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Mar. 3rd, 2019 01:24 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
girlofpreyHello. I'm playing a lot of The Sims 4 at the moment, in an attempt to get a satisfying ending for my Deputy and Joseph Seed/the Seeds, since it's becoming clear to me I'm probably not going to get it from canon or from fic. I enjoy the Sims 4, but literally directing your OTP to kiss when they have no other desire to do so isn't always that appealing. But still I'm enjoying it.
I know that a lot of the disappointment I have is my own fault for projecting so hard onto a blank slate character, and going along with Ubisoft's "your character can be anyone!" spiel, which ultimately means your character is no-one, for better projection. But I also blame Ubisoft for doing that thing in the first place, and for doing a sequel to a story like that where they wanted your blank slate character to be a side character in the game, because ?????? And a lot of the upset and disappointment I have with what they did with the Deputy in New Dawn comes from the fact that I know they had to do it to keep their blank slate character, and not because of anything to do with what little canonical character the Deputy had.
But also New Dawn was just fucking weird, like fun and nice in some ways, but also very much like fanfiction for the first game which is more or less how I'm viewing it now. So basically the story of the first game is that you're a rookie Sheriff's Deputy in an American county you've never been to before, and on your first day on the job they take you and like two other people along to arrest a local cult leader (???) whose whole deal is that he believes God told him the end of the world is coming, and he personally has to save as many people as he can. If you arrest him (you don't have to, but it's a short game if you don't, also he's literally killing people), the cult leader manages to get away, and declares this is a sign that the end of the world is practically here and tells his people they need to really go to town with getting as many resources and 'saving' as many people as they can before that happens. You have to get away from him then, and when you do you find out the Cult's taken over the county, and you have to fight them, because religious lunatics can't just kidnap and murder people, and no outside help is coming even though you can fly a plane whenever you want.
So far so good. Plenty of opportunity for you to be a murderous saviour and whatever. But throughout the game, you have to deal with the cult leader (who is Joseph Seed) and all his family who have their own sad backstories, all trying to tell you that the end of the world is definitely coming. Except they never really make it clear exactly what they think that means. Joseph says it's going to be global nuclear war, but he definitely really talks like literally only the people he saves/who join him will survive and everyone else will die. Which makes sense, because then all the killing the cult does makes a bit more sense, because if they think anyone fighting them is going to die anyway, then it really doesn't matter if they kill them. But his brother Jacob, who used to be a soldier, says that "when the rest of the world falls into chaos, we'll be ready" - implying that he really does think other people in the world will survive, just won't do so well. Meanwhile their brother John, who was adopted by a super rich couple, appears to be getting his people to pack up gold from a local gold mine, because "this is the only currency that's going to mean anything after the Collapse" - suggesting there'll be a need for currency? And other people will survive to trade with? I don't know. But then there's the possibility that even within the Cult there's differences of opinion, and it's all very meaningful and your enemy is deeper than you realise, and Joseph does tend to let his sad family do whatever they want in a nepotistic way. But Joseph himself, the man who had the visions, clearly seems to believe that after the 'Collapse', only the people he's saved will survive, and that everyone he saves will end up going back to how things 'were', in the Garden of Eden, "safe and protected in our garden".
So anyway, I've already been over the ending of the game - you kill Joseph's brothers and 'sister', and end up in a final confrontation with him, and if you choose to fight him (you don't have to), you end up arresting him and as you do the first nuclear bomb falls. Because he was right. Maybe. About some things. You race to a bunker, there's a car crash, your fellow law enforcement officers die, but Joseph saves you and takes you to the bunker you were heading to, and you wake up to find he's killed the person who owned the bunker, and it's just you and him for seven years (maybe?) until you get to come out into the new world, and he's very convinced he was completely right now, and cult stuff.
