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Mercutio
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Sep-25-13, 02:03 AM (EDT)
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"Future Imperfect: 20th Anniversary Celebration"
 
   So by some measures, Future Imperfect turns 20 today.

I say some because it's slightly unclear. According to the wonderful and well-researched timeline provided by the incomparable Jonathan Lennox, twenty years ago today, 25 September 1993, Rob Mandeville posted "Phoenix" to rec.arts.anime.stories. And Phoenix is definitely part of Future Imperfect; it says so right here on the website.

Except.

Phoenix doesn't categorize itself as part of FI. Its existence may predate the creation of the imprint. The earliest story that actually bills itself as part of FI is "Cybertron Dreams," which dates to December of 1993, or thereabouts.

Cybertron Dreams, of course, is deprecated content in the ongoing process of being replaced. So that muddles things further.

I decided to go with Phoenix as the marker, using the "Cybertron Reloaded" promotional posters, which bill Cybertron Dreams as "one of the first" rather than "the first", as the tiebreaker.

Phoenix is an okay little story. (Don't worry, I don't plan to go through it line by line. I mean, what would be the point by now?) In many ways it reads like a Golden Age story but with bigger guns and more awesome toys; it even has the Kilrathi as our antagonists du jour, a common thing at the time. (For context, Wing Commander III had not even been released yet. People were still editing their autoexec.bat and config.sys files to make WC II run properly.)
ReRob plays with lots of spiffy engineering tricks and there's a fair bit of technological fetishism; the extended sequence where he basically wears a Valkyrie as a suit of clothing is something you wouldn't really expect to see in modern FI stories, which spend less time concentrating on telling you how cool the hardware is and showing you people strapping into it and doing cool shit with it. The Rogue Squadron stories come to mind here; if those had been written back in the mid-nineties there probably would have been a lot more scenes of the pilots sitting around discussing technical specifications of their Vipers in loving detail.

Anyway. The purpose of this thread is to celebrate and reminisce upon twenty years of Future Imperfect lighting up the joint. I'll start!

My own first experience with the imprint, like that of many, was Cybertron Dreams. Cybertron Dreams, I'm sorry to say, is a story that's become less and less good for me as the years have gone by, but when I first read it at the age of 17 I thought it was goddamn amazing. From there, for a few years, to me Future Imperfect was more-or-less synonymous with "Twilight," which got a seal released once a year or so whenever the production team could get NXE out of their heads for a little bit.

In fact, for awhile there it really seemed like UF was winding down; the EPU team had branched out into a more traditionally structured story with a beginning, middle, and end (NXE) and other non-UF works such as In Nomine, Gods Willing, and Hopelessly Lost got a fair amount of attention in that 1999-2001 window as well. In addition, people who were once stalwarts (Chris Meadows, Marty Rose) had obviously begun drifting away.

Then 2001 arrived, and Symphony of the Sword came along.

Today, of course, the Symphony is more or less synonymous with Future Impefect; I believe that by itself it is bigger than every other FI story combined. I still nowadays think of Symphony of the Sword as representing a bold new direction and style of writing for EPU, despite the fact that it is older now than UF as a whole was when it debuted back in 2001. I was very surprised, intrigued, and excited by the presence of Shoujo Kakumei Utena becoming integrated into UF. SkU (still the greatest television show I have ever seen, period, ever) is pitch goddamn black. It is a tragedy, in fact, when it isn't a farce. It's also deeply postmodern and generally weird as fuck, traits I hadn't really associated with most of the series that eventually found their way into Undocumented Features. And then the production team combined it with Magic Knight Rayearth, a series that is ALSO a tragedy and ALSO generally weird as fuck.

Somehow it all ended up working out spectacularly well. I think of Symphony of the Sword as the beginning of a distinct "second phase" in UF, where the stories became a lot more character-based than plot-based, less emphasis on hardware, more emphasis on people, and executing some pretty angsty themes without some of the "the characters hang around and mope about how much the universe hates them and generally have their heads up their goddamn asses" stuff we encountered in... more than one Exile story.

(I don't mean to be overly harsh to the Exile. There's some very good stuff in there. But there are a LOT of howlers as well.)

It also seemed to revitalize UF in general. The Symphony was playing hot and hard there for a number of years, Warriors of the Outer Rim came out of nowhere, as did CSI: New Avalon (CSI: New Avalon is something that I, as a reader, consider to be the most solid writing ever done in this universe) Fables of the Reconstruction (sadly deprecated but very amazing) and Cybertron Reloaded. "Day of Infamy" was in there as well, perhaps the piece in the dustbin most beloved by fans; to me it was a very successful fusion pieces, combining the "lets have a huge space battle" aspects of the Core/Golden Age stories with the "no, this is more about the people" aspects of Future Imperfect.

