i was playing pokemon blue on stream earlier at 350% speed and i got to thinking
what if the reason nobody in the pokemon world has any good teams is because its considered a dick move to have a proper team comp
like culturally everyone is like “haha pick the pokemon you want! if you’re happy with three geodudes, thats you and your life!” and then you’re supposed to just have a friendly battle with any other pokemon trainers and whatever pokemon they just happen to have
like the average trainer is probably just walking around with a growlithe because that’s their pet, or a hiker has three geodudes because the geodudes help him with hiking. and if this pet owner and geodude hiker meet, you’re supposed to have a friendly battle but nothing too serious
now imagine the 10 year old kid that has six pokeballs on their belt comes up. you’re like “haha, we’ll have a friendly battle!” and you throw out your geodude
and they throw out a fucking gyarados, and it one-shots your geodude
and then you throw out your pidgey you have because the pidgey helps you navigate mountains because you’re a hiker
and then electricity crackles around the gyarados and a thunderbolt flies off of this giant dragon and evaporates your pidgey
so you’re down to your last pokemon. you tell them you’re gonna send out your bulbasaur. the ten year old is like “oh okay in that case i’m gonna pull out my vulpix.” like not only is this kid walking around with an amped-up super dragon, but theyve also got multiple pokemon specifically for making type advantage counter-picks?
this kid’s a fucking asshole! really, kid? what are you trying to prove here? this is a friendly match between strangers for fun! why are you composing real-ass competitive teams? what a fucker!
Maybe since Peridots aren’t made for combat they’re designed to poof faster if they’re being attacked by another gem in the hopes that their gems will be left alone. They don’t poof very easily when taking damage from non-gem sources because its assumed support will be there in a minute or two to help them out during construction projects/kindergarden related tasks.
Makes sense! They’re engineers so they’re expected to take a few hard knocks. Susceptibility to gem weaponry might be intended to prevent rebellion of the technical caste.
Actually… have we seen a gem ever be poofed by something that wasn’t by the direct action of another gem?
Oh woah
amethyst falls off a cliff and only scratches her gem, but gets poofed by jasper’s attack, i think it was a kick or a headbutt? actually, if you think about gems who have taken the most direct damage from other gems, pearl wins so far. she got kicked around like a sportsball by sugillite, one of the very strongest gem fusions, and didn’t poof.
perhaps if technician gems like peridot are meant to buckle quickly in combat situations, pearls are meant to hold up under whatever physical abuse their much, much larger superiors dish out. i don’t think a diamond or high-ranking quartz would be pleased with a toy that snaps the first time they smack it, and doesn’t regenerate for weeks.
imagine younger pearl realizing that how much abuse she was built to take could actually be a huge asset in battle, and let her face down gems ten times her size. imagine frustrated quartzes realizing this too.
The Final Pam really is an absolutely inspired creation
The implementaion of Fallout 4′s story, the setting, and the game mechanics are exactly what makes Final Pam the end conclusion of indifferent, unimpressed gameplay, deliberately avoiding immersion at all costs. The use of an engine we all already know the dev codes for, enabling them to enact mass murder RIGHT from the goddamn start in the tutorial… obviously leading to the first characterisation of Pam as all-powerful, bending the will of reality – “I do this.”
The way the game constantly tries to act dramatic in somewhat absurd ways. Watching a nuke go off, escaping seconds before the impact of the blast wave? Of course it’s okay, this is The Final Pam, pock-marked immortal. All Monster Factories are tests – the McElroys pitting their ability to distort a player character’s appearance against the game’s insistence that they conform to its rules. And Fallout 4 is the pinnacle of that idea, since the game itself relies on forcing you to conform to it incessantly. You have to care about the story they feed you. You have to comply with the regular rules of an RPG, stats and numbers, working hard for your weapons and gear, earning them.
The McElroys delight in not just distressing the hell out of a character creator, but extending that to kick the game’s formality apart. Final Pam does not need to search for her son. They spawn in a thousand ghost boys and coffee tins. The Final Pam does not salvage or explore for armour. She spawns in a test cell and takes what she wants. The Final Pam doesn’t give a shit about preserving the delicate integrity of the intro sequence, and they kill everyone just to see what would happen, discovering they can cause a Vertibird to crash. The Final Pam invalidates the entire supposedly frantic rush for the safety of the underground vault in the face of imminent nuclear explosion. Brb, Final Pam forgot keys.
Some of those moments of characterisation are accidental and some are just experience of knowing how to cheat combined with great improv instincts. Final Pam would not have emerged from a Monster Factory in an indie game or a lesser known, more modest game. It’s the legacy behind Bethesda, and the way Fallout 4 obviously expects you to behave and react that prompts Final Pam to behave so erratically, the way Fallout 4 is supposed to be a polished multimillion juggernaut that makes it so amusing to see Final Pam decimate the bounds of virtual reality, and the dogmatic insistence of Bethesda that the player watch their story unfold, engage only in the narrative they have set out for you, that makes it so enjoyable for Final Pam to completely ignore it, right from the very first notion that she is married to Trash Hulk, she rejects and takes instead a metal husband. She doesn’t look for her son, and instead finds a field of ghost boys.
Final Pam could only have been borne from Fallout 4, because in the power tug-of-war between player and developer that is the basis for Monster Factory, in this game the tools and humour and narrative irrelevance existed to make the McElroy’s creation surpass everything that existed around her.
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just moving along like everyone else 