And yet many people do. Many people actually see his "kill em all, let *insert being of your choice* sort it out" justice as the right thing, and consider him a good protagonist. And I would disagree that they didn't want you to root for him in Daredevil, given the way Karen Page went to bat for him, to try and show that he wasn't a monster, that he wasn't insane, that he was out there "doing good".Agent_Z said:
Identifying with Authority
- Thread starter Paragon Fury
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While I do agree with the idea that most writers of videogames could do better than the whole entire government is composed with evil people trope I will have to disagree with you about your last statement. Our own recent world history is filled with generals and solders who were perfectly willing to use unrelenting force against their own people. Look at leaders like Idi Amin, Francisco Franco and Augusto Pinochet among others. They had no problems with gunning down mother and son. They probably did feel like they were helping and protecting their country. It's just that they were thinking about a particular subset of people that made up their country.Silentpony said:
The COG's attempt to boost its popularity is utterly futile, and in the long run it might have actually hurt their society in the long run. I'm not talking about Gears 4 so much here, as I am everything before it.
Let's wind the clock back. Emergence Day. Humanity comes out of a century long war, only for shit to hit the fan six weeks later. Locust invade and the COG need to retreat to Jacinto and torch everything else. Life sucks. For the next fifteen years they hold out against the Locust, and the whole time they reduce women to being baby farms. This is an utterly stupid idea. Think about it. Really think about it. You've been reduced to a single plateau and a handful of cities. The majority of your territory is gone, and that means you have a limited supply of food. You are being lay under siege by a species that wants to murder every last one of you. And your plan to deal with that is to tie down half of the population to have babies, which will bloat the population with useless mouths!?
It should be pretty obvious with the way the war is going that, one way or another, it's going to be over before these kids become adults that are old enough to fight and make a difference. If you push it, the kids born within the first year or two of the war would be able to contribute in meaningful ways. If you rush them. And even then they would only be ready to fight during the events of Gears 3, at which point the COG has more or less fallen apart.
So here's what the COG managed to win for itself. It took all of the women that could've been contributing to the war effort, whether via direct combat or support roles, and tied them up doing nothing, produced a ton of children that will suck down the little food the COG has left and will, at best, make the Locust waste a few bullets on them (Assuming the kids don't get fed alive to a Corpser), and stretched their existing army thin as now they have to defend all these little brats.
If we're identifying with authority, can we get an authority that isn't stupid? I mean it's LESS stupid in 4 considering that they now have robots defending them, but at this point there's no need to rush repopulation. The director of the COG in that game takes a long freaking time to buy that there's a threat that isn't just the Outsiders, so why bother? And even IF there was a bigger threat that they believed in, the majority of the military seems to be robots now, so why bother rushing? It's not like you need more soldiers and you need them now. It's be smarter to have less settlements over more. Build tall, not wide. This isn't freaking Civilization where you want to have as many people as possible because because.
Let's wind the clock back. Emergence Day. Humanity comes out of a century long war, only for shit to hit the fan six weeks later. Locust invade and the COG need to retreat to Jacinto and torch everything else. Life sucks. For the next fifteen years they hold out against the Locust, and the whole time they reduce women to being baby farms. This is an utterly stupid idea. Think about it. Really think about it. You've been reduced to a single plateau and a handful of cities. The majority of your territory is gone, and that means you have a limited supply of food. You are being lay under siege by a species that wants to murder every last one of you. And your plan to deal with that is to tie down half of the population to have babies, which will bloat the population with useless mouths!?
It should be pretty obvious with the way the war is going that, one way or another, it's going to be over before these kids become adults that are old enough to fight and make a difference. If you push it, the kids born within the first year or two of the war would be able to contribute in meaningful ways. If you rush them. And even then they would only be ready to fight during the events of Gears 3, at which point the COG has more or less fallen apart.
So here's what the COG managed to win for itself. It took all of the women that could've been contributing to the war effort, whether via direct combat or support roles, and tied them up doing nothing, produced a ton of children that will suck down the little food the COG has left and will, at best, make the Locust waste a few bullets on them (Assuming the kids don't get fed alive to a Corpser), and stretched their existing army thin as now they have to defend all these little brats.
If we're identifying with authority, can we get an authority that isn't stupid? I mean it's LESS stupid in 4 considering that they now have robots defending them, but at this point there's no need to rush repopulation. The director of the COG in that game takes a long freaking time to buy that there's a threat that isn't just the Outsiders, so why bother? And even IF there was a bigger threat that they believed in, the majority of the military seems to be robots now, so why bother rushing? It's not like you need more soldiers and you need them now. It's be smarter to have less settlements over more. Build tall, not wide. This isn't freaking Civilization where you want to have as many people as possible because because.