Future Imperfect provided me a lot of entertainment and emotional value at a time when a lot of the older works in a universe I'd grown up with as a fanfiction reader was really beginning to age and age badly. As an imprint, it has grown somewhat beyond spec, I think; I recall bold promises being made in 2005 about coming to the end of the FI era. But still it perseveres, constantly adding new and thoroughly enjoyable people such as Commander Shepard and Avatar Korra. I think of the imprint as representing reinvention, rebirth, a way to move forward and continue to stay relevant and creative while also producing some damn fine art. I think of Cephiro, of Bancroft Tower, of New Avalon, and, these days, of Diqiu.

So it's kind of appropriate it kicked off with a story called "Phoenix."

It's been good times.

So that's at least some of what FI means to me, as it enters its third decade and will soon be old enough to drink. Don't be shy, peeps. Get on in here, share, be happy. The bar is open.

Tip your servers.

-Merc
Keep Rat

"The future is changing, but it’s hard to tell."


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  Subject     Author     Message Date     ID  
  RE: Future Imperfect: 20th Anniversary Celebration Gryphonadmin Sep-25-13 1
     RE: Future Imperfect: 20th Anniversary Celebration Mercutio Sep-25-13 2
         RE: Future Imperfect: 20th Anniversary Celebration Gryphonadmin Sep-25-13 3
             RE: Future Imperfect: 20th Anniversary Celebration CdrMike Sep-25-13 4
             RE: Future Imperfect: 20th Anniversary Celebration The Traitor Sep-25-13 5
                 RE: Future Imperfect: 20th Anniversary Celebration Nova Floresca Sep-25-13 6
                     RE: Future Imperfect: 20th Anniversary Celebration pjmoyermoderator Sep-25-13 8
                         RE: Future Imperfect: 20th Anniversary Celebration The Traitor Sep-25-13 9
                         RE: Future Imperfect: 20th Anniversary Celebration Blaizer Sep-26-13 10
                             RE: Future Imperfect: 20th Anniversary Celebration Gryphonadmin Sep-26-13 11
                 RE: Future Imperfect: 20th Anniversary Celebration CdrMike Sep-25-13 7
                 RE: Future Imperfect: 20th Anniversary Celebration Mercutio Sep-26-13 12
                     RE: Future Imperfect: 20th Anniversary Celebration Meridias Sep-26-13 13
                     RE: Future Imperfect: 20th Anniversary Celebration drakensis Sep-26-13 14
                     RE: Future Imperfect: 20th Anniversary Celebration CdrMike Sep-26-13 15
                     RE: Future Imperfect: 20th Anniversary Celebration Gryphonadmin Sep-26-13 16
                         RE: Future Imperfect: 20th Anniversary Celebration Mercutio Sep-26-13 19
                     RE: Future Imperfect: 20th Anniversary Celebration The Traitor Sep-26-13 17
                         RE: Future Imperfect: 20th Anniversary Celebration Gryphonadmin Sep-26-13 18
                             RE: Future Imperfect: 20th Anniversary Celebration The Traitor Sep-26-13 20
  RE: Future Imperfect: 20th Anniversary Celebration Sofaspud Oct-01-13 21

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Gryphonadmin
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Sep-25-13, 04:18 PM (EDT)
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1. "RE: Future Imperfect: 20th Anniversary Celebration"
In response to message #0
 
   >Phoenix doesn't categorize itself as part of FI. Its existence may
>predate the creation of the imprint.

Ding.

>(I don't mean to be overly harsh to the Exile. There's some very good
>stuff in there. But there are a LOT of howlers as well.)

Well, there's a reason I loosely label the years from, say, 1993 to 1997 as my Crap Period. :)

>Fables of the Reconstruction (sadly
>deprecated but very amazing) and Cybertron Reloaded. "Day of Infamy"
>was in there as well, perhaps the piece in the dustbin most beloved by
>fans

Infamy will be back, and much of it not too changed; it mainly needs readjusting to better reflect where things will stand at the end of Symphony No. 5, which doesn't directly affect, for example, the Battle of the Jormundgand Nebula or the Third Battle of Zeta Cygni.

I should probably un-dustbin it and just put a note on it that there's some stuff in it that's wrong and will be fixed someday. At the time I took it down, I foolishly did not realize that the next few years would involve Huge Medical Adventures and going back to college instead of, you know, finishing S5.

(Which worked out, ultimately - it's a much richer story for the delay - but still.)

As for Fables, I have plans to revive some of that material as well, though they are less concrete than those for the Infamy revisions.

>As an imprint, it has grown somewhat beyond spec, I think; I
>recall bold promises being made in 2005 about coming to the end of the
>FI era.

In terms of in-story chronology, no, it hasn't; FI still ends in 2412, exactly as planned before. I think I know the remarks you mean - they were about Cybertron Reloaded being "the last FI story", but I thought I had explicated at the time that the "last" there was in-universe, not out-of. I never intended "the end of FI" to mean FI stories would stop coming, only that there'd be another period after it (which CR is actually supposed to set up; if and when we regain momentum on that project, it will probably transition partway through the storyline to New Frontier labeling, reflecting its position as the "hinge" of that changeover.)