So you get to New Dawn. Everyone survived. Pretty much everyone you met in the original game and who were your friends survived the nuclear fallout, except for the ones who died of old age. Everyone who made fun of Joseph Seed for thinking the end of the world was coming survived in bunkers. Everyone who made fun of the 'preppers' in the area (people who also thought the end of the world was coming but weren't religious about it), turned out to actually be preppers themselves and managed to get to their bunker and survive. Everyone. It's all just actually fine. Things were hard for a few years while they tried to survive on their own in a world destroyed by radiation, but then just out of nowhere they got a superbloom effect and everything started growing great again, and all the animals are mutated but their meat doesn't hurt you, and everything's fine. Someone mentions that one person from the first game died, but later on you find a note explaining that, as the owner of the local bar in pretty much the only town in the county, that person didn't even go underground during the disaster, and just tried to keep the bar running, and when it didn't work, she probably had too much radiation in her, but mostly people think she 'died of a broken heart'. Okay then. Maybe she deserved that broken heart/radiation. Otherwise everyone's okay! Literally everyone! Joseph has come out of his bunker and knows about this and it hasn't dissuaded him in any way! In fact, it seems like he knew about it beforehand (???), because the notes you find about him traumatising the Deputy (I covered that already) involve him wanting them to be his 'Judge'. In the first game, the 'judges' were wolves the Cult had mutated and drugged into hunting for them, so he literally puts the Deputy into the role of an animal which, as much as I love wolves and like the legal parallel of a Deputy and a Judge, isn't great anyway. But also, it implies Joseph thinks there are people around who will need to be hunted or judged. Which doesn't super go along with the "we're the only ones who survived"/"you're my only family now"/"safe and protected in our garden" thing he was saying before.
And this is before they come out of the bunker and see the state the world's actually been left in - but also he has a separate vision in the bunker of someone who's going to lead his New Eden after he dies, and it's no-one he knows, so he must also think other people survived so someone he doesn't know could come along, and also that some of his own people must have survived so he can have a New Eden in the first place. And again, they had to do it, because they had to have the Deputy from the first game be someone who now constantly wears a mask, and was affected in some way by their seven years alone with the Cult leader, and says nothing - and also so they can have a reason for the main character of the new game to have some kind of interaction with New Eden (guess what, they are the prophecied new leader of New Eden!). But it's just weird for a follow-up/sequel to an amibiguous story make the story make even less sense than before. But here we are!
So the Deputy is the Judge. They're the - something. Main badass? Of New Eden. They never speak, of course. When you get to New Eden, Joseph has gone somewhere, and you have to go get him. When he comes back, he says you are defo the new leader of New Eden, and gives 'leave' for the Judge to come with you and fight for you. And then - the Judge is just your sidekick. They come with you when you want them to. They never speak. They come with you to the town your old friends from the first game have built, and they never speak to them, which is sad and everything, but also does it mean anything because what could the writers do? When you don't want the Judge accompanying you, they go off to a clubhouse for all your sidekicks that someone else built, never speak to them. They never go back to New Eden. Meanwhile, the story of New Dawn is that you are a person who helps build up new settlements in the post-disaster world, you came to this county because they were having trouble with the current enemy faction of the game, a set of roving crazy bandits called Highwaymen, the Highwaymen blew up all your people at the start of the game so only you and your boss survived, and now you're sort of stuck with the county survivors because all your people blew up so you don't really have anyone else. You go to the Cult because they seem to have magic. There you meet Joseph Seed's son, which they gave him because Joseph Seed literally doesn't make sense without a blood relative, but whom they never mentioned in the first game. Turns out his mother was a follower of the Cult, had Joseph's son, then got upset because she realised Joseph was pretty murderous and the baby might be in danger, so she ran off somewhere else even though she definitely believed Joseph was right and the Collapse was coming. Then, after the Collapse happened, she came back with the baby to see if the Project at Eden's Gate survived, and the radiation of the trip killed her but not him, and she'd raised the boy (Ethan) to not be a believer even though she was a believer. Ethan looks about 34 but is apparently supposed to be about 20. He seems to be the only person in the Cult/New Eden to think maybe Joseph isn't a messenger of God, but you shouldn't believe that that will bring some balance or nuance to the story, Ethan is kind of evil and a right prick. He clearly doesn't believe his dad is a prophet, but eventually tries to convince the people of New Eden that he is their prophet and to follow him instead of Joseph. I don't know. Joseph just looks at him.
