Mw3 Spoilers - Tumblr Posts
Y'ALL I COULD NEVER SEE THIS DAMN DRAWING THE SAME AGAIN
I saw a tiktok of the same thing and thought it was so fuckin funny-
makarov hunting an/a (enemy? long assassin?) reader who doesn’t really want to work with him- reader knows their stuff, erasing tracks, setting up traps, etc- its a game
призрак Cw: canon-typical death, murder, assassination, mercenary, blood, tell me if I missed any.
You were a ghost —призрак in his mother-tongue. Appearing whenever you wanted and disappearing before anyone could find you, a phantom in the business of assassination, a killer without too high of a price. He’s watched the aftermath of your handiwork, the shows you played and the kills you made, they were a masterpiece he wanted to witness, to utilise for his goals. Even from the darkness of his solitary cell, locked away in the Gulag - the Zorgaya prison complex - he kept hearing about your endeavours.
You interest him, your brought out a certain excitement, made adrenaline pump in his blood, when you were first brought up. You were the a ghost - a wraith - that haunted the world, killing off men and women for the right number. You were a killer for hire, one of the best in the industry that even he - Vladimir Makarov - had attempted to recruit, to tie you down to his name and fame, to have you work for his purpose. Permanently.
But you were a slippery one, escaping whatever trap he carefully laid out for you, falling through his fingers, finding the smallest crack - mistake - in his plan that he once thought was full-proof. You were smart, feisty and skillful, able to see through his carefully crafted words for a hire, pushing past the firewall of his mind and planting a virus, corrupting his original purpose, rooting yourself into his sick mind. This feeling, the way his heart rammed against his rib when you sent a warning shot, or when you escaped from his grasp, this wasn’t love —no, he was a being detached from such frivolous affairs. He didn’t love. He couldn’t with his cold, dead heart. This was an obsession, Makarov obsessed over things, he knit picked, he stole and took apart.
Makarov was a being whose conscious transcended the likes of capitalist westerners who’ve corrupted his motherland, small-minded and parasitic politician who made the Soviet Union crumble to dust; whose forgone the primal needs that made humanity weak —vulnerable; Vladimir Makarov was better than any man.
That’s where stemmed his obsession with you, the need to hunt you down. You portrayed yourself as a being higher than him. A better strategist and killer than him. It went from word of mouth to ear, Makarov heard from the other guards and new inmate speak of you, you achievements, the spike in your demands and the people who were ready to give you an arm and leg to pay for your service. Powerful men and women routing you an undisclosed amount of money to kill of someone, to have them assassinated in their own bedroom, to be drowned in their own bathtub or to be poisoned by their own wine.
He had Konni keep a track on your work while he waited for the right time to be freed, jumping back to work once he landed in Russia. He took it on himself to follow your steps, he had a hand in every sector of the underworld, dabbing in everything to keep his hold over the world. He couldn’t find anything about you, neither your past nor your character, you were nameless and faceless, the hooded mask obscuring your face from the world. Makarov’s best couldn’t even track you through cameras and find your deposit account, it seemed as though you had a team of your own, working in the dark to keep your and their livelihood going.
You evaded his traps, able to figure out which deals were made by him as a ploy to catch you, to find the ghost that haunted his mind. You were a disease, a parasite that unknowingly clung to him. You knew him, the messages he received through the grapevines, taunting remarks and threats that made him see red. You were too skillful, erasing your steps, making it seem as if you were never there in the first place, uninvolved with it, but the world knew who committed the crime. This was a game - or so he liked to think - of cat and mouse, he preferred being the cat, the dangerous and cunning feline who stalked the small mouse, he had to swallow his pride and confess that he played the mouse as often as he played the cat, being hunted and narrowly escaping because you let him.
But this, this meeting was a surprise, to see his призрак stand before him, tempted by the proposition he had to offer you —without any underlying meaning or hidden thoughts.
“мы наконец встретились, Призрак.” (We finally meet, ghost.)
Taglist: @sae1kie @yeoldedumbslut @tallmanlover @distracteddragoness @vxnilla-hxrddrugs @konigsblog @havoc973 @im-making-an-effort @daisychainsinknots @0alk0msan @danielle143 @dont-mind-me-just-existing-sadly @tuttifuckinfruttifriday
the best of us.
