The specific example that made me start thinking about this was how AC Odyssey has a sidequest where a slave doesn’t want to be freed because he thinks being a slave is cool, actually, which is both absurd apologetics but also misses that in Greek and Roman systems manumission was a form of social control that both rewarded and indebted slavers’ most loyal collaborators. That turned into thinking about how just absolutely absurdly shitty classic Greek society was in general, and how AC Odyssey made it this weird wholesome egalitarian slaver dictatorship where everything’s cool and good except for the bad mean guys who are indistinguishable in methods or goals from anyone else.
That’s also one of the things that pisses me off about Starfield so much, how the “good guys” are a pair of far right colonial empires: one is literally just the fascists from Starship Troopers, and the other are a bunch of feudal ancap dictatorships. Even the villains are just saturday morning cartoon villains who are bad and mean but don’t really ever do anything distinct from the “good” factions except be ontologically opposed to you, the main character.
Someone else pointed out recently how HOI4 ends up effectively doing Nazi apologetics the same way, where in trying to avoid giving their worst fans a holocaust button they just outright remove all the actual horror and material actions the Nazis did altogether.
And I don’t think I even need to get into how rampant this problem is in liberal fantasy settings, which are always full of apologetics for monarchism, because that’s well tread ground for criticism. It’s enough to make something like how the original Mount and Blade handled the in-universe nobles as being inherently sexist and classist pieces of shit who were obstacles for a female and/or commoner PC to fight against and overcome almost refreshing, instead of it just being like “yeah these awful pieces of shit who are all definitely mass murderers and worse are actually cool and nice to you and not really all that bad really” like so much feudal apologia media does.
And yeah, there’s a point to be made about not wanting to grapple with problematic themes and all, but where there’s the line where that just turns into apologetics for the very problematic thing you’re trying to avoid dealing with at all?
Moral dilemma in starfield: kill the ultra rich CEO who has been knowingly poisoning the soil and funding a vicious army of angry war veterans to displace poor farmers OR let him live because he is a “job creator”
funding a vicious army of angry war veterans
The funniest part is they weren’t even veterans: there were only a tiny handful of survivors of the actual First, the rest were just dumbass fascist fanboys they found in FC bars who were all “hell yeah I would love to join your death cult and subscribe to your newsletter!” All the actual veterans were old, since they’d been locked up for 20 years and they were pretty much just the handful of officers left after all the grunts got thrown into a meatgrinder for literally nothing.
At least no one gave you any shit for executing Ron Hope, though it’s kind of weird that the FC’s only federal law enforcement agency was just like “lol, lmao” to you executing one of the literal dictators of the FC on the spot. You’d think the other dictators of the FC would be upset about one of their own facing consequences for his actions, and at the prospect that someone could come after them for their own crimes.
Sucks that you cant kill the dickhead CEO tyrant in Neon because “essential” (i know mods can remove it and people would complain about no world impact if hes killable but still wtf) Come on Todd at least dissable the essential tag in Ng+. Like if you break a questline just make a new game+ like in souls games.
i’ll still kill the ultra rich CEO, you don’t need to have private “entrepreneurs” to create jobs
there are other ways
It pissed me off so much when the workers were all like “I’m not sure what we’ll do now without him,” like motherfucker you’ll just show up tomorrow and keep doing the same job nothing will change. He wasn’t the one working the fucking assembly line. His major contribution to the company seemed to be poisoning the local population, not doing any actual fucking work. Also his given reasoning is that he needs to be evil so the company can stay profitable with absolutely no acknowledgment of or thought put into what “profit” means. Oh your company had to hire mercenaries to shoot meemaw and force her off her land because there wasn’t enough cash left over after covering operating expenses for you and the other board members to swim around in? You can’t fill a second pool with credits because it’s been a slow quarter? The horror 🙄
It’s implied that the corporation and workers can potentially survive even with the CEO dead so killing the CEO turns out to be the right choice. The CEO is on a goverment as well and his colleagues seem to be fine with him dead. I like the outcome but I hate that it is presented as a critical junction of that questline because the dilemma is a bit of a no-brainer.
Yeah, HoI4 inherently has an interesting double bind as a WW2 game, being stuck between “let players do the Holocaust” and “ignore the Holocaust.” It’s a problem I’ve thought about myself, and I’ve heard or come up with a couple of possible solutions:
- Depict the Holocaust through events that fire off for Allied players when they capture the provinces where Dachau, Auschwitz, etc. were located. This acknowledges the event in a way that makes it invisible to a German player, hopefully robbing them of any satisfaction.
- The brute force option: Do not let players play as Germany. Do not let players use the dev console to tag switch to Germany. Take down any Steam Workshop mods that allow the player to play as Germany.
