The first few episodes of the Acolyte were pretty mid, but this episode was good. I like Jedi as martial artists if they lose their lightsaber, like in Tartakovsky Clone Wars.
spoilers
Introducing a bunch of redshirt Jedi, just to kill two named Jedi we’ve had from the start was a nice twist. The guy playing Qmir the Sith villain is great, he was Jason in the good place which is funny. Plus a cortois helmet that shorts out light sabers? Fantastic.
Who doesn’t love a drifter targeting women?
The thing I like in her book is HILFs (Humanoid intelligent life forms) are generally all referred to as men/women/humans etc (especially given everyone shares a common Hainish ancestor). Like in the Word for World is forest the people of the colonized planets are basically green furred monkey hobbits, but they're written about with the same dignity and respect as Terran humans.
I thought he was going to quietly break his hyoid bone at some point TBH.
I did always like the Second Thirty Years War for WW1, Russian Revolution,various failed revolutions, various Soviet wars and the foreign invasion of the USSR, Italian invasion of Abyssinia,the Spanish Civil War, Sino-Japanese war, WW2, post WW2 uprisings etc
My understanding is to assist Chinese citizens working abroad (and those eligible for Chinese citizenship) who couldn’t attend embassies and consulates they set up pop centres in areas with high Chinese diaspora populations, in restaurants, corner stores etc. There’s some connection between their civilian police and their immigration services that handle passports etc. Hence the conspiracy tin foil stuff.
But it’s basically just a country making things easier for its population even those overseas especially with covid19 etc.
I'm not a huge Fallout-head, so I don't know all of the lore. But I guess I figured that the reason the settlements are still so ramshackle is because resources are scarce and organizing the brainpower/manpower to really develop would be difficult in an apocalyptic wasteland where everyone and everything is trying to kill you, or take what little you have.
That’s okay. For reference in Fallout 1, it was 84 years post bombs dropping, people in Shady Sands were living in adobe houses, with farms, wells etc. In LA they were living in reclaimed ruins, but were restarting industry by reloading bullets for other communities. The hub had large scale water purification facilities and lots of trading via Brahmin caravan (trailers built out of car trays/axles). The post apocalyptic Wild West was actually finishing up, the NCR is formed as one of the endings.
In Fallout 2 it was 165 years post bomb. NCR had new red brick houses, paved roads, electricity etc. industrial mining uranium and gold had resumed in Broken Hills and Redding. The Shi in San Francisco were building new power armour suits, and had the capacity to build vertibirds once given the blueprints etc. There was lawlessness and poor communities still around the fringes and the interstitial areas but it was post-post-apocalypse in major cities albeit fragile and tenuous.
So Fallout 3 and 4 which are even later (>200 years) have been criticised for being so primitive when the solution is just a prequel (which they ultimately did with 76).
I feel the setting of Fallout 4 would have been better if it was ~25-30 years after the bombs dropped like they did in Fallout 76. Diamond City and the scattered settlments make more sense. The hastily thrown together barricades and armor made out of scavenged baseball gear. The shacks, the abundance of pre war loot and undisturbed skeletons etc.
I think how the Union of Atomic Workers was introduced in Fallout 1 as a throwaway detail, the idea that dozens of organizations and factions across the former USA were popping up and disappearing over the course of a few years. Minutemen, Institute, Railroad, Atom Cats, Children of the Atom being some of these, the idea being we don't necessarily know if they're still around by the time of latter Fallouts it being decades and even centuries, as well as geography (being on opposite coasts).
Including the villainous factions. The Triggermen being members of organized crime who got turned into Ghouls who immediately restored their old rackets in extortion/drugs/gambling, first for ghoul survivors and then humans as they emerged. The Forged could be a generation of survivors who were sheltered in the bowels of the Saugus Ironworks without adequate supplies and turned to cannibalism.
The Gunners the most unexplained faction, could have been the pre-War equivalent of Freikorps, fascist veterans cracking heads of protestors, who when the bombs were dropping seized control of a vault for themselves and kicked out the carefully handpicked experiment participants. Their younger members being the kids they brought in or had, their leaders being Great War veterans in their 50s and 60s. Armed with weapons they've seized from depots they were familiar with pre-war.
Yeah that’s probably the best fix, intelligence being more like your character’s total education/knowledge rather than mental capacity, would need to avoid problematic tribal depictions, but yeah a feral or even just terse mostly monosyllabic answers like Mad Max in Road Warrior and Fury Road.
Fallout 4 Struggle session topics:
-It's good there's no low int dialogue, that was ableist. Idiot Savant's noise is pretty offensive too though.
-Assaultrons are trans femme coded (good)
Learning from this post about the attempted coup and having a brief panic moment