So how "unliveable" is The City in reality?

[A Wispy Willy]

I remember reading people talk about how it could never function in reality because of how loose the laws seem. But Nests are relatively safe (Distortions are the main threat, if not the only one) while the Backstreets are where everything is terrible.

And even in the Backstreets, it seems like it depends highly on which district you live in. Generally it seems you just need to know the rules, stay out of trouble, and keep away from the limelight unlike a certain fixer fangirl. All the violence in LoR wasn't necessarily normal, given regular people wouldn't make good keypages, or give decent combat pages.

[Reptiloid]

It is a work of fiction, so giving ties to our reality is kind of long way off. I mean, we have a 3 Birb monsters used as energy production. Though, considering what states managed to work in reality, I believe it has some degree of realism. Kind of a Singapore on steroids with extreme level of violence, favelas, a.k.a. backstreets and explotative technocracies ran by even bigger explotative technocracy as the Head.

No offence to ppl from Singapore if there are any, I've only using testimonies of my acquintance who wroked there and lives in Malasya.

[Yerc2]

Given how supernatural the world is, it seems quite volatile, especially for people who aren't in a high ranking position. Like even if people do nothing wrong, they can still get torn apart by monsters, other humans, or just starve.

While there are functioning wings and other groups surviving, there are also many mass horror stories. I'm not sure if this is the correct use of the word, but it seems rather dystopian and pretty much gang-ruled?
Not specifically gangs, but like how big groups exploit and use people. To the point of death or other weird visceral extents.

While we don't have solid lore of every group/corporations goals, it seems like most of it can be generalised to something like "wanting to be safe and/or wanting to have lots of money", both of which are very closely related in this the series.
I believe that we can infer the Project Moon games take place in California.

[SmallGespenst]

Depends, people living in Nests are pretty safe most of the time, There's a reason The Crying Children was a big enough deal to have section 1 of the Liu sent against it, and it's almost entirely because it attacked a Nest.
In the backstreets people are typically not in much more danger than living in a rough part of a modern city as long as they pay for protection and don't go bothering local syndicates, sure you might get mugged but that can also be said for the real world.

[Geoluread]

The main takeaway I got from LoR was that whether you're in a Wing or the Backstreets, happy or sad, you have little to no control over your life. Surviving as a citizen seems more a matter of luck than anything else, so people generally give up on hoping and dreaming. But you're right that our view is skewed because all we do is fight and don't know a lot about the typical person. My bet is if you're just John Doe in some Wing there's a good chance your life will just be normal.

[Lycan]

Erm... Nest is safe? Sinclair's village is in the Nest, and they just got... executed.
But for me, yeah, it's somewhat "unbelieveable". Where does the City churn out human everyday where life expectancy is low, death rate is high af, kids get killed because they are "ignorant about the rules of the world", etc?
Like, look at our world. Both Korean and Japan are somewhat good place to live, but they have some emergency plans because their birthrate are the lowest of the world.

[SmallGespenst]

The life expectancy is a lot higher than you'd expect, even Naive and idealistic weaklings like Finn from LoR can survive into their twenties in the infamously dangerous work of a low-end fixer office. There's just a *lot* of people so the death rate looks higher than you'd expect from real-world standards.

[Zalgo]

Originally posted by Lycan:

Erm... Nest is safe? Sinclair's village is in the Nest, and they just got... executed.
But for me, yeah, it's somewhat "unbelieveable". Where does the City churn out human everyday where life expectancy is low, death rate is high af, kids get killed because they are "ignorant about the rules of the world", etc?
Like, look at our world. Both Korean and Japan are somewhat good place to live, but they have some emergency plans because their birthrate are the lowest of the world.

The thing is, it's the same case IRL where our Death Rate is obscenely high that normally balances out against the birth rate. The reason why it feels like it's higher in the City is because the City itself has a population of 7 billion people, the same amount of people that live on Earth. Such a closed off space can easily give off the impression that the death rate is larger than it really is.

