u/Yougart_Man

“Forget About Freeman” is the scariest level in the entirety of Half-Life 1, and it has absolutely nothing to do with conventional horror, aka monsters or a scary thing attacking you.

This is the moment where the entire situation at Black Mesa signals the future extinction of humanity, and the worst part is that the military, the people who were supposed to contain this entire mess, are beginning to realize it themselves.

The HECU did not exactly arrive at Black Mesa with a pathetic little security detail and a couple of rifles. These are actual military units equipped with assault rifles, shotguns, machine guns, explosives, armored vehicles, tanks, helicopters, and air support, sent into a research facility with the explicit objective of eliminating the alien threat and silencing the witnesses; they know what they are fightning.

The Marines are clearing rooms, setting up defensive positions, operating heavy weapons, and engaging the aliens with a level of coordination that makes them genuinely dangerous opponents. Sure, they are also trying to kill Gordon Freeman, but that is a separate problem entirely.

But here's the thing. As seen in Half-Life 1 and in Black Mesa Source, they are literally losing, even without factoring you, they are losing. The aliens just keep coming because it is an entire universe vs a few batallions. They do not worry about supply lines, ammunition production, transportation, reinforcements crossing an ocean. They are fighting creatures that can be teleported directly into the battlefield from another dimension, and their apparent numbers are effectively impossible to control through conventional military operations.

Humanity is essentially trying to fight an entire alien ecosystem, an entire universe, not a country, not a planet, a whole ass universe who keeps teleporting things. It does not matter how many bullets you fire if the enemy can keep appearing and has billions to spare, and it does not matter how many positions you secure if the battlefield itself is becoming increasingly unstable.

The wider Half-Life lore establishes that the Resonance Cascade has consequences beyond Black Mesa, with alien creatures and dimensional disturbances affecting places elsewhere in the world, even if the original game does not spend much time showing us the global picture. Black Mesa is the immediate battlefield, but the implications of what happened there are much larger than the facility itself. Humanity has accidentally opened a door into another world, and nobody has a reliable method of closing it.

Then you hear the radio.

"Forget about Freeman! We are cutting our losses and pulling out! Anyone left down there is on his own"

The situation has deteriorated so badly that Freeman is no longer the priority. The military is abandoning the pursuit because it has much bigger problems to deal with, and the people responsible for coordinating the operation are apparently beginning to recognize that the entire mission is going to hell. Their equipment is not enough, their training is not enough, and their numbers are not enough.

After this? You rarely see HECU. You are moving through a military disaster's aftermath. Destroying Black Mesa does not undo the Resonance Cascade, eliminate the existence of Xen, or magically restore the boundary between dimensions. Because the Combine upon seeing this disaster, quickly invade and defeat humanity in seven hours.

My other post got traction, so let's do something crazier.

In this scenario, a time-slip connects the Republic of China (Taiwan) from 1960–1965 directly against the peak 1947 Empire of Japan (Dai Nippon Teikoku) from the The New Order: Last Days of Europe (TNO) universe.

Can Taiwan defeat an Imperial Japan who won?

1947 Dai Nippon Teikoku is a terrifying beast. This is not the real-world starving 1945 Japan, but the triumphant superpower that defeated China, seized all of East Asia, conquered India, forced the US to cede Hawaii/Aleutians, and developed its own atomic weapons (Nuking Pearl Harbor in 1945 to end WWII).

So, can the island fortress of 1960–1965 Taiwan (the Republic of China under Chiang Kai-shek) stand up against the victorious TNO Empire at its absolute peak?

How much land Japan has? They have this much land:

• Japanese Mainland: Honshu, Hokkaido, Kyushu, Shikoku, plus Karafuto (Southern Sakhalin) and the Chishima (Kuril) Islands.
• Chosen (Korea): Fully integrated colonial territory.
• Manshūkoku (Manchukuo / Manchuria): Japanese puppet state covering all of Northeast China.
• Mengjiang (Inner Mongolia): Autonomous puppet government under Japanese oversight. China (Occupied Regions): Extensive coastal, northern, and central regions of mainland China, including major industrial and population centers like Beijing, Tianjin, Shanghai, Nanjing, and Wuhan.
• French Indochina: Modern-day Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia.
• Thailand: Allied/vassal state within the sphere.
• Malaya & Singapore (Shōnan-tō): British Malaya and the naval stronghold of Singapore.
• British Borneo & Dutch East Indies: Modern-day Malaysia, Brunei, and the massive archipelago of Indonesia (Java, Sumatra, Borneo, Celebes, the Moluccas, and Western New Guinea).
• The Philippines: Full military occupation/puppet administration across the entire archipelago.
• Burma: Occupied territory pushing up to the Indian border.
• Nan'yō-chō (South Seas Mandate): Thousands of islands across Micronesia, including the Marianas, Carolines, Marshalls, and Palau.
• Central & South Pacific: Ocean Islands, Gilbert & Ellice Islands, Solomon Islands, Santa Cruz, and Northern New Guinea.
• Territory of Hawaii (TNO Victory Perk): The Hawaiian Islands annexed following the defeat/surrender of the United States.
• Aleutian Islands & Alaska Fringe: Attu, Kiska, and strategic North Pacific outposts ceded during the war.

Round 1:

• Taiwan gets no external allies. Imperial Japan cannot use nuclear weapons.
• Japan’s Win Condition: Successfully conquer and occupy Taiwan.
• Taiwan’s Win Condition: Survive until Japan’s military runs out of gear/fuel, or suffers an internal coup / civil war due to civilian pushback.

