Creative works you enjoyed until politics happened - "How politics made me hate Welcome to Nightvale and other things"

[Flaming Insignias]

Shows on The CW

It went from being obvious young adult shows that you can sit back and laugh at, until they rammed up random gay/lesbian relationships, superheroes fighting along with anarchists, strong women GOOD/strong men BAD episodes, etc.

And I haven’t begin to talk about what they did to Riverdale and The Flash.

We should've seen the writing on the wall when the Wests were blackwashed, but we were optimistic and got nothing but disappointment for our troubles.

 

[Overly Serious]

It's not wholly this as I was already tapping out in Season 3 due to how slow it had become and moving away from the characters I liked, but Young Justice counts. The first two seasons are some of the best writing for a cartoon I've seen - clever plotting, intelligent but not too revealing foreshadowing, interesting characters and actual stakes where characters can and sometimes do die. S3 I was carried through mainly by inertia from the first two seasons. They also introduced the character of Violet who is a Fatherbox (basically the Good version of Apokalips' evil AIs called Motherboxes) transferred into the dead (but fresh and healed) body of a young Muslim girl. It's okay, she's not terrible (though wildly over-powered). But S4 episode ends with a conversation about how Islam was super-important to the dead girl and Violet wants to explore whether it might be important to her.

How the fuck does an immortal, millenias old sentient computer brain from an ancient civilization that has seen hundreds of inhabited worlds decide that "hey, this warlord slave trader from a few hundred years ago on this primitive world is the final representative of some supreme all-creator and spoke just to some local tribes who then started murdering, enslaving and colonising their neighbours" might be 'something that I want to explore'.

It's not just dumb, it's supporting a pretty nasty religion. Perhaps in episode 2 she'll throw one of the gay characters off a roof-top or start cutting up babies' penises. But I'll probably not know because it was the final nail in a coffin of a season that was already shaping up to be all about bigotry and prejudice against immigrants.

 

[Cactuar King]

It's not wholly this as I was already tapping out in Season 3 due to how slow it had become and moving away from the characters I liked, but Young Justice counts. The first two seasons are some of the best writing for a cartoon I've seen - clever plotting, intelligent but not too revealing foreshadowing, interesting characters and actual stakes where characters can and sometimes do die. S3 I was carried through mainly by inertia from the first two seasons. They also introduced the character of Violet who is a Fatherbox (basically the Good version of Apokalips' evil AIs called Motherboxes) transferred into the dead (but fresh and healed) body of a young Muslim girl. It's okay, she's not terrible (though wildly over-powered). But S4 episode ends with a conversation about how Islam was super-important to the dead girl and Violet wants to explore whether it might be important to her.

How the fuck does an immortal, millenias old sentient computer brain from an ancient civilization that has seen hundreds of inhabited worlds decide that "hey, this warlord slave trader from a few hundred years ago on this primitive world is the final representative of some supreme all-creator and spoke just to some local tribes who then started murdering, enslaving and colonising their neighbours" might be 'something that I want to explore'.

It's not just dumb, it's supporting a pretty nasty religion. Perhaps in episode 2 she'll throw one of the gay characters off a roof-top or start cutting up babies' penises. But I'll probably not know because it was the final nail in a coffin of a season that was already shaping up to be all about bigotry and prejudice against immigrants.

Don't forget driving throwing a van of peace into an Ariana Grande concert.

 

[Ginger Piglet]

I think Games Workshop is sensing an opportunity to transition from selling physical products--like the tabletop game--to a far more lucrative business model selling a license to produce their IP to production studios. Look at Marvel and DC comics: they keep the lights on by selling their rights to movie and TV productions, not selling actual comic books. GW knows this and is maneuvering into position. The "You Will Not Be Missed" letter was a signal to all potential corporate partners that they don't share the right-wing politics of many of their fans, that GW is one of the Good Ones. The hyper-focus on space marines to the exclusion of all others is because their marketing dept said that space marines have the most buzz in the normiesphere. The seemingly inexplicably crackdown on fan-led content creators is because selling their IP will tolerate no competition. None of these things are by accident.

They've sensed, correctly, that their product has spilled over into wider cultural consciousness, even be non-players. The will of the long-time players, just as it was with old comics fans, will be of no consequence. Now they're going to attempt to cash in. Since the Church of Woke is the language of corporate culture, you can expect nu-Warhammer to be written like that.

To be fair, with the popularity of vidya like Dawn of War and Total Warhammer, do they even need to sell miniatures for over the board play any more? I heard that more people played Dawn of War than even were enthusiasts of shoving the little metal guys around, and Creative Assembly have expanded the world of Warhammer Fantasy in their games far more and quickly, what with the Vampire Coast as its own distinct faction (complete with a fucking undead opera singer who has sonic attacks because when the fat lady sings it's all over) and expanding Kislev and Cathay in Total Warhammer 3 to being actually their own sides with their own gear and themes rather than just reskins of the Empire with furry hats and jade ornaments respectively. I suspect GW knows that they make far more money selling their IP to corporate clients than they do selling minis to neckbeards.

Also, 3D printing. You can get affordable 3D printers that can do sufficient detail miniatures in both plastic and sintered metal nowadays and maker sites are full of model files with suspiciously similar generic names like "Elf Warrior Prince" for Tyrion, "Evil Sorceress" for Morathi, "Demon Lord" for Kharn the Betrayer, and "Wererat Ninja" for Snikch. Soon enough anyone willing to spend £1,500 on an official new army might find it cheaper to spend £2,000 on a quality 3D printer and a load of model files for your favourite side or even just for bitz so you can kitbash them yourselves.

Wizards of the Coast seem to be doing the same thing with Magic the Gathering. Now I admit it's been over 15 years since I gave up the cardboard crack. But even back then there was a bit of a move to push "MODO" as Magic Online was known as by the fanbase. After all, it's cheaper to sell the addicts digital cards than waste time and money printing a hundred million cards for each set for over the board play. And for tournament play it's easier to monitor cheating (you can't stick a Black Lotus up your sleeve online so you don't need arbiters walking the rows) and to keep everyone's Elo rating updated. And you can charge just as much for the bits and bytes that mean that a player actually has the cards in their deck, and keep a cut of the secondary market by controlling the only trading platform. And because you control the game, the players, and the play, you can then permaban people from playing for wrongthink or causing offence even from casual play, which you can't with OTB play.

For the record, my Elo at MTG was 1650. That would be a fairly good rating at chess, where woodpushers are usually sub 1000, people who vaguely know what they're doing get to 1200, the best casual club players are 1500-1700, enthusiasts and people who actually put in significant time and effort hover around 2000, and GMs are over 2600, but for MTG they started everyone at 1600 for some reason, so it just means I was better than average by a nose.

I still have all my cards as well, apart from the lightly scuffed Gaea's Cradle I disposed of on greedbay earlier in the year for three hundred quid. Might see if I can flog off the rest of my collection but I don't have the time or the inclination to go through it and separate out everything of value.

 

[Heavy Duty Boots]

Reading through this thread just makes me appreciate New Vegas more

-Highly political game that keeps itself completely away from real politics
-Has three gay companions that are compelling outside of their sexuality, so no one cares
-Has characters that could easily be used for woke points like Raul (yay minorities) and Lily (mental illness representation is important you guize) but it handles them elegantly and without falling into Twiterr-esque wokeisms
-Actually lets you make meaningful choices and the game itself doesn't judge for it, only opposing factions do
-Old style expansions that are actually worth it (even HH, if only for Joshua Graham)

Time to take the dust off the old boy and give it a spin one more time

 

[Thiletonomics]

Wizards of the Coast seem to be doing the same thing with Magic the Gathering. Now I admit it's been over 15 years since I gave up the cardboard crack. But even back then there was a bit of a move to push "MODO" as Magic Online was known as by the fanbase. After all, it's cheaper to sell the addicts digital cards than waste time and money printing a hundred million cards for each set for over the board play. And for tournament play it's easier to monitor cheating (you can't stick a Black Lotus up your sleeve online so you don't need arbiters walking the rows) and to keep everyone's Elo rating updated. And you can charge just as much for the bits and bytes that mean that a player actually has the cards in their deck, and keep a cut of the secondary market by controlling the only trading platform. And because you control the game, the players, and the play, you can then permaban people from playing for wrongthink or causing offence even from casual play, which you can't with OTB play.

For the record, my Elo at MTG was 1650. That would be a fairly good rating at chess, where woodpushers are usually sub 1000, people who vaguely know what they're doing get to 1200, the best casual club players are 1500-1700, enthusiasts and people who actually put in significant time and effort hover around 2000, and GMs are over 2600, but for MTG they started everyone at 1600 for some reason, so it just means I was better than average by a nose.

I still have all my cards as well, apart from the lightly scuffed Gaea's Cradle I disposed of on greedbay earlier in the year for three hundred quid. Might see if I can flog off the rest of my collection but I don't have the time or the inclination to go through it and separate out everything of value.

WOTC also tried to cash in on the digital card game market that opened up when Hearthstone was a success, with Magic Arena, but IIRC, the game hasn't had the player base and impact that WOTC expected. And Magic Online is just "there", so players can play with the older cards that aren't in Magic Arena.

 

[Character from a movie]

-Has three gay companions that are compelling outside of their sexuality, so no one cares

Who's the third one? You mean Christine?

 

[Heavy Duty Boots]

Who's the third one? You mean Christine?

Yes.
Might be DLC only, but still counts.

 

[Eurasian Lynx]

Cool book, interesting story, but when I grew older and read about how the author intended it to have a pro migrant message it became harder for me to like it.

 

[Mola Ram]

Yes.
Might be DLC only, but still counts.

Amusingly, you can provoke her into trying to kill you by forcing her into a closet.

 

[SomeDingus]

-Has characters that could easily be used for woke points like Raul (yay minorities) and Lily (mental illness representation is important you guize) but it handles them elegantly and without falling into Twiterr-esque wokeisms

Lily is honestly one of my favorite companions of all time. Her story is sad, and her whole 'Tough Old Lady' shtick is really cute. A part of me wishes that you could've gotten a definitive happy ending for her besides her medicine, but another part of me is glad that it's sort of left ambiguous.

 

[Ginger Piglet]

Reading through this thread just makes me appreciate New Vegas more

-Highly political game that keeps itself completely away from real politics
-Has three gay companions that are compelling outside of their sexuality, so no one cares
-Has characters that could easily be used for woke points like Raul (yay minorities) and Lily (mental illness representation is important you guize) but it handles them elegantly and without falling into Twiterr-esque wokeisms
-Actually lets you make meaningful choices and the game itself doesn't judge for it, only opposing factions do
-Old style expansions that are actually worth it (even HH, if only for Joshua Graham)

Time to take the dust off the old boy and give it a spin one more time

It's almost like, I dunno, people like good writing. This is why I'm unstoked for Dragon Age 4. You just know that every single companion will be a walking talking talking point of the devs. And they will dumb down the combat even further than it was in Inquisition with its exercise in spamming special attacks and cooldowns because real time with pause is somehow "outmoded" these days, which it fucking is not.

Speaking of real time with pause, I couldn't stand Pathfinder: Kingmaker, though not for want of trying, because I just found everyone in it extremely dull rather than constant Woko Haram bollox. Amiri was very two dimensional, that married wizard couple were uninteresting and had no character beyond "we like swinging," and Valerie the Valkyrie and her "I'm so beautiful it's a curse" nonsense. Fucking hell.

Also it felt like it was trying to appeal too much to hardcore tabletop players rather than streamlining things to keep moving long. I don't want to fucking have to assign jobs around the camp every fucking night to determine whether or not I get jumped by wandering mobs. It also kept wigging out by refusing to let me gather my party and venture forth because I on my own was overloaded, but wouldn't be overloaded if I had all my chosen henchmen in the party. Like, why can't I add those henchmen to party, then I won't be overloaded, and can leave? This frustrated me to almost the point of quitting.

I want to role-play, not roll-play.

(Incidentally, it is possible to have all the rules in place and still keep the game ticking along on the tabletop. Even the AD&D 2E rules for high level fighters leading warbands and even armies could be well streamlined by a competent DM by taking "averages" of all guys in a unit and using the comparative unit sized as coefficients rather than having to roll for every last combatant. I think I posted a while back on here about a campaign in which me, as the party's 12th level fighter, took murderhoboing to a new level by basically becoming a private military contractor, and then jagged hard for Neutral Evil on the alignment chart by betraying everyone just because the enemy bought us off.)

Wrath of the Righteous is apparently better mechanically but the characters look like fucking talking points though I'm semi reliably informed they're not and are actually well written. Anyone able to confirm this?

 

[Fictional Character]

that married wizard couple were uninteresting and had no character beyond "we like swinging,"

Cuck orc was the funniest character in the entire game. And you're forgetting the black ranger who just wants to murder evil and is pretty great in general.

Wrath of the Righteous is apparently better mechanically but the characters look like fucking talking points though I'm semi reliably informed they're not and are actually well written. Anyone able to confirm this?

The characters in Wrath are all pretty good except for the good-aligned ones. The black paladin is incredibly boring, but you do get to tell her she sucks at being lawful if you do her quest (and you should because it gives the best item in the game as reward). The black gay priest is incredibly boring, but his quest lets you recruit his brother whose build is so retarded it's funny. The witch is just Aerie from Baldur's Gate, but worse and underage and therefore worthless.

The only wizard in the game has introduction that's pretty much full Reddit, but gets better later on, since she never strays from her gimmick personality and pretty much all the cool characters make fun of her.