If this strikes you as a somewhat clunky exercise in branding, well, guilty. I like branding stuff as a lark, but I don't take it as seriously as people who use that word in a professional capacity. It's just part of the fun of pretending stuff is real, like writing brand names on the spaceship control panels we designed on posterboard as children.

... Oh come on, I can't be the only one who did that, drew a spaceship control panel on a sheet of posterboard with Magic Markers and made certain it had a Blaupunkt stereo.

--G.
-><-
Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/
zgryphon at that email service Google has
Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.


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Mercutio
Member since May-25-13
255 posts
Sep-25-13, 05:11 PM (EDT)
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2. "RE: Future Imperfect: 20th Anniversary Celebration"
In response to message #1
 
   >I should probably un-dustbin it and just put a note on it that there's
>some stuff in it that's wrong and will be fixed someday.

Speaking of the dustbin... I once or twice thought that I should maybe ask you to put "Secrets" in there, as a historical artifact of Plot That Was if nothing else. It wasn't that bad, right? I mean, the prison scenes were okay...

Then I read Phoenix again in preparation for this, for the first time in literally fifteen years I think, and discovered an unexpected direct quote from the Butcher in there:

"All those kids, and they thought I was Santa Claus, the
Easter Bunny, Rambo and Kerry Eurodyne rolled into one. And
then--WHACK! Oh, my God, the memories alone keep me warm at
night! Thank you, Largo, for an eidetic memory! God! It
was so glorious! All the blood! The brains! The young
lives snuffed out! I'm writing a book! I'm going to
Disneyland! I want the movie rights!!"

... yeah. You made the right call burying that one, Chief. Yeeesh.

>As for Fables, I have plans to revive some of that material as
>well, though they are less concrete than those for the Infamy
>revisions.

Someone, I think Phil but now I'm not sure, once told me that Hot Rod base jumping off of a Genom arcology directly into a high-speed chase was too awesome not to be used SOMEWHERE. :)

>In terms of in-story chronology, no, it hasn't; FI still ends in 2412,
>exactly as planned before. I think I know the remarks you mean - they
>were about Cybertron Reloaded being "the last FI story", but I
>thought I had explicated at the time that the "last" there was
>in-universe, not out-of.

Well, I mean... I know that none of the imprints ever actually END. You produced work in the Exile recently. It's not crazy that there could be another major Golden Age story at one point. But the "focus" has been on FI for a long time now, and I kind of got the impression that CR was meant to say "hey, the focus is moving to this awesome other new era" now, not "we're never gonna write in FI ever again."

Still, I stand cheerfully corrected.

>It's just part of the fun of pretending stuff is real, like writing
>brand names on the spaceship control panels we designed on posterboard
>as children.

True that.

As a Rochester native, I always found it way more fun than I oughta that, in Hopelessly Lost, you took the time to let us know that, yes, Priss' artifical eyes had "BAUSCH & LOMB" branded onto the irises.

-Merc
Keep Rat


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Gryphonadmin
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Sep-25-13, 06:20 PM (EDT)
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3. "RE: Future Imperfect: 20th Anniversary Celebration"
In response to message #2
 
   >Then I read Phoenix again in preparation for this, for the first time
>in literally fifteen years I think, and discovered an unexpected
>direct quote from the Butcher in there:
>
>... yeah. You made the right call burying that one, Chief. Yeeesh.

Haha, the best part is, that's one of the relatively few bits of Secrets that made it through to Manhunt unscathed. Because, you see, it's about the Butcher being so far out of his fucking tree that he would say that. :)

--G.
-><-
Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/
zgryphon at that email service Google has
Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.


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CdrMike
Member since Feb-19-05
305 posts
Sep-25-13, 06:55 PM (EDT)
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4. "RE: Future Imperfect: 20th Anniversary Celebration"
In response to message #3
 
   >Haha, the best part is, that's one of the relatively few bits of
>Secrets that made it through to Manhunt unscathed.
>Because, you see, it's about the Butcher being so far out of his
>fucking tree that he would say that. :)

Which is probably why GENOM decided that going with the "defective robot" story was the best idea.

--------------------------
CdrMike, Columbia pilgrim

"Why do you ask 'what'?"
"When the delicious question is 'when'?"
- Robert & Rosalind Lutece, Bioshock Infinite


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The Traitor
Member since Feb-24-09
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Sep-25-13, 08:21 PM (EDT)
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5. "RE: Future Imperfect: 20th Anniversary Celebration"
In response to message #3
 
   Everybody buys it, is the problem with the entire Exile arc. Joe Public just... buys it. Wholesale. So far as I remember, there's no real investigation beyond "Yup, school got shot up, yup, here's the tapes, y'all can go back to bein' outraged now". I mean, didn't they at least TRY to salvage something out of it? Didn't some guy try and at least cover it up, Streisand Effect be damned, until they could actually figure out what the hell went down? Surely an organization as labyrinthine as the WDF has a media specialist.

