By Harry Fakename, Coreward Cell Arts Critic-Atlantis Interstellar Courier Dispatch in Exile
If you have people, you have media, it has always been such: even a single person isolated on an island or a space-station will make up stories to stave off madness and keep themselves entertained.
There is always a media landscape, and for much of the past two centuries that landscape has been dominated by Hermes-Ishtar and its predecessors. Massive interstellar corporations with the SolCoin to rival God and the drive to fill every mind with their product at every moment.
Every living being was exposed to the promoted genius of HI's product, carefully planned and executed sometimes decades in advance, the one single overriding goal of Hermes-Ishtar was not to make money directly, but capture and own the imaginations of every citizen of the Community of Humanity.
Great projects were launched, immense campaigns waged, springing off from great cultural marshaling grounds like those of Chronicle, Symphony, or Elysium and all centrally planned from Number One Aspire Plaza on Penglai by rank after rank of dedicated marketing personnel and a constellation of all-too-perfect executives.
Yet despite this, most media produced in the Compact remained locally sourced, often not even produced by Hermes-Ishtar. Indeed, large segments of the media landscape were produced by the other Charters for internal consumption in the frontiers (sometimes by subsidiaries or by contracting out to Hermes-Ishtar) or by companies local to the First Colonies and thus proportionately powerful in their own right. The leading example of such being the family owned Sun Media empire of Penglai.
The power and planning of Hermes-Ishtar and the immense scale of the First Colonies means that the mass media landscape has been integrated into a single market with many tiny segments ripe for exploitation. While any single individual may find themselves with a unique media consumption pattern, they will remain aware of a shared landscape around them.
This single media sphere is in fact something that the Cosmoliberal Establishment of the Solarian Compact is quite proud of, as it reinforces the concept of the Community of Humanity as being a single indivisible whole.
Though challenged by Amaranthine's Broadcast and the subsequent political strife, that single media sphere has remained. In fact, the participation of the Amaranthine revolutionaries in the RBC and SolComm projects has strengthened the idea of all Humanity participating in a single living media ecosystem, giving it legs as a project that may outlive the Cosmoliberalism that birthed it.
That is to say, the current media landscape of Humanity finds itself in the midst of sea change. We find ourselves in a transitional period where the ideas of yesteryear and tomorrow exist together at once. Where the great media behemoths decay and metamorphosize at the same time as new properties emerge onto the scene and both the private and personal find themselves on the same screen as the ideological and state-mandated.
To begin, we look back to recent years. For multiple media cycles now the Compact's media landscape has been dominated by the 'Feel Good' movie. Often (though not always) set in an idealized past, these properties tended to have little ongoing plot and focused instead on mood, crafting an unchallenged and enjoyable experience. These properties centered themselves on broadly drawn and unthreatening characters -characters a consumer could easily insert themselves into. This crypto-voyeuristic experience let billions imagine themselves separated from the hustle and bustle of the workday and instead leading an easy and comfortable life.
While the leading examples of the format were feature films, regular half hour installments of various series were how most regularly experienced this vibes-based artistic movement. Often a popular series would receive elevation to relevancy with a feature film or a successful film would inspire an extended series.
As for Unscripted Content, the world of XP was tailor made for the Feel Good era. Ideally XP stars would participate in experiences or consume products that the average consumer had trouble finding the time and money for. While in previous eras this would trend towards the exhilarating or titillating, more recent XP stars would instead record themselves in comfortable and relatable situations. Relatable or comfortable situations facilitated by the goods and services of whoever was sponsoring the broadcast.
Many predicted the fall of this genre after the smash success of "Empty Passages" and its sequel, which heralded the rise of what became known as the 'Frontier Thriller'. Representing what feature movies and games could provide best: sweeping action and epic setpieces an uncountable number of imitators were rushed into production.
Most of these, ended up high-profile flops. The most infamous of these failures were HI Big Set Features "Edge of Space" and "Hollow Guns" both flops due to endless director driven cost overruns and failure to capture the moral ambiguity that characterized the Frontier Thriller. Interestingly enough the Frontier Thriller found its true calling as mid-budget TV series. "Only the Sky Can Save Us from Our Own Sins", "Hollow Dawn", and "Morningstar" proved to be smash hits for original properties and semi-successful in their own rights, avoiding cancellation for multiple seasons while building a devoted following of hundreds of millions or even low billions.
While the Frontier Thriller genre did displace the Feel Good movie and game from the Feature Product and Mid Budget Show market segments and posed a challenge to the dominance of the Feel Good era, Feel Good media remained dominant with smaller series and XP recordings until the Broadcast upended the entire landscape.
Since the Broadcast has been another matter entirely, one that must be dealt with on a region by region basis. I've included some major media you might have heard of and should probably be aware of, even watch if you want to understand it. I don't promise it's all good, or even moral, but it is good to understand where our current media landscape is at. You should of course, follow all legal requirements of whatever place you are in and definitely not look for illegal methods of media consumption made easier thanks to the technologies of the broadcast.
Despite her fallen status, Earth's population and diversity of culture ensured that her status as a cultural production center never really went away in the same way as her policial and industrial strength.
Though more and more media from Earth tended to hide its origins, the Broadcast, and a wave of planet-wide patriotic fervour, has gripped Earth. While patriotism is at an all time high, the current trend lends itself towards a patriotism of 'our nation and all our buddies on Earth vs the Compact' rather than the traditional patriotism of nation vs nation. This patriotism also tends to be both top down and bottom up, with state funded Feature Productions accompanied by a flood of amature productions coming out at a pace that is threatening to overtake even Penglai's traditionally prodigious output.
