>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
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