---
"She's old and lame and barren too, // "She's not worth feed or hay, // "But I'll give her this," - he blew smoke at me - // "She was something in her day." -- Garnet Rogers, Small Victory

Insert relevant Malcolm Tucker quote here.


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Nova Floresca
Member since Sep-13-13
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Sep-25-13, 08:38 PM (EDT)
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6. "RE: Future Imperfect: 20th Anniversary Celebration"
In response to message #5
 
   Without doing a full re-read, I don't believe there was time to do a cover-up, or even a press release. Also, wasn't the original WDF actually pretty compact? I would imagine whoever was the media specialist was probably busy helping fight the Bad Guys.

"This is probably a stupid question, but . . ."


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pjmoyermoderator
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Sep-25-13, 09:19 PM (EDT)
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8. "RE: Future Imperfect: 20th Anniversary Celebration"
In response to message #6
 
   LAST EDITED ON Sep-25-13 AT 09:19 PM (EDT)
 
>Without doing a full re-read, I don't believe there was time to do a
>cover-up, or even a press release. Also, wasn't the original WDF
>actually pretty compact? I would imagine whoever was the media
>specialist was probably busy helping fight the Bad Guys.

The Golden-Age WDF was pretty compact, yes. The two major nerve centers were the SDF-17 Wayward Son, and the Zeta Cygni II shipyards (with the WDF academy on the planet). That's it. The rest of the WDF proper were a handful of various exploratory ships, none of them the same (WDF Normandy, WDF Delphinus, WDF Righteous Indignation, WDF Enterprise (NX-01) and probably a few I missed) and all of them scattered across the known galaxy. In terms of fleet size alone, GENOM had the WDF "fleet" outpaced by a sizable margin.

(This doesn't count allied forces like the Royal Salusian Navy, the Zentraedi Alliance, the Autobots, etc, who were all busy doing their own thing at the time.)

Basically, the WDF had less than 12 hours to figure out what the hell was going on (re. "Gryphon"'s rampage at the school) before it all collapsed like a deck of cards from a combination of personality fracture lines (that had been carefully poked at or exploited) or overwhelmed by the sudden onslaught of GENOM's military/infiltrator might. And by the time the blitz ended, it was pretty much every Wedge Rat for himself, as the entire core organization had disintegrated and the surface of a planet had burned. After that little cock-up, not many people were in favor of speaking up on the WDF's behalf.

Keep in mind, GENOM nearly went bankrupt from Operation Gotterdamerung. The only reason they ended up back in the black was because the payoff from wiping out the WDF was so high.

--- Philip





Philip J. Moyer
Contributing Writer, Editor and Artist (and Moderator) -- Eyrie Productions, Unlimited
CEO of MTS, High Poobah Of Artwork, and High Priest Of the Church Of Aerianne -- Magnetic Terrapin Studios
"Insert Pithy Comment Here"


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The Traitor
Member since Feb-24-09
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Sep-25-13, 09:38 PM (EDT)
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9. "RE: Future Imperfect: 20th Anniversary Celebration"
In response to message #8
 
   Ah. Clearly I have misremembered; I thought it was always pretty big. Objection withdrawn.

---
"She's old and lame and barren too, // "She's not worth feed or hay, // "But I'll give her this," - he blew smoke at me - // "She was something in her day." --Garnet Rogers, Small Victory


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Blaizer
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Sep-26-13, 00:10 AM (EDT)
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10. "RE: Future Imperfect: 20th Anniversary Celebration"
In response to message #8
 
   It just struck me that there are parallels between Gotterdamerung and the plot Lucas used to explain the elimination of the Jedi. Like the WDF, the Jedi were a compact but powerful peacekeeping force in the galaxy. It could be argued that Palpatine poked at/exploited the Jedi mind set to commit them to spreading their forces thin fighting the separatists like Largo manipulated the Wedge Rat core group. Slight variation in that he actually turned Akakin to the dark side to get him to murder children while Largo used a copy of Gryphon to do so. Then once the play was in motion the clone troops, which vastly outnumbered the Jedi, wiped them out in a surprise attack the same way the Genom fleets ambushed the SDF-17 and other WDF ships.

I wonder if Lucas is a secret UF fan or if he just got his plot ideas from searching Usenet archives.


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Gryphonadmin
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Sep-26-13, 00:16 AM (EDT)
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11. "RE: Future Imperfect: 20th Anniversary Celebration"
In response to message #10
 
   >It just struck me that there are parallels between Gotterdamerung and
>the plot Lucas used to explain the elimination of the Jedi.