But the ending of the game is that Ethan gets mad that the current Blank Slate Character is going to be the leader of New Eden instead of him, goes to the leaders of the Highwayman offering him their magic (the fruit of a special tree Joseph found that gives you fighting powers) in exchange for them BURNING NEW EDEN TO THE GROUND. You get to New Eden to find that they've BURNED NEW EDEN TO THE GROUND. There were kids in New Eden. They and everyone else are dead. Ethan's already gone to the MAGIC TREE up North, and Joseph followed him, because Ethan isn't allowed to have the magic fruit because he's a prick, but the leaders of the Highwaymen are still in New Eden and you have to kill them. You do. Then you run up North, to the magic tree, and Joseph and Ethan are there, and Joseph's pretty upset about New Eden, but Ethan just claims he's 'freed' everyone - and himself - from Joseph's rules. Then Ethan takes an apple from the magic tree (it's all very symbolic) and eats it even though Joseph says not to. But you only get fighting powers from the fruit if you have a weird vision and fight a bear (successfully) to 'overcome the sin inside you'. Ethan pretty clearly wasn't going to do that, so instead of getting fighting powers, he becomes an abomination. Joseph asks you to 'stop' him. You do. By killing him. And then Joseph has a deathbed conversation with his son, another member of his family that's about to die, and then when Ethan dies he claims "his only crime is that he was mine", which I don't think is true, and then he picks up Ethan's body and runs off with it. It was a lot about Ethan when Ethan wasn't even in the first game.
So then you get back out, straight away, to the magic tree. Joseph is there. Ethan's body is nowhere to be seen. Did he throw it off the cliff? Who knows. Then he says that clearly he wasn't supposed to bring about a New Eden, or go to the Garden of Eden, or live in the Garden of Eden, after the global nuclear war, because y'know, New Eden was his best attempt and now it's burned down and everyone's dead. He burns the magic tree. And then he says that he's not the Lord's Shepherd - "you are". To the main character who's basically been killing their way across the world and doing whatever anyone told them to do. Except maybe he's saying that to the player, but that's a power fantasy I don't want to believe anyone would literally invoke in a game. Then Joseph says that all he's done is spread misery and death in the name of the Lord, and he's a monster, and all he deserves is the Lord's justice, and he presses your hand which naturally has a gun in it into his chest, and asks you to kill him. You can, but I didn't. Because I love Joseph Seed, and he did think he was doing the right thing, and also, what the fuck. The Judge/Deputy is nowhere to be seen. The Judge/Deputy wasn't there when they burned New Eden to the ground. The Judge/Deputy didn't turn up after New Eden was burned to the ground. The Judge/Deputy didn't show up at the end. Joseph never suggested that maybe he owed an apology to the Judge/Deputy, and also to everyone, before he died. If you don't kill him, he falls to the ground screaming to the sky/God to 'release him', and he does that over and over again until you leave. If you go back, he's not there anymore. If you go back to New Eden, it's still on fire, no matter how long it's been. The Judge is still at your clubhouse as a sidekick. They still say nothing. They'll still come with you on your jaunts around the county if you ask them too. If you go to burning New Eden they say nothing and do nothing. If you go to the burnt magic tree and the last place you saw Joseph, they say and do nothing. The baddies of the game, the Highwaymen, are still wandering around even though you killed literally all of their leaders. But at the end of the story, you get a little cutscene and some words on the screen declaring "The world is yours". Which I guess made the global nuclear disaster worth it. Or something. And again, another power fantasy that I think it's just weird. Far Cry was always all about the violent power fantasy, from what I've played, but they were also always pretty good at saying "it's fucked up, though" too. None of that here.
So I don't know. I don't know. Endings are hard I guess. Endings are hard for lots of games. It makes me feel slightly better that I could never really manage them in my own stories. Because I guess endings are hard. But I'm worried now that that's all the fic writers are going to write about because it's canon, even though it's shit canon. Someone wrote a Deputy/Joseph fic and tagged it as a "The Judge isn't totally traumatised AU". What a lovely AU to write. Maybe it's my fault for liking such fucked up things. Still. It had some satisfying things in New Dawn that were nice, but also - so many things that took what was interesting in Far Cry 5 and threw it out the window, in my opinion. It was a fun game though, for what it was. But also - maybe don't try to have that kind of story if you're not going to actually take it seriously, or don't know what to do with it.
So I'm playing the Sims 4. It has some nice things about it. And also, while I was getting a little depressed over the stuff in Far Cry: New Dawn, I got to thinking about how the next game I was looking forward to was The Division 2, a post-apocalypse story. And then after that it was Days Gone...a post-apocalypse story. But then The Sims 4 came out announcing Strangerville! Which just looks like a bit of fun. So that was real nice.