Round 2:

• Taiwan gets no external allies. Imperial Japan cannot use nuclear weapons.
• ONLY the Japanese military is bloodlusted. Japanese civilians and non-Japanese colonial subjects remain rational/sane.
• Japan’s Win Condition: Successfully conquer and occupy Taiwan.
• Taiwan’s Win Condition: Survive until Japan’s military runs out of gear/fuel, or suffers an internal coup / civil war due to civilian pushback.

Round 3:

• Same as round 2 but the USA gets taken over by a revanchist Fascist Macarhur seeking revenge for losing WWII/Hawaii and joins Taiwan with 1960s industrial supply lines and military support.
• Japan’s Win Condition: Successfully conquer and occupy Taiwan.
• Taiwan’s Win Condition: Cause Japan to completely and utterly collapse into anarchy.

At midnight on September 1, 1939, the entirety of mainland France (along with its military hardware, infrastructure, and population) from the 1960–1965 era is magically swapped with 1939 France. The rest of the world remains strictly in its WWII state.

All Allied powers (UK, USSR, USA) adopt a policy of total neutrality to test whether De Gaulle’s modernised nation can solo the entire Axis coalition (Nazi Germany, Imperial Japan, Fascist Italy, and their European satellites at peak strength).

Rules:

• France is alone. They have the same amount of land they had in WW2.
• The Axis thinks they are dealing with 1939 France, they do not know France just got swapped.
• France is being ruled by the same people who ruled in 1960-1965.

Round 1: No Nukes.

Round 2: France is allowed to use the nukes they developed in 1965.

The curse was born at the very beginning.

In 1986, Hasbro and Sunbow decided to make The Transformers: The Movie (Do not confuse it with the 2007 movie, Transformers). They had a genius idea to raise the stakes beyond Megatron by introducing a villain who literally eats planets. To voice this apocalyptic threat, they hired absolute royalty: Orson Welles, in what would tragically be his final film role before his death. And he went down with a badass quote too.

The hand-drawn animation was stunning, the synth-rock soundtrack was elite, and the sheer existential dread of a giant metal planet eating Cybertron's moons scarred an entire generation of kids.

• Budget: $6 Million
• Domestic Box Office: $5.8 Million

The movie didn't even make its budget back. It was decimated at the box office by fatigue, traumatized parents who were furious that Optimus Prime was brutally murdered in the first thirty minutes, and stiff competition. The very project built to showcase Unicron bombed so hard it effectively ended the golden era of the G1. It became a beloved cult classic years later.

Fast forward thirty-one years. Paramount Pictures was sitting on a absolute gold mine with Michael Bay’s Transformers franchise. Dark of the Moon (2011) made $1.12 billion on the box office. Age of Extinction (2014) made $1.10 billion on the box office. The franchise was an invincible and critic-proof. So, what did Paramount decide to do for the fifth installment, The Last Knight? They decided to tease Unicron. The entire plot of The Last Knight revolves around the reveal that Earth isn't just a rock, it's Unicron. Massive horns start sprouting out. Quintessa shows up in a post-credits scene.

• Previous Film (Age of Extinction): $1.10 Billion
• Unicron Film (The Last Knight): $605 Million

The Last Knight collected almost half compared to its predecessor, that literally means to any company "I am going to lose monety, pull the plug!". With a production budget pushing $260 million and a $100+ million marketing campaign. The moment Unicron was woven into the narrative, a franchise that had comfortably cleared a billion dollars twice in a row suddenly wasn't viablle. Paramount immediately erased Transformers 6 from their release schedule, fired the writers' room, and threw out the entire Unicron storyline.

After The Last Knight bombed, Paramount played it smart. They downscaled. They made Bumblebee (2018), a $100 million movie, no world-ending skybeams, and lots of heart. It was a critical darling and made a solid profit ($468 million). Naturally, Paramount executives looked at each other and said: "Hey, you know what we should bring back?"

Enter Transformers: Rise of the Beasts (2023). They brought in a full CGI Unicron, complete with the Terrorcons, the Transwarp Key, and planetary consumption scenes. They spent massive cash bringing the giant back to the big screen in full modern visual effects glory.

• Production Budget: $195 Million–$200 Million
• Global Box Office: $439 Million

A $200 million blockbuster needs roughly $450M–$500M just to break even after marketing and theater cuts. Rise of the Beasts barely limped past $439 million.

Think about the absurdity. Every time they wanna use Unicron, the movie tanks.

In 2024, Paramount released Transformers One, a critically acclaimed, high-energy animated prequel detailing the tragic backstory of Orion Pax and D-16. Critics loved it. Fans loved it. It sat at over 88% on Rotten Tomatoes.

Where does Unicron fit in? He’s just background lore, the ancient cosmic threat that the Primes fought in the past, leaving Cybertron depleted of Energon and setting up the whole social collapse of the planet.

• Budget: $75 Million
• Global Box Office: ~$128 Million

Even serving as just lore in an animated movie was enough for Unicron's bad juju appeared.

Why does this happen? You cannot do Unicron on a budget, your VFX budget balloons. Studios only pull out Unicron when a franchise is already experiencing narrative fatigue. Unicron brings heavy cosmic baggage.

He eats studios' bottom lines in reality. Keep him only on tv shows or comics, if you put him on a movie, he kills it.

I just finished Weapons, the insane third act where a horde of elementary schoolers literally dismembers an ancient witch in broad daylight is awesome.

Think about this for five minutes

Picture the actual, literal aftermath in Maybrook, Pennsylvania.

You are a county detective. What do you roll up on?

• Two adult men (a local cop and a homeless guy) shot dead on the front lawn.
• A third-grade teacher holding a smoking gun.
• A grieving, half-insane father who was reported missing/suspicious earlier that week.
• A house whose windows are covered in goddamn newspaper and most are broken.
• Seventeen missing kids standing on the grass, covered in blood, staring blankly into the middle distance.
• And torn apart is the literal, human-meat-puzzle remains of an elderly woman who looks like she was put through a woodchiper.

