COOL ROBOT!!!!!!!!!!!!! (Labor Is Entitled To All That It Creates.)

[braintransplant]

 i finished PARTIZAN. shoutout to noura who never misses when recommending things to me...i have to lay down forever now. like in a drainage ditch on the side of the highway. but i have to go to school so instead i will loosely assemble my thoughts here in bullet points that occur in no particular order

• you guys...listen to friends at the table. if weird military sci fi isnt your jam than skip partizan and go to some other season but seriously friends at the table just GETS IT. THEY GET IT!!!
• austin walker i need to study your mind in a lab NOW. austin is not only a really good GM but also just smart and cool as fuck. my only other experience w/ actual play podcast format is like critical role (which bored me though matt mercer is obviously a very good GM) and dimension 20 fantasy high (in which brennan lee mulligan is a highly entertaining GM despite the genre of fantasy high being way outside my tastes), so maybe i just have too small a sampling size but i loooove the way austin GMs. he really balances honesty and humor and just straight up good storytelling with drama and seriousness somehow...and he's so good at just Saying Words. so many quotes and monologues of his from a nearly 50 episode season still stick in my head. he cooked up some sick as shit missions and played one of my fav characters of all time; gur sevraq. austin slay!!!!
• the mechanics of beam saber are so fucking BRUTAL (in a good way). rolling d6s instead of d20s like most other tabletop rbgs/actual play podcasts do makes the stakes soooo high. the stress mechanic that makes it harder to help characters you care about it so crazy. as someone who loves failure and humiliation i like how beam saber really forces players to just fail constantly, without the wishy washyness of rolling like, an 8 on a d20. in beam saber if you roll a 1 or 2 You're In Grave Danger. 
• ver'million blue my friend ver'million blue. whats a greater character manifesto than i am the gun on this ship. 
• jack de quidt music. when that evil synth hits>>>>>>>>
• two people whose morals are diametrically opposed getting into a massive argument until they physically attack each other and fall to their deaths off the top of a giant fort into the ocean IS the pinnacle of character interaction
• ideograms everywhere. ideograms as codes. ideograms on rings. ideograms as overrides. ideograms as song titles. what do you know about SOFTPOINT. UMBRAL. TOUCHPAPER. 
• partizan character are so fun and perfect TO ME. space pirate with a camera as a head. buff old guy. evil yet totally moronic princess. robotic spider priest. clone school dropout. sexy war criminal. farming robot. alien made of gas. history teacher made of bismuth. gay bird steeplejack. person whose existence is the concept of 'diminished'. evil spy mom. a person who is the concept of erosion but 1000 years of it at once. witch in glass castle. 
• "play your character like you're crashing a stolen car"
• sovereign immunty's first belief about millie being "millie is a delight, i simply must show her to the whole universe" versus sovereign immunity dying carrying millie away from motion/the portcullis
• straight up nothing is funnier than clementine kesh almost dying in the first arc of the season because of bad dice rolls on PC performed surgery. 
• "valence died. we had no idea that was coming. i was like, ali, i think we might have to end the season now, i think the seasons actually over. im not sure what we're doing." so true austin post-mortem walker. i love how the back half of partizan s1 is so nebulous in that in every episode no one on mic has any idea when the season will end. anything can happen. AND IT DOES
• "braun lies to me because they think i am a person" simultaneously the saddest and funniest bond/belief ever
• in the beginning i really preferred rapid evening episodes more than sbbr episodes but look at me now, dying in agony at how the peak of romanze is playing your dead best friends voicemail to a 1000 yr old prophet as a black ops organization tries to crash god into the moon
• clementine kesh truly iconic antagonist. she is so fucking stupid and incompetent that you have to love her. no offense clem. her absolute refusal to go through any character development is camp
• can we talk about gur sevraq? i've been dying to talk about gur sevraq. i think the gur sevraq was lovely. first of all click here to understand how i imagined a robotic spider priest. truly inspired character design. his intro in the road to partizan episodes is sooo cool. wwyd if My name is Gur Sevraq, and I have stolen the future. i feel like i am forgetting everything i love about gur i wish partizan wiki was filled out fully so i could relive it all!!!! anyway he is able to make miracles happen...one of which is making a giant walking military fort disappear. ALSO I JUST REALIZED GUR SEVRAQ IS ROT13 FOR 'THE FRIEND' :(
• imagine if you died and your mom went 'in death you can be something you never were in life: useful." CLEMENTINE KESH DOESN'T HAVE TO
• ao rooke always keeping it real. i love when he shows up, talks some shit, and bounces
• nooncrown mission where valence murder-suicides crysanthe...whats better than this; every roll going horribly wrong simultaneously 
• chasmata quarry mission was SO FUN. i love a good disguise plan....the drama of splitting up the original squad of 4, then phrygian and sovereign being like ummmmm maybe we should split up again?
• every day thisbe is throwing mech pilots into the vacuum of space
• the absolute soul-crushingness of witch in glass first law being There is a reason why I am alive. 
• IM COMING BACK TO EDIT THIS POST WHEN I GATHER MORE THOUGHTS

personal fav episode titles

• bitter air - behest
• the first and second arrests of clementine kesh
• she said, "to win, we must play!"
• the storm over cruciat
• obelle, on fire
• a cemetery for heroes
• GLORY arrives
• guests, invited and otherwise
• orbital decay
• escape velocity
• operation shackled sun: the gate

Comments

[prizefig]

