Listen to the Rain

I couldn't sleep last night, and while I was trying and failing to sleep I stumbled on this miniseries about Stellaris, a dramatization of a let's play called "Stellaris Invicta":

Watch on YouTube

The basic premise is that late in the 21st century, Earth is invaded by aliens and, over the course of a decade of war, manages to defeat the small alien force thanks to a retaliatory nuclear strike at their orbital flagship and a long, grinding land war, but at the cost of almost completely devastating Earth. So after further decades of martial law, the Earth is unified as the Greater Terran Union with the goal of finding the alien homeworld and making sure nothing ever threatens humanity again.

Normally these kind of Humanity FUCK YEAH stories either bore me or annoy me, because they're so often an excuse for crypto-(or not so crypto)fascist fantasies played out with aliens standing in for people of color. But I liked it a lot here because the narrative is woven out of a Let's Play series that went on for dozens of hours, so rather than being someone's fantasies of oppressing the lesser races with a sci fi mask, it's building a story out of the events of the game, most of the major ones of which were voted on by the people watching the stream.

For example, slight spoiler here for the War in Heaven event that triggers later:
( Read more... )

I've watched a bunch of the livestreams and all of the post-livestream narrative and the storytelling is top notch in the way that they take the chaos and randomness of an 4X game and turn it into coherent narrative thread. And while it seems like it's just going to be 40K fanfic, listening to the hosts shows they consistently put hard decisions to a vote and don't immediately leap for the most bloodthirsty option. The first species the Greater Terran Union encountered after achieving FTL, the Wessari, were occupied, vassalized, and centuries later, integrated into the GTU rather than being genocided, and the GTU eventually did ally itself with alien powers. It's that consistent thread of decency that kept me interested--the sense that the GTU was the way it was because of the invasion of Earth, but that they always remembered that its harsh measures were born out of necessity due to the situation and not a one-size-fits-all policy to dealing with the galaxy.

There's a season 2 coming. I can't wait.