As befits such an important cultural center, more than one of their local products has entered the galaxy's discourse and imaginations.
Fellow Travelers represents the 'top down' side of Earth's patriotism. A prestige drama and Small Stage Feature directed by the legendary Miranda Ogundare (rumored to have been coaxed out of retirement by a personal visit from UNS General Secretary himself)
Fellow Travellers tells the story of how the real historical figures of Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Joseph Stalin worked together to defeat fascism at the start of the atomic age.
By turns harrowing and heartwarming it's a propaganda piece with a surprisingly dark comedic edge that allows some honest points about the flaws of both men. Told in an almost epistolemic style unfolding over nearly two decades,
Fellow Travellers sits in an odd place where it could almost, almost have been something that would evade the wartime censor's brush for general release, but an unseemly brutality towards the invading Germans in Russia saw its distribution limited in Loyalist space among with press outrage -something which has only enhanced its mystique and deepened its viewership.
Fellow Travelers ends on a tragic tone, where the stress of war ends up destroying both men. FDR dies in a literal manner, leaving Stalin to drink himself into a shell of a man who returns to his paranoid ways. In their wake there is a falling out that weakens both their nations. A harrowing timeline of collapse that interspersed the credits of
Fellow Travelers implies that the collapse of both the United States and Soviet Union and the return of fascism in the 21st century stems from the inability of their successors to deal a final deathblow to international capitalism and their own countries' incipient imperial ambitions.
Contrasting the stories of Miranda Ogundare and Studio Hadi,
2 Nations comes from Áoxiáng Studio. Founded in the wake of the Broadcast, Áoxiáng Studio drew its staff from that segment of Chinese creatives previously employed in what were derisively called the "HI Farms". A success for the newly formed group,
2 Nations has been hailed as a foretaste of what post-Compact Earth Media could and should be.
Like
Fellow Travelers,
2 Nations is a Feature Product set during the Second World War around the time of the foundation of United Nations itself. Unlike the Small Stage
Fellow Travelers, this Big Set Feature has been described as an "ahistorical historic". Nominally
2 Nations is about a volunteer squadron of United States pilots named "The Flying Tigers" aiding a weak China against the invading Japanese Empire.
But what
2 Nations is really about is the
People's Republic of China and the Democratic Federation, and doesn't hide it. The American pilots are heavily coded as modern Chinese, and the Chinese coded as modern DF, though each mixes this with actual historical aesthetics in a way meant to deliberately blur the lines, given
2 Nations an incredibly unique stylization. This look has buoyed an ongoing wave of interest in looking back to historical Earth-cultural aesthetics rather than interstellar Compact-focused ones.
CSI: Pacific City was a gritty show about the grim lives of Pacific city, where in order to catch the criminals the cops tortured, killed, lied, and worse to hold the line against a greater evil. Which was, of course, treated as necessary and good. Post revolution, some creators, along with some remaining cast members, reimagined the show with an iconoclastic and contrarian ACAB bent.
The previous heroes are now the villains, and many of the villains revealed to have indeed been innocent like they claimed or to have committed crimes far less than those they were punished for.
Normally
Real Pacific City would have entered the local consciousness and maybe picked up a mod sized following, but two things have propelled it to galactic fame.
Firstly, locally "
CSI:RPC" captured a key zeitgeist of Pacific City shortly after the North American Resurgence, and then in turn clips and then entire episodes made it out to the wider Compact, enraging or enrapturing fans of the original show, whose engagement in turn fueled further engagement throughout UNS and allied space.
Pacifica especially has developed an especially large following with Patriot faction leader Gergory Liao promoting the show as an example of the Federation's own drive for militant justice being universal. Naturally
CSI: RPC has inspired the production of several local imitators in the Citizens' Federation.
As a show, the number of contributors and often amateur writing leads to wildly varying tones and quality.
CSI:RPC is often satirically biting at the original show, or even mean spirited anger. It has episodes that hit like a knife and ones that just flail without a point.
Overall the most recent series has started to even out as the creators find their footing and have gotten a glut of volunteers, but even so it's an open question weather
CSI:RPC will attain any real staying power or merely be relegated to a flash in the pan phenomenon.
Luminary
Taking advantage of Hermes Ishtar having lost their control of Terrestrial Media, and the UNS General Assembly throwing the Charter's intellectual properties into the public domain, Studio Hadi, one of the genuinely prestigious Earth-based Egyptime studios, opted to adapt this hit
Empty Passages fanfic (In which Captain Loria finds herself captured by Rosepierre).
Interestingly,
Luminary itself is something of a fanfic having received a major revision along with the blessings of the original writer. While the original fic kept the original
Empty Passages premise that the revolution had gone too far even if Rosepierre herself was good, rewrites blessed by original
Luminary writer Ms. Alija Han opts to instead have Loria confront the evils of the Compact itself.
From my own review, I can tell you that
Luminary is 'the most fucking Egyptime space fight that ever Egyptime'. And 'someone on this team is horny for sleek triangle ships, and is giving several people new fetishes'.
The latest iteration of the
CAPITAL PD series of police procedurals overseen by regular producer Armand Maras, CPD:CT reunites CAPITAL franchise veterans with Atlantis' most talked about up and coming talent.
Following the fictional Counter Terrorism Unit of the Capital City Police Department, writers, actors, and staff of CPD:CTU have been given unprecedented access to the CCPD's very real Terrorism Response And Prevention Section under the direction of a Normal Regime which sees CPD:CTU as a key locus in habituating Atlanteans to the day to day reality of law enforcement under the PROTECT laws.
Headlined by veteran CAPITAL PD actor Vincent Montrose returning in his role as Captain Cal Malheur, newly reassigned to the CTU after an initially unspecified terrorist attack on the fictional Precinct 51 (The setting of the recently concluded CAPITAL PD: PRECINCT 51). He is joined by an all-star ensemble cast who find themselves weekly drawn into the machinations of extremist groups threatening the Peace, Order, and Good Government of Atlantis even as Captain Malheur investigates off the books to uncover the true culprits behind the destruction of Precinct 51.
The result is a glossy but cynical procedural who's plots are often too fanciful for its general aesthetic. Almost every episode arc features low level criminal acts turning out to be the machinations of some shadowy outside force. As of the current point, nearing the end of the second blockbuster season, all of the "Congressional People's Navy RAVENS", "United Earth Special Forces", "Revolutionary Student and Workers's United Front", and "Baseline Rights Alliance", have all taken turns as being the shadowy mastermind of their own respective arcs. As of the current arc, it appears that all four groups are secretly working together to stir the pot on Atlantis, backing the frightening "Shadow Council" of the "All-Atlantis Industrial Workers' Union" a corrupt Adamsist union with links to organized crime.
As a show CPD:CTU is a perfect example of Atlantis' new favorite production model: establishment propaganda in a mid budget TV format dressed up like a Big Set Feature Production. Take an existing franchise, give its producers a budget bigger than God, grant them exclusive access to subject matter experts, lend them real government resources to fill in the gaps and then sprinkle liberally with veteran actors and younger up and comer true believers willing to give their all.
CTU's ripped from the headlines veneer and Normal Regime support do little to detract from the slick and well produced series, because as a show CPD: CTU delivers well acted and well presented chills and thrills, moving at a pace so fast that one doesn't have time to really think about the politics on display.
A trio of Small Stage Feature Production films about the refugee experience presented in reverse chronological order,
Captured Raindrops follows the generational struggles of a Chinese family through the Xinhai Revolution, the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, and the Fourteen Days as they suffer upheaval at the hands of revolutionaries heedlessly causing destruction in the pursuit of an impossible dream.
While each generation is forced from China by the actions of utopian idealists causing untold horrors, they eventually return to their homeland helping to restore prosperity, only for the cycle to repeat again. Using period sources and current day interviews with refugees from Earth
Captured Raindrops captures their mourning for their lost home, the feelings of disconnection, and lack of understanding among those they meet in atmospheric scenes that are allowed the time to properly breathe in Director J Nilfar's signature Atlantean Melancholy style.
While its political themes are obvious (Revolution is bad, nowhere on Earth is safe until the revolution collapses on itself) an undeniable authenticity and heartfelt production makes
Captured Raindrops J Nilfar's, one of the best known of the Atlantean new wave's normal melancholy style. The result is a heartfelt drama which has seen large scale distribution even on Penglai and other revolutionary worlds.
While there are currently no rumblings of spin offs, rumour also holds that originally
Captured Raindrops was a single movie about the most recent generation of refugees produced out of pocket by Nilfar and a circle of friends. It was only after by the Atlantean Ratings Board that Normal Regime media liaisons suggested that the movie be expanded to a full trilogy leading to a hasty production schedule for the later two period piece Feature Productions.
The latest in the
Great Wars ™ franchise of hard core competitive online strategy games,
Compact's Edge has been in production for nearly a decade. Despite an extended production cycle that would usually herald disaster,
Compact's Edge has come out to near universally positive to glowing reviews, with its eclectic mix of micro and macro scales being well-received.
Compact's Edge narrative (such as it is) involves taking the players through a series of campaigns reminiscent of the actual Charter Frontier Wars, or alternate scenarios branching off from various "what ifs".
Compact's Edge also sees the return of the "referee" system returning from 2243's smash-hit spin off "
Great Wars: Campaigns: -Warpath" in which the player is encouraged to balance their degree of conflicts with other Charters against the possibility of Naval and Parliamentary involvement if they create too much market disruption or become front page news.
With the success of
Compact's Edge, official and consumer-involved expansion content is already announced to be on the way being proposed for the game involving alien invasions, major alternate histories, and more detailed gameplay.
However, not all is smooth sailing for
Great Wars Studios as some Normal Regime media figureheads view its moderately anti-Charter, if generically pro-Compact atmosphere as potentially disloyal. Already a petition with several million signatures has been forwarded to
Great Wars Studios asking that the studio rush out official expansion content set in the current moment in which a resurgent Solarian Compact crushes crazed Anarchist Revolts on the Frontier.
Thus far
Great War Studios have refused to bend, citing that it goes against their creative vision as a history focused series. This has led the Atlantis Rating Agency to publically muse on increasing the rating for the entire
Great Wars Series to Adults Only, or pulling its advertising from public spaces. At the moment, however, the controversy has only driven sales and given it the appearance of a far more politically radical game than it truly is.
The latest iteration of the long running and oft rebooted
Ghost Recon series,
Risen Ghosts is a 2070s Feature Product game period piece that follows the titular United States special forces over the period of the death of the United States through their long exile during and into the last days of the Democratic Federation. The plot of
Risen Dead involves the Ghosts attempts to prevent a group of anarchist terrorist cyborgs known as the "Revenants" to build and use the "Atmospheric Depletion Bomb" (a fictional super weapon) against their political and personal enemies.
Rated as dire and barely functioning on release,
Risen Dead had a deeply troubled production. Initially set in eastern Europe in the early 2020s and featuring Gangster Russia as the antagonists, production was hastily retooled into the current game after an infusion of USC Army funding.
The result, a much expanded, but extremely buggy game that required a 120 hour a week crunch by most of the staff. While officially painted as a passion project, off the books there have been reports of several hospitalizations from the abuse of stimulants and circadian regulators by programming staff.
The current v1.390c patch has put
Risen Dead in a more or less functional state, though most players prefer the early stage setting sections, where the Ghosts are on a mission in Eastern Europe (reusing assets from the original 2020s maps but pushing the timeline forward) when they hear the news of the fall of the USA into anarchy. While the "Interregnum" chapters are well regarded for their asymmetrical cat and mouse gameplay against Democratic Federation secret police during the Federation's height, the concluding fall of the Federation segments are comparatively much weaker, and the publisher, FreedomSoft, has promised further patches to improve things.
Recent discourse has revolved around how deep
Risen Dead's emotional story beats actually are when not interrupted by crashes or glitches. Telling a story of exile, revenge, and hatred,
Risen Dead appears to draw a direct correlation between the Ghosts and Revenants, with the Revenants playing the role of dark mirror with all the worst moments of the Revenants being reflected in some way by the Ghosts before a sadly underwhelming climactic set piece in Earth Orbit that sees the Ghosts defeating their personal and professional demons embodied by the various members of the Revenant team.
The discourse around the story is sadly not driven by the merits of the game as a work of art, but over how much of said depth was patched in (a common joke is to post an image of FreedomSoft patch notes solely containing the words "Added Gameplay and Story") after the fact. Much of the story of the middle act was entirely rewritten between release and the present, moderating a much more bombastic tone and adding in character beats that would be retroactively called back in the closing act.
Those used to FreedomSoft's usual politics will be pleased to note that
Risen Dead has a surprisingly friendly and nuanced portrayal of augments, including interactions between the squad and new cyborg member Able.
A crossover with popular monster movie franchise Howlers is planned for release in the next few months.
The sequel of a somewhat-successful Feel Good Big Stage comedy featuring a lagomorph augment babysitter teaching her charge basketball in order to stick it to a neighborhood bully, with the surprise twist that augment "Bell O'Hare" didn't know anything about basketball herself.
This movie takes the usual response to the success of the first
Bounding by expanding the scale and stakes. Now known in the neighborhood as an expert basketball coach, O'Hare finds herself coaching an entire team of kids for the Big Tournament and being just as unprepared for the job as before, with predictably comedic results.
A Feel Good Era Feature Product film released post broadcast,
Bounding II is absolutely out of sync with the current cultural moment, even disregarding rumored production issues. The film would be unremarkable if not for Humanist influencers on Columbia pointing to the comedic consequences of O'Hare's inexperience as the 'Natural result of putting an augment in a position of power'. The absurdity of the statement led to a re-evaluation of the film and its ironic adaptation by the Columbian anti-Humanist community in memes.
Having observed the buzz around the movie Mercury-Manat producers are already laying the groundwork for
Bounding III.
Published by super grognard history hobby publisher Bayonet Games,
Royal Lao Army is a period piece tactical shooter centering around a unit of paratroopers fighting Communist insurgents in South East Asia during the Cold War of the 20th century.
Bayonet Games have published a large number of extremely well researched historical war games over the years, and Royal Lao Army was simply another in the series. However
Royal Lao Army's release only six months after the broadcast, and script revisions which sharpened the game's anti-Communism saw it capture the Columbian zeitgeist at the time.
Bayonet doesn't quite know what to do with this success, but is apparently workshopping several follow up ideas with their devoted fanbase.
The latest horror novel from perpetual best selling Olduvai horror writer Yonas Samuel,
Dark Depths follows a group of police officers who learn that their friends, family, and even government have been infiltrated by sinister and eldritch things from beyond the stars. These beings, called the Worms, have made common cause with various augmented radicals and seek to mutate humanity into a new slave race.
Dark Depths has been condemned by members of the ruling Social Reform Party and various media critics for its overt Humanist themes, and most horror fans and even fans of Yonas Samuel's previous works think that her Humanist politics have leaked too hard into her work.
A prestige mini-series about the Broken Circle Conspiracy and its unraveling.
Produced with unprecedented access to government and OCPS personnel and records and featuring interviews with everyone from ground level soldiers and police following both sides up to Prime Minister Izem Meziane himself,
The Broken Circle is either considered the most deeply intimate and well researched documentaries produced in recent times or blatant propaganda providing causus belli for the "real" coup, Meziane's Night of Popular Renewal.
Either way, it's hard to argue that
Broken Circle isn't very well produced, and was made with the blessing and enthusiastic cooperation of the current Olduvai government.
The revival of the smash hit orchestral-style musical Feature Product, first produced on Olduvai in 2200, has by pure chance arrived at a truly fortuitous moment under the direction of Conductor Wind Ruto and the famed Zambezi Symphony Orchestra.
A Musical Odyssey's invocation of the musical history of Sol, and especially its focus on the whole musical history, from recreations of the oldest songs in East Asia, Greece, and Africa, to a dizzying and almost worrying array of popular music, metal, remixes and more, celebrates all the facets of Earth's musical history, and thus was viewed even in 2200 as an intensely Daughter-aligned work of musical prowess.
On August 21, 2255, the current run of
A Musical Odyssey became a subject of great controversy. In its farewell performance on Olduvai, at which point it had been scheduled to go on the road across the Core Worlds (now, after hasty schedule revisions in the last months, sans Sol and Penglai), the musicians of the ZSO staged a protest at the end of the performance by playing a
very familiar chiptune ringtone before launching into several old and several new revolutionary songs from Earth, including some recent chart-toppers from just a month before.
Seen as a protest against the Atlantis Ratings Agency, which had requested veto power over the performance, the gesture led to widespread controversy which saw the musically-interested public divided but generally intrigued by the controversy.
A fairly low budget but extremely visceral Small Set horror film from Penglai, The Rats features a small student commune's battle against rats infected with the runoff from a broken corporate lab which was examining alien material.
Extremely gory and exploitative, with
The Rats main heroine (played by pre-war video blogger and real life student revolutionary Mona Chrome) and her enby love interest spend almost a third of the film naked or topless,
The Rats is emblematic of the so-called New Films on Pengalai, produced since the revolution often on almost no budget or script approval from a production company. Whether the lack of corporate oversight has really led to a good film or not is disputed by many. But regardless New Films like
The Rats and its like have become a staple of easy entertainment on Penglai.
With the protagonists being the only ones willing to fight against the rats while various other groups won't listen, won't cooperate, or have become engaged in self destructive factionalism, the film is totally unsubtle in its unificationist politics.
The Rats is also is marked by the same New Films horror genre convention of almost the entire cast going down fighting against the monster.
A sequel,
"The Plant", is in production.
Mr. February was a generally well reviewed 'Feel Good' film released in 2252 about a somewhat hapless man managing to find love and a family over a ten year period. Its sequel was released… on May 19th. Far too late for any changes in a post broadcast world.
It was not the only film to completely miss the cultural zeitgeist of a post-broadcast world. Many films did, with already released films seeing no impact post broadcast, and new releases seeing next to no viewings, or even hasty retools or canceled production.
But it was
Mr. February II that most captured the discontinuity between the news and the media being released in the public imagination, enough to grant it a second life as a discussion piece.
Part of the infamy was timing, as
Mr. February II was the largest film to be released into Penglai's revolution, and part of it was that
Mr. February II was, honestly, a rather clever film. With the plot revolving around the family moving to the colonies, the film took a comedic look at the 'Frontier Thriller' genre, lampooning a genre that had far more misses than hits.
As some critics had pointed out, in many ways
Mr. February II's writing team 'understood' the message of
Empty Passages far more than many of the trend-chasers who aped its style without substance. Underneath its comedy and feel good feelings was a comedic critique of the colonial abuses, often showing the colonies as incompetently run and as a place to send meritocrat failchidren so they won't embarrass the big families of the Core worlds.
Watching it now… there is a sense of haunting wrongness to
Mr February II. Jovial, joking critiques that were biting in one era suddenly reduced to ineffective, near toothless gnawing only weeks later.
Mr. February II's optimistic sense that everything would turn out alright feels utterly alien in the wake of recent chaos. The film's sense that the First Colonies were sturdy and certain and that some things only happened 'in the frontier' are now strange to worlds that have all experienced unimaginable upheaval, for good or for ill.
The movie's most discussed aspect these days is viewers' experiences watching something that is at once so familiar and so alien.
Adaptations of Romance of the Three Kingdoms have always been popular, but
The War of Queens is a science fantasy retelling set in an ancient human civilization with a caste entirely devoid of all types of men is perhaps the oddest to have become popular in recent years.
Much of the project's success perhaps owes to its directors, as it grew out of a project between rising star of the Penglai Landing Island action circuit Naomi Song, and darling of the Atlantean New Wave Liliana Azure. Azure's flight to Penglai shortly after the broadcast apparently left her feeling depressed and useless and the love story between her and the much younger Song has drawn attention and gossip to the project.
The initial pitch was put out more than a year before the broadcast and production was well begun when Song met Azure preparing to jump off the roof of a Landing Island party a few weeks after the Broadcast. She talked the other director down, and pulled her into the project, on the promise of teaching her a new form of cinematic language, that of action cinema.
The round of re-shoots and computer editing, and the expansion of the project brought by the Shintokyo Art School Death Commandos liberation of the massive Hermes Ishtar prop warehouse near the Charter's old HQ contributed to a massive escalation in scale for the project.
The result has been a uniquely artistic piece of action cinema which has almost perfectly captured the current Zeitgeist of chaos, hope and depression across the Compact, and has become one of the most popular pieces of media on all sides across Penglai and beyond.
Stand out performances include Kasumi Wu as Cao Cao, in a breakout performance apparently influenced by recently discovered early 21st century retellings of the story, and Daisy Kim as Zhuangzi, one of the leaders of the yellow turban rebellion, whose show stealing performance owes a lot to Empty Passage's Robespierre (and her real life inspirations).
Perhaps the single most viewed piece of media in current times (second only to the Broadcast itself)
The War of Queens has made a massive cultural impact across the galaxy. Even bleeding into contemporary meme culture
The War of Queens is set to be one of the defining pieces of media produced in the current era. The immense success consequently solidifies the fact that Penglai is Humanity's beating cultural heart at a time when the very idea was in doubt, no doubt to the chagrin of frontier separatists and Compact loyalists alike.
A light, feel-good comedy set on Lakishima. Only notable for definite favouritism from Epsilon's first-among-equals Mary Zhang,
Roulette appears to be a contemporary take on the Feel Good Feature Product film.
Roulette is the work of first time Director Bradly Chess-Station, who had previously been a mechanic before the rise of the Interstellar Prosperity Association, who said that he got the idea for
Roulette from his own experiences trying to manage a family trip to Lakishima in 2239.
Roulette is often accused of being a propaganda piece as the film emphases Lakishima as a fun and family friendly place that is in line with the greater IPA values. However, by all evidence Chess-Station seems to merely be a Director who believes into the IPA's worldview and
Roulette is not a deliberate work of propaganda.
It is said, although this might merely be rumors, that not only did Mrs. Zhang watch
Roulette twice (a confirmed fact) but that she laughed both times. Certainly, it is the case that if her enjoyment is
entirely performative it is a rather overstated performance as she personally attended the second viewing with a who's who of Epsilon movers and shakers and paid the tickets of all in attendance out of her own luxury stipend.
A comedy show about the cast of a newsroom in the fictional Uvarian system. The Uvarian system has recently had a revolution, only no one can decide what that revolution was for. Day to day coup and contrecoup result in governing systems that are Anarchist, Corporatist, Communist, Humanist, and even Loyalist. Meanwhile the cast of the newsroom tries to survive by reporting in a way to please the current party in charge, often having to change direction midway through broadcast.
Cynically, one could argue that it is Epsilon propaganda, portraying most other systems as wild and dangerous hellscapes. Unfortunately for those who point this out, it's also bitingly funny, and its willingness to take shots at most everyone means there are at least a few clips aimed at people you hate that you will circulate.
(Quick side note: Unlike the rest of the core, KC has never had much of a movie industry due to its fairly small population and large preponderance of its economy dealing with the navy; however, during the revolution on Sol, it gained a windfall in the form of several famed directors from Hollywood, Bollywood, and Nollywood who saw the winds on Earth as unfavourable to them. This included Mark Li and famous action director Kiran Langtree. The Navy of the Solarian Compact has since produced multiple high budget propaganda movies that combine military realism with the talents of several of Earth's finest directors.)
Following a team of SNNISDOGS (Solarian Navy Naval Infantry Special Detached Operation Group) commandos,
HELLHOUNDS is a Big Set Feature Product film movie-cycle of the kind that Mark Li previously did for the First Frontier War and the Great Black Summer of 2187. The tale is somewhat more fanciful than Mark Li's last few years of more gritty and realistic fare and harkens back to his work of the 2230s, though it shares the same realistic style of his more modern work such as "The Cooper Extraction" and "DZ.".
HELLHOUNDS follows a SNNISDOGS team trapped on a rogue Battlecruiser whose crew of defectors seek to bring a salvaged alien probe full of strange technological secrets to the UNS.
HELLHOUNDS stars frequent Mark Li collaborator Olivia Felix who received several new augmentations to get the role, and took a large amount of advice from KC's real SNNISDOGS teams. This has led to much interest from military nerds who believe it might expose SNNISDOGS tactics and procedures, though most experts think that it does not expose more information than is already publicly available.
In general,
HELLHOUNDS has Mark Li's deft touch, though some consider the combination of ripped from the headlines current events and 2230's era quasi-horror science fiction slightly strange.
HELLHOUNDS is also the cause of a minor but growing breach between the Solarian Navy and the government of Atlantis, after the Atlantis Ratings Agency banned
HELLHOUNDS from official release there due to its mention of the Atlantis civil war as a site of a previous mission and source of angst for the team. Private screenings of the film have become a way for the more peaceful and pro-capitalist opposition to Charles Normal's regime to show their displeasure with the government's growing censorship.
While Mark Li's KC career has turned back towards his earlier work, Langtree has turned to new horizons. Her latest film,
2187--while the bones had been in pre-production, casting, or storyboarding for years--gained fresh life in the last year.
2187 is a historical epic about the Great Black Summer of 2187 mostly from a Sol Nav perspective. Based on numerous books, interviews and access to Sol Nav's archives on the subject and even broaches the topic of Admiral Jurriaan Ayodele who notoriously killed himself during the height of the crisis.
High budget and with several excellent actors from across the Loyalist Compact,
2187 has been described as a "Drama for Real Adults" by the Atlantis Interstellar Courier Dispatch, and "the highest budget competency porn in existence" by famous Penglai Film Critic Jetro Hillfold. While an excellent movie with both good action and scripting, it rather suffers from its almost total omission of the revolutionary perspective on the events of the greatest pre-broadcast Black Summer.
Some controversy has been attached to the film due to its condemnation of elements of Compact politics (especially the old Roderic Administration) for their failure to learn the lessons of 2187. The shadow of the broadcast can be seen hanging heavy over many of the events of the film, and much of the latter fighting carries a feeling of melancholy exhaustion which is new to Langtree's filmography.
Release of the film has however recrystalised interest in
2187 and several historical epics on it are planned across the Compact and in Sol itself.
A 'independent' news service . Chronicles was considered one of the more respectable news organizations for its independence from most of the core world mainstream media enterprises, leading it to break news on several scandals in the core worlds and hold a decent investigative journalism budget.
In reality
Chronicles was an autonomous HI subsidiary overseen by HI Regional Senior President Derek Hussain who directed its focus. However, as Hussain's interests were in keeping its content on brand and not investments in core worlds,
Chronicles came to have far more willingness to touch topics other news media wouldn't.
In the wake of the broadcast it became the newly renamed Chronicle system's de-facto state news outlet. Depending on who one asks,
Chronicles is either now a government mouthpiece or more objective and stronger than ever before.
In either event much of the reporting on the Near and Far Trailing that arrives in the Core and Spinward Frontiers comes from
Chronicles reporting.
Star Rising! Is a long running franchise from Isekai about… Isekais. Like many long running franchises it has different series, each lasting a couple seasons and featuring new characters and settings, with each new setting being a destination that you too could visit on Isekai!
A middle tier exercise in entertainment marketing,
Star Rising was a long running franchise that had plenty of unnoticeably alright series, a few bad ones, and even some that were considered good and resulted in breathless reporting like my own article "Yes I know it's
Star Rising but it's Really Good Right Now." about the twenty second season.
What the franchise did not have was a season so infamously, staggeringly, reprehensible as the ongoing thirty third season "
Star Admiral!"
To draw from my colleague, Navigator Towards-Heavenly-Stars-Go-I's review: "I had no idea it was fucking Hermes-Ishtar of all people were actually preventing Isekai media from getting
more tasteless."
Well put, Navi.
The dual protagonists of
Star Admiral! are the late Seventh Star Minister Elaine Vandermeer and her subordinate Vice Admiral Jefferson-Smith. Yes, the ones who tried to glass Earth. After their respective suicides they find themselves transmigrated to a fantastical new world instead of hell due to a clerical error which both are too shocked to dispute.
Hailed as the saviors of "Theia" the pair are identified as prophesied saviors against a tide of demonic evil. Confused and shocked the pair stumble from misadventure to misadventure and eventually discover that the world of Theia is slated to be purged by angels from the heavens due to its corruption and only they can stop this unjust act
By using real people,
Star Admiral! has something for everyone to hate. For those loyal to the Compact, depicting the pair of Admirals as largely ineffectual, cowardly, and babbling, is annoying, and the overall subtext is even less welcome. For those Sol-aligned, having the one time near executioners as protagonists you are still rooting for and their slow progression to unironic semi-heroes, is enraging.
Both pro and anti augments find having Elaine Vandermeer reincarnated as a cute elf-girl is offensive. Admiral Jefferson-Smith's family has publicly called his portrayal offensive even though the man maintains his chastity and loyalty to his wife despite a cavalcade of available and nubile young men and women all but throwing themselves at him. No matter what, there is something to be disgusted at for utter tastelessness for someone.
A shame, perhaps, that
Star Admiral! Is so controversial, as its story arcs are rather compelling, with the show being hilariously cruel and mean spirited towards the fantasies they once embraced. ("Even
I know slavery is wrong and I once tried to incinerate a half billion kids for copyright infringement", "I need you to make me a sign that says that I'm off the market", "Don't tell the knife ears but this 'being an Elf' thing is actually pretty fun")
Star Admiral! also writing and plotting that can be quite funny and highly meme-able in its own right. (Everyone alive must have seen the clip where Jefferson-Smith is talking to Archangel Jeramehel and proclaims "Following orders to destroy an entire world based on nothing but panic and the lack of identity outside a rank pin doesn't actually go down too smooth. Just ask the brain-splattered mirror in my old stateroom.")
Which means that clips of it are everywhere and people can't help but follow it. While most hate-watchers consume
Star Admiral through other reviewers, they still follow it.
Increasingly the main debate swirling around
Star Admiral! is if it's shocking tastelessness is an intentional affect making the point that the series has always been tasteless, and if so, does it make the tastelessness any more bearable?
It appears that in the aftermath of whatever revolt occurred in the Isekai (now Chronicle) system the local populace set out to make their own version of the AIC's "Putting Together the Pieces" or Pacifica's "Black Tribunals". Media campaigns that so thoroughly interrogated the old regime that they became cathartic for the local populace and informative for the rest of the galaxy.
The problem, according to the series' commentary is that when the Chronicle Truth Commission were releasing the early documents for internal viewership it turned out that the incidents that everyone shared, noted, and talked about weren't the really horrible ones, they were the funny ones. The absolutely insane requests. The shitshows of management. The things that might be a nightmare, but only long enough that it'd take to clock off and bitch about it over a drink in a carefully private location.
Eventually those producing the documentary opted to change tact and lean into the mood, changing the show into two series: a grounded documentary series called
"Observations on the Behavior of Guests to the former Isekai System" and an anthology series called "
Outtakes" in which each episode was a dramatized version of the most infamous stories shot in double: with an "in universe" and "out of universe" version of the unfolding events.
The documentary series itself is supplemented with real interviews with involved staff and supporting documentation drawn from HI's internal records system, and has been hailed as a "genius example of comedic journalism".
The anthology accompanying series "
Outtakes" show is mostly focuses on the stupid, funny, and memorable incidents and the various offputting requests and insane guests that have been hosted over the decades.
However
Outtakes is infamous for episodes slowly transitioning from dark humour to full on horror, often with only a pre-credits warning card, showing both sexual and physical abuses by guests that staff had to put up with. These episodes only hit all the harder for the contrast with the otherwise silly tone of the anthology.
Outtakes skewering of the Compact's upper-crust has given it a wide range of appeal, not least because even among the middle-upper crust who could have visited, they can always see it's skewing as aimed at the wrong sort of upper-crust.
Much like
Star Admiral and
War of Queens,
Outtakes infamy and popularity have spawned a variety of memes widely used across the galaxy like, "Just try and act more dead next time.", "NEXT TIME I'LL THROW THE CHEST OKAY!?", Chocolate Tea Guy, "So when you get down to it, the moral of this story is that if I had sexier feet, the Compact would have never fallen.", and "So, he
doesn't want to fuck the horse?"