How. Do. You. Write. That. Police. Report.

Do you arrest seventeen third-graders for First-Degree Murder and Cannibalistic Assault?! Do you put a bunch of eight-year-olds on trial as adults? What is the jury selection for "Seventeen mind-controlled children who tore an old woman to pieces"?

Also Paul who was a cop is dead. Shot by Justine. His patrol car is parked outside with the camera running. The last thing on his dashcam is probably him dragging a screaming, handcuffed homeless man into a house of horrors.

Marcus killed Terry because Gladys cut his hair and cast a spell on him. Then Marcus tried to vehicular-homicide Justine at a gas station before getting pasted by a semi-truck. To the FBI, Principal Marcus Miller looks like a closeted, psychotic serial killer.

Alex's parents are ruined for life, they were self-harming for weeks under mind control. The film says they get "institutionalized." "Patient claims they were forced to cut themselves because an elderly relative made a doll out of their fingernails." That is a one-way ticket to a maximum-security padded room for the rest of their natural lives.

Forensics rolls up to Alex’s basement. What do they find? They don't find a kidnapping setup. They don't find zip-ties, chains, or locks. Instead they find a pile of sticks, stolen hair clips, dirty teeth, chewed fingernails, and blood-soaked rags.

The FBI Behavioral Science Unit is going to step into that basement, look at a pile of twigs, look at seventeen kids who won't stop staring at the ceiling, and collectively lose their minds.

"Up next at 11: Local teacher Justine Gandy acquitted of double homicide after jury accepts 'She Was A Witch' defense."

Imagine being the parent of one of those kids! Your kid goes missing for weeks, comes back covered in the blood and bone fragments of an old woman, doesn't say a word for 700 days.

I would change my name and join the French Foreign Legion!

Gladys ruined the entire judicial, psychiatric, and forensic infrastructure of the state of Pennsylvania.

Someone really needs to make a mockumentary styled sequel for this movie, detailing the absolute nightmare of people trying to understand what the hell happened.

28 Days Later was a total "fuck you" to the entire zombie genre. It set up a brutal, realistic biological logic, only for subsequent films (And the original creators themselves) to completely murder what made it special.

In the original movie, the infected were living humans driven by pure, unsustainable rage with a mutated rabies virus and ebola virus. Because they were still human bodies, they had human limitations. They didn't eat or drink. They literally ran themselves to death or starved. Within almost a month, almost all of them died off from thirst and hunger. The government collapsed, sure, but the apocalypse solved itself because biology wins every time. London was an empty graveyard because the infected literally killed themselves off.

I will give credit where it's due: the outside world telling Britain to go to hell is the single logical plot point left. According to what happened in the prologue of the movie and the ending of 28 Weeks Later, when the infection breached the Green Zone and reached Paris, they had to nuke the city to stop it; it makes sense they would say Britain was a lost cause due to the passive carriers. If anybody can be a carrier, nobody is safe.

What doesn't make sense is that Britain still has infected to quarantine 28 years later. To force this franchise into existence, they had to pull a massive retcon on how the Rage Virus actually works.

If the infected starved to death in 28 Days, how the hell are they still roaming around three decades later? The movie had to invent "Alpha infected" and hand-wave their survival just to keep the setting alive. But the absolute breaking point? The cure.

Dr. Kelson knocks out an infected with a cocktail of morphine and standard anti-psychotics (Haloperidol), and suddenly the creature regains human consciousness, starts speaking, and recovers.

You’re telling me that for TWENTY-MOTHERFUCKING GODAMMED EIGHT YEARS, nobody in a fucking goddamn high-tech NATO isolation lab, no scientist in mainland Europe, and no military doctor thought to administer basic, off-the-shelf psychiatric medication to a living patient? Did NATO lose half of their IQ!?

You cannot cure rabies with anti-psychotics, this thing was a mutated strain of Ebola and rabies, but nope, turns out it was actually just a super-spicy episode of psychosis that can be cured by popping a couple of anti-psychotics?

They murdered my favorite zombie movie retroactively.

“Do not speak of the Name.”

“Turn back, delicious friend.”

“It is a story of misery and self-destruction.”

Who decided that?

It has been treated like a cursed scroll bound in human skin. People act like if you write down the ending online, the developers will manifest in your room and personally kill you. You have players out here spending months of real-world effort to systematically dismantle their own accounts, halving their hard-earned stats, burning vast fortunes of end-game gear, betraying real-life friends, and permanently scarring their character’s soul.

All so they can sail to the Avid Horizon, ask a question to a well, and get their account bricked for eternity like a sacrificial lamb on the altar of video game pretentiousness.

And the community’s response? An omertà.

Well, I spent the last several months doing a deep-dive excavation across forgotten Discord servers, deleted Pastebins, archived forums, and obscure Tumblr blogs.

The secret dies, today.

The internet is fragile. Web games die. Live-service servers get turned off. If Fallen London ever goes offline, a decade of brilliant, unhinged narrative history would vanish overnight, locked behind a wall of player-enforced secrecy and dead accounts. I refuse to let one of the most unique narrative experiments in gaming history become lost media. Here is the exact, literal truth of what happens when you go NORTH.

To reach the end of SMEN, you travel to the Avid Horizon after a quest of pure masochism where you harm your own character and destroy it, the gate of black ice at the northern border of the Unterzee. There, you find a well containing the cosmic remnant of Mr Candles, a Master of the Bazaar who was ambushed, murdered, chopped up, and eaten by the other Masters. His agony transformed him into Mr Eaten, a drowned god radiating an infectious curse of pure hunger and self-destruction across London.

