Histidine's SR4 chapter 4 rantble

Then we get to the Astrium Station and everything goes downhill. There are a few good moments, like Icari's understated sarcasm at Alan Grey's "we don't meddle with foreign governments" line, or Storn's insanity motive rant (excellent voice acting for the guy, I'll say). But most of it was just a disappointment, even with LibDay already lowering my standards.

(You could probably just say all the stuff below is like this because of
and such, which I guess works but also, come on.)

Indeed the whole chapter's hollowness is summed up by the bar conversation with Icari, where we go from "what if Fontana is, like, uncontroversially correct" to a dumb fourth-wall-breaking joke.

Everything happens because it's needed for the narrative, not because it makes sense to. Like, I can just do this as a bullet point list.
Like, some of these holes could be filled with some fanon real quick, but here's the thing: the author should not delegate "make the plot make a lick of sense" to the reader. You can do that for things that aren't key events in the main plot.

I actually liked this, despite it arguably being typical "power of friendship" anime bullshit. Protip: You can get away with any writing sin with a bit of setup and enough emotional impact (I think the best example of this is the "the claw" scene in Toy Story 3).

What's this about Kryska discovering the Ongessite fracking process? Character archetypes aside, when has she ever shown the needed knowledge in exotic physics, or indeed any other field of science or engineering? You could just say it was she who came up with the idea that actual scientists were able to work off from.