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	Re: Eternal X Tour of Duty LAST EPISODE
	Posted By: Aaron Freed	Date: 12/9/20 11:48 p.m.
	In Response To: Eternal X Tour of Duty LAST EPISODE (Lion O Cyborg) : Along the way I find another of Lia’s new areas in the map. Lia didn't make any new segments for "Deep Into the Grotto", although she did add a couple of secrets to the area shown in your screenshot and also revised one of my two new secret areas slightly. The area seen in your screenshot existed in all prior revisions of the map, but part of it required a grenade jump to access, and part of it wasn't accessible at all. I have no idea why; you'll have to ask Drictelt. If you look at the map for 1.0.x or 1.1, though, you'll see that segment was there on all of them. I added one secret to the northwest quadrant of the map for 1.2 and another to the southwest. The one in the southwest is probably pretty easy to find, but the one in the northwest may be more elusive. > This map uses What About Bob and while the song isn’t shit unlike Freedom, this map used to use Rushing and it was WAY BETTER FOR IT. It gave the impression of you running full pelt for your life while still being a badass. What About Bob better fits a mid-game battle level like Third Rock from Lh’owon or Babylon X. Hard disagree. "Rushing" doesn't fit the tone of the level or its place in the story at all; it doesn't feel at all urgent or ominous. You're running for your life here before the whole galaxy literally blows up at the end of "Where Giants Have Fallen". There's no time to be a badass; you just have to get the hell out so you can get Outside and reset the whole timeline. "Rushing" would fit a level on which the player is triumphant. There's no triumph here, nothing even remotely approaching a victory. A victory isn't even possible at this point of the story. The best you can hope for is to avert defeat. There's a valid argument that some of the tracks are underused (and that by extension, some of the others are overused), but this is absolutely not an appropriate place to use "Rushing". None of the tracks in this part of the game should be at all uplifting. They should all be frantic. Spoiler warning for a future release: The Hathor battle, when it's implemented at the end of the level, will hopefully drive this point home further. There will (deliberately) be no way of triumphing over her: she has a Cybernetic Junction and the Jjaro weapons, and you can't possibly hope to damage her; you can only hope to escape her. There's no victory possible. (Though, to be fair, if you have one of the Jjaro weapons drawn, she won't be able to damage you either. The best you can hope for is to force a stalemate.) : If you excuse the final rant, another way of looking at the Jjaro : unrelated to terrorism is that their failure is the same reason that good : guys in some TV shows and movies are fucking pussies and would rather let : blatantly always chaotic evil beings live instead of killing them, or just : sitting and taking abuse from bullies or other bad people because fucking : DEFENDING themselves they see as “stooping to their level”, quoting that : in the most demeaning, whiny, mimicking voice I can. This also spreads to : deliberately missing their attacks, sticking to shitty melee weapons : (looking at you, both versions of Thundercats, Tygra's fusion pistol in : the only good one notwithstanding) and not even swearing at the bad guys : to make it clear they think they are dicks. : I never realised this before but the transsentient Jjaro are now what : happens when you take the tired old thing parents tell their kids, the : “Never fight back and protect yourself from people harming you because : you’ll be as bad as them” blatantly false BULLSHIT too far. I knew that : way of thinking would lead to the end of the world. That was my : interpretation when I first played Eternal X 1.03 back in 2013, anyway. With respect, if this is what you got out of Eternal, then you missed one of the game's central points (and I don't appreciate your use of misogynistic slurs, either). Durandal explicitly says in the final terminal of the game that the Jjaro have become indistinguishable from the W'rkncacnter in their methods and goals: : Viciously and violently fraternal in method, identical in their doctrines : of adherence; where once we sat convinced of the W'rkncacnter's madness, : we cannot now deny this trait the Jjaro thus shared with their brethren. The final chapters of the game are showing how the once-idyllic Jjaro society has turned into a totalitarian nightmare. Those who would give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety deserve neither, as Franklin put it. The game is showing how both too much order and too much chaos are undesirable: the Stage Three Jjaro are, not to put too fine a point on it, lawful evil and the W'rkncacnter are chaotic evil. You are not meant to sympathise with either; the short-sightedness of their conflict literally destroys the galaxy at the end of the "Where Giants Have Fallen" timeline. In calling for the extermination of "always chaotic evil" beings, you are also coming dangerously close to calling for outright genocide. There is no such thing as "always chaotic evil" in real life. Tolkien himself sincerely regretted popularising that trope and considered it one of the biggest flaws with his own work; he spent his whole career searching for a satisfactory justification and never found one that pleased him. Terrorism is a complex problem with a myriad of causes, and treating it as a simple black-and-white issue that can be solved by killing the right groups of people misidentifies the causes and is certain to extend the conflict. I don't have time to write go as far into depth on the topic as I'd like right now, but one of the most pertinent points is that civilian casualties create more resentment - and, in all likelihood, more terrorists. I'll simply focus on a couple of case studies, one real and one fictional. It is of course a cliché that one person's terrorist is another's freedom fighter, but I don't think most people appreciate how far this extends: the U.S. and U.K. governments under Reagan and Thatcher, amongst others, both labelled Nelson Mandela's African National Congress as a terrorist organisation. (In fact, the ANC wasn't removed from the US terrorism watchlist until 2008.) I have, to put it mildly, no great love for either Thatcher or Reagan, but they weren't completely without justification to do this; they were just massively oversimplifying the issue by focusing on only one side's violence. The ANC became far more militant after the 1960 Sharpeville massacre, in which 69 people were massacred after police opened fire on antiapartheid protestors; after that point, the ANC became more willing to commit acts of sabotage, and at least occasionally attacked both members of the military and civilians. Mandela himself explained: : At the beginning of June 1961, after a long and anxious assessment of the : South African situation, I, and some colleagues, came to the conclusion : that as violence in this country was inevitable, it would be unrealistic : and wrong for African leaders to continue preaching peace and non-violence : at a time when the government met our peaceful demands with force. : This conclusion was not easily arrived at. It was only when all else had : failed, when all channels of peaceful protest had been barred to us, that : the decision was made to embark on violent forms of political struggle, : and to form uMkhonto we Sizwe. We did so not because we desired such a : course, but solely because the government had left us with no other : choice. In the Manifesto of uMkhonto published on 16 December 1961, which : is exhibit AD, we said: "The time comes in the life of any nation when : there remain only two choices – submit or fight. That time has now come to : South Africa. We shall not submit and we have no choice but to hit back by : all means in our power in defence of our people, our future, and our : freedom." : Firstly, we believed that as a result of Government policy, violence by : the African people had become inevitable, and that unless responsible : leadership was given to canalise and control the feelings of our people, : there would be outbreaks of terrorism which would produce an intensity of : bitterness and hostility between the various races of this country which : is not produced even by war. Secondly, we felt that without violence there : would be no way open to the African people to succeed in their struggle : against the principle of white supremacy. All lawful modes of expressing : opposition to this principle had been closed by legislation, and we were : placed in a position in which we had either to accept a permanent state of : inferiority, or take over the Government. We chose to defy the law. We : first broke the law in a way which avoided any recourse to violence; when : this form was legislated against, and then the Government resorted to a : show of force to crush opposition to its policies, only then did we decide : to answer with violence. The ANC's military arm, the aforementioned uMkhonto we Sizwe (meaning Spear of the Nation), conducted several bombings in the 1980s that resulted in civilian deaths; the deadliest, the Church Street bombing, claimed 19 lives. The Truth and Reconciliation Commission formed by the ANC itself after the end of apartheid also found that uMkhonto we Sizwe routinely engaged in torture and executed prisoners "without due process". Of course, the ANC, despite those atrocities in its past, was not and is not at all comparable to either al-Qaeda or Daesh. (I refuse to dignify Daesh with the name "Islamic State", as it is neither. "Daesh" is derived from group's Arabic initialism and also sounds like the Arabic words "daes" and "dahes", both of which refer to someone who tramples on another, i.e., an oppressor.) Something somewhat more comparable would be MIDA from the backstory of this very game series. A major event that enabled MIDA's rise to power, however, was the Misriah Massacre in which UEG forces casually murdered some 500 starving Martians, which suggests that the UEG wasn't really any better. Notably, MIDA did *not* institute anything remotely resembling a Truth and Reconciliation Commission when it came to power, or even attempt to. Instead, it murdered some 10% of Mars' population on suspicions of being UEG sympathisers. Another of the central points of Eternal is that taking this sort of black-and-white thinking to extremes is morally myopic and leads to people becoming indistinguishable from those they fight. The game is explicitly endorsing a balance between order and chaos; and, ideally (and less explicitly), a balance of power, so that no one has the authority to coerce others through violence. The fact that Durandal notes (in the game's final terminal) that he and the player will have to obtain that latter balance through violence of their own is a major irony of the game - and arguably, of real life itself. Of course, this exact form of irony has been noted in writing for millennia: "Sī vīs pācem, parā bellum." The Jjaro and W'rkncacnter may share opposing goals, but they both seek to impose their will on others through violence. (And a central irony of Eternal's plot is that they both could create their own realities that conform entirely to their own desires, and spare the inhabitants of our reality their conflict entirely.) This is far from the only similarity between them; but it is a crucial one.