The is a reason most successful societies didn't allow their women to engage in dangerous or hard work en masse - its' a terrible survival strategy. Every woman that dies is several times more devastating to your society's survival than any man (unless that man has a very important skill or skillset).erttheking said:
That in the case of the COG pregnant women can still perform functions like nursing, teaching, tending the protein vats and comms/support for the military. But letting them slack off on the very important function of having children means that even if you win, you lose, whereas having them keep focusing on it means you have some small chance to keep going afterwards.
It basically prevents you from bottlenecking/human resource starving your society.
I just went into detail on why their current model is already terrible survival strategy. This isn't Metro 2033 where humanity is trying to weather out bad environments. There is a massive army trying to systematically kill all humans, and they're doing a damn good job of it. What's the point of keeping women off the front lines if the front lines come to them? What's the point of having them pump out babies if the city that they live in gets overwhelmed before they hit puberty? It was obvious from the word go that the Locust War heavily favored the Locust and that the entirety of the human race was forced into the combat zone. When you get down to it, the COG's main strategy by Gears 2 was a desperate all-out assault with Operation Hollow Storm, and when you're so desperate that you're lunching a direct assault on a numerically superior foe, you CANNOT be holding back.Paragon Fury said:
Sure enough, come Gears 3 and COG society has essentially collapsed. I never saw any kids outside of Stranded, so I think it's safe to say that they're all dead, that was a waste of time. And women in all the cities that the Locust destroyed were slaughtered and the women had to start fighting. A realization they should've come to fifteen years ago. All in all, the pregnancy farming ended up accomplishing nothing. And they can teach? I don't think kids knowing basic math is going to help much when a Brumak smashes the roof to the school in. As for women on COM support, we only ever saw Anya doing that, and that was because she lied and said she was barren. She had to lie about being able to have kids so that she could actually do something productive with her life. That is not the move of a tough society. That is the move of a stupid society.
Prevents them from starving their society? How does pumping out kids that they most likely can't afford to feed keep them from starving their society?
You're knowledge of the lore is patchwork, as you're making the same mistake that a lot of people are - or do not remember how long the Locust War and how hard the Locust had to struggle to even get to the point of Gears 2?erttheking said:
Also, they didn't show any kids in the games because the games didn't focus anything on there where they would've been appropriate (and killing ends en masse in games is still a no-no). If you remember Jacinto's Remnant and Coalition's End it talks a bit about the kids in the setting and how there were a lot of them and Ana even remarks at least once about how many of her fellow support operators and old friends are onto their multiple pregnancies - whom are still doing jobs in the COG as well. And there definitely WERE children around; as First Minister Jinn notes in the opening cutscene - she was one of them.
And its' starving yourself of human resources - if childbirth gets to too low a point, your society won't be able to recover even if it survives the event that caused the drop-off.
Do I know how long it took? Well I flat out said fifteen years, so yeah. I kinda know. And it was made blatantly clear that the COG was losing the war every step of the way. Or did they let Marcus out of prison for shits and giggles? Spending time worrying about repopulating with the Locust are knocking on your front door and slowly and surely kicking your ass is a case of messed up priorities.Paragon Fury said:
Yeah, that ship and Anvil Gate in Gears 3 that were supposed to act as some of the last bastions of humanity, those totally weren't appropriate for kids to show up. Kids didn't show up because no one bothered to program them. Oh wow, expanded universe. That totally excuses the lack of women doing anything in 1 and 2 if they weren't named Anya. Were these the same expanded universe materials written by Karen Travis that talked about how smart the Locust were, when they focused more on killing Gears than the vital farming equipment they were shipping. I have a very plain opinion on the EU of just about everything. Doesn't. Fucking. Count. If you can't establish something in the main entries of your franchise, if you need to have make things make sense when your main entries couldn't do it, you fucking suck as a storyteller. Show. Don't. Tell. And even if the kids were there, I have gone into great lengths about how them being there is a stupid idea, something you've not really done anything to dismiss.
Worrying about being able to recover after the war is a luxury that the COG do not fucking have. And the COG doesn't have any right to be worrying about not being able to recover, because they're never recovering from the damage that they did to themselves. You still haven't pointed out how the COG plan on feeding a massive influx of children when they're barely holding on.
But whatever. Women need to shut up and let the men rape them because authority knows best, even when it's fuck headed.
This is pretty much what occurred to me. Was there any point in establishing creches to boost reproduction? Especially considering that, by the end of the second game, the COG has been reduced to nomadic warbands with little stationary infrastructure. All of those creches were overrun, and the children inside most likely slaughtered. There was no point to any of it. It was just needless cruelty inflicted on a large segment of the population.erttheking said:
The best possible interpretation is that the COG government dramatically underestimated their own capacity to end the war within a single generation - which is funny considering that they're simultaneously building a Lightmass bomb intended to do exactly that - while also overestimating their ability to hold Jacinto in the long term.