Take thy beak from out my heart.

--G.
-><-
Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/
zgryphon at that email service Google has
Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.


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CdrMike
Member since Feb-19-05
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Sep-25-13, 09:15 PM (EDT)
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7. "RE: Future Imperfect: 20th Anniversary Celebration"
In response to message #5
 
   >Everybody buys it, is the problem with the entire Exile arc. Joe
>Public just... buys it. Wholesale. So far as I remember, there's no
>real investigation beyond "Yup, school got shot up, yup, here's the
>tapes, y'all can go back to bein' outraged now". I mean, didn't they
>at least TRY to salvage something out of it? Didn't some guy try and
>at least cover it up, Streisand Effect be damned, until they could
>actually figure out what the hell went down? Surely an organization as
>labyrinthine as the WDF has a media specialist.

The site of the shooting is a radioactive wasteland, the members of the organization have been scattered to the wind/killed/gone missing, and the perpetrators of the whole incident are the ones launching a massive PR campaign to portray the victims of this frame job as the worst sorts of monsters imaginable and putting bounties on their heads high enough to make venturing into even uncivilized space a hazardous gamble. Joe Public would be too busy seeing red from repeated viewings of the video and news about the loss of life on Musashi in the aftermath of the Wayward Son's crash to listen to suggestions that GENOM might be pulling a fast one on everybody.

--------------------------
CdrMike, Columbia pilgrim

"Why do you ask 'what'?"
"When the delicious question is 'when'?"
- Robert & Rosalind Lutece, Bioshock Infinite


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Mercutio
Member since May-25-13
255 posts
Sep-26-13, 01:03 AM (EDT)
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12. "RE: Future Imperfect: 20th Anniversary Celebration"
In response to message #5
 
   You know, I feel kind of bad for re-igniting the old debate about the biggest bone of contention in the Core in a thread I intended to be a celebration and sharing of anecdotes of twenty years of FI kicking ass and taking names.

>Everybody buys it, is the problem with the entire Exile arc. Joe
>Public just... buys it. Wholesale.

Not bad enough to not participate myself, though!

These days, I personally operate on two seperate ideas.

1) Core 3, like all of the Core, is not a good fit to the universe it helped build anymore and isn't entirely canonical. I think of it as the "movie" version of what actually happened. The Lifetime Original TV Movie version, at that.

2) What actually happened was a much richer and more complex takedown than what we saw onscreen. It wasn't just a really good Type-33-S Gryphon plant, Shasti, and a media blitz. It was them and a backbone of very highly skilled intelligence officers who had spent decades infiltrating the WDF and every other organ of galactic governance, including the UG Assembly and Salusia to the extent they could do that without getting rid of Asrial, combined with a covert military buildup.

In addition to that damning video, there was probably a boatload of forensic evidence planted at the scene, which was quickly analyzed locally and then leaked to the media and international governing and police organizations before the whole place conveniently went up in a fireball and couldn't be re-examined.

There was also probably a lot of evidence planted that this sort of thing had happened before and been covered up. The WDF had a nearly 300 year long track record at that point, and, well... archive security is important, but usually not considered something vital, especially for declassified materiel. Someone goes back and carefully doctors the official mission logs, yearly psyche evaluations, etc etc. to make very ugly implications in hindsight, but which might not be noticed even by the people who WROTE those reports if they go back and review them. And really, is Zoner gonna spend his evening re-reading the mission report Gryphon wrote him seventy years ago about that time he walked into that restaurant and the evening took a weird turn and ended with twenty dead Cerberus troopers and a burning warehouse? I think not.

Probably the personality fault lines we saw exploited as the WDF high command fell apart weren't just "poked" at. MegaZone and Kei had always been somewhat unstable to begin with, with Zoner probably having either undiagnosed or untreated depression and Kei being prone to making really bad snap judgments she would stick with out of pride. I imagine Genom recruited the very best sci-fi style psychiatrists to do things like spend decades slowly and carefully working on those, possibly using telepaths (there were SOME around at the time) or technological-telepathy equivalents to slowly and carefully shape their minds into ways that would encourage them to collapse like a Jenga tower when poked.

That's all just the tip of the iceberg. Combine that with your infiltration of the media and government organs of the United Galactica, and you actually don't really care what Joe Public thinks or doubts. You've removed the WDF's legal sanction and veneer of respectability among galactic elites and power brokers, which is enough to move against them and turn them into outlaws and pirates.

It's worth noting that, galacticaly speaking, those members of the galactic intelligentsia who were ideologically sympathetic to the WDF and suspicious of hell of Genom DID doubt what had happened. Extensively. As the man once said, if you read the Exile you get the impression that "everybody and his DUCK believed in Gryphon." And as time went by and Genom made the miscalculation of forgetting to keep the pressure on as they prepared for Phase II: Buy Everything, that impression worked its way back into the general public as well.

