Canon Promo Post 2020

[modzilla]

Please use this post to promote the fandoms you're interested in requesting, or ask for recommendations of canons that suit you!

Promoting your canons

Comment here with information about the canons you are thinking of requesting, or otherwise want to get people into!

Information you might include

Title

Media

Approx length

Where to find it (If giving links, please only link to legal sources. You may want to encourage people to contact you directly if they are having trouble finding a canon and you can give them tips.)

What is it, in summary?

What do you love about it?

What sort of things are you likely to request for it?

Are there sections of canon (rather than the whole canon) that can be consumed by themselves to fulfil your requests?

Content warnings (ie, rape, incest, racism, gore/violence) - this is at your discretion and is not expected to be comprehensive

Some examples: Yuletide, Fandom5k

Please keep an eye on comments, as people may have follow-up questions about your canons.

Asking for recs

You're also welcome to leave comments (anon or not) asking people to rec you canons that they are likely to request.

Consider letting people know if you're interested in specific media only, or have other restrictions.

Comments

[kanadka]

Title: XCOM (is a franchise, but each is standalone and I'm specifically requesting Chimera Squad)

Media/Length: Video game, takes 20-26 hours to complete, or about 4 hours to consume enough youtube material. You can find the game on Steam, and I'd wait for the next sale to get a better discount. (While the XCOM games typically are available on Windows, Mac, or Linux, alas CS is currently Windows-only.)

What is it?
XCOM Chimera Squad is a turn-based tactical action/strategy game by the same guys who brought you Civilization (and XCOM generally is a lot like Civilisation except military sci-fi, and also in addition to the resource planning, it has missions where you shoot people). In Chimera Squad, you have a team of 11 agents, 4 of whom you can bring on any mission. Your goal on any of those missions is stuff like escorting a hostage out, rescuing civilians, capturing flags, etc. Between missions, you have to manage resources to be able to quell unrest in different parts of the city.

What's it about?
If you're not familiar with XCOM as a franchise, here's the story so far from the main games: you play as the Commander of an international paramilitary organisation (that's XCOM), originally set up by a council of nations to combat an alien invasion. The aliens win, though, and they set up their own occupying organisation on Earth called ADVENT. There's a lot of capturing, autopsying and genetic experimentation on both sides: ADVENT has its own strange science projects for their own murky reasons which you discover as you play, while XCOM is mostly looking for answers and how to make better weapons and not be the underdog all the time. After 20 years of occupation and alien rule, ADVENT is finally overthrown in the events of XCOM 2. The upper caste of the aliens who made up ADVENT leave the planet, but they leave behind all their alien grunt soldiers. A tentative peace has been struck to get humans and remaining aliens (and the hybrids that ADVENT created, who aren't human or alien) to work together.

This is where Chimera Squad comes in, and it takes place 5 years into this tentative peace, trying to enforce that peace. It's up to you as the player to figure out how effective that enforcement really is! When not saving the city in an alien/human/hybrid SWAT team, or choosing where to expend resources, your team snarks playfully at each other in the background.

Why I love it:
- I'm a huge fan of turn-based tactical strategy :D
- the worldbuilding is great but has a lot of potential that's constantly going under-explored
- the characters in Chimera Squad are charming and super fun - unlike in previous XCOMs, you can't customise them, they come pre-made; and while they've done a good job making a diverse and fun cast for CS (nice voices, some clever writing), there is still so, so, so much more potential to fleshing out these characters, and it'd only be a step above Original Works type fic at this point.
- it's cheap but replayable (you can only collect 8 of the 11 agents and playing with different ones means different strategies), so there's value for your money; it's also relatively short
- it's (arguably) not as difficult* as regular ordinary XCOM, because you get a free first turn, and there's not as much stuff to customise, so it's an easy gateway to the franchise (or indeed to other turn-based strategy games, such as Shadowrun (the computer game version, that is))
- it has that Great XCOM Feel of having a 97% probable hit and missing and ruining the absolute rest of the mission and getting everyone killed!
- it doesn't take very long before you find the cool guns and unlock the cool skills and become massively overpowered and then No One Can Stop You. It's very good for working out aggression.

*unless you pick the super hard ironman-type setting that doesn't let you save so you can't refresh the game over and over to try that shot you missed again. ...which I would never do, of course.

What I'll request
Worldbuilding, and found-family teambuilding shenanigans. My favourite character is Verge, and I nominated a few others I was fond of, but I really love them all, and there's a whole bunch of cool character archetypes for those who don't like the 'I grew empathy so I heel-face turned and found myself a redemption arc'. For example, Terminal is a cheerful/wisecracking/sarcastic medic who hides pain and a difficult past that she conceals-doesn't-feel; Godmother is an older srs bsns resistance veteran who Can't Stop Fighting and Doesn't Like Trusting, and Torque (the sexy snake lady) fought for the opposite side throughout the entire war - only her connections with Col. Kelly seem to have gotten her out of detention - and she's still generally kinda prickly.

Are there sections of canon (rather than the whole canon) that can be consumed by themselves to fulfil your requests?
Yes! There's a campaign movie here - it's not long, though it feels a little more disjointed as it removes all of the fun things the squad says to one another as they're standing around the map table, or in missions, or while you're planning your resources, but youtube provides for those, too and you can get a sense of in-mission dynamics and the agents' special skills just from watching that or other playthroughs. All character intros can be found here, if that helps entice you.

[aearis]

I know you said Chimera Squad is a standalone, but would you recommend playing any of the other games first to better understand the world/backstory?

[kanadka]

That's actually a really good question. While the other games aren't necessary to enjoy Chimera Squad, they do provide some background information (just not nearly as much as you might think). But they're also tonally completely different from Chimera Squad. So I think on the whole the answer would be 'no, but check out some of the cutscenes from XCOM 2, specifically War of the Chosen; and if you like it, go ahead and play XCOM 2! it is fun!'

While there's an 'in medias res' feel to the opening of the campaign movie I linked, I suspect that's intentional - there's no missing in-game information from XCOM 2 that would help bridge XCOM 2 to Chimera Squad in a satisfying way. Chimera Squad just sort of starts off with that X Years Later feel, and I'm fairly sure that's by design.

But there is a difference in tone between Chimera Squad, and the first XCOM ("Enemy Unknown", has an expansion "Enemy Within") and its sequel XCOM 2 (has an expansion "War of the Chosen"). Chimera Squad is sort of a post-war more jocular team feel but XCOM/XCOM 2 are darker and come with a few more content warnings (body horror, autopsying/mad science, explosions, the usual alien invasion war stuff). It's a little like if Men in Black were the sequel to Independence Day. Both main XCOM games are also a lot longer than Chimera Squad is.

That said, if you're interested in the mood-whiplashy potential of Chimera Squad and the characters' darker pasts (which are hinted-at in the game and promo materials, but never really fleshed out), then XCOM 2 does help ground that aspect of the world and backstory. The expansion "War of the Chosen" especially gives more information about what happens to Earth and its citizens during the occupation and control by the aliens, as well as resistance groups on Earth who aren't XCOM (and most of those groups are human, but one is made up of rebellious genetically altered human/alien hybrids). For the most part, XCOM 2/War of the Chosen takes place in and around XCOM headquarters, not on Earth, though, so I'd advocate watching the cutscenes (the first 35 minutes are probably enough, and bonus, you get to meet the Chosen, who are really fun enemies) over an actual playthrough (between 30-50 hours). But if those cutscenes pique your interest about the game, I absolutely do recommend it.

(While the first XCOM: Enemy Unknown, is also good, the game mechanics are similar enough to XCOM 2 that you're not missing anything, and it's a bit dated.)

I should also note that one character does show up in XCOM 2 and Chimera Squad, and that's Jane Kelly, who starts in XCOM 2 as a wee baby Rookie and then shows up in Chimera Squad as a Colonel. But I think that's more for fun continuity than anything else; she doesn't feature as more than a name in XCOM 2 and only gets developed in Chimera Squad.

that... was really wordy, I am sorry /o\ I'm just really passionate about XCOM!

[aearis]

Thanks for the information! I'll check it out :)

[kanadka]

❤️❤️ I hope you'll enjoy it!