I’m sure libs will be totally normal and not descend into talking like Cecil Rhodes once these African countries start pursuing closer ties with Western adversaries a la Russia and China.

im jwust an editow at a smow bean pubwication normawizing detewiowating conditions under bourgeois rule while sitting by my poowl

Interesting read, even if I had no opinion on AoT since I haven’t watched much of it nor engaged in the discourse at all. Not necessarily because I’m averse to le grimdark (I like Berserk so…) but because the whiplashes of trying to shock you by showing established characters getting eviscerated in gruesome detail got old past the first Titan attack.

I will say I like you pointing out how something so obvious as authorial intent is almost always overlooked by defenders of a given piece of fiction.

For my next trick I will explain why Fullmetal Alchemist; Brotherhood is apologia for the crimes of Imperial Japan

As someone who loves that anime and has rewatched it on a couple occasions, I hate the way the Ishvalan genocide is handled with a passion.

Yeah. A whole point about his character is that oppression doesn’t automatically induce compassion and solidarity in its victims. Sometimes like in his case, it does the exact opposite and the victim wonders why can’t they be the hammer for once.

He’s a Zionist who actually lived in Israel, so…

It’s funny to me how common the trope of “good guys win only to not do anything to fundamentally change society to address root conflict and end up where they started come the sequel” is. End-of-History liberalism in a nutshell.

Next DLC gives you the option of forming the Communist International, too.

Ostalgie

I remember reading about how during development, the villains were originally going to be Nazis but that got canned because Westwood didn’t want to get locked out of the German market due to censorship as the previous year’s Tiberian Dawn was a surprisingly huge hit there. That puts everything into perspective, really, since you can see little bits of it poking out (like the Soviets specializing in stupidly-heavy, overdesigned tanks).

jokes on you liberals! they looked way cooler to my 6 year old brain, so the allies never had a chance

It helps that the villain factions tend to be cooler than Quasi-NATO in C&C games, only exception was Generals which had China as (anti-)heroes.

Catsuya

The insidiousness of settler-colonialism is that it makes beasts out of otherwise mundane people, yes, correct.

Feeding Frenzy gang

Trump is an opportunistic grifter while Biden is an ideologically-committed Zionist and imperialist who thinks the only issue here is that the PR is bad.

Guess I should have had the modifier “at launch” since I haven’t played CK3 in quite a bit.

CK3’s launch was notable for being one of the few PDX launches that wasn’t barely-functioning hot garbage, so that might inflate perceptions…

Thanks, kid!

Same but I was 12-13.

“Paradox did a somewhat decent job optimizing CK3 so surely Vicky 3 will get a similar treatment, right?”

-My naive ass once upon a time

One thing I can appreciate about gusanos is that many of the more famous ones will almost always hitch their ride on the right-wing culture war grift train, thus muddying the waters for ann actually effective anticommunist front. Liberals who might be sympathetic are turned off because they get equated with Vladimir Zedong Putin for believing in a marginal wealth tax, and “Talk to the people who suffered under communism!” Loses its ‘oomph’.

In a world as fucked as a Tiberium-infested Earth where it’s only downhill from here, may as well go with the most fun faction with the cool backstory/aesthetics over Super-NATO.

It’s funny because C&C1’s intro has Nod sounding more like a rising economic powerhouse nation like the PRC than an international terrorist org. Imagine Daesh having their own megacorp and share of the stock exchange.