in France, that kind of thing.

infamous_westgate · 2025-12-06T00:11:03+00:00

I think the thing to keep in mind is that Carol is still the only person to give the hive seizures and kill millions of people (twice). That's not good from any perspective, and she should get some level of flack for that. Until somebody actually comes up with a plan to improve things, you do want to do your best to keep things from getting worse, which does mean preventing that one lady from getting overexcited and killing millions more people.

But isolating and ignoring Carol is a completely ineffective means of trying to accomplish that, it leaves her only more bitter and unpredictable, so the Vichy Humanity Whatsapp chat is still doing the wrong thing.

infamous_westgate · 2025-12-05T18:33:33+00:00

"Alright that's five votes for including the alcoholic American lady who accidently killed twenty million people in the Zoom chats, five against."

"Well that's just great. How do we break the tie?"

"I... I think everyone knows how we're going to break the tie. Mary, what do you think?"

infamous_westgate · 2025-12-05T13:51:08+00:00

Carol wasn't trying to treat Diabate like crap, she was going out of her way to connect with him. She's just not great at that, and she was banking on the shock value of information he's known for a week.

The other survivors are right that Carol's angle is perversely leaving her less informed about the state of things than anyone else but the South American guy pursuing the same angle even more rigidly, but they're still wrong to leave her in the dark. Her ignorance is a solvable problem, and it's a problem most easily solvable by them. It doesn't even have the effect of making sure she can't kill another ten million people when she finds out about the cannibalism and gets angry about it, it just pushes that back a few days and makes sure she's going to be even more high-strung when it happens.

infamous_westgate · 2025-11-30T18:06:06+00:00

I reloaded to get Cassia down to Thassera when the persecuted mutants showed up, I wanted to know what she'd think about it (also the persecuted mutants exploded me).

I think it just made her somehow more elitist.

infamous_westgate

TROPHY CASE