This is all speculation, of course.

Basically, in my head, Gotterdamerung was so epic in scope, conception, and execution that it makes the game Eidun Palpatine and Bill Clark (and Bill Clark's bosses) played with the Federation look like Babies First Galactic Conspiracy in comparison. It came at the WDF from a direction they weren't really expecting and fucked them up hard.

It doesn't really work as a narrative otherwise.

-Merc
Keep Rat


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Meridias
Member since Jun-9-12
18 posts
Sep-26-13, 03:01 AM (EDT)
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13. "RE: Future Imperfect: 20th Anniversary Celebration"
In response to message #12
 
  
>Probably the personality fault lines we saw exploited as the WDF high
>command fell apart weren't just "poked" at. MegaZone and Kei had
>always been somewhat unstable to begin with, with Zoner probably
>having either undiagnosed or untreated depression and Kei being prone
>to making really bad snap judgments she would stick with out of pride.
>I imagine Genom recruited the very best sci-fi style psychiatrists to
>do things like spend decades slowly and carefully working on those,
>possibly using telepaths (there were SOME around at the time) or
>technological-telepathy equivalents to slowly and carefully shape
>their minds into ways that would encourage them to collapse like a
>Jenga tower when poked.
>>-Merc
>Keep Rat

Keep in mind that there were agents like Agent A-KO (probably more), whose main mission was to send back personality profiles of the higher ups specifically to find those fault lines. So that, when the time came, Largo knew not only which buttons to press but where they were, how big they are and how hard to press them. I would think that Largo wouldn't run the risk of doing any direct manipulation like telepathy/psychiatry because the more you try to influence, the greater the chance something goes wrong. With all the agents that infiltrated the WDF to execute the observe/report mission, he wouldn't need to do any shaping. He already knows how to break them.

*********************
Rock Is Dead. Long Live Paper And Scissors.


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drakensis
Member since Dec-20-06
54 posts
Sep-26-13, 03:32 AM (EDT)
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14. "RE: Future Imperfect: 20th Anniversary Celebration"
In response to message #12
 
   There was certainly some specific hack-jobs on WDF records carried out since during Gryphon's trial, Kei points out part of his psychiatric reports is falsified (specifically by copying parts of hers into it).

D.


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CdrMike
Member since Feb-19-05
305 posts
Sep-26-13, 02:24 PM (EDT)
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15. "RE: Future Imperfect: 20th Anniversary Celebration"
In response to message #12
 
   >1) Core 3, like all of the Core, is not a good fit to the universe it
>helped build anymore and isn't entirely canonical. I think of it as
>the "movie" version of what actually happened. The Lifetime Original
>TV Movie version, at that.

Well, I guess that's a step above a SyFy production. Not enough sharks were involved.

>2) What actually happened was a much richer and more complex
>takedown than what we saw onscreen. It wasn't just a really good
>Type-33-S Gryphon plant, Shasti, and a media blitz. It was them and a
>backbone of very highly skilled intelligence officers who had spent
>decades infiltrating the WDF and every other organ of galactic
>governance
, including the UG Assembly and Salusia to the extent
>they could do that without getting rid of Asrial, combined with a
>covert military buildup.

An undertaking that had even the Illuminati going "Damn, this guy means business!"

>In addition to that damning video, there was probably a boatload of
>forensic evidence planted at the scene, which was quickly analyzed
>locally and then leaked to the media and international governing and
>police organizations before the whole place conveniently went up in a
>fireball and couldn't be re-examined.

Puts me in the mind of how the RL modern media likes to handle such tragedies today, with the scramble to be "first" with an exclusive new tidbit, repeating assumptions and half-truths before the cops can address them, and overall turning a criminal investigation into a circus in the first few minutes. Just the sort of environment that a Genom smear job would work well in.

>There was also probably a lot of evidence planted that this sort of
>thing had happened before and been covered up. The WDF had a nearly
>300 year long track record at that point, and, well... archive
>security is important, but usually not considered something vital,
>especially for declassified materiel. Someone goes back and carefully
>doctors the official mission logs, yearly psyche evaluations, etc etc.
>to make very ugly implications in hindsight, but which might not be
>noticed even by the people who WROTE those reports if they go back and
>review them. And really, is Zoner gonna spend his evening re-reading
>the mission report Gryphon wrote him seventy years ago about that time
>he walked into that restaurant and the evening took a weird turn and
>ended with twenty dead Cerberus troopers and a burning warehouse? I
>think not.

Again another of those parts of the plan that were likely helped by outside forces, namely skeptics as well as critics of the WDF who would be looking for evidence that the Wedge crew had "something to hide." Even non-edited reports likely were the subject of much scrutiny, with articles and entire books published both inside and outside Genom's influence about how the WDF was a ticking time bomb.