And heck, LOR confirmed that people have been able to live genuinely normal lives like Finn, who was completely innocent up until his death by the Library. Romance is also incredibly prevalent in the City thanks to LOR although PM refuses to show anything remotely sexual about it.

[A Wispy Willy]

Sinclair's village got executed, but I believe it also got mentioned that Kromer & friends only recently started their genocide on prosthetic users and were either killed or forced out before we learned what K. Corp would think on it. Nest vs. Nest outward violence isn't a common thing either.

Keep in mind that while N.Corp does look down on some body modifications, mainly things like removing pain or complete body modifications, only Kromer's faction was actually out killing people.

[RedCobra]

well imagine you just do your life normally as normal people then somewhere people want to kitnap you and turn you into premium meat dish.

what ever your nest is, i don't think you are save.

[LotusBlade]

Well, lets see how unlivable it is.

1) You lived in Lobotomy Nest. L.Corp decided to play with enkephalin, if you worked for them = got crazy or died. Then whole nest got blown up by wave of corruption with distortions of different threat level appearing and Aleph abnormalities on lose. Yes, very nice enviroment to make a family and live a good life. After it all settled, distortions spread in other nests and if somehow you survivrd in L.Nest, congratulations, now all sort of bandits come to rob it and get under theirs controll.

2) You can't travel the world cus outside of big towns (nests) is backstreets with bandits and mafia, you will get robbed, killed or eaten / sold for organs. If you manage to pass backstreets, there are outside area called Ruins, with all the fun stuff like deserters, sinners, distortions, abnormalities of Aleph or higher lvl and no protection at all. Good luck.

3) If you stay in town, you have to live by strict rules like that town with prescripts where they tell you to do stupid things once in a while. If you don't - they kill you immediately. You can transfer to different town, but everywhere is unsafe, you either have to pay to mafia for protection or participate in some cultist crap. Oh by the way, the official guards only protect civillians during particular hours, outside of timeframe you are on your own, haha. There is even movie series similar to this idea where 1 day in each year all crime is allowed.

4) Even if everything is good and safe, feeling strong emotions can end up turning you into abnormality permanently. And you don't even know about it, that is classified secret of L.Corp which only Angela and Roland know. And they are canned up inside Library. As you might know, there was thing called Fog War where Gregor participated, basically it is ONE strong abnormality fighting against city. And that crap happens all the time, cus L.Corp is not the only one using distortions and illegal experiments.

5) As far as i know, one of the corporation created damn portal to hell ro extract energy from demons yeah, so Doom incoming.


The only safe bet would be to manifest Aleph EGO and leave town. Preferably, EGO should allow flying.

[A Wispy Willy]

Originally posted by LotusBlade:

Well, lets see how unlivable it is.

1) You lived in Lobotomy Nest. L.Corp decided to play with enkephalin, if you worked for them = got crazy or died. Then whole nest got blown up by wave of corruption with distortions of different threat level appearing and Aleph abnormalities on lose. Yes, very nice enviroment to make a family and live a good life. After it all settled, distortions spread in other nests and if somehow you survivrd in L.Nest, congratulations, now all sort of bandits come to rob it and get under theirs controll.

2) You can't travel the world cus outside of big towns (nests) is backstreets with bandits and mafia, you will get robbed, killed or eaten / sold for organs. If you manage to pass backstreets, there are outside area called Ruins, with all the fun stuff like deserters, sinners, distortions, abnormalities of Aleph or higher lvl and no protection at all. Good luck.

3) If you stay in town, you have to live by strict rules like that town with prescripts where they tell you to do stupid things once in a while. If you don't - they kill you immediately. You can transfer to different town, but everywhere is unsafe, you either have to pay to mafia for protection or participate in some cultist crap. Oh by the way, the official guards only protect civillians during particular hours, outside of timeframe you are on your own, haha. There is even movie series similar to this idea where 1 day in each year all crime is allowed.