When you stand at the edge of the well, stripped of everything you ever owned, you are forced to choose one of three Questions.

Selecting any of them triggers an absolute, unbypassable account lock. Failbetter Games will not restore your save file. Your character is permanently removed from the game world.

Here are the three texts that the community tried to hide, and the layman reality of why your save file dies.

A funeral

The others will comb the sea, transgress the sky, plunder the earth. They will find each mote of Candles. He is a wound, an absence, a decay, but they will assemble his elements for the ceremony.

They shape his catafalque of cinder and devilbone. They set it to orbit and idle Judgement, one that is almost sympathetic. The greater Judgements are not informed. The celebrants are the smaller powers of the Chain: vane-merchants, vagabonds, radiants, axiles, the liberant pariahs and the corsairs of the Curve. They look upon the remnants of the Runt; they grieve; they will not forget.

There is very little left of you by then. His un-siblings take you up, up, and shape the last flickers of you. They set you at the head of the catafalque, to be a light and a memorial. The emanations of the High Wilderness bathe and dessicate you. You stiffen and do not move: but you illuminate. Eternal, indivisible, sessile as oak and dripstone. You are a candle.

You have completed the search for Mr Eaten’s Name, asking the Question. There is nothing to be restored. You have planted a seed in bleak and urgent soil. But this character is finished, forever.

“These are my children and this is my light. These are my words in the merciful night. This is the Sun whose commands run below, and the Feast of it all is the way we must go. The One who denied is love’s enemy but the enemy, love, is the last we shall see.”

AKA:

Minor cosmic powers gather your broken soul, pull you into deep space, and dry your body out until you are completely paralyzed. They attach your desiccated corpse to the front of Mr Candles’ floating coffin to act as a permanent light source. You can't play anymore because you are literally a piece of frozen cosmic furniture holding a candle at a space funeral.

You will be honoured

The myrmidons of the Law bring you before the thrones of Gold, the White, the Red. Stars wheel about you. The void roars. A thousand thousand cores of light whelm you, sear you, expose you. You render your evidence. The courier is found instantly guilty.

The Judgements have no armies. They do not require armies. In the far heavens, where light curdles and harmony is enforced and silence is unbroken, they silently agree and express their Will. Their Will comes, at least, to Earth, to the Neath, as a storm crosses the sea. In time, when the Sequence is enacted, when the agonies are subdued, when the fabrics of the place resolve to something like matter once more, when the tears dry and the screams have nearly ceased, you will miss London.

You?

You are a trophy; a memento; a flambeaux. You accorded the high honour of remaining discrete. Your soul, and its shadow, are absorbed into no star. You are pinned to a high place, to illuminate the vestibule of the antechamber of the Court. There you remain. There you will always remain. High, cold, eternal, immobile, minuscule. You endure; you burn.

You have completed the search for Mr Eaten’s Name. You have brought down the inevitability of Judgements on the Neath. The treachery of the Bazaar and Masters will be punished. The Courier will be subjected to the agonies that only the highest Law may require. The Neath will return forever to stone and silence. Mr Eaten is avenged, avenged, avenged.But this character is finished, forever.

AKA:

You snitch on the Masters to the Judgements (the sentient stars that rule universe law). The stars immediately obliterate London, reducing the entire game world to silence and stone while subjecting the Masters to eternal agony. You get your revenge! But as your reward, the stars pin your soul to the wall of their cosmic courtroom like a taxidermied insect. You can't play anymore because the entire setting was destroyed and you are a burning hood ornament in space.

TRAVELLER RETURNING

Across that sea which is no longer night. Extend your limbs to feel the warmth of the sun. Across the harbour, bright with aluminium and intricate with masts. White walls, red brick. A familiar window. A wide room of bronze (violet-glinting). And here you are.

Stretch your limbs. Creak your neck. The mirror shows you you. A miniature monster rattles its dark carapace in a silver cage. Expensive machines glitter on your desk: you can disregard them. The phone rings: it can wait. Rise from your chair. You are still you, and you will be here, in this little port of sun and intrigue and eternity, for the longest time you can manage.

You failed, you succeeded. This was only the first element. It is a terrible pity about the Runt. If you could have saved him, you would. But all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well. Contact the others. Let them know what the White intended. Continue.

You have completed the search for Mr Eaten’s Name. What you have done with that Name is nothing anyone ever expected. But this character is finished, forever.

“Yes, very likely you are right. Very likely, its hopes are meaningless. But even the Judgements, now and then, have encountered something unsuspected. We all choose what we take, and what we leave behind.”

You bypass the local tragedy entirely, transcend the lower reality of London, and wake up in a surreal room filled with futuristic bronze machinery, realizing you were playing a higher-level game of cosmic chess all along. You can't play anymore because your character literally exited Fallen London entirely.

The game logs you out, and your account is locked.

It is a brilliant, vicious piece of game design, a massive middle finger to the toxic completionist urge to click every button and own every piece of lore. The developers gave players a button labeled "DO NOT PRESS OR YOUR ACCOUNT WILL BE DESTROYED", and thousands of players pressed it anyway.

If the community had its way, these texts would disappear the moment Failbetter Games eventually turns off their web servers. But now, it’s archived right here.

To the cult of silence: you're welcome. To everyone else: thank me later.

Miro Haverinen created a magic system that is evil, repulsive, broken, and completely indifferent to human dignity. It is absolutely unhinged and I love it for it.

Invoking magic means committing acts of total physical and moral corruption to court ancient, sadistic deities.