I'm more inclined to chalk it up to bad writing, considering that this is the same background material that insisted Gears consume a KFC variety bucket's worth of calories on a daily basis.
Most people in most successful societies didn't engage in genuinely dangerous work, and the gathering aspect of hunter gathering isn't exactly easy. Farms and trades were usually participated in by the whole family, only the super elite could afford to have women sit around as baby factories.Paragon Fury said:
I mean, why do they need to have a big population boom to survive? It's probably more sustainable to have a typical moderately positive reproduction rate so you don't have a massive population boom without the resources or structure to sustain it. The only really logical reason to force a population boom would be to raise another, larger generation of soldiers or to give yourself some long term competitive edge, which isn't a realistic outlook in a war of extinction that you are imminently losing. Instead you're forcing a scenario where a significant portion of your population cannot participate in the activities necessary to win that war (children and pregnant women), and cripple yourself once you win the war by causing an unsustainable population boom. The time scale on the war isn't generations, it's not even one full generation, and there was no realistic reason to think they would have generations to make this plan effective. It generally just sucks.
Also its horrifically immoral and is an affront to any concept of human autonomy, but hey, that's just a personal issue apparently.
Well, it is very natural. Revolutionaries are always young people.
When you are young you learn that the world is unfair in a lot of ways, and you have the exuberant youth to try to fight the system without the perspective to understand why it is like that. Not that I don't respect younger people (and there I spoiled my age) for trying to change the world (it is their role), it is just that most people grow more apathetic with time.
When you are young you learn that the world is unfair in a lot of ways, and you have the exuberant youth to try to fight the system without the perspective to understand why it is like that. Not that I don't respect younger people (and there I spoiled my age) for trying to change the world (it is their role), it is just that most people grow more apathetic with time.
I'm the same with the fiction thing but not in real like....which is probably the reason I don't agree with it in fictionParagon Fury said:
what I mean is in fiction "rebels" are often a very shallow attempt to sympathieze with the audience...hell look at anything (assasins creed or XCOM 2for example) you'll see the same archetypes over and over often the geeky tech girl, the crazy person. the stuck up smart person, they never wear uniforms or look professionaly organized ether...
these portrays don't really have a grasp on real oppression and the reasons for it aside from vague ideas of "freedom" that can appeal to anyone (mainly white, 1st world people) its essentially playing pretend with the idea of fighting against the powers that be you know "Don't tell me what to do mom"...when in reality people face that kind of shit day in day out from "both sides" of the equation
real life is a different story though....
I think part of this is a personality thing...I've always naturally been a "defer to authority" type of person, and was utter perplexed and frustrated by people who didn't, to me they were assholes who just wanted to ruin everything
when I was younger I actually had trouble viewing things in grey, I could only think in terms of right and wrong and seeing my peers for example aspire to or talk about "wrong things" (drinking, sex) was very distressful and confusing
Except that's not the reason. This is, literally, a bullshit appeal to nature. Very few human societies in recorded history have been in imminent danger of vanishing from acute under population and in the cases they have (mostly from war or disease) the problem is that large numbers of your population have died in a very short time. You can't prevent depopulation in the next 5 years by "breeding" people that will be able to take care of themselves in 15.Paragon Fury said:
And let's not even get into the fact that in any population above a few thousand the individual gender of any one person that is not "breeding" is irrelevant, since the population is large enough to sustain itself on the people that follow their natural urge to get it on.
Finally, women have always been engaged in dangerous and hard work. For most of human history there has been very little work that's of any other description and being a woman was not reason enough to slack around. It is only in the past hundred years or so that the number of jobs that are not dangerous or physically strenuous have risen dramatically and we've gotten the idea in the Western World that women should have these jobs. If you look at the poorer parts of the Earth, women are still engaged in incredibly heavy and dangerous work every day, whether it is agricultural jobs, sweat shops, prostitution (the most dangerous job on Earth) or just the menial day to day domestic labor of a poor person in a rural area in an underdeveloped part of the Earth.
You don't have much experience with nursing do you? There's a reason why Sweden allows nursing staff to go on maternity leave when they are 6 months pregnant. That's because it is a physically demanding, high stress job that drastically increases the risk of miscarriage and permanent physical injury for the mother. Ironically, nursing assistants are also the profession most likely to be subjected to violence in the workplace in the Western world, so it isn't exactly a safe job either.Paragon Fury said:
And, as I mentioned before, unless your surviving society is down to a few thousand individuals (at which point, you already lost) there's literally no reason to be force-breeding people. The whole rape farm thing is meant to show how fucking, god awful the COG are. That you are excusing the repressive, authoritarian regime in a crapsack world video game is honestly astounding to me.
I'd also note that that idea was challenged during both World Wars, when societies had to let women work in male dominated jobs, at least for the duration.Gethsemani said: