Omicron said:
The Balamb Garden therapist who definitely doesn't exist?
"Ah, I see, I see. Well, it certainly sounds like you've been having a hard time. I recommend attempting to
fully sublimate your identity into your work; all these issues you've talked to me about today, I believe they're because you're trying to be an
individual. But happily,
you don't have to! Just live for nothing but excelling in battle in loyal service to your employer, and all these insecurities will just melt away!"
and in that environment Squall's reaction to another student reaching out and telling him 'hey man we're both pretty messed up, do you maybe want a friend, someone you can talk to about your trouble, quid pro quo?" is "Fuck off, I don't believe in that nonsense."
...Also, it occurs to me (and since I happily don't remember one way or the other, I'm free to speculate openly): might agreeing "Yeah, our life is actually kind of terrible, isn't it?" be
unwise? Like, that's not a thing you want your superpowered child soldier mercenaries thinking, right, lest they start getting Ideas? And depending on just
how totalitarian Balamb Garden is under the surface... do the students and SeeDs ever report on each other? Try to fish for things
to report? If so, Squall might actually be doing Quistis a kindness by
just refusing to talk with her, instead of reporting her just in case it was a trap she was setting or someone else overheard.
...Or maybe I'm just being paranoid.
Buuut with how sketchy the Garden is, how Oh Dear so much of what we've seen has been, and how we keep seeing
more...
McFluffles said:
Having worked with both kids and adults on the spectrum before... yeah, this right here? Pretty much the conclusive argument for me of "Selphie is absolutely somewhat ASD".
Now, I don't recall noticing or suspecting that at all as a kid...
...But as I am also ASD and like trains, I wonder if that might in part have been because my brain looked at her and went "Ah, yes, completely normal and unremarkable behavior".
And thus, died my first playthrough of Final Fantasy VIII, the challenge run of "No Junctioning Allowed" was killed not by a difficult boss wall, but by blindness RIP
Oof. Sorry.
Omicron said:
I did briefly entertain that notion, but I think there's a small issue with Kiros being either Zell or Selphie's dad, at the very least if we assume the memory transference passes down a hereditary/genetic line.
[attempts to remember and fails]
What issue?
Omicron said:
i have been reliably informed that if my next FF game isn't Tactics, Tempera will annihilate my house in nuclear hellfire
Bit disappointed we won't be going straight to IX, but, eh, we went straight to VIII from VII; I can compromise.
And I'm pretty confident your coverage of Tactics will be interesting to me, even if I'm neither particularly familiar with nor interested in the game at the moment.
[reads following posts and proceeds to be vaguely amused she has no idea what The Marche Discourse is]
Adloquium said:
Also Laguna's last bit of thought here isn't "She's pretty", but "She's pretty and she smells nice". Just to pile on more demerits on the manliness scale.
...Which sent my brain off. So, that earlier speculation about reincarnation, stasis, de-aging, etc.? Which wondered if Laguna was actually Squall?
Well, Squall doesn't seem to be much like Laguna, and it also seems like he's been at the Garden for a while, based on things like Quistis knowing him so well, and he's apparently been Squall long enough for Non-Dance Blue Girl to have known him but him and Quistis to have both forgotten her...
But what about, on the other hand,
Selphie, the transfer student? How does Laguna feel about trains?
(It's probably pretty obvious that I'd have remembered a twist like
that, but I feel like it's also so unlikely a game of FFVIII's era would do that that posting the thing my brain came up with here isn't a spoiler one way or the other.)
Omicron said:
plays it off by saying it's part of SeeD training in a variety of skills useful in subterfuge, like approaching a target inconspicuously at a party. Those seem to directly contradict one another.
Maybe it
is part of SeeD training, but also Squall got the bare minimum passing grade there?
That said, interesting point, and I now also wonder whether there was an internal miscommunication there.
...Oh. Hm. Or, maybe Squall seemed to pick up the dancing so quickly because he actually
was, thanks to his training, a good dancer, and his bad dancing before that was a "Maybe if I do this badly enough she'll go away" situation? And then either he gave that up as lost and decided to dance properly and/or actually starting enjoying himself.
re Trotsky's train:
...Wow. Thanks for the information!
President Deling: (He stands up.) "Boo-hoo… Too bad… I'm not the President. I'm what they call… a body double."
President Deling: "All these rumors about the many resistance groups in Timber… You pass along a little false information and they fall for it… How pathetic… Seems like there are only amateurs around here."
President Deling: (He stands up from his seat.)
He stands up twice?
but he presumably can't broadcast to Balamb because there is no established cable network between the two
I'd first thought that they could just run the cable through the train tunnel.
...And then I wondered what sorts of monsters are in the train tunnel, that we don't see because dealing with them is someone else's job and/or the train is armored and maybe armed enough to just plow straight through them, but they'd still regularly gnaw through or dissolve or whatever anything less robust than the track and tunnel walls.
re Cid's motives (or possibly "Cid's" motives) for that contract:
Well... Hm. Consider, though:
1: The more of the world is pacified under one government, the fewer conflicts there will be for which SeeD will be hired. A Timber that's still resisting is still generating conflict, and a Timber that achieves independence is now a potential independent actor in war and might want to start out by getting back at Galbadia and/or fighting off Galbadia's attempt to reconquer it.
2: The contract says that no
replacement of SeeD members can be made. Nothing about
addition of SeeD members, or taking out an additional contract.
3: The Timber Owls pretty clearly seem to be getting funding
somewhere, given their base and the resources they put together for this plan already.
So, the position of the Timber resistance is kind of precarious; without help, they might not survive much longer. They're not willing to pay a
lot, or maybe their backers aren't and thus they can't, but Cid "lets himself be sweet-talked" into giving them three SeeDs on a long-term contract at a massive discount. Well, if those three SeeDs along succeed in liberating Timber, great! Lots of future business generation for a minimal initial investment.
But even if they don't do that, they'll give the resistance a firsthand demonstration of how awesome SeeD is, right? This is what just three literally-graduated-yesterday SeeDs can do, and look how much more effective it's made you! But if it's still not
quite effective enough? Well, of course,
that contract was a special exception for a nice young lady, we can't afford to do that sort of thing all the time, but our standard rates
are quite reasonable, if your backers have perhaps realized they were underestimating us...
There
was that line from the Garden Faculty suggesting that they might not wholly approve of this, but that could have just been them and Cid disagreeing on the
details of the investment in new customer creation.
Seifer taught her. They knew each other, after all. Hmm. This may have legs to stand on.
...If that's what it was, though (I don't remember), that does seem like very much the sort of thing Balamb Garden students are
not supposed to do.
daniel_gudman said:
3. The full, actually legally binding version of the contract (as opposed to the Cliffs Notes version that Cid gave Rinoa) also has a careful definition of "full independence", which Cid fully expects will be achieved soon, possibly by another team (ie assassinating the Galbadian president or whatever). This will plunge the world into another huge war full of business opportunities, an ocean of blood for Cid to get his beak wet in.
Or something like that, yeah.
Actually, that could readily be combined with my speculation above.
1: Send three green SeeDs for cheap to the Owls, primarily to give a close demonstration of how powerful SeeDs are. If they actually win on their own, though, great!
2: If, as expected, they don't, the Owls will likely be willing to hire
more SeeDs to get the job done, which'll potentially have the Garden making
even more money on the way to making a much more customer-rich world.
3: If a bit of time passes and the Owls don't shell out, do something else, probably more expensive, to stoke conflict and in the process fulfil the technical requirement that releases said three green SeeDs, as spelled out in the contract that the Owls' representative didn't read carefully after friendly helpful Headmaster Cid provided her with an abridged (and non-binding) version.
And maybe the Garden Faculty thought this was all overcomplicated and skipping straight to whatever they'd do in 3 above would actually save time and overall money.
StormyEyed said:
Like, if the Dollet radio tower is strong enough tk transmit across the world, shouldn't it have been usable this entire time?
Maybe, but "usable" isn't the same as "economically feasible". It presumably took considerably more power to punch through the interference, and even if the tower was capable of it, that power presumably cost more. Also, with other broadcasters having to shut down, and quite likely the quality of reception even from Dollet's tower dropping, there'd be less incentive for people to have ways of
receiving the signals (I'm guessing that perhaps Deling send out people ahead of this upcoming broadcast to distribute receivers, and let people know when to expect it if that couldn't be done over the cable). For comparison, what'd be the business advantage of being able to produce HD color video, at significant additional expense, if the most any of the potential views have is low-resolution black-and-white screens? For
most programs, it'd be far more cost-effective, and produce a higher-quality product, to broadcast on the cable network where you could and ship hard drives or whatever between isolated networks.
And as for military use, having a single transmitter capable of one-way communication would be more useful than
no military radio, true... but possibly not
much more useful, and then either you'd still have to be fully capable of operating without the tower (which would make the investment even less worth it) or have it as a massive vulnerability to, say, a long-range missile strike. And that's if you plan to operate over a large area, which it seems like Dollet probably didn't anyway; if they were primarily interested in just defending their own territory, the ability to broadcast over radio would be even less useful.
Whereas, here... possibly I'm missing something, but this kind of seems like Deling just
showing off. It's big, it's dumb, it's in no way cost effective, and that he can do it
anyway just shows everyone how powerful he is. The effort to make the broadcast, after all, has already involved successfully invading Dollet to gain access to the broadcast tower and yet again foiling a resistance movement in Timber, and that's just what we've seen on screen.
Maybe the worldwide radio interference has been weakening over time, and only Galbadia realized? Or maybe the radio tower needed to be overlooked and this broadcast threatens to fry its circuits?
Things like that could also be part of it, though.
Lirana said:
You know, after seventeen years and all, even if the Dollet Tower could send a Radio broadcast world wide, considering that the President had to go to an entirely different country with an ...active? rebellion in order to send out his broadcast in the first place...who else out there can even still receive Radio signals?
I think I encountered that same question somewhere else relatively recently, yeah, and didn't have an answer at the time but remembered it here and came up with the hypothesis above (that is, he sent people out ahead of time to distribute receivers and if necessary also news of the broadcast (though that might have been done in secret, with the reveal to be shortly before the broadcast and possibly what the Owls found out above right near the end of the update)).
Adloquium said:
And if you've been following along, that makes this Day 4, while the communications tower was activated on Day 2, ie not "yesterday".
...Hm. Maybe what we saw on Day 2 wasn't the tower being activated, though, just the
hardware coming online? Maybe even just the local hardware, too. So then the tower had to be booted up and configured, and a guarded cable connection had to be established between Dollet and Timber, and all of that took long enough that it was all finally finished "yesterday" for whichever "today" this is, and Squall found out about this offscreen... from, the rumor mill, maybe? Due to understandably wondering what all that with the tower was about, or maybe someone just told him unprompted.
(And thanks for tracking the days, there.)
Oh, and I'm guessing the Japanese text you have doesn't include that poster with the in-English-odd timing for the resistance hunt?