>Probably the personality fault lines we saw exploited as the WDF high
>command fell apart weren't just "poked" at. MegaZone and Kei had
>always been somewhat unstable to begin with, with Zoner probably
>having either undiagnosed or untreated depression and Kei being prone
>to making really bad snap judgments she would stick with out of pride.
>I imagine Genom recruited the very best sci-fi style psychiatrists to
>do things like spend decades slowly and carefully working on those,
>possibly using telepaths (there were SOME around at the time) or
>technological-telepathy equivalents to slowly and carefully shape
>their minds into ways that would encourage them to collapse like a
>Jenga tower when poked.

I doubt that telepaths were involved beyond the equivalent of psychic recon. As noted, there wouldn't be the need for any shaping when Largo had a complete map of who to push in what way to get the results he wanted. I'm not sure he'd have wanted to spend so much time and money on a plan that might fail if a single operative popped a blood vessel under the strain and gave the whole thing away.

>That's all just the tip of the iceberg. Combine that with your
>infiltration of the media and government organs of the United
>Galactica, and you actually don't really care what Joe Public thinks
>or doubts. You've removed the WDF's legal sanction and veneer of
>respectability among galactic elites and power brokers, which is
>enough to move against them and turn them into outlaws and pirates.

Yet another instance where Genom likely capitalized on negative opinions of the WDF, in this case from the elites and power brokers who felt they had little or no influence over galactic politics with the Wedge crew acting as galactic problem-solvers. I imagine it sort of like Dark Knight Rises, with Largo playing as Bane, offering the illusion of these men having power over him if they went along with the plan. Some wouldn't even need to be paid off, just told "Help me bring down the WDF and your world will enjoy a bigger role in the new order."

>It's worth noting that, galacticaly speaking, those members of the
>galactic intelligentsia who were ideologically sympathetic to the WDF
>and suspicious of hell of Genom DID doubt what had happened.
>Extensively. As the man once said, if you read the Exile you get the
>impression that "everybody and his DUCK believed in Gryphon." And as
>time went by and Genom made the miscalculation of forgetting to keep
>the pressure on as they prepared for Phase II: Buy Everything, that
>impression worked its way back into the general public as well.

Very likely the seeds of doubt in Genom's version of events was there on Day One, they just lacked the proper environment to flourish. As time went on and people got a good look at who Genom was when its counterweight was gone and Largo didn't need to keep the illusion up any longer, the popular opinion likely edged back in the WDF's favor.

>This is all speculation, of course.

Something that messageboards tend to thrive upon.

>Basically, in my head, Gotterdamerung was so epic in scope,
>conception, and execution that it makes the game Eidun Palpatine and
>Bill Clark (and Bill Clark's bosses) played with the Federation look
>like Babies First Galactic Conspiracy in comparison. It came at the
>WDF from a direction they weren't really expecting and fucked them up
>hard.
>
>It doesn't really work as a narrative otherwise.

Or they were just reading Largo's book: "Galactic Conquest For Dummies." Funny how it ends halfway through the chapter on going to war with the powers you haven't bought out yet...

--------------------------
CdrMike, Columbia pilgrim

"Why do you ask 'what'?"
"When the delicious question is 'when'?"
- Robert & Rosalind Lutece, Bioshock Infinite


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Gryphonadmin
Charter Member
12725 posts
Sep-26-13, 02:29 PM (EDT)
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16. "RE: Future Imperfect: 20th Anniversary Celebration"
In response to message #12
 
   LAST EDITED ON Sep-26-13 AT 02:30 PM (EDT)
 
>You know, I feel kind of bad for re-igniting the old debate about the
>biggest bone of contention in the Core in a thread I intended to be a
>celebration and sharing of anecdotes of twenty years of FI kicking ass
>and taking names.
>
>Not bad enough to not participate myself, though!

What, a, shock.

--G.
Anyway, we covered this in, I think, the Manhunt discussions.
-><-
Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/
zgryphon at that email service Google has
Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.


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Mercutio
Member since May-25-13
255 posts
Sep-26-13, 04:21 PM (EDT)
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19. "RE: Future Imperfect: 20th Anniversary Celebration"
In response to message #16
 
   I should go read those, then.

Also, I'd like to take this moment, in all seriousness, to issue a blanket... well, not an apology, I guess, but something of that nature for making regular "new guy who doesn't know this stuff" statements 'round these parts. I've followed UF forever but my lurking on these forums has been... sporadic, at best, sometimes with gaps measured in years.

And while I've done my best to catch up and be a Responsible Commentator (if I want people to take my thoughts seriously I feel I need to demonstrate that I take their own thoughts seriously) reading every single thread start to finish is something I haven't done and may never.

(Although any thread with CdrMike, Traitor, or Croaker in a prominent role is usually guarenteed to have good stuff.)

This thread hasn't turned out... quite the way I'd hoped either, really, but one tries.

