There was a strike for animators, if I recall correctly, in 1982. Mainly because of what the Animators Guild called "Runaway Productions", as in outsourcing production work to different areas, I.E. studios in the Eeast that would work for cheap.
Oddly enough, we've done this, only instead of paying less, we're paying more, adn we bought the studio instead of subcontracting it. I feel the GUilds may try another strike there, but then again we're ina confusing position; we cannot agree to their demands to keep animation in house because part of our animation team is in another country, at the same time we're following the rules as written to keep our animators happy and productive, while also going overboard in their payments.
If the Guild is smart they will leave Lucasfilms alone, if they're not, well...
The will submit, or they will die.
True, the Actors and Writer's Strike of OTL around this time were pretty justified in trying to protect their members from the changing times of VHS and while the Animation Strike was justified OTL as their loss fucked over American animation in effects which still carry out today, they have absolutely zero grounds to perform a strike on us when we're "outsoucring" to a member of our company where many of our American animators also perform work with Sunrise. Not to mention that our animators have a higher salary than literally any other studio and live like corporate executives with even the most basic animators being upper middle class.
The animation strike also had a weird ass rule where the Animation Guild of the time where all of Animation had to be done within the territory of Los Angeles County. So that means even if you had a studio which treated its workers very well like say Texas, New York, Georgia, etc., that is seen as violating their rules, and thus Pixar is against the Guild for being done in San Francisco....despite being staffed 100% by Americans.
So yeah, while I want to work with the actors and writers and give them fair terms, if the Animation Guild goes against us I wouldn't mind going Full Reagan and breaking them like OTL, ditto for the Directors and Producers.
First, it's a lot easier to answer critiques of my writing when they're written soon after I write these pitches and omakes, especially given that I tend to datadump my mindset and notes for when I have to spend an next hour and a half in traffic going to and from my twelve-hour work shift. If you feel that something is subpar, please just say so, even if it's something as simple as "I feel like you forgot or undermined a piece of lore, let me get back to you with notes", because for all that these in-depth looks are thorough, when they show up this late, I feel as if they aren't helping me improve as a writer. An editor sure, but not as a writer.
This is admittedly bad timing on my part and my fault not yours. To explain my reasoning for the timing, when you originally posted COD: Ghosts, I briefly skimmed over it and assumed that it was like Tijuana Takedown in being a Latin Iraq War and thus approved of it. I didn't reread it until last night when I got interested in the fine details so I have an idea of what to do after Tijuana Takedown and then read it and got into major conflict for just how out of place it felt to me to OTL's Cyberpunk.
Second, you do realize that not only is Cyberpunk a different timeline, but the events of Tijuana Takedown (needs a better name than this working title) occur in 1989, and that by 1991 the Hermes spaceplane launched, by CHOO2 is developed, an Arcology is built in New Jersey (the fact it wasn't named Gotham and built over the corpse of Newark is criminal) and the first artificial muscles are developed, with Ghosts being two years later in 1993, where the first AV enters military production? [All of this is from the officially published timeline] Like, the general public in Tijuana Takedown and Ghosts aren't meant to have the pure, cutting-edge technology that most folk have in Cyberpunk 2013, it's meant to introduce people to not only the precursor to all of that technology but also the fact that things are starting to break down, with technology just starting to rapidly outpace societal norms.
On this part you never gave out any concrete dates in the Ghosts Omake so I assumed it was taking place along the same timetable as the Second Central American War from 2003 to 2010, thus going from this total war which makes World War II look like the Spanish-American War to Cyberpunk 2013 and its state seemed too extreme. I didn't read your updated timeline on the informational and from Tijuana Takedown it still says it takes place in the 21st century on that Omake.
Four, You do realize I moved the border a lot further south for this very reason, right
In your plot summary you in a 1 for 1 with the game synopsis, had South America orbital drop on the American Southwest which in my opinion is a mistake as it utterly destroys and depopulates one of the most dynamic parts of Cyberpunk America and it pretty much kills the Free States before they become a thing when the Free States were the most powerful and richest of the American states and were essentially the new America. Not to mention that this cripples California and turns it into a third world backwater, which again ruins the fun dynamics of NorCal and SoCal and erases any reason for Richard Night to build Night City in Coronado Bay.
In my opinion the first strike of South America should take place at the Mid Atlantic or Rust Belt/Great Lakes reason. Those two regions were the absolute bottom of America in Cyberpunk 2020, and if South America targeted them instead of the Southwest, then it gives a reason why the Free States are so powerful and why what was once the political and economic heartland of America fell into ruin besides shit luck with global warming (While Canada suffers nothing). It also gives justification for the NUSA basing its power in the Appalachian states. But anyways that gets into the biggest flaw of Ghosts, why the US didn't carpet nuke South America into the stone age.