• Demon Seed: You don't summon a spirit from another plane; you literally use a corpse to use its rotting body as fertile soil, birthing a malformed human-monster hybrid mid-exploration to fight on your behalf.
• Brain & Heart Flowers: Survival requires you to butcher another person, plant parasitic seeds inside their freshly slain body, and wait for flowers to sprout out of their organs so you can harvest their stigma so you can heal up.
• Flesh Puppetry: You are casually severing limbs, stuffing them into your pack, and using dark magic to make those severed, lifeless limbs dance through the air, beating your enemies to death.
• Blood Golem: You are constantly forced to mutilate yourself. Summoning a creature of blood requires tearing open your own veins in the heat of battle.
• Casually altering reality to duplicate shit. You rewrite creation to turn a single piece of moldy bread into three, or to force plain water to become wine.
• By invoking a single word (PHASE), you start teleporting five steps in front of you. You literally ignore the solid atoms of the earth itself, chancing the very real nightmare of rematerializing fused solid inside a brick wall forever.
• You paint a circle in human blood to teleport to a waypoint or step through the Moon God's shimmering portals and end up in the Backrooms and then to your location.

The most terrifying aspect of the magic is that when these spells are unleashed, they ignore durability to completely. There is no shielding, and no willpower strong enough to resist the absolute nature of the gods. If you get hit, you die or get maimed.

• You are forcing the victim's body to literally rot alive in real-time.
• You manifest a cloud of pure, concentrated, industrial smoke. It fills the lungs of everyone in the room and damages their eyesight.
• You pull the literal iron links that tormented Chambara for centuries straight out of the ether, the literal chains that held a god in place.
• Red Arc fires a concentrated bolt of divine lightning straight to the brain, instantly giving the target brain damage. Black Orb hurls localized, dense spheres of pure anti-existence that shred target limbs into meat before the victim can even process what hit them... and it hits multiple people.

The Older Gods and the Ascended Gods aren't benevolent. They are indifferent and don't care about your happiness or suffering. Channeling Gro-goroth should mean hurling a ball of destructive dark mass that shreds a person in half a second. Channeling Sylvian should mean forcing flesh to mend and mutate at the cost of terrifying, horrific rituals.

The magic isn't scaled down for human safety, and I love it for it.

I was replaying the game as an adult and I noticed something that as a kid or teenager you do not notice, but as an adult, it hits you like a brick to the face if you know the law.

The literal dumpster fire that occurs in Chapter 5 of Bully (Canis Canem Edit).

Dr. Crabblesnitch is a pompous, self-righteous hypocrite, Bullworth Academy are a collection of alcoholics, criminals and idiots. But when Gary Smith orchestrates the town-wide smear campaign and frames Jimmy Hopkins, leading directly to Jimmy’s expulsion, the administration does something so incredibly boneheaded, that it is criminal.

Jimmy is a 15-year-old, placed into the legal custody/care of a private boarding school by his mother and his new stepfather. His mother literally dumped him there so she could go on a year-long honeymoon cruise. Bullworth Academy is, for all intents and purposes, acting in loco parentis (in the place of a parent). They hold the legal duty of care for this teenager.

And what do they do when they expel him?

Do they call his mother? No. She’s in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean, probably getting day-drunk on a yacht.

Do they contact Child Protective Services? No.

Do they arrange safe transport to a juvenile shelter or a legal guardian? No.

Crabblesnitch essentially slams the heavy oak door and tells Jimmy to get the fuck out of the school or he is trespassing.

• You are barred from classes. (Fine, standard expulsion stuff).
• You are barred from the Boy’s Dormitory.
• If you set foot anywhere on school grounds, you are treated as a hostile trespasser.

Using real world logic, Jimmy is literally homeless, he is wandering the streets of a horrible industrial Rust Belt town. As players, we know Jimmy has unlocked various "hideouts." But let’s cut through the game mechanics for a second and look at what those places actually are... they are unsanitary, unheated, abandoned, or gang-infested shacks.

The administration of Bullworth Academy kicked a 15-year-old out with no legal guardians present and forced him into being a squatter. Bullworth Academy got astronomically, impossibly lucky that Jimmy Hopkins is an absolute badass, because if he was a normal guy, he dies in a week or so and the school would have been sued to death.

If Jimmy gets hit by a car while wandering the streets at 2:00 AM because he literally has no legal bed to sleep in, who is responsible? THE SCHOOL THAT LOCKED HIM OUT.

If Jimmy gets shanked by a meth addict, who is responsible? THE SCHOOL THAT LOCKED HIM OUT.

If he had died of hypothermia sleeping on a cold couch in an unheated garage, the entire administration of Bullworth Academy would be facing reckless homicide charges.

When an institution takes in vulnerable person, they assume a strict legal Duty of Care under the doctrine of in loco parentis. When residential facilities have summarily expelled or discharged troubled youth without proper safety protocols, notifying guardians, or ensuring secure transportation, and those youths were subsequently attacked, exploited, or murdered while stranded, the courts did not buy the "well, they weren't our student anymore" defense.

Crabblesnitch wouldn't just be facing a board review; he’d be sharing a jail cell. The lawsuits alone would have bankrupted the academy. Jimmy’s mother, as terrible and absent as she is, would have smelled a massive payout from a mile away.

Bullworth Academy didn't just fail Jimmy Hopkins academically or morally, they literally committed a fucking felony. This detail completely reframes the entire tone of Bully, Bullworth Academy is a legal and moral void, they dumped a 15-year-old child onto the pavement, locked the iron gates, and told him to get lost, they actively tossed a vulnerable person to the wolves and prayed the town would swallow him whole before anyone came asking questions.

I know, it's a videogame, but it is extremely dark if you think about it using real life logic.