A music label with a reputation for signing 'indie' (IE no massive corp pre-selection) artists. Its CEO, Anna Khan, values the 'brand' of independence enough to genuinely give the artists far more leeway than most Compact media, and it has constantly courted controversy for this. Currently hosting both Anne Silver and Tryon-X releasing actively dueling songs condemning the nuking of Earth and the revolution respectively.
While owned by Ares, at least 51% of the multimedia STARS franchise series was produced by Ares or HI subsidiaries on Symphony allowing it to claim to be "Syphony produced" and therefore take advantage of the prestigious branding as well as local tax incentives. Due to the size of the franchise and its multimedia productions, it is one of the single largest individual media employers on Symphony, especially as other low profile, "low skill", work moved from Symphony to Radiant. As such it's been considered a key component of Symphony's media landscape by previous and current governments, even if many of Symphony's highest profile critics and influencers despise the franchise for 'devaluing what Symphony means'
Despite recent revelations, Ares continues to be bullish on the product, pointing to increased user engagement and even many new users coming to explore the setting and its associated products. While there has been a decrease in purchase-per-user most of this can be attributed to broadcast hacking, and it is projected that once protections are fully in place, growth is projected to triple its previous high. As such Ares has been happy to continue to fund production on Symphony, with many new products coming out in its latest WeFall2Gether event.
Rumors that current board head Emily Wiessman despises it are false, as she herself has come forward to praise it, the jobs it creates and the ties it allows with Ares.
Ignore any involuntary eye twitches that appear unprompted during these statements.
The Breeze is Still Free is a Symphonic Harmonic--a form of live performance that is part music, part story, a little heavier on the music than a typical musical--which is a well-respected art-form within the Compact and on Symphony especially.
The Breeze is Still Free is a well-like piece from two years ago that could be thought of a Symphonic Harmonic take on the then dominant 'Feel Good' genre of Feature Product. Heavier, with a bit more waxing nostalgic than a proper Feel Good product, but not particularly radical or anti-radical for the time.
It would be otherwise unremarkable if not for the recent announcement that recorded performances would be made available as part of the upcoming Symphony offerings. This has lit a firestorm under several of Symphony's most respected Harmonic writers and directors, as traditionally Symphonic Harmonics have not allowed recordings, even XP recordings and most were traditionally live only performances, as part of the special charm of the medium.
The Breeze Is Still Free is set to perform exclusively in select areas on Symphony at first, then be allowed to be performed at other theaters off-world, and finally will be recorded into XP adaptations of the viewing experience.
This "special run" is considered a test run for future mass distribution of a unique local art form and is deeply controversial in local artistic circles. The controversy has even expanded into the vocabularies of Symphony patriots who decry this as heavy handed anti-free speech censorship caused by the overbearing near-totalitarian crypto-anarchism of Chairwoman Emily Wiessman's emerging SFREA government.
Nonetheless, despite harsh outcry and even pushback by the remaining members of Hermes-Ishtar's executive board in exile, SFREA Chairwoman Emily Wiessman has pushed forward with the
The Breeze is Still Free test run.
A kid friendly parody of a political thriller played straight and starring an everyboy named Kevin (Played by first time main actor Kevin Pham). Kevin discovers that Santa isn't real and tries to expose the vast "Claus Conspiracy'' but is hunted at every turn (by school administration, for causing a ruckus) and ends in a climax where he is brought before the Principal and his mother who ask him to keep the story of Santa Claus alive because kids need the hope that the Claus myth provides and that it would cause panic if it got out that Stanta Claus was fake because "children, like all people, need a beautiful lie to believe in, Kevin".
After a grandstanding speech on truth, Kevin is eventually cowed, letting Christmas happen. On Christmas he wakes up to see extra presents under his tree for "being such a good boy" and "for believing". He attempts to ease his guilt by sharing them with Julia, a reindeer augment friend of his, but she rejects them as they are 'his presents' for being good. He looks at her pile, and is presumably reminded of all the times she's been called out in class despite being one of the nicest people he knows, and the film ends on a long reverse shot of Kevin's anguished face as the pantomime of a cheerful holiday unfolds behind him.
Despite the ridiculousness of the premise, the movie plays the concept with a straight-face. Never once does Director Barry Wash acknowledge that the Claus Conspiracy is anything other than a serious premise we should take 100% seriously. Which, in turn, only heightens the humor.
Despite its general popularity, the film has mixed reception on Trescore itself. Given that it has become a galaxy wide hit, and not
Atlantic, the elaborately produced and extravagantly expensive Big Set Feature Product mini-series Revolutionary Liberalism wank alternate history period piece.
Atlantic centers on the American, French, Haitian, and Bolivaran revolutions allying to topple the European Empires and founding the "Atlantic Federation" (Featuring a strangely IPA shaped East India Company as a major villain!). Despite being heavily pushed by the Trescore government as a must see film,
Atlantic remains only a hit in Trescore itself and is little known elsewhere)
A propaganda reel for the Drake Humanists. The film is a propagandic retelling of the history of Drake, the scourge of the augments upon it, and the triumph of the Human spirit enduring and then correcting the stain on the planet's surface before taking to the stars and defeating all comers.
Widely mocked across the galaxy, Loyalist media commentators everywhere like to compare it to other revolutionary films and outlets such as the Black Trials or RBC works, with a conspiracy having cropped up claiming the AIC is behind the Drake Humanists (used as a cat's paw to distract Compact and Ares forces), and pointing to the surprisingly competent filmmaking and actions scenes in the movie as indicative of Radiant backing.
