#xcomposting

This still lives rent free in my head btw

The IVs. The blanket. This dead sectoid has been treated better by Vahlen and her people than the living sectoids ever were by the Elders. There's even a human skeleton in there with him, implying there was someone looking after him until the very end.

He's weak to explosives this run and look where he parked himself

She keeps opening escape rifts and then not being able to use them. (As I was writing this between making moves, it took her like... six Ruler Reactions to escape.) Not for anything I did except throw an acid bomb on her-- the acid puddle is there, so she can't move. Or rather, won't move, through the puddle.

Very much backs up the nature of what Vahlen actually did for them-- that is to say, giving them more agency and self-preservation than the Elders allow of their subjects. Beta is especially unique among berserkers for exactly that reason: berserkers are notorious for being full-throttle Leeroy Jenkinses, to the extent that EU/EW explains that their own brains shut off parts of themselves to suppress any instinct towards risk-assessment and defense instincts. And here's their queen, the most dangerous berserker of all, who's special because her brain doesn't do that.

It just. It tells me so much about the distinction between Vahlen and the Elders and how it can't just be swept under the rug that Vahlen, even in the most bad-faith negative interpretation of her character, can never commit the same wrongs that the Elders do. Everyone questions why the fuck she made a deadlier berserker. Everyone questions why she made deadly aliens with teleporters. No one points out that if she equipped these deadly aliens with teleporters, and the berserker in particular has the instinct to use it when she's losing a fight, how that demonstrates a care for her test subjects. That she wanted them to live. That she wanted them to be able to save themselves in a pinch. That, even if you believe she wanted to turn the Rulers against the Elders, their lives still took more priority than that goal.

You know, I wonder how much Vahlen found out/was corrected on after the invasion. Particularly when it came to guesses like this, where she was aware that there was no proper way to estimate the creature's age from appearance alone

I know I've posted these screenshots before but look