Yup, a rant about a portuguese movie about an event that happened in real life, get ready for a history lesson boys, because this movie is awesome, hilarious... but the real life event was like 40% way funnier.

Maria de Medeiros made an absolute masterpiece with Capitães de Abril. It hits the emotional beats, pays immense respect to Salgueiro Maia, and manages to turn a bloodless military coup into a compelling, deeply personal story. If you read snobby film critics or historical purists talking about this movie, there is always an annoying subset of posers who whine by saying "Why is this silly?" or "It should have taken itself more seriously as a political thriller."

If anything, Medeiros pulled her punches. Because if you actually sit down and read or watch the documentaries about the event, this wasn't a political thriller or a badass moment, it was an absolute circus. It was a live-action Monty Python sketch performed by armed men operating on vibes, caffeine, bad radio signal, and complete, unadulterated desperation and insanity.

Medeiros actually undersold the sheer level of surreal comedy.

The movie vs the real life event

It does include the absurdities: Salgueiro Maia’s armored column has to pull over on a rural highway because a key vehicle broke down, and while they're sitting there looking like idiots, Major Gervásio shows up in a loud, bright red sports car. The young conscript soldier (Daniel) spends half the revolution dodging military duties to meet his girlfriend, puts a carnation in his rifle, and gets caught making out inside an armored car. People call that "Hollywood romance fluff," but that was literally the demographic: exhausted 20 year olds improvising on the go and being a bunch of accidental comedians.

Manuel and his crew taking over the Rádio Clube Português is presented with high tension, but the real-life setup was a comedy of errors. The signal to kick off a national revolution was literally two songs on the radio: First, Portugal’s Eurovision entry from that year (E Depois do Adeus), a generic, sappy pop song, to tell the officers "get ready." Then, shortly after midnight, a banned song by Zeca Afonso (Grândola, Vila Morena) meaning "GO GO GO."

The green light is literally a Eurovision pop ballad dropping at 10:55 PM. The secret police didn't even realize a revolution was happening because they thought the DJ was fucking around.

In the film, Maia’s column faces off at the Praça do Comércio against loyalist tanks led by Brigadier Pais and a frigate in the river pointing heavy weapons at them. In any standard movie, this is an epic firefight. In real life and this movie? It was an absolute farce. When the loyalist commander ordered his tank crews to open fire on Maia’s men, the tank crews... just looked at each other and said, "Nah". Then the loyalist officers tried to get the naval frigate to shell the square. The guys on the ship checked their radio, realized nobody knew who was actually in charge of the country anymore, and decided that firing heavy artillery into the capital city’s main tourist square was stupid.

The Armed Forces Movement had broadcasted on the radio: "EVERYONE PLEASE STAY INSIDE YOUR HOUSES. REMAIN CALM AND DO NOT GO OUT."

Civilians were showing up, thousands of them. They read that broadcast and thought, "Oh sick, a parade!"

They poured out into the streets by the tens of thousands. They started hand-feeding the soldiers. They brought them coffee, cigarettes, pastries, and carnations from the nearby flower markets. The soldiers didn't have plugs to put in their gun barrels to show they weren't going to shoot, so a restaurant worker named Celeste Caeiro started handing out carnations... which gave the name of the revolution, yup, like that scene from Fant4stic where Reed says "Say that again?".

The third act of Captains of April focuses on the siege of the GNR barracks at Largo do Carmo, where dictator Marcelo Caetano was hiding. Medeiros handles this with dramatic weight, showing the tragedy of four civilians killed by cornered secret police firing from windows.

What she skips over is the actual surrender, which is one of the most hilariously stupid moments in European history ever.

Maia has the barracks surrounded. Thousands of screaming, cheering, angry civilians are packed into the square. Maia needs to negotiate with Caetano inside, but there are no cell phones, landlines are jammed, and nobody has a military PA system. So what do they use? A civilian megaphone borrowed from a local street vendor. Maia is standing on top of an armored vehicle, holding this tiny, tinny megaphone, shouting at a historical government building, telling the ruler of the Portuguese Empire that his time is up. Half the time the batteries are dying, or the crowd is cheering so loudly that Caetano can't even hear the demands!

Inside the barracks, Marcelo Caetano is panicking... about looking good. General Spínola finally arrives to negotiate the transfer of power... and Caetano proceeds to say "I ain't surrendering to a captain, fuck off". People outside are chanting for his head. Armed soldiers are pointing cannons at his front door. And this guy refuses to hand over the country to Salgueiro Maia because Maia is only a Captain. So Maia has to let Spínola walk in and pretend to be the grand savior, just so Caetano could feel dignified while losing his dictatorship. He gives up, runs away on an armored car that people rock back and forth and flees to Brazil.

What happened after is literally pure Monty Python styled comedy

I warn you, I did not exaggerate any of this for comedic effect... the movie never adapted this because people would have died of laughter in the cinema or called the movie unrealistic, because let me tell you, the hot summer ran on pure insanity.

After the dude fled, what happened? Insanity and stupidity. The movement exploded into factions who hated each other.

• The Communist Party (PCP): Old-school Marxists who thought, "Yay, my own soviet union coming soon"
• The Socialists (PS): Backed by Western Europe, shouting, "Democracy"
• Maoists, Trotskyists, and Anarchists: Dozens of student groups arguing on street corners about whether a collective farm was "revisionist" because they used the wrong kind of tractor.
• The Military: Split into three factions. One faction was literally operating on "Depends on who I am trolling".

At one point, disgruntled construction workers got mad about wages, surrounded the Prime Minister's palace, and held the entire Sixth Provisional Government hostage for two days. Did the military intervene? No, they found this hilarious and just watched! The Prime Minister literally suspended his own government in protest because his army wouldn't guard his office.