4) Even if everything is good and safe, feeling strong emotions can end up turning you into abnormality permanently. And you don't even know about it, that is classified secret of L.Corp which only Angela and Roland know. And they are canned up inside Library. As you might know, there was thing called Fog War where Gregor participated, basically it is ONE strong abnormality fighting against city. And that crap happens all the time, cus L.Corp is not the only one using distortions and illegal experiments.

5) As far as i know, one of the corporation created damn portal to hell ro extract energy from demons yeah, so Doom incoming.


The only safe bet would be to manifest Aleph EGO and leave town. Preferably, EGO should allow flying.

1. In the end, yeah. If you were living in the L.Corp nest, it's gone now. We don't know what the others' responses to the collapse of the Wing was specifically towards allowing Nest migration. Before then though, unless you were extremely unlucky like poor Rose in Wonderlab, generally all you had to do in the non-main branches was actually doing your job.

2. We don't actually know how dangerous the Outskirts are. We only hear from City inhabitants, and all we know is that Carmen and co. were at least capable of running a lab out there.

3. It doesn't seem any different than living in places where gangs or crime syndicates have a strong presence. The abstract ones like "kill your painting" absolutely suck to deal with if there's no way you can get an interpreter for your prescript (I would assume the Index doesn't do that), but otherwise a lot of them aren't hard to fulfill. I do wonder what happened to the people Yan stopped from killing others for their prescripts, but that's another topic. The Index, insane as they are, are also your best chance to escape somewhere better since they don't ask for money at all.
As for the guard thing, that's exclusively in the Backstreets, and staying out that late anyway is risking getting caught in up by Sweepers.

4. The Smoke War was not against an Abnormality, it was many Wings fighting the old L.Corp. The "smoke" was a result of the Singularity they possessed. Also, while Distortions/EGO are much more common, they're still a fairly rare phenomenon. Even moreso after the events of LoR, since there's no big event like the Library going on.

5. I'm not sure which that'd be, unless you mean the Warp trains? But they're not going through hell.

[Reptiloid]

Originally posted by LotusBlade:

The only safe bet would be to manifest Aleph EGO and leave town. Preferably, EGO should allow flying.

According to the universe lore, the city is the only existing metropolis on Earth, everything else beyond outskirts and ruins is hostile, hazardous and devastated. So, eh, might be not such a good idea.

Originally posted by A Wispy Willy:

Yan stopped from killing others for their prescripts, but that's another topic. The Index, insane as they are, are also your best chance to escape somewhere better since they don't ask for money at all.

Yan actually demonstrated that you can carry out the priscripts without taking the literal meaning written in there. Like when he gave a prescript saying to put needles in the cake and offer it a frien, he showed a workaround for it. So unless faced with something explicitly guresome, harmful, and dangerous, like cut your own balls and eat them, I guess prescripts could be manageble

[A Wispy Willy]

Originally posted by Reptiloid:

Originally posted by A Wispy Willy:

Yan stopped from killing others for their prescripts, but that's another topic. The Index, insane as they are, are also your best chance to escape somewhere better since they don't ask for money at all.

Yan actually demonstrated that you can carry out the priscripts without taking the literal meaning written in there. Like when he gave a prescript saying to put needles in the cake and offer it a frien, he showed a workaround for it. So unless faced with something explicitly guresome, harmful, and dangerous, like cut your own balls and eat them, I guess prescripts could be manageble

The main issue is that, with a lot of stuff that doesn't happen immediately before a guest arrives, we don't actually know the result of Yan's efforts. With any luck those people ended up fine, but there's also the chance they got killed anyway.

[Beato]

The city is just Russia mixed with Brazil and some of the worst aspects of the South Korean society seasoned with a bit of ultra-futuristic tech. You first worlders would never get it, but the City is mild compared to the Kafkian nightmare that is the real world.

[Reptiloid]

Originally posted by A Wispy Willy:

With any luck those people ended up fine, but there's also the chance they got killed anyway.[/spoiler]

You know this can be attributed to many other situations in the city, and irl in countries of non-western herritage. I don't see the issue there.