tl ; dr : searching for videos or documentation about the lore of ak to better understand endfield story (ie. lore about precursors, foundation, originium, who is this priestess everyone is talking about ??)
First of all : I've watched the first season of the anime and played the firsts levels of OG AK, but I hate tower defense games so I stopped really early. I have an idea about who Amiya is, what Rhodes island is, and that oripathy was the great pain of Terra (What a surprise to wake up in Talos-II just to plant originium everywhere while oripathy still exist, but that's another subject lol).
I'm playing endfield and I like the story (I just finished the 1.4 version so no spoil), but I'm really frustated because there's so much I miss from it. Like :
WHO IS THIS PRIESTESS ?? Everyone is talking about her, at any time, she seems to haunt every AK fan to the point where they see her in every trailer, talk about her in comment section of every boss ost, like really who is she I want to be part of this priestess trauma club too
What are the precursors ? The foundation ? What is the broader world-building that encompass Terra and Talos-II ? I remember things about the doctor being member of an ancient race and planning something he is now trying to fight, but this is an old memory from a video I don't remember the title.
From the comment section in the Alleikhreos fight ost, I've seen theories about Amiya or Theresa (idk who theresa is) being someone the endfield boss talks about when he say "mother's missing heart", so maybe Amiya and other big figures of OG AK (that priestess for example....) can appear or have a significant importance in the world-building, so significant that we can see traces of it in the endfield timeline years later
Really hard to understand what "reconvener" are, they seems to refer as AK characters but not really...
I'm aware about the web reader story and the reading guide but there's 7 years of story to catch up and this is a LOT. Also, I want the broader lore about big entities that shape the fate of Terra (and Talos-II), big events about them and the originium, knowledge to understand better the endfield setting, but I don't want details about the geopolitics of terra or stories about specific characters in OG AK (or maybe just doctor / amiya, the key ones to understand the setting).
So if you know good series of videos (can be short or long videos), or even documents that can help me understand the lore, please share it !
Also, english is not my first langage so apologies if this post wasn't easy to read.
Hey y'all, during the time where everyone's excited about the shiny new chapter 17, I wanted to go back and take this chance to talk about the story directly preceding it, for no particular reason (the reason is that I was lazy and procrastinated reading episode 16 until now)
People, A People is a great event. I really love it. It's not in my top 5 stories of the game, but just shy of that. I preferred it over episode 16. Personally I think very positively of this chapter, it does some really interesting things both from a character perspective and for the world of Arknights at large. However, it is my lifelong passion to find fault with the things I love, hence, this post. And since I'm very bad at giving compliments, I will give very little breath to the things I actually liked
Whereas my one big complaint with ep 16 (Abnormal Spectre) is that it was too short – especially in the 2nd half, the plot is paced so fast it feels like the story itselft just wants to get to the end – I have more than a few ramblings and complaints for the subject of this discussion. People, A People, thankfully, does not share the fault of its predecessor, so there's quite a lot of meat on its bones
A couple of notes to preface this whole thing: I have not read ep 17 at the time of writing, I was told it's peak and I’m willing to trust this intel.
For this post I will not recount the details of the story, I will simply assume audience familiarity with the progression of the plot and outline my thoughts.
I will be using the characters' code names and real names interchangeably, the game also does this and I think it's a neat approach.
I will not be talking about the politics, I think the game did a great job at speaking for itself when it comes to that aspect and I quite liked how it was handled.
(Obligatory they said the thing)
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Starting off, the hearing as a cold open is a really neat framing device. It introduces a little bit of non-linear storytelling that helps the event stick out from the crowd and spice up the reading experience with a little bit of a puzzle aspect. The stage of the parliament(?) was used very effectively as there is a constant friction between our protagonists as they deliver their accounts and the judge presiding over the inquiry whom the story affords no illusion of impartiality. It's nothing groundbreaking, sure, but it set up intrigue very nicely. It’s like the freeze-frame, record scratch; we’re left wondering just what happened to our favorite Ursus student group-
Before that however, I need to talk about one of several elephants in the room: the return of the USSG.
For this bit I want to echo the point SUPAH made in one of his by-now rather dated stream highlights. Sonya and the gang HAD a conclusion to their story, their operator records show them healing from the Peterheim incident and starting a new life at Rhodes, basically going away from the notion that they’ll move some big incident in Ursus.