I know that a lot of the disappointment I have is my own fault for projecting so hard onto a blank slate character, and going along with Ubisoft's "your character can be anyone!" spiel, which ultimately means your character is no-one, for better projection. But I also blame Ubisoft for doing that thing in the first place, and for doing a sequel to a story like that where they wanted your blank slate character to be a side character in the game, because ?????? And a lot of the upset and disappointment I have with what they did with the Deputy in New Dawn comes from the fact that I know they had to do it to keep their blank slate character, and not because of anything to do with what little canonical character the Deputy had.
But also New Dawn was just fucking weird, like fun and nice in some ways, but also very much like fanfiction for the first game which is more or less how I'm viewing it now. So basically the story of the first game is that you're a rookie Sheriff's Deputy in an American county you've never been to before, and on your first day on the job they take you and like two other people along to arrest a local cult leader (???) whose whole deal is that he believes God told him the end of the world is coming, and he personally has to save as many people as he can. If you arrest him (you don't have to, but it's a short game if you don't, also he's literally killing people), the cult leader manages to get away, and declares this is a sign that the end of the world is practically here and tells his people they need to really go to town with getting as many resources and 'saving' as many people as they can before that happens. You have to get away from him then, and when you do you find out the Cult's taken over the county, and you have to fight them, because religious lunatics can't just kidnap and murder people, and no outside help is coming even though you can fly a plane whenever you want.
So far so good. Plenty of opportunity for you to be a murderous saviour and whatever. But throughout the game, you have to deal with the cult leader (who is Joseph Seed) and all his family who have their own sad backstories, all trying to tell you that the end of the world is definitely coming. Except they never really make it clear exactly what they think that means. Joseph says it's going to be global nuclear war, but he definitely really talks like literally only the people he saves/who join him will survive and everyone else will die. Which makes sense, because then all the killing the cult does makes a bit more sense, because if they think anyone fighting them is going to die anyway, then it really doesn't matter if they kill them. But his brother Jacob, who used to be a soldier, says that "when the rest of the world falls into chaos, we'll be ready" - implying that he really does think other people in the world will survive, just won't do so well. Meanwhile their brother John, who was adopted by a super rich couple, appears to be getting his people to pack up gold from a local gold mine, because "this is the only currency that's going to mean anything after the Collapse" - suggesting there'll be a need for currency? And other people will survive to trade with? I don't know. But then there's the possibility that even within the Cult there's differences of opinion, and it's all very meaningful and your enemy is deeper than you realise, and Joseph does tend to let his sad family do whatever they want in a nepotistic way. But Joseph himself, the man who had the visions, clearly seems to believe that after the 'Collapse', only the people he's saved will survive, and that everyone he saves will end up going back to how things 'were', in the Garden of Eden, "safe and protected in our garden".
So anyway, I've already been over the ending of the game - you kill Joseph's brothers and 'sister', and end up in a final confrontation with him, and if you choose to fight him (you don't have to), you end up arresting him and as you do the first nuclear bomb falls. Because he was right. Maybe. About some things. You race to a bunker, there's a car crash, your fellow law enforcement officers die, but Joseph saves you and takes you to the bunker you were heading to, and you wake up to find he's killed the person who owned the bunker, and it's just you and him for seven years (maybe?) until you get to come out into the new world, and he's very convinced he was completely right now, and cult stuff.