Meanwhile all of West Europe is having a panic attack and NATO is sweating bullets. Henry Kissinger looked at Portugal and essentially said: "Portugal is lost".

And then, on November 25, 1975, radical far-left paratroopers seized the air force headquarters and radio stations. They were ready for their sacred war to establish a socialist state. And what happened? They got mogged.

The absolute chad known as António Ramalho Eanes enters the story, a Lieutenant Colonel in aviator sunglasses representing the moderate military faction. Eanes’s troops surrounded the rebel bases. The radical leaders looked around, realized nobody was coming to back them up, and that the public was tired of the circus. Eanes basically told them: "Surrender, go back to your barracks, and stop this. You are fired!" The rebels decided to... give up and turn tail. The military handed the keys of the country back to civilian politicians, held normal democratic elections, Eanes won by landslide, the military dusted off their hands, and went back to standard peacetime guard duty.

Captains of April is an absolute 10/10 movie. But Maria de Medeiros had to tone reality down by at least 40%, because if she showed the full scale of the comedy, the dictator's ego, the construction worker hostages, and the guy in aviator sunglasses firing everyone until they said "Okie," the audience would have literally died of laughter.

Look, I’m sick of opening any comment section about a movie, show, or game adaptation and seeing the exact same tired binary argument: "It wasn't 100% faithful to the book, so it's garbage!" versus "The original version sucks, the adaptation is better!"

Why do people think that adaptation means doing a 1 to 1 copy of something or just going completely unhinged and doing something that doesn't look like the original work?

If we’re going to argue about that, we need a common vocabulary. I have come up with four tiers. Each has its own purpose, its own traps, and its own iconic successes and disasters.

One to One. Treats the source material not just as inspiration, but as an infallible holy text. The creators trace over the original work like tracing paper. Every line of iconic dialogue is kept verbatim, every visual beat mirrors a comic panel or book description, and the pacing follows the source material to a fault. The trap here is medium incompatibility. Novels have internal monologues and infinite prose time; comic books have static panels; video games have interactivity.

Examples?

• The average manga to anime adaptation tends to be one to one.
• Sin City is almost one to one with the original comic book, disorganized stories and all.

Almost Transcribed: It is the story, characters, themes, and major plot beats, but it knows that a movie, TV show, or game is a completely different beast than a book or comic. The writers aren't trying to change the story, they cut fluff, combine minor characters to streamline the cast, alter pacing to fit a 2-hour runtime (or a 10-episode season), and reframe internal thoughts into visual storytelling. The trap is knowing what to cut. Cut the wrong subplot, and you ruin a character.

Examples?

• The Peter Jackson threatical edits of the Lord of the Rings, they cut down tons of scenes that only slowed down the plot or only slowed down the pacing or bloated it.
• The Last of Us by HBO grabbed all the plot beats and adapted them one to one or expanded them, removing the gameplay only sections unless they were plot mandatory.

New Spin: Takes the core premise, character archetypes, or thematic engine of the source material and drops them into an entirely new genre, setting, structure, or modern context. They’re asking: "What if we took this classic skeleton and put completely new flesh on it?" or "What is the core message of this story, and how can we put it on a nother setting?". When it fails, it feels pretentious or disrespectful, like a director who thought they were smarter than the author and completely missed what made the original great in the first place.

Examples?

• Almost every adaptation of The Prince and the Pauper is like this. They mess with the setting, it is rare to see one who is super close (The Barbie version and the Mickey Mouse one are extremely close in some levels).
• The Shining. Kubrick grabbed a story about a haunted hotel turning a dysfunctional man into a total madman, and decided to just go crazy by making the main character dysfunctional from the get-go and removing the talking.
• Mamoru Oshii's Ghost in the Shell. He grabbed a manga that was 50% funny and 50% serious and made it 100% serious and melancholic.

In Name Only: A studio buys the intellectual property rights to a popular book, comic, or game, and then throws out 99% of the plot, the lore, the character dynamics, and often the core themes, the final script bears almost zero resemblance to the original work. 90% of the time, INO adaptations anger the built-in fanbase and confuse casual viewers, but the other 10% you get absolute gold.

Examples?

• World War Z the movie and the game: Max Brooks’ novel is an incredible, fake oral history of a global zombie pandemic, structured as a series of political, geopolitical, and military interviews from around the world. The movie? A fast-paced, globetrotting Brad Pitt action flick about fast-running zombie swarms. It has literally nothing to do with the book beyond having zombies, the Indian-Pakistan war, the wall in Israel and the same title.
• Stalker the videogame: In the original book, aliens visited Earth, stopped by for a brief moment and then left. They just left behind their toxic, bizarre, radioactive litter in six "Visiting Zones" across the globe, the main character, Redrick Schuhart, is a "Stalker", an illegal scavenger who sneaks into the Canadian Zone to loot bizarre alien artifacts. Then the soviet movie shows up and just removed 90% of the content and but kept the depressing stuff. And then the game goes and throws away things too; the alien Premise? Gone, replaced by Chernobyl's nuclear reactor exploding and the noosphere experiment, the book is a character drama about a desperate father while the game is a tactical FPS survival horror where you mag-dump a rusty Kalashnikov into bloodsuckers and bandits, the book's Zone is outside a fictional Canadian town called Harmont, the game’s Zone is the actual Chernobyl Exclusion Zone.

An adaptation ain't bad just because it's a New Spin, and a show isn't automatically brilliant just because it's One-to-One. The art of adaptation isn't about copying text; it's about understanding what makes the original tick and finding a way to make it beat in a completely different chest.

