You are so right in your distaste for Blades book 2. No matter how great things get near the end, a majority of the book was horrible. They led us along like mouse to cheese. It’s inexcusable to play with their audience this way.
I only wish more people were less willing to excuse PB’s mediocrity. The signs were on the wall for me when DLS was flat out better than Blades 2, and it’s narratively quite simple. The story told was well paced, thought out, and above all kept us waiting for more each week. I cannot say the same for B2. That is sad.
I mean I do understand why people still enjoyed it and were willing to overlook the negative aspects or didn’t have much of a problem with them to begin with. Blades 1 was a fan favorite, we all missed these characters a lot, and many people (myself included at one point) didn’t believe we would actually get book 2 because of all the bait and switches PB had done in the past. But the first two things are why I personally couldn’t overlook the glaring issues.
I can’t remember who the OP was now, but I remember seeing a post from when book 2 only had a few chapters out where someone said something about it seeming like the writers learned all the wrong things about what made the book so good, and I couldn’t agree with that person more! Yeah, book 1 was good because it was different from anything we had ever gotten before. But I think the main reason it was so good was because of the characters as individuals and the relationships we got to form with those individuals to ultimately become a family. Yet they didn’t really acknowledge those individuals or relationships in ways that did them justice for the majority of book 2. And on top of that, MC’s own characterization was inconsistent at times because the writers picked and chose when they wanted us to be a competent leader and when they wanted us to be virtually clueless for plot convenience.
Book 1 was also relatively straightforward whereas it seemed like the writers wanted to turn the sequel into their own personal commentary on religion, which is an incredibly complex topic in itself. They had some social commentary in book 1, but it was done a lot better in my opinion because it didn’t take so much of a front seat. They managed to make it clear that that commentary was important and relevant to the writers, the characters, and the readers living in the real world while never robbing book 1 of that fun adventure game used for escapism feel. Meanwhile, book 2 almost felt like ‘Rising Tides but make it religion’ at times. And that’s on top of all of the other issues I’ve already mentioned in my previous posts.
I will say that I can see how there’s usually a lot of pressure to blow things out of the water for a sequel to something so beloved, and that most likely contributed to how things played out. So maybe I’m being a bit too harsh in my judgement of everything. But I still find it very disappointing to wait so long for something just for it to be so messy and miss the mark by a mile
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i know there's a little bit of info on him currently included in my roster but ! i wanted to cobble together a more detailed rundown of my courier (the sixth one) + his verses. he is a bit of an unreliable narrator, so i'm leaving gaps in this - thing is he doesn't know what's up, so neither shall we.
(that said, if anyone has ncr muses who could maybe piece some things together, hit me up. he can't keep getting away with this).
rough bio under the cut. trigger warnings for death, violence, drug use, the military, addiction + memory issues.
name & aliases: sasha dubrovhsky / boris medvedev / courier six.
tag skills: unarmed, survival, guns. (note: given his backstory, he's proficient in these, and in stealth).
age: late twenties / early thirties during the events of fallout new vegas. moving into his late thirties if in the tv show era.
sexuality: bisexual. you know, for the extra damage.
alignment: chaotic something.
personality types: estp. enneagram 8.
physical appearance: 6'3", buzzcut, brown eyes, cheekbones, numerous tattoos. imagine a large russian man who has clearly broken his nose more than once. he is russian jewish & roma ft. general slavic aura. always clean shaven if he can help it, but stubble happens to him frequently. if in the verse in which he's courier six, he will have two scars on his forehead courtesy of benny.
notable features: speaking to six, one may get the sense that english isn't his first language. he doesn't really have much of a russian accent, but his cadence (especially when he is particularly tired), as well as his word choices can sometimes give him away.
he is also autistic, and may have adhd. both are undiagnosed. the latter may have something to do with six's mentat habit.
his face is rarely shown - he tends to wear full combat armour, helmet included.
the man who eventually becomes courier six is born in ncr territory to a family who are descended from vault 13, if a tad distantly (nobody in the family can track the exact lineage, nor have they tried).
six is born alexander dubrovhsky. his branch of the family are loyal to the ncr in some ways, though their primary ideology is born not of the ncr, but of memories of their heritage. sasha receives more of an education than he feels he needs, but he is a curious soul and enjoys picking apart the way of things. devours books when he can get them. is in trouble more than once in his childhood for taking things apart to see what makes them tick.
he is not yet of age when he enlists. he's tall and broad enough to pass for it, and nobody in ncr recruitment looks too deeply into the issue. even before taking two bullets to the forehead, he is an improviser - there's no real plan tied to his enlistment. he makes it through basic easily enough - can remember that fine. can remember being passed up for first recon so as not to waste his hand to hand abilities - he is, in a word, large. can remember being filtered into the rangers instead. can remember later leaving his dog tags on a corpse about his size. tossing the tags that had originally been on the corpse in question into the colorado river.
the why of it is unclear. but he remembers the bloodless panic, and in hindsight is certain he had something to do with that death. can't say for certain whether or not this is unlike him, but the potential will keep him watching himself out of the corner of his eye, waiting for some similar slip up.
he knows he picked his new name out of the past. boris was the name of some relative, he thinks. perhaps a distant cousin, perhaps not. medvedev, on the other hand, is born of the bear tattoo adorning his ribs. (two-headed, stick and poke, slightly weathered, scar cutting through it).
recalls a time, too, when he burns his armour and weighs his options. he knows how to kill things, and is the sort of person with at least a chance at surviving the wasteland. so far so good, anyway. he passes a town with a mojave express office, and volunteers himself for a job. from that point on, he is a courier.
post gunshots to the head, he'll wonder if the memory issues are new. thinks they must be. things improve with time, but some things, he thinks, will never come back to him.
he remembers just enough to feel like helping the ncr is the most deranged thing he's ever done. he does it anyway. that said, six saunters vaguely in the direction of socialism whenever possible.
he identifies a chem habit, but can't be sure he had it before he was shot. can remember snippets of things he used to know, and understands that a great deal of the information is barred now. one hobby of his is gathering it again.
choices in game:
these will be updated in time (i'm going to play again to refresh my memory on him), but he can either pick the independent or ncr route depending. if we're writing post game, his default is independent, though that was a difficult decision for him and he still feels two ways about it. he isn't a blind ncr loyalist by any stretch, and is aware that there are some in the ncr who'd string him up if they knew he'd deserted, but he is not immune to propaganda.
alternate depictions:
i have written him before as an ncr ranger spy who is only moonlighting as a courier, never properly deserted (because the desertion catalyst wasn't there; he made it through the battle of hoover dam in 2077 just fine in this verse), and didn't end up shot in the head in goodsprings. in that verse, he can be recruited as a companion - for anyone who's into that.
this version of him isn't as fleshed out right now (read: i don't remember most of the development i did when i was writing him this way) but i'll update this later, and i'm happy to plot things out on a character by character basis. he is generally motivated to fight the legion, and will in time become somewhat disillusioned with the ncr.
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I think what really gets me about the situation in Hearthdell is that there is clearly a lot happening on both sides, and the party has been shoved into action without knowing what's lying underneath the contradictory information they've been given in rapid succession, in a way that is designed to force them into hasty taking sides.
On one side, there is clearly something going on with the temple, particularly with the knowledge that only recently have any agents of it begun to impose notable presence upon the town. On the other side, Abbadina has whipped up the town based on manipulated, if not outright wrong, information, even while they have legitimate grievances.
What the party would have preferred, given their hesitance and discomfort, would've been to uncover the misunderstandings that have led to this clash, but they've been deliberately prevented from doing so. What they understand, though, is that this is not a simple, one-sided situation where one side is wholly wrong and one wholly right.
Even so, what with how convoluted the situation has been made, the misunderstandings underneath are probably pretty mundane, and not worthy of the seemingly inevitable violence.
So jumping to conclusions based on information that we know is contradictory to unilaterally condemn the whole of one religious sect or the other, even when what we know of the world belies it, is... kind of exactly what the situation is trying to demand of the party, and it's wild to me that a lot of the fandom are making that leap wholeheartedly.
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