So you get to New Dawn. Everyone survived. Pretty much everyone you met in the original game and who were your friends survived the nuclear fallout, except for the ones who died of old age. Everyone who made fun of Joseph Seed for thinking the end of the world was coming survived in bunkers. Everyone who made fun of the 'preppers' in the area (people who also thought the end of the world was coming but weren't religious about it), turned out to actually be preppers themselves and managed to get to their bunker and survive. Everyone. It's all just actually fine. Things were hard for a few years while they tried to survive on their own in a world destroyed by radiation, but then just out of nowhere they got a superbloom effect and everything started growing great again, and all the animals are mutated but their meat doesn't hurt you, and everything's fine. Someone mentions that one person from the first game died, but later on you find a note explaining that, as the owner of the local bar in pretty much the only town in the county, that person didn't even go underground during the disaster, and just tried to keep the bar running, and when it didn't work, she probably had too much radiation in her, but mostly people think she 'died of a broken heart'. Okay then. Maybe she deserved that broken heart/radiation. Otherwise everyone's okay! Literally everyone! Joseph has come out of his bunker and knows about this and it hasn't dissuaded him in any way! In fact, it seems like he knew about it beforehand (???), because the notes you find about him traumatising the Deputy (I covered that already) involve him wanting them to be his 'Judge'. In the first game, the 'judges' were wolves the Cult had mutated and drugged into hunting for them, so he literally puts the Deputy into the role of an animal which, as much as I love wolves and like the legal parallel of a Deputy and a Judge, isn't great anyway. But also, it implies Joseph thinks there are people around who will need to be hunted or judged. Which doesn't super go along with the "we're the only ones who survived"/"you're my only family now"/"safe and protected in our garden" thing he was saying before.
And this is before they come out of the bunker and see the state the world's actually been left in - but also he has a separate vision in the bunker of someone who's going to lead his New Eden after he dies, and it's no-one he knows, so he must also think other people survived so someone he doesn't know could come along, and also that some of his own people must have survived so he can have a New Eden in the first place. And again, they had to do it, because they had to have the Deputy from the first game be someone who now constantly wears a mask, and was affected in some way by their seven years alone with the Cult leader, and says nothing - and also so they can have a reason for the main character of the new game to have some kind of interaction with New Eden (guess what, they are the prophecied new leader of New Eden!). But it's just weird for a follow-up/sequel to an amibiguous story make the story make even less sense than before. But here we are!
So the Deputy is the Judge. They're the - something. Main badass? Of New Eden. They never speak, of course. When you get to New Eden, Joseph has gone somewhere, and you have to go get him. When he comes back, he says you are defo the new leader of New Eden, and gives 'leave' for the Judge to come with you and fight for you. And then - the Judge is just your sidekick. They come with you when you want them to. They never speak. They come with you to the town your old friends from the first game have built, and they never speak to them, which is sad and everything, but also does it mean anything because what could the writers do? When you don't want the Judge accompanying you, they go off to a clubhouse for all your sidekicks that someone else built, never speak to them. They never go back to New Eden. Meanwhile, the story of New Dawn is that you are a person who helps build up new settlements in the post-disaster world, you came to this county because they were having trouble with the current enemy faction of the game, a set of roving crazy bandits called Highwaymen, the Highwaymen blew up all your people at the start of the game so only you and your boss survived, and now you're sort of stuck with the county survivors because all your people blew up so you don't really have anyone else. You go to the Cult because they seem to have magic. There you meet Joseph Seed's son, which they gave him because Joseph Seed literally doesn't make sense without a blood relative, but whom they never mentioned in the first game. Turns out his mother was a follower of the Cult, had Joseph's son, then got upset because she realised Joseph was pretty murderous and the baby might be in danger, so she ran off somewhere else even though she definitely believed Joseph was right and the Collapse was coming. Then, after the Collapse happened, she came back with the baby to see if the Project at Eden's Gate survived, and the radiation of the trip killed her but not him, and she'd raised the boy (Ethan) to not be a believer even though she was a believer. Ethan looks about 34 but is apparently supposed to be about 20. He seems to be the only person in the Cult/New Eden to think maybe Joseph isn't a messenger of God, but you shouldn't believe that that will bring some balance or nuance to the story, Ethan is kind of evil and a right prick. He clearly doesn't believe his dad is a prophet, but eventually tries to convince the people of New Eden that he is their prophet and to follow him instead of Joseph. I don't know. Joseph just looks at him.