Other than that, you have the best gnome ever, serial killer waifu, reformed succubus waifu, killer for hire and depraved bisexual aristocrat. Those are all pretty great.

And if you don't like the characters, you can just go full Lich or Swarm-that-walks.

 

[Honka Honka Burning Love]

Wizards of the Coast seem to be doing the same thing with Magic the Gathering. Now I admit it's been over 15 years since I gave up the cardboard crack. But even back then there was a bit of a move to push "MODO" as Magic Online was known as by the fanbase

They attempted it, but are kind of failing because The Most Popular Game format now..isn't on the "NEW AND IMPROVED" digital Client.

 

[Ginger Piglet]

The characters in Wrath are all pretty good except for the good-aligned ones. The black paladin is incredibly boring, but you do get to tell her she sucks at being lawful if you do her quest (and you should because it gives the best item in the game as reward). The black gay priest is incredibly boring, but his quest lets you recruit his brother whose build is so exceptional it's funny. The witch is just Aerie from Baldur's Gate, but worse and underage and therefore worthless.

Might get it then, and be Neutral Evil PMC murderhobo fighter.

I've kind of developed recently for RPGs doing what I call an "asshole" run. The rules for this are, absent a formal alignment system:

- Combat focused build for protagonist; diplomacy and stealth are for pussies
- Always choose the most cruel or aggressive dialogue options
- Never pass up an opportunity to gloat over someone else's misfortune
- Always accept when challenged to a fight
- For party based games, reserve best gear to protagonist; everyone else gets their castoffs

Doing such a run does help gauge quite well the developers' attitudes towards actually role playing. Woke devs generally won't let you do this, or will penalise you heavily. Generally speaking Black Isle and Obsidian games score highly on this metric; Fallout 1 and 2 and Torment are unequalled in this way (Torment allows you to throw your chaste succubus gf to a pillar of severed heads in Hell to be eaten alive for all eternity and also allows you to gloat about how you manipulated a person to whom slavery is utterly anathema into being your slave, repeatedly).

Pillars of Eternity and its sequel also score quite highly and certain classes (Bleak Walker order for paladins) actually give bonuses for being an intransigent asshole and penalties for being nice.

Piranha Bytes games do it quite well in my experience; ELEX with its themes of how the protagonist, a former emotionless super soldier who has gone cold turkey from his super soldier serum and now is just a normie and is having these things called emotions for the first time in his life, gets it; and their settings are usually very morally grey which helps with this.

Cyberpunk 2077 scores fairly highly on such metrics (it is possible to screw people over in some fairly glorious ways and gloat about it). Witcher does it at times but it's kinda constrained by the fact that doing that would derail Geralt as a character a bit too much; its moral choice is more about putting the player into quandaries as to what the right thing to do is.

VTMB ranks about the same as CP77 on this metric. Once again, morally grey setting, the real war being ten miles above your head, more about protagonist saving themselves than saving the world.

Ditto Greedfall, but a bit lower because the game does tend to push you towards siding with the natives a little bit too hard for my liking, though getting the best ending requires you to actually act like a diplomat rather than a big hero.

Baldur's Gate sort of did it and even provided encouragement by having stat-wise overpowered evil henchmen balanced by the need to pick assholish resolutions to things or they quit the party forever. But it didn't offer enough choices like that and where it did it pounded you (betraying Valygar to the Cowled Wizards for instance).

Mass Effect cheated and gave you the false choice between service with a smile and service with a snark and only really allowed abject assholishness in a few specific places. Ditto Dragon Age Origins.

Dragon Age Inquisition completely failed to allow it but then it wouldn't have mattered anyhow; the whole game suffered from the script needing the plot to happen in any event.

Bethesda games don't get onto this chart because they rarely have anything worth shouting about in the plot or character development front in the first place. I can name possibly two vaguely memorable characters from Skyrim. In fact, the Elder Scrolls games in general feel more like a package holiday to fantasy land rather than living in it.

Mass Effect Andromeda is fan fiction.

 

[Mola Ram]

Mass Effect cheated and gave you the false choice between service with a smile and service with a snark and only really allowed abject assholishness in a few specific places. Ditto Dragon Age Origins.

I'll give you Mass Effect, but Origins allows some impressive shittiness: defiling the Urn of Sacred Ashes (including potentially killing Wynne and Leliana), allowing Alastair to be executed, saving the Anvil of the Void, encouraging the werewolves to murder the Dalish, etc.

DA2 I'm not as familiar with (mostly because the game is so unmemorable) but I do know you can turn Isabela over to the Qunari and sell Fenris back to his master.

 

[Ginger Piglet]

I'll give you Mass Effect, but Origins allows some impressive shittiness: defiling the Urn of Sacred Ashes (including potentially killing Wynne and Leliana), allowing Alastair to be executed, saving the Anvil of the Void, encouraging the werewolves to murder the Dalish, etc.

DA2 I'm not as familiar with (mostly because the game is so unmemorable) but I do know you can turn Isabela over to the Qunari and sell Fenris back to his master.

I did start another run of DAO earlier this year during lockdown but I kind of lost interest. I was trying an asshole run as a city elf assassin and while I did indeed make with feeding the Dalish to werewolves (and also, because I was a woman, taking the virginity of the virgin male hunter on the pretext that this way he can properly please his gf, and then bragging about it to her), and killed off Wynne at the tower, I never got to the Anvil of the Void in that run. I was definitely going to betray Alistair for Loghain though. Fuck Alistair (I didn't, before you ask)

Likewise, DA2 was a game I played and then forgot about, mainly because the characters could be interesting, but because there was no plot.

Inquisition had unmemorable characters, an idiot plot, and fucking fetch quests everywhere. I gave up on it at about 80 percent through. I just stopped caring. It wasn't a sudden thing that made me bin it either. It was like the heat death of my ability to care. I uninstalled thereafter and have zero motivation to reinstall.

Oh yes, how could I forget about how in Torment you could knowingly bring about the fall of the multiverse to Chaos. If you give the modron cube to Coaxmetal he is able to use its secrets to develop a weapon that can kill reality. This is considered more chaotic and more evil than everything else in the game, even more than having Grace eaten alive, throwing Morte back into the Pillar of Skulls, buying the baby oil (it's made from real babies), selling your companions into slavery, and premeditatedly murdering one of your friends for a spell scroll, put together.

Torment is not a game that could be made today. There's just too much for Woko Haram to screech at.

I also think Baldur's Gate as well could not be made today because you can have party henchmen that are pretty openly racist (Kivan, Korgan, Anomen, Viconia as well, though I think it's more for her that she just likes pushing people's buttons rather than actual bigotry; the woman has bespoke abuse for every possible other character in the game) and sexist (Eldoth, Edwin) and Edwin's adventures in accidental gender bending would upset alphabet people.

 

[Bastard_Call]

Reading through this thread just makes me appreciate New Vegas more

-Highly political game that keeps itself completely away from real politics
-Has three gay companions that are compelling outside of their sexuality, so no one cares
-Has characters that could easily be used for woke points like Raul (yay minorities) and Lily (mental illness representation is important you guize) but it handles them elegantly and without falling into Twiterr-esque wokeisms
-Actually lets you make meaningful choices and the game itself doesn't judge for it, only opposing factions do
-Old style expansions that are actually worth it (even HH, if only for Joshua Graham)

Time to take the dust off the old boy and give it a spin one more time

New Vegas reminds me a lot of Watchmen. Both stories which take an impartial look at human morality and ideals then get co-opted by people who really wish they didn't.

 

[Honka Honka Burning Love]

- For party based games, reserve best gear to protagonist; everyone else gets their castoffs

That isn't asshole gameplay that is just smart.

The boss should always get the best gear.

 

[Jetpack Himmler]

It's not wholly this as I was already tapping out in Season 3 due to how slow it had become and moving away from the characters I liked, but Young Justice counts. The first two seasons are some of the best writing for a cartoon I've seen - clever plotting, intelligent but not too revealing foreshadowing, interesting characters and actual stakes where characters can and sometimes do die. S3 I was carried through mainly by inertia from the first two seasons. They also introduced the character of Violet who is a Fatherbox (basically the Good version of Apokalips' evil AIs called Motherboxes) transferred into the dead (but fresh and healed) body of a young Muslim girl. It's okay, she's not terrible (though wildly over-powered). But S4 episode ends with a conversation about how Islam was super-important to the dead girl and Violet wants to explore whether it might be important to her.

How the fuck does an immortal, millenias old sentient computer brain from an ancient civilization that has seen hundreds of inhabited worlds decide that "hey, this warlord slave trader from a few hundred years ago on this primitive world is the final representative of some supreme all-creator and spoke just to some local tribes who then started murdering, enslaving and colonising their neighbours" might be 'something that I want to explore'.

It's not just dumb, it's supporting a pretty nasty religion. Perhaps in episode 2 she'll throw one of the gay characters off a roof-top or start cutting up babies' penises. But I'll probably not know because it was the final nail in a coffin of a season that was already shaping up to