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Replies:

	Eternal X Tour of Duty LAST EPISODE	Lion O Cyborg	12/6/20 7:11 a.m.
	Re: Eternal X Tour of Duty LAST EPISODE	Forrest of B.org	12/6/20 11:51 a.m.
	Re: Eternal X Tour of Duty LAST EPISODE	Lion O Cyborg	12/6/20 1:53 p.m.
	Re: Eternal X Tour of Duty LAST EPISODE	VikingBoyBilly	12/6/20 2:41 p.m.
	Re: Eternal X Tour of Duty LAST EPISODE	Lion O Cyborg	12/6/20 3:21 p.m.
	Re: Eternal X Tour of Duty LAST EPISODE	VikingBoyBilly	12/6/20 4:58 p.m.
	Re: Eternal X Tour of Duty LAST EPISODE	Forrest of B.org	12/6/20 6:53 p.m.
	Re: Eternal X Tour of Duty LAST EPISODE	Aaron Freed	12/9/20 11:48 p.m.
	Re: Eternal X Tour of Duty LAST EPISODE	Lion O Cyborg	12/10/20 5:26 a.m.
	Re: Eternal X Tour of Duty LAST EPISODE	VikingBoyBilly	12/10/20 1:40 p.m.
	Re: Eternal X Tour of Duty LAST EPISODE	Forrest of B.org	12/10/20 4:36 p.m.
	Re: Eternal X Tour of Duty LAST EPISODE	VikingBoyBilly	12/10/20 1:42 p.m.
	Re: Eternal X Tour of Duty LAST EPISODE	Lion O Cyborg	12/11/20 8:32 a.m.

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