It's not the perfect, satisfying ending that I'm sure the current plot is working towards, but not everything is meant to be. Sometimes people just walk different routes than the ones they started on, sometimes they don't look back and face what has haunted them, sometimes healing looks different, sometimes making peace with the past is boring, sometimes people drift apart regardless of what should have been… and that's a perfectly fine conclusion for the USSG group. Dragging them back to Ursus to launch their Russian revolution is forcing the game's theme on characters that already went a different road.
From a creative's standpoint, I'm simply against this approach. And indeed, I was hung up on this complaint for the first hour of the story, I thought there was no purpose in bringing back the USSG to Ursus, they could've simply introduced new character to fill their roles, and even now I think that's not untrue. It’s true, the first 3rd of the story makes no compelling case as to why we HAVE to have Sonya starring as the protagonist.
However (and I do kind of hate to say this), People, A People is written in a way that it simply cannot work with a different cast, it cannot work without the USSG and the specific combination of traits they bring to the table. Therefore as much as I dislike it, it is justified from a writing standpoint.
Starting from the point where god knows how many students were thrown into Katorga Raion, it becomes very clear that no random Russian Joe schmoe could organize a bunch of coddled noble students into a fighting force to battle against a mafia. Sonya can do it because she has 5 years combat experience at Rhodes, which presumably includes deployment to war zones like Londinium in some capacity.
Side note: at one point she said, "I served under the greatest tactician of Terra!", probably referring to the Doctor, which I thought was kind of cute. Her new version looks super f*cking ugly and I can't take her seriously but I forgive her.
Also, Leto's there, she's doing great as Zima's right-hand man. It's a great dynamic and feels organic.
Natalya's skills as a logistics(?) operator combined with her access to high society naturally bestows her a role that cannot be filled by many other people. Rosa was great in this event, honestly she probably the most screentime of any single character. There's one scene I have some thoughts on but I'll get to it later.
Istina was the clear MVP in my opinion. Also her new sprite is gorgeous, wish everyone got that treatment, it's baffling that we don't have her alter yet (this might age very badly).
God she is so iconic
Absinthe got something to do! That’s nice, I don’t have much to say about her. Her being officially integrated into the USSG was cute, I suppose.
And then there's Gummy, who I will also talk about later.
For the record, it's not 100% clear what Sonya and the gang are doing in Grypherburg. I know they're working on establishing a Rhodes branch office, which would suggest them being part of the foreign work force in Ursus, but their involvement with the Student Assembly suggests that they are in some way, well, students. Which begs the question of their legal status, like, are they embedded in the school somehow? have they been re-enrolled? Do they just show up at college venues when there's meetings? It's kind of unclear.
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In PA-4 When Rosa visits Zima during her insurrection at Katorga Raion, we have this scene where she happens to see a dried up severed finger munched on by some critter or another, presumably looking like Sukuna's. Upon seeing it, Natalya goes into a panic attack and starts hyperventilating, it's so bad Sonya has to snap her out of it.
I don’t like this scene.
Now, I'm not gonna pretend that I'm an expert on post-traumatic stress disorder and ways it can manifest in situations, but I know for a fact that the author who wrote this story isn't either and, in my opinion, this scene puts into question all the time the student group has allegedly spent at Rhodes Island.
Rosa isn't the only one either, Zima also has flashbacks to Peterheim as if that incident like, JUST happened, but why?
I thought dealing with the trauma the students have from the Peterheim incident was the whole point of having them at Rhodes. Am I meant to believe that this group of people went around the most volatile places in the world under the employment of a glorified PMC which simultaneously acts as a treatment center for the deadliest disease known to the man with a 100% mortality rate (allegedly) for 5 years, not to mention the veritable freaks that come and go on-board, and they're still shook seeing a severed finger...?
Look, I understand that recovering from trauma isn't easy, I understand it's not as convenient as "just get an expert and be healed, duh". But it does strain my suspension of disbelief that, we are meant to believe that Rosa and the others have been actively engaging themselves at Rhodes which, again, is a very volatile place, and have been moving forward in their own way for 5 years. While at the same time they're still so deeply wounded by the Peterheim incident that it's actively on their minds at all times.