- The historical realism option: Make Germany a completely dysfunctional mess with a putrid, unsustainable ideology that is doomed to fail. Its Ponzi Scheme economy means it must constantly pick fights against harder and harder targets. Its reliance on slave labor results in widespread sabotage that cripples its industries. Its horrific occupation policies result in it facing overwhelming resistance in conquered territories. There is no level of player skill that would allow Germany to emerge the winner, barring ousting the Nazis from power.
by making it super hard/impossible, it might become a challenge. Holocaust speedrun/WAVE 250 shit.
The historical realism option: Make Germany a completely dysfunctional mess with a putrid, unsustainable ideology that is doomed to fail. Its Ponzi Scheme economy means it must constantly pick fights against harder and harder targets. Its reliance on slave labor results in widespread sabotage that cripples its industries. Its horrific occupation policies result in it facing overwhelming resistance in conquered territories. There is no level of player skill that would allow Germany to emerge the winner, barring ousting the Nazis from power.
I like this but I’d like to point out these criticisms apply to every playable country in the game though not just the Axis. The UK/France were also decaying imperial powers and the minor allies(Netherlands/Belgium/Brazil etc) are completely irrelevant. Yes players can brute force achievements but its more to do with limitations of the game than actual realism, I mean fucking Brazil isn’t capable of conquering the entirety of South America in 6 years or whatever either but its fairly trivial.
Anyway point is the US obviously found itself fighting Germany by chance and a chain of events rather than much deeper ideological differences and if you handle Germany like that then the probably should do the same with the other capitalist shit countries too.
At the end the only valid WW2 game should be a USSR simulator lol.
To be fair to Starfield: as an American, I get confused if you ask me to choose between anything other than fascism and capitalism
I’m not even in my mid 20s yet but I’ve become jaded with video games and media in general. I never finished reading Capitalist Realism because it meanders too much, but the first few chapters stuck with me. Every piece of media wants to critique “the system” but all of them fail to say anything meaningful. At this point, any time I see the word “mega corporation” in the premise of a game or movie, I immediately dismiss it as dogshit.
The exception would be Andor. Probably the only mainstream piece of media that doesn’t obscure the ugly truths of what it means to resist an oppressive force.
Someone else pointed out recently how HOI4 ends up effectively doing Nazi apologetics the same way, where in trying to avoid giving their worst fans a holocaust button they just outright remove all the actual horror and material actions the Nazis did altogether.
Don’t forget that they also took away civilian casualties even though that would affect so many things like production, recruiting, and psychology. They added this to Vicky 3 but I don’t know. The warfare kind of sucks and yes I know they didn’t want to prioritize that. But if you’re going to add all these dependent systems you might as well show the carnage.
But the best part is that many Paradox fans (and developers, I assume, since they’re e*ros) believe that Stalin is more evil than Hitler, but they have mechanics for the great purge and famine. Don’t forget CoD with their “gulag” mechanic In their own logic, they don’t even take what they consider genocide seriously because if they truly believed their own words, there’d be characters fighting each other with AKs and striped pajamas
Every piece of media wants to critique “the system” but all of them fail to say anything meaningful.
One may dye their hair green and wear their grandma’s coat all they want. Capital has the ability to subsume all critiques into itself. Even those who would critique capital end up reinforcing it instead.
I like the line but I never liked how aware Joyce is of this. In real life people like Joyce are fully consumed by the ideology and blind to what capital even is. Maybe she’s just cynical.
she’s not a capitalist though. she’s a professional agent of capital. she went to a university overseas where she probably read mazov. she’s a specimen of the kind of person we encounter when real political change is foreclosed upon in the public imagination.
e: in fact there’s a reason why she gets the line about capital subsuming criticism of itself, and why she’s the one to teach Harry about the wider world and the Pale. she is capitalist realism personified, empowered, and yet without agency.
While I never played COD, these threads always remind me of the scene where they portray the Highway of Death as a Russian atrocity. Straight up revisionism…
But the in popular media are staggering. In addition to OPs examples, I notice how in LNs it is a trope that the main character gets to own slaves, but it’s not bad in their case, because they are good slave owners and tread them well… It is so fucking messed up. On a related note, I’d like to see a John Brown Isekai
I’d like to see a John Brown Isekai
I know what I’m gonna put on my reading list right now :D I was kind of joking when I wrote that, but now my day got much better. Thank you!
On a related note, I’d like to see a John Brown Isekai
Someone wrote one and I’ve seen it linked here before. Let’s see… ok, I managed to track it down, though google only returned reddit threads of people talking about it even though I remembered the name. Haven’t read it though.