-Merc
Keep Rat


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The Traitor
Member since Feb-24-09
595 posts
Sep-26-13, 03:41 PM (EDT)
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17. "RE: Future Imperfect: 20th Anniversary Celebration"
In response to message #12
 
   >Not bad enough to not participate myself, though!

...

From post #9:

"Objection withdrawn."

English, motherfucker, do you speak it?

---
"She's old and lame and barren too, // "She's not worth feed or hay, // "But I'll give her this," - he blew smoke at me - // "She was something in her day." --Garnet Rogers, Small Victory

"Let me just stop you there, Steve Carlsburg."


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Gryphonadmin
Charter Member
12725 posts
Sep-26-13, 04:01 PM (EDT)
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18. "RE: Future Imperfect: 20th Anniversary Celebration"
In response to message #17
 
   >>Not bad enough to not participate myself, though!
>
>...
>
>From post #9:
>
>"Objection withdrawn."
>
>English, motherfucker, do you speak it?

This made me make an actual HA! sound in a room where that is not necessarily appropriate conduct. Well played, Traitor.

--G.
I never heard of Planet What. Do they speak Standard on What?
-><-
Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/
zgryphon at that email service Google has
Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.


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The Traitor
Member since Feb-24-09
595 posts
Sep-26-13, 05:55 PM (EDT)
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20. "RE: Future Imperfect: 20th Anniversary Celebration"
In response to message #18
 
   Live to serve. =]

---
"She's old and lame and barren too, // "She's not worth feed or hay, // "But I'll give her this," - he blew smoke at me - // "She was something in her day." -- Garnet Rogers, Small Victory


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Sofaspud
Member since Apr-6-06
140 posts
Oct-01-13, 12:50 PM (EDT)
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21. "RE: Future Imperfect: 20th Anniversary Celebration"
In response to message #0
 
   So, a few days behind the times, and in the spirit that this thread claims to have started with...

I've been a Undocumented Features fan since the Dark Ages. I missed the first post to Usenet but stumbled across the second and was pretty much hooked then and there, even if I didn't grok even half the in-jokes (as noted elsewhere on these forums, I didn't even know what Robotech *was* at the time). We could debate the quality of the Core or preceding pieces until the sun goes cold, but regardless, it was good enough to get us interested at the very least. But it was... immature.

Future Imperfect, I think, is where UF really started to grow up.

I don't mean that in the sense that "everything before it was childish crap"; far from it. But FI definitely brought a more mature, thoughtful approach, especially with the later pieces. And (not to be a gushing fanboy, but) I love that. The Golden Age pieces are fun, but they're ... simple. The Exile pieces are very similar, except anti-fun for the most part. That fits the theme, but I'm not fond of re-reading them all that often -- not because they're *bad*, but because they're torturing characters I care about and dammit I don't want to see that.

Future Imperfect actually brings *meat* to the table. Stuff is fun, but it's also deep -- not in the philosophical sense, but in terms of character depth and plotting. Not always, of course, but on the whole it's there.

I've been a UF fan forever, it feels like... but honestly, my favorite piece of EPU work has (since before it completed, even) always been NXE. The main reason isn't because I'm an Evangelion fan (I'd, um, never heard of it before reading NXE), it's because it *has* that depth. There is *meaningful conflict* throughout the entire piece, and at the same time the writers didn't let off the 'More Awesome' button. That's a hard act to pull off!

Future Imperfect on the whole has caught up with that bar and, in my mind at least, is pulling ahead at this point. When I need a pick-me-up, I open up Hunted Rose. The sheer awesome, the fact that the Good Guys win, the fact that there's a challenge -- and a *real* one, at that, not just something solved by (for example) a brand-new never-seen-before-or-since bit of tech that someone just had lying around 'because' -- and the fact that there are actual, believable consequences for everyone's actions...

... well, it adds up to a story that *never* fails to lift my spirits. Cynical as I am, it reminds me somehow that Good can triumph. And if the purpose of fiction isn't to remind people of things like that, then I'll happily go on being wrong, because I don't want to be right.

Still in Future Imperfect... If I need a laugh, I can turn to pretty much anything in the Bacon Comics imprint (so to speak) and be guaranteed that I'll end up grinning like a loon before the end of the issue. Or I can turn to one of the CSI:NA pieces. While I don't think they're primarily *meant* to be funny, the character interactions *always* get a laugh, and does so while dealing with (often) pretty dark subject matter.

I could continue listing examples (and did, before deciding I'd be here *all day* if I kept that up), but the point has, I think, been made. While I may tend towards hyperfocusing on things that the authors haven't revealed yet -- and, for the record, I apologize; I'm trying to stop looking for meat in the produce aisle, I really am! -- and while I may have some disagreements with how things turn out or were handled, on the whole Future Imperfect is really where the writing team has begun to shine, and I can't express how much it means to me that EPU continues to produce it for us.

*raises glass* To Future Imperfect!

--sofaspud
--


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