And if you are gonna say "If you're going to throw out the entire book/game and keep almost nothing, why didn't you just write an original movie/game with a new title?"

Come closer. A little closer. Yeah, right here, give me your ear... LAWSUITS FUCKING EXIST.

While Soviet copyright law was wildly different from Western law, authors still owned the intellectual property of their works. When GSC Game World started developing S.T.A.L.K.E.R. in 2001, the Soviet Union had been dead for a decade. Ukraine and Russia were fully integrated into international copyright agreements (Like the Berne Convention). You couldn't just steal a famous Russian book and sell it globally in 2007 without getting sued to death. GSC Game World originally wanted to make an official, licensed adaptation of Roadside Picnic. They actually approached Boris Strugatsky to buy the video game rights. The problem? The film and adaptation rights to Roadside Picnic were already tied up in a nightmare web of international Hollywood option deals; so they went and changed absolutely everything to dodge a lawsuit.

This happened with I, Robot too. Jeff Vintar wrote an original script called Hardwired. It was a murder mystery involving a robot. Fox bought it and then it hit them... "If we make this, Asimov’s estate or the publisher is going to sue our pants off for knocking off the Three Laws of Robotics," so they bought the rights to I, Robot, glued the two together, and hired Will Smith.

Slapping the official IP title is sometimes literal copyright armor.

Yeah, I am powerscaling real life. Problem? I was bored.

Nerfs happen and people start typing. Nerf Greninja. Nerf the Golden Gun. Nerf Gojo. Nerf whatever new weapon just one-shot you across the map in patch 69.420. People act like their favorite character getting a 5% damage reduction or a slightly longer cooldown is the absolute end of the world.

If you want to talk about a real character-ruining, absolute disrespect of a nerf. Look at what the world did to the horse and the chicken.

No fictional media has ever subjected two characters to the level of systemic, generational, humiliating disrespect that history handed these two animals.

Let’s start with the horse, because this fella went from god tier to posturing.

For thousands of years, the horse was the entire game; no horse? You were softlocked. The horse was the ultimate multi-role. You had shock cavalry crashing into infantry lines like a freight train and doing massive psychological fear to entire armies. You had horses pulling trade caravans across continents, hauling early siege engines, and turning agrarian economies up to max efficiency. Alexander the Great didn't conquer half the known world on a moped; he did it because his horse build was cracked

And how did umanity and technological progress reward the horse? By doing everything in their power to kill it.

It wasn't even the horse's fault! The horse didn't get lazy. It didn't lose its stats.

• Gunpowder.
• Rifles.
• Machine guns.
• Internal combustion engines.

Imagine being a top-tier, meta-defining shock cavalry unit for three thousand years, and suddenly some guy in a trench coat pulls up in a metal box that runs on dead dinosaurs and shoots fire out of a pipe at 600 rounds per minute.

Today, what is the horse doing? It’s eating carrots in a fenced-in square, running races, wearing a decorative ribbon at a county fair, or being a very expensive, high-maintenance organic lawnmower.

If the horse got screwed over by external tech creep, the chicken got gene edited into bottom tier.

They were airborne, feathered terror machines that could kill rats or fight off other birds.

And then humans got their hands on them.

Human developers realized that flying, aggressive murder-birds were terrible for farming efficiency. So they spent centuries selectively breeding every ounce of dignity, combat capability, and survival instinct out of the chicken build.

Most modern chickens have massive, heavy bodies attached to tiny, withered wings. They can barely clear a low garden fence. If a predator shows up, their flight response is basically non-existent.

Modern commercial chickens? They can literally get bullied, cornered, and eliminated by a regular sewer rat.

Sure, you have feral game-fowl and angry roosters out in the wild that can still throw hands and leave a nasty slash on a human leg or a stray cat. But 99% of the chicken population has been reduced to a literal walking protein source.

No anime writer has ever cooked up a tragedy that severe. No game developer has ever dropped a nerf that harsh.

Browser game played on Newgrounds (HTML5 / late Flash era).

2D Puzzle Platformer / Experimental Social Experiment.

Played around 3 to 4 years ago (around 2020–2022).

Simple 2D sprite art with a straightforward, classic indie platformer look. It was clean, extremely simple, focusing heavily on the obstacles (spikes, pits, traps) and the ragdoll/static player corpses cluttering the level.

Nothing overly detailed, meant to represent "you" as just one of thousands of disposable participants.

When you died on an obstacle, your character's corpse stayed on the server right where you fell. The corpse turned into a solid, safe platform.

Because thousands of people were playing, high-lethal areas became flooded with a massive pile of player bodies. Over time, the community created literal "corpse bridges" over deadly traps, making the level much easier for subsequent players.

If you died, you were immediately kicked out and couldn't play again for 24 hours.

The game saved a browser cookie (or local storage flag) to enforce the 24-hour lockout and stop you from immediately respawning to spam body-stacking on your own.

You relied on other players across the globe dying in strategic spots so that when your 24-hour ban lifted, new corpses might be waiting there to help you push slightly further into the level.

Featured simple, looping background music that gave it an atmospheric, slightly minimalist vibe.

All embrace me

It’s my time to rule at last

I was chosen by heaven

Say my name when you pray

What an absolutely crazy run, I turned Sweden from a minor power to an absolute powerhouse that broke Russia's back with the help of Germany. You can invade Germany and Canada but I decided against it because I was completely satisfied.

This run was so crazy because I had to save Iran's butt when they fought the ottomans alongside the Cairo Axis, allowing me to get Turkey and Iraq which proceeded to wall Russia in the middle east alongside Iran. Spain didn't collapse into a civil war, and they garrisoned everything.

Members of my anti-Russia faction: Iran, Iraq, Mexico, Spain, Turkey.