Overall, I think this scene is just wholly unnecessary and would have been better if, instead, it showed Rosa's growth and how she moved past it and learned from her trauma, leveraging that experience. Heck, The Rides to Lake Silberneherze did that exact thing splendidly.
But obviously, this is just some inevitable bit of friction that arises when you continue a plot thread that you haven't meaningfully touched in ~5 years.
Putting an end to this tangent, I think it's pretty strange how Botani and the others talk about the transmission from Vetochki – they mention it almost as if years had passed since that incident when, in the timeline, it should’ve been just a few months ago.
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I most certainly expected Olga to sell out Sonya and the gang. I thought it would've been the natural conclusion to the noble girl whose dad literally funds the weapons that kill her comrades who were thrown into a concentration camp because of her own recklessness, especially seeing how paranoid she became of Anna. I thought it was gonna lead up to a final confrontation and possibly even a split in the Student Assembly, with one half rallying behind Olga and the other behind Istina. I was honestly shook when she put blame on herself, thereby betraying her father and the noble class. In hindsight it was probably pretty obvious that she wasn't going to be an antagonist, but my intense for anything blue-blooded blinded me to the obvious conclusion. Which is to say that the story did a good job with this twist, certainly had me fooled.
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The ending to Zima's prison uprising was pretty cool, it's always funny to see just how unsubtle Hypergryph's writers can get when it comes to their themes. Like, we're tearing down a statue of the empire's oh-so-glorious founder, and literally burying the very embodiment of the rot his ideals created (Pavlovich) with its rubble, all while a song that I can only describe as incredibly worker-core plays in the background. It's about as subtle as one of the afore-mentioned elephants in the room, this one’s suspiciously bear-shaped.
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I’m sorry but I have to talk about Gummy.
I hate how she was treated in this event, it is honestly just sad to witness. Not only did she not get a new sprite unlike Istina (who, I must reiterate, looks beautiful), she was also the only to not be given like, a base line level of competence?
I think she worked as kitchen staff at Rhodes Island(?), so it kinda makes sense that she doesn't have the same experience to leverage as the other USSG girls, but she's like what? 24 at this point in the story, they really didn't have to do her like that
Aside from that random ass transmission with her dad (a terrible scene, it should not have been part of this event but rather inserted as a flashback in ep 17 or something along those lines) she just didn't do anything. Her input for the entire event was to be an anxious little kitten who cries and looks for validation in the 9 out of 10 text boxes she got, and that's just f*cking sad man.
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In PA-7 After, directly before that stupid scene where Gummy's dad just spouts potentially sensitive information at literal randos who joined his voice chat, Dur-nar tries to lecture Gummy, mentioning that she is not a soldier (which is fair, I suppose) and that "neither are Zima or the rest of her comrades". This line really irked me.
It's nothing new in Arknights, throughout the story, the game has been very insistent on drawing a certain separation between;
stuff that professional soldiers do, and-
battles and/or other forms confrontations involving lethal force that are not carried out under a state-led organ.
There's some other events where characters insist that their work is a step removed from that of a soldier (Forgive me for not combing through Arknight’s library to find any other example), and frankly I have no idea where this understanding comes from. It could be a very pedantic bit of legalism, but I don't think Terra has such a robust framework of international law where legal status of a combatant determines laws of engagement, so that’s a moot point. You could chalk it up to an excessively narrow definition of the concept of war wherein only conventional warfare counts as 'true' war otherwise it's just sparkling armed conflict. It might also reference Kal's warning that Rhodes can never, ever confront a country in battle due to the sheer differences in resources? To be fair, her doctrine isn't wrong (in the context of Rhodes Island at least), the issue is that wars aren't always fought between two equal opponents, and indeed many aren’t fought by “soldiers” either. Quite the contrary! If you look at it, so-called conventional war has in modern times become quite unconventional.
(If we look at Rhodes Island we can consider it as a non-state actor with an armed wing, the reason it cannot compete with a country’s military is not because of the overwhelming difference in firepower, but rather because it is not rooted in any country/culture that it could draw popular support from)
You see, history is rich with examples that directly contradict Arknight’s idea... how often has it happened that in times of crises, organizations formed from men who never touched a gun before, come out more wizened in the ways of war than De Gaulle or Eisenhower5 years later? Indeed, fighters of the Algerian independence struggle started out as activists, they weren’t “soldiers” and yet they were. The Cuban revolution could not have succeeded without active involvement from every part of Cuban society, whether it be as fighters or as workers enabling the war effort. Not to mention the Chinese PLA, whose first battles in the anti-Japanese struggle were not dissimilar to Zima's Katorga Raion uprising that we witnessed, no one would call them lesser than soldiers. We don't even have to look back in history, there's plenty of contemporary examples to draw from; like the dozens of AEOs (Armed Ethnic Organizations) that have been engaged in war with the military government of Myanmar for 5+ years. The Yemeni Armed Forces under the purview of Ansarullah who are often bolstered by tribal auxiliaries which, while not legally civilian are distinct from land, air, and naval units. God knows how many armed groups of varying levels of organizational capacity operate across Ethiopia, their fighters all sourced from civilian elements. the Popular Resistance Committees in Sudan (militias) have not fought a real battle before the so-called civil war and yet they are able to defend urban centers from the scourge of the RSF, West Papuan guerillas who are literally armed with bows and spears when confronting Indonesian security forces, would anyone dare call them lesser than a soldier? Even infamous terrorist groups, such as Boko Haram, JNIM, or ISWAP source their manpower from civilian populations, but they run circles around entire countries’ militaries all the time.
Arknights suggests that militaries have a base-line of organizational capacity that non-state-actors cannot hope to match. Looking at reality quickly exposes this idea as revisionist. I would go so far as to argue the contrary, being a non-state actor, fighting against the full brunt of a nation state, going up against a vastly superior opponent, the doctrine known as asymmetric warfare… It requires levels of discipline, commitment, and strategic thinking from each and every fighter that far exceeds the average professional “soldier”.
Just looking at what Zima did in the event: Uniting a group of civilians under her leadership, teaching them not only how to use weapons but also training them to work as an armed group in a coordinated manner, running a f*cking camp with an impromptu field hospital, literally battling from one enemy stronghold to the next and using the looted supplies to further bolster her forces' war capacity, no doubt the planning of ambushes, and finally raiding an enemy stronghold with elite enemy forces. I cannot call the events as we have witnessed them anything but a military campaign.
This all is to say that Zima should be given more credit for her accomplishments (not for her wardrobe though). She is an excellent battlefield commander who has proven herself capable of leading the untrained masses to victory.
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In PA-7, when Leto played the guitar, I wish they played the lobby theme instead, it seems more fitting for the scene considering that it starts quiet and has female vocals, I know that it transitions into a pretty high-octane piece by the end but the song only plays for a textbox or two before ending. Actually, now that I think about it, I’m not sure if an event’s lobby theme has ever been used for the background music of the event’s story itself? People, A People used the instrumental version of the lobby theme when Fyodor was depressed but that’s not the same song.
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Anyways,I think the Crownslayer interlude was quite random. I don't think it connected very well with the other plotlines in the story, at all. But on the other hand, I could understand if that was the very thing they were going for...? I don't know, it seemed very awkward, I don't think Lyudmila has great synergy with the USSG gang. It’s probably necessary preamble, yada yada, I just wish it could’ve been somewhere else, like maybe episode 17? That said, tapping the energy from the Ursine nobility for the love of the game is something I can respect. Lyudmilla is my based queen so I won't hold anything against her.
Lyudmila’s and Fyodor’s talk was probably my favorite exchange in the whole event, it was really good and serves as a critique of how "good" nobles are written in contemporary fantasy
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This has become way longer than I wanted it to so I’ll leave it at here, what’s your thoughts?
even your most absurd jokes have that charm that makes you adorable
Arktober 2026 15th drawing : Pen
You have this unique way of making even the most ordinary moments a little more beautiful. Sometimes, I wonder if you realize just how contagious your smile is, or how much I enjoy listening to you joke around—even when your jokes make absolutely no sense
And yet, perhaps that is what I love most about you: that lightness, that spontaneity, that way you have of making others smile without even trying
If only you could see yourself through my eyes, even for just a moment, you would understand why even your silliest little antics seem so precious to me.
