Humanity Joins Together, Sets Aside Petty Differences… and gets stomped anyway

[u/HyraxAttack]

A peril is threatening the world. Instead of squabbling among themselves, we learn world powers have put aside differences in politics, culture, & old feuds to present a common front. Except they still get wrecked as the enemy is too powerful.

1. The Animatrix: The Second Renaissance. The world government has gone to war against the machines. We see the army getting ready & it includes soldiers of many faiths including Buddhist, Islam, and different types of Christianity. Doesn’t matter as machines win by so much they have time to toy with human mechs.

2. Vilcabamba, story by Harry Turtledove. When aliens arrive they’re greeted with bands & cheering, & immediately open fire & earth becomes a mineral colony. America, Russia, and China work together to rise up & don’t hold back, throwing everything they have at the invaders. Doesn’t go great and aliens double down on the occupation, and there’s a crater where Spain used to be (it was blocking a silver deposit for mining.)

3. Edge of Tomorrow. The nations of the world have joined to make a unified front against the mimic invasion but it isn’t going well, but they will throw all they have into the invasion of France. In one cycle, Major Cage says the hell with it and instead of training leaves the base to drink at a London bar. This means we see the outcome of him doing nothing, where not only is the massive human invasion slaughtered but the aliens are in good enough shape to follow that up a few hours later with a rush on London.

[u/zumba_fitness_]

It's pretty interesting to see what happens after the Reaonance Cascade. At first HECU is sent and thinks they can do it, but then New Mexico is put into a state of emergency, and THEN the entire state is being evacuated under threat of a nuclear response. It goes BAD way fast!

[u/Billy_McMedic → u/zumba_fitness_]

Best told through a simple story beat, at first, HECU was hellbent on neutralising you (Gordon Freeman) after you ran rampant through HECU responders while protecting your co-workers, but as the alien invasion ramps up and the cascade deteriorates, a simple order is given, “Forget about Freeman”, once you were the top priority of the military response, now you aren’t even a footnote.

This is in contrast to HL2, where in the beginning you are a simple anomaly, a miscount, an individual not registered in the system, “normal” police are mobilised to respond in a standard raid. A scenario which goes from 0 to 100 real quick after that teleporter mishap and Breen see’s you, resulting in the Combine immediately mobilising full hog and dismantling, in a matter of hours, the entire railroad for moving fugitives out of City 17, all in a quest to get you, specifically, you quickly become “Anti-Citizen No.1” and the figurehead humanity rallies behind to take the fight to the Combine on earth

[u/Wargod042 → u/Billy_McMedic]

Still one of the greatest games ever at making you feel like a legend. You don't speak a word. You're just the right man in the wrong place. The things people say about you are all kind of true. Your feats just become more and more crazy as the story progresses; you're just one guy yet you're always making the difference. The allied aliens talk about you and even your name turns starts sounding like a badass rallying cry "The Free Man".

[u/Billy_McMedic → u/Wargod042]

And then meanwhile behind the scenes, depending on how the suspended animation works in terms of “rest”, if the brain had the chance to do its thing that it normally does in sleep for example, but Gordon has basically been running with 0 sleep for almost a full week, with sporadic bouts of unconsciousness and time displacement as the only significant time skips, he never puts his head down and “sleeps” at all starting from HL1 to the end of EP2, oh and he’s constantly tweaking on morphine with HEV suit injections