‘goddamnit, johnny’
‘i’m sorry, LT’
Review & Rant Concerning MW3 Reboot
**This has Spoilers for MW3. If you have not played the full game and care about spoilers, please do not read.**
To preface this, hi!! I'm Max is a Well, and I am a writer. I have not published any novels, but I do have one in the works. I have written for plenty of people, including some pretty big fanfiction authors [past tense] (not as impressive as most, but I quite enjoyed it), and I have written my fair share of fan artworks, and then a few half published WIPs are floating around the internet somewhere. I've been writing since I was like, 12 years old. I've done it for the better part of my life now, and I've turned some heads with my writing. If circumstances were better where I could pursue this passion for full-time, I'd probably be really well off by now. All this to say, I'm very much someone who knows a lot about writing, story pacing, emotions dramatics and the whole 9 yards.
I love playing games and immersing myself within what's happening in game, and I got that feeling from MW1 & 2, but 3 was just, a little rough feeling. I can't quite explain it, but it just didn't have the same vibe as the first or second. I enjoyed the narrative although, again really rough story telling. (You're gonna get that in games like this that are essentially propaganda for a certain cause or organization, so I disregard most of it. It's the "look this is cool guys! You wanna do this," kind of thing.)
Then, Price didn't let Soap kill Makarov. Standing from a narrative point of view, we were told this guy 1, is extremely dangerous extremist, and threatening to bring WW3 onto humanity. 2, Brass is worried about this, and if they're worried about it, than we need to be too. (This solidifies that the man is a genuine threat, and that he needs to be treated as such. Often this means, a straight up get rid of this guy.) 3, Price and the 141 have some history with Makarov. Then, to build off this, in the previous game, MW2, we literally were on a to-kill mission for Hassan. So if Makarov is an even bigger threat than Hassan, (and Hassan had MISSILES), then, shouldn't we have killed Makarov when given the chance?
Also to build off this, they are all within the SAS, or have passed SAS selection. They are, narratively speaking, the best of the best within their specific branch. They are more than well trained and specialists when it comes to Counter-Terrorism, which with that would come with knowing things like how to properly debilitate your enemy, knock them out, etc. They would have had done interrogations to get specific information and you can't just bring someone awake to a location to be interrogated. You would have to knock them out or debilitate them prior before moving. Yet, they didn't do any of that. Just, knocked his ass to the ground after a stab to the shoulder.
None of it past a certain point makes any sense narratively, and me as a writer is so fucking pissed. They made Makarov a fucking badass and BBEG for the century, yet they kill off arguably one of the best liked characters? Especially after Neil did so much advertising for the fans and even doing the corny Christmas thing that was all over COD TikTok for a few good weeks afterwards. People were going WILD over the Scot, and Ghost.
One thing you learn pretty quickly when creating content, whether it be games, art, comics, novels, etc... is that you got to feed your fanbase from time to time. You give them an inch, and you'll get a mile. No one needed to die within the third game, especially when it felt so rushed. If they really needed the suspense, then they could have easily injured Soap, and kept us wondering if he was alive, and then revealed him okay within the fourth installment. That would have made people buy the game just to see if their favorite was still around, and who knows, maybe they'd actually enjoy the story and decide to play the rest of the game.
What really pissed me off other than the weird pacing of the stretch of the game is the way they reacted to Soap's death. Now, they didn't have to be horribly torn up at it like Price in the original series, in fact, that would be horribly unrealistic. My mother is a hospice nurse, so she's gotten close to a lot of patients that have passed. Some being really traumatic and saddening ways. She can't cry anymore, but she does grieve, and she grieves hard when it's a patient she's had for a while and gotten close to. You can't look me in the eyes, and tell me these three men who have just spent a year and some change chasing down Hassan, and now Makarov, wouldn't show no emotion when it came to one of their own dying?
Soldiers are friends but more. There's a whole reason there's the saying "brothers in arms" exists. They go through hell and back together, they definitely did in Las Almas, and during Chicago in the second game. So to have barely 2 minutes worth of a cutscene to pay homage to a character that they all bonded so deeply with? I genuinely thought people were seriously joking about it, and then I saw it with my own two eyes and I'm appalled on how they thought that was a good send off both emotionally and narratively. It did nothing. It didn't comfort you, it didn't sound like they were grieving too terribly, it was just, flat. Monotonous. There was hardly any emotion in the lines, and the guys didn't have to be crying, but at least put some emotion in it.
