Yes I know that fascism measurehead is a playable ideology in Disco Elysium, but presenting fascism as with its integral ugly reality, glaring contradictions, and unsustainable death drive is a pretty leftist (and correct) way of portraying it. de-encyclopedia

  • TheWorldSpins [any, undecided]@hexbear.net
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    1 year ago

    I mean the game is set in fucking hell, half the freaks you kill kidnap people (mostly women) off the street to chop up for parts on the black market. Also for VR snuff porn. Communism was pretty much snuffed out in Russia even though the Soviet Union exists. China is also kinda fucked, Maoism was never embraced it seems according to the wiki.

    Shame about the new DLC ending.

    • UlyssesT [he/him]@hexbear.netOP
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      1 year ago

      “The world is shit, even trying to improve it somewhat is naive, and everyone in it with any meaningful agency is probably an asshole” settings leave very little room for me to care about what the fiction is portraying. I’m glad I didn’t buy in to it.

      • TheWorldSpins [any, undecided]@hexbear.net
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        1 year ago

        I get that. Nihilistic grim dark shit is really overused in media. Personally I didn’t buy into any message the game was or wasn’t trying to push, because Cyberpunk 2177 would just be endless deserts, ruins and skeletons. I just find the established setting and lore interesting in a dark way.

        • UlyssesT [he/him]@hexbear.netOP
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          1 year ago

          Personally I didn’t buy into any message the game was or wasn’t trying to push, because Cyberpunk 2177 would just be endless deserts, ruins and skeletons. I just find the established setting and lore interesting in a dark way.

          I personally find the message and the setting inseperable, or at least too much trouble to be worth the effort. For me, if the central narrative is repulsive, it stains everything else I may otherwise be doing. There’s plenty of pop-nihilistic edgy fiction settings out there to choose from if I wanted that.

            • UlyssesT [he/him]@hexbear.netOP
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              1 year ago

              I enjoy a wide range of fiction, but my problematic (yet all-time) favorite is Frank Herbert’s Dune series. It’s dark, tumultuous, full of vast and difficult-to-fathom massive political movements that span the stars, but it isn’t just ripe for change, it is dangerously ripe for change that does come and does change everything, in good ways and bad.

              There are very bad people in it, there are misguided people, there are people with true and actual messiah complexes, but there are also deeply sympathetic and heroic people. It’s a complicated struggle, much like the world we live in, just expanded into the far future.

                • UlyssesT [he/him]@hexbear.netOP
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                  1 year ago

                  Yeah, the books feel different too, and not just in the details.

                  One of the main things I like about Dune was that it was the first science fiction series I ever read that had potent emotional impact for me. The characters feel alive, driven by beliefs and passions. There are literal warrior-poets. There are religious beliefs that are cast so far in the future of speculative reckoning that they are both absurd by modern understanding (don’t get me started on the Orange Bible or Zensunni) but also very immersive in setting. It feels messy and alive in ways that resonate and feel real.