A common point in US history is that when it goes to war, America tends to retaliate and inflict far greater proportional damage for anything it took in attack. 2,400 sailors and dozens of ships were lost at Pearl Harbor, the US destroyed the Japanese Empire and nuked Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Over 3,000 lives were lost on 9/11 and the twin towers fell, the US invaded Afghanistan and Iraq and caused the death of 100,000 enemy combatants in both wars and hundreds of thousands lost in Iraq. The Gulf of Tonkin incident saw a Destroyer be hit, and we invaded Vietnam and created a war which caused the death of millions in the region. If the Federation truly bombed the entire US Southwest and caused the deaths of tens of millions as it was presented in COD Ghosts, then the US is carpet nuking all of South America and glassing any city that has over 100,000 citizens along with all military bases and in the end turning South America into the Morgenthau plan. There is absolutely no reason why the US wouldn't do this, nuclear doctrine has the ability to escalate to total nuclear war.
I would have it be more proprotional along the line of Europe's Mass Driver strikes against the NUSA in Canon. You could also justify it by having the Space Force actually be useful and cause the strike to only launch a few rods instead of dropping its entire payload. So overall, 1-6 cities are lost in the Midwest and Mid-Atlantic, America retaliates by nuking several major cities. Full scale nuclear and space war is prohibited by the Soviets or Europe placing an umbrella over South America against first strikes.
Like, I did that to avoid that entire mess in the first place, justifying it narratively by the thought process that because the Federation had shittier short-range missle systems that necessitated their acquisition of an orbital bombardment system (see more below)...that was already out of date by this time because the US had already moved on, having rapidly improved its orbital bombardment defense in the face of [again, canon to Cyberpunk] a massdriver is built onto the Canary Islands,
Five, I was purposefully leaving a lot of this blank so that I could cover this more in depth in the next and final installment to the "Call of Duty narrative arc", where it would go onto explain that a large part of it was an outgrowth of Cyberpunk's version of OTL's BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa) alliance, one where it had managed to get briefly off the ground before things went to shit and the Warsaw Pact fell apart from the Cold War ending, South Africa falling, and the rise of the Federation [the first two being canonical to OTL Cyberpunk] in the years beforehand, and that following Ghosts, the US absolutely did nuke the Federation in retaliation.
In regards to the missile system, if it's so old school then there has to be a reason why the US doesn't just carpet nuke all of South America or why it would cripple the US war machine like Ghosts where in the aftermath of the Mexican War, it should be ready to steamroll South America.
I'm kind of wary of the BRICS alliance existing as I think it makes the geopolitical situation a little bloated and too complicated to have all of this major world war like events take place right at the end of the Cold War and in a few years before we transition to Cyberpunk. I really like the Soviet's and China's paths in Cyberpunk where the Soviets became a shell of themselves and lost all adherence to Marxism as they fell under the control of SovOil while transitioning into full Oligarch like Russia OTL, and the Second Chinese Civil War serves as a smart warning lesson to Communist China, shows the dangers of totalitarianism and militarism, and produces some good narrative irony where China ends up allying with NUSA and Militech and thus both nations are betrayals of their founding ideals in the Cyberpunk world.
As for South America, I think there's a more organic way to portray them than to do what COD did and just have them become a superpower because of "Muh Scarce Oil" and at the same time becoming Nazis. Just lean into full alternate history and have the Federation be essentially a Latin Soviet Union as a product of a different and more radical 60's where Brazil and Venezuela become Communist and unify with Pinochet's Chile to become the "People's Federation of the America's." It gives them about three decades to reform and industrialize to fight a peer war with America, helps to explain the hyper militarization and Capitalism of America as a reactionary effect of the spread of Marxism, gives the Federation an organic motivation to fight America to stop American Imperialism after Mexico and as revenge for Operation Condor and Latin America's right-wing dictatorships, gives a reason for the speedy conquest of Latin America due to popular support and fighting corrupt Juntas, installs some poetic karma to America for its Cold War policies and warns of the contemporary dangers of treating Latin America as a playground, and with the fall of the Federation goes the end of true Socialism and thus the Hyper Capitalism of the 21st century.
Overall that leads to a more realistic setting and we can still keep the drug narratives of the Central American Wars focused on the Mexican War. Perhaps have the US fight a two front war in the 80s, one with Mexico and one in Columbia, the former to target the criminal cartels in distribution and the latter to target drug production.
As a warning though, for the future I would rather change the name of Call of Duty and just place Tijuana Takedown and Ghosts under a different umbrella term. I think it's too unfair to Activision to deny them the COD franchise and all the great games that came from them, and I most especially want the Black Ops and Modern Warfare games to be made and for Lucasfilms to make them as adaptations rather than steal all the credit like we have with films like Tarzan and Pacific Rim.
But if there is room for more dialogue, I'll move onto the seventh and the last part: this version of Ghost does not go against the setting, it's to showcase a completely different perspective in that of a patriotic, borderline jingoistic, soldier who can see the logistical supplychain breaking down before his eyes and is still choosing to move forward, partly because they do not see another way. They see the PMC soldier coming in to take "their glory", who is (for the moment) trained to much lower standards and their shortcomings made up for with better technology. They're seeing the United States and all her promises fade as they realize the war has taken too many lives and is about to explode into something akin to the Russian Revolution (that preceded the Bolshevik Revolution). It's to showcase the setting as it solidifies into a Broken Dream.
Okay I can see this working, but to be fair, none of this nuance was conveyed or written in the original Omake post, you're sharing this outside of the post.