Ghost and Gaz arguably in the reboot are the closest to Soap, so some sort of emotion, like Ghost being just a little choked up on his "Rest in Peace, Johnny" would have been just top tier. You would have been able to gauge so much off of that, and it would have fed the Ghost and Soap fangirls so much. (I know some COD players don't like to hear that, but the fandom shifting is a normal thing to happen, and the new people within the fandom are buying the games to play them just to understand the story and that is absolutely helping the studio and the games preform better. To put it simply, they are now also apart of the integral part of keeping COD alive and well.) Or, Gaz instead of just saying the most generic army farewell thing in the world, instead make a personal promise to bring Makarov to his knees himself. Again, it would gauge so much with his character, how he's feeling, what this death is doing to him, and what his personal goals are moving forwards.
They absolutely, from a narrative position could have done so much better. There are always going to be bugs and glitches in games, especially shooters, but the thing that draws people in and keeps them coming back, is the story and the characters. At the end of the day, this was not only a horrible story decision, but also is probably going to hurt them a lot when concerning the next game release. The newer crowd hardly has a reason to come back to see the new game. If Soap, a beloved character was treated this way, how are they going to treat Price, Gaz or Ghost if they die? I'm incredibly disappointed, they had an amazing story, amazing VA's, amazing graphics and design. The COD fandom was seriously getting a much needed breath of fresh air, new life was coming in, and they just tossed everything out the window.
TL;DR:: As a writer, the decision to kill off Soap was extremely horrible from both a monetary and narrative standpoint. It didn't move the story forwards, create any friction, and he didn't even have a decent send off. This is probably going to kill the new growth the COD fandom was experiencing, which in turn is definitely going to hit the studio's pockets. How much is yet to be seen, but I've seen a lot of new-blood say they weren't satisfied and aren't looking at purchasing the next game. Me included.
a smaller part of my thoughts on the mw3 campaign that i think is important enough to need its own post:
(there are spoilers below)
i've seen many cod creators on here talking about the situation going on in the middle east right now, and a lot of posts condemning the ethnic cleansing and genocide happening in palestine. i think it's great, especially coming from a fandom based on games that are first and foremost military propaganda. what i don't think is great is that soap's death seems to be taking priority over the blatant terrorist storyline that happens with samara and the changing of the no russian mission.
a middle eastern woman - the second one to get a shocking, and brutal death (more brutal than soap's, might i add) - is taken hostage by a group and forcibly made to hijack a plane. she is forced to wear a bomb strapped to her chest and dragged to the back of the plane where more civilians are. when she tries to fight back we get this exchange:
hijacker: are you a terrorist?
samara: no!
hijacker: you look like one.
she is then handed a gun, shoved into a crowd, and we are forced to watch her struggle to get a phone against a crowd of people who think she is a terrorist before the plane blows up.
i see a lot of people in the fandom saying to reject canon as a way to cope, which i fully understand - canon is really really stupid sometimes. however, i'm also seeing a lot of people saying to pretend this campaign just doesn't exist, and i take a lot of issue with that.
this fandom, in particular, does not get to do that. you can be upset with soap's death, the thrown together storyline, the half-baked combat, whatever else you don't like about the game, but we do not get to ignore the purposeful mistreatment of a middle eastern character while also being vocal about palestine. we do not get to ignore that activision chose to change this mission from makarov shooting up an airport, to forcing a middle eastern character to blow up a plane while he escapes. we do not get to ignore that the cod games are military propaganda, and that just because we may enjoy playing or watching these games, that doesn't mean we shouldn't be looking at these games, their storylines, and their characters critically.
i need people to understand that it is an immense privilege to be able to turn them off and "ignore the campaign" while casually reblogging the occasional post about palestine. you are allowed to enjoy these games, and you are allowed to be angry and hurt over soap's death. these games are allowed to be a form of escapism for you, but i am begging you all to think more critically about the choices activision is making here, and understand that escapism doesn't mean you can disregard and ignore those choices.
and i think a lot of people, those who post about palestine in particular, should think about why this fandom is placing more importance on a white character's death than the blatant and egregious islamophobia and military propaganda.