But the ending of the game is that Ethan gets mad that the current Blank Slate Character is going to be the leader of New Eden instead of him, goes to the leaders of the Highwayman offering him their magic (the fruit of a special tree Joseph found that gives you fighting powers) in exchange for them BURNING NEW EDEN TO THE GROUND. You get to New Eden to find that they've BURNED NEW EDEN TO THE GROUND. There were kids in New Eden. They and everyone else are dead. Ethan's already gone to the MAGIC TREE up North, and Joseph followed him, because Ethan isn't allowed to have the magic fruit because he's a prick, but the leaders of the Highwaymen are still in New Eden and you have to kill them. You do. Then you run up North, to the magic tree, and Joseph and Ethan are there, and Joseph's pretty upset about New Eden, but Ethan just claims he's 'freed' everyone - and himself - from Joseph's rules. Then Ethan takes an apple from the magic tree (it's all very symbolic) and eats it even though Joseph says not to. But you only get fighting powers from the fruit if you have a weird vision and fight a bear (successfully) to 'overcome the sin inside you'. Ethan pretty clearly wasn't going to do that, so instead of getting fighting powers, he becomes an abomination. Joseph asks you to 'stop' him. You do. By killing him. And then Joseph has a deathbed conversation with his son, another member of his family that's about to die, and then when Ethan dies he claims "his only crime is that he was mine", which I don't think is true, and then he picks up Ethan's body and runs off with it. It was a lot about Ethan when Ethan wasn't even in the first game.
So then you get back out, straight away, to the magic tree. Joseph is there. Ethan's body is nowhere to be seen. Did he throw it off the cliff? Who knows. Then he says that clearly he wasn't supposed to bring about a New Eden, or go to the Garden of Eden, or live in the Garden of Eden, after the global nuclear war, because y'know, New Eden was his best attempt and now it's burned down and everyone's dead. He burns the magic tree. And then he says that he's not the Lord's Shepherd - "you are". To the main character who's basically been killing their way across the world and doing whatever anyone told them to do. Except maybe he's saying that to the player, but that's a power fantasy I don't want to believe anyone would literally invoke in a game. Then Joseph says that all he's done is spread misery and death in the name of the Lord, and he's a monster, and all he deserves is the Lord's justice, and he presses your hand which naturally has a gun in it into his chest, and asks you to kill him. You can, but I didn't. Because I love Joseph Seed, and he did think he was doing the right thing, and also, what the fuck. The Judge/Deputy is nowhere to be seen. The Judge/Deputy wasn't there when they burned New Eden to the ground. The Judge/Deputy didn't turn up after New Eden was burned to the ground. The Judge/Deputy didn't show up at the end. Joseph never suggested that maybe he owed an apology to the Judge/Deputy, and also to everyone, before he died. If you don't kill him, he falls to the ground screaming to the sky/God to 'release him', and he does that over and over again until you leave. If you go back, he's not there anymore. If you go back to New Eden, it's still on fire, no matter how long it's been. The Judge is still at your clubhouse as a sidekick. They still say nothing. They'll still come with you on your jaunts around the county if you ask them too. If you go to burning New Eden they say nothing and do nothing. If you go to the burnt magic tree and the last place you saw Joseph, they say and do nothing. The baddies of the game, the Highwaymen, are still wandering around even though you killed literally all of their leaders. But at the end of the story, you get a little cutscene and some words on the screen declaring "The world is yours". Which I guess made the global nuclear disaster worth it. Or something. And again, another power fantasy that I think it's just weird. Far Cry was always all about the violent power fantasy, from what I've played, but they were also always pretty good at saying "it's fucked up, though" too. None of that here.
So I don't know. I don't know. Endings are hard I guess. Endings are hard for lots of games. It makes me feel slightly better that I could never really manage them in my own stories. Because I guess endings are hard. But I'm worried now that that's all the fic writers are going to write about because it's canon, even though it's shit canon. Someone wrote a Deputy/Joseph fic and tagged it as a "The Judge isn't totally traumatised AU". What a lovely AU to write. Maybe it's my fault for liking such fucked up things. Still. It had some satisfying things in New Dawn that were nice, but also - so many things that took what was interesting in Far Cry 5 and threw it out the window, in my opinion. It was a fun game though, for what it was. But also - maybe don't try to have that kind of story if you're not going to actually take it seriously, or don't know what to do with it.
So I'm playing the Sims 4. It has some nice things about it. And also, while I was getting a little depressed over the stuff in Far Cry: New Dawn, I got to thinking about how the next game I was looking forward to was The Division 2, a post-apocalypse story. And then after that it was Days Gone...a post-apocalypse story. But then The Sims 4 came out announcing Strangerville! Which just looks like a bit of fun. So that was real nice.
(no subject)
Date: 2019-03-03 05:08 pm (UTC)