YES!!!!! YES!!!!!! HAHAHAHA YES!!!!!!!! i hope my absolute glee and delight has been coming thru every time i like your pzn tweets but i'm seriously so happy you enjoyed it 😄😄😄

i'm trying to remember like... any of my in depth thoughts at this point, particularly about the early game, but i think i was pretty much feeling the same as you where i enjoyed the rapid evening a lot more than sbbr. i really really liked the premise set up by milli's character even though i got the sense that sylvi wanted different things for her as a player than i did as a listener. also ofc clem was soooooo AWFUL and PERFECT, hahaha, i remember distinctly feeling like clem and milli should be the toxic femslash hatefuck ship that never materialized... for obvious reasons on the show, but also fatt fandom generally aren't really the type of people to go for like... coercive warden x prisoner setups. well, that's fine. the nearly botched surgery also stands out to me as a big turning point where i was like OKAY i am totally bought into this season, i know they talked about not wanting to make it too grotesque but PLEASE MEDICAL HORROR IN MY MOUTH PLEASE PLEASE. i don't remember where in the season the first motion encounter happened, but that + clem deciding fuck the mission and taking over fort icebreaker were also big moments from the pre-kingdom game for me.

we already talked a bit about clem/gur and the witch in glass arc, but it's seriously just sooooooo good when austin and jack start to do their telepathic mindmeld shit and let some absolutely bonkers off the walls stuff come out of their mouths... there was a lot of negativity around the witch in glass arc at the time it came out because the clem hate was Extremely Real but like... at risk of coming across like a clem stan.... i obviously enjoyed it very much. though i do remember being like "this is fanfic? they're just doing canon divergence au fanfic on the show?" when i first heard it lmao perennial/clem ship ♥ clem/gur ship ♥

ummm i definitely have more thoughts on like game mechanics and systems stuff that we can get into later + i've recently been itching to run a beam saber campaign so...... hello 😏 (though don't expect austin walker caliber gming from me) and basically i will have to relisten before p2n starts anyway so i could be back with more thoughts by ummm... january... maybe....

i don't remember if you said on twitter that you were planning to listen to any other seasons next? i think you would enjoy the rest of the divine trilogy a lot, counter/weight is probably still my favorite season and has more cool robots/another clone school dropout pc/more on the nose Capitalism Is The Real Big Bad theme. i was a bit disappointed by twilight mirage the first time because austin gets so on his bullshit so fast that it was a bit hard for me to follow or latch onto, but i've enjoyed the first half a lot more on the onion listen this year.

[braintransplant]

ehehe yes i promise you imagined every fucked up ship possible in this show, which as you said fandom doesn't really go for for obvious reasons. and YEHAAAA the first motion encounter that comob'd with the first black century encounter right before the whole fort icebreaker takeover is soooooo good.

witch in glass arc is so interesting because i do like it but i also think i would have liked it a little better if both clem and gur just stayed dead. both are good but in terms of long form narrative witch in glass path is more fun because you can get way more mileage out of both their characters. jack and austin really do have some drift compatibleness i love listening to them just Talk

im listening to counter/weight next!!! in pzn postmortem they said they drew on c/w stuff quite a bit so i want to Understand now because tbh sometimes i had no idea wtf was going on.

i know i had more thoughts about partizan but its so big and complicated and i listened to it over like 9 months so i cant remember half of them except COOL ROBOT

[prizefig]

hehe nice!! enjoy!!! i think pzn is def listenable without having heard c/w but knowing what you know about pzn will totally make c/w hit different. c/w is also a lot more accessible, like, thematically... even with the faction game being a little bit lost in the weeds, you should manage fine if you can't necessarily follow all of it. whereas pzn absolutely has a lot going on, but it's still MUCH more accessible than tm.

yeah tbh i think i was pretty ambivalent on everything following the kingdom game (and possibly even the kingdom game) but at points the execution really sold a lot of of concepts that i found questionable. it's interesting that you said you liked the nebulosity of the late game because i was kinda having my mind boggled every episode trying to make all the disparate plot points they were throwing out come together... going from the extended kingdom game to two random beam saber missions to valence dying to the witch in glass interlude to three new pcs being introduced to the finale had some really stilted momentum to it, but it was pretty obvious (if not outright stated) at that point that there would be a season 2 so i was just like, alright i guess i'll just ride this out and things will stabilize a bit in the end. oh and i just realized this was your first listening experience, so maybe that's why you were kind of rolling with the punches whereas i was like... trying to use the previous seasons to predict what was coming next but pzn turned out so much weirder, like, metastructurally.

THANK YOU FOR GETTING ME THO... who else do i have to join me in depravity and perversion if not you <3

[braintransplant]

LOL i appreciate your perspective on the disorganized chaos of the second half of partizan...basically its like you said: this was my first listening experience so every time something seemed kind of odd i was just like Hm...Well It Must Always Be Like This! like at first i was kind of shocked by the switching of the game they were playing from beam saber to kingdom, but i got used to it and then wasn't shocked again when it switched to beam saber/the tower/war in the year 3000. i was shocked by leap no longer being a PC, then shocked by clem dying, then valence dying, and then i just assumed introducing new PCS in the middle/end of a season was pretty par for the course, which it apparently isn't LOL!!! im just along for the ride, no clue whats normal and whats not

[prizefig]

changing games is pretty typical, usually for holiday specials and finales and sometimes they'll need to switch systems for other reasons but pzn had far and away the highest pc turnover of every season, mostly by having any pc turnover at all... past seasons didn't have any irreversible pc deaths/defections before finales

[latespring]

this is very compelling!! I might pick up a few episodes when I have more time; I haven't listened to any dice game podcasts since the adventure zone (which only engages very loosely with the gameplay aspect of it all). I've heard good things about austin walker too!!

[braintransplant]

YEHAAAAA

i had a slow time getting into it since the early eps just have to contain a lot of info about the world/characters but it was sooo worth it to me!! if military sci fi doesnt do it for you you can also go the podcast's twt @ friends_table where they've pinned a fun flow chart about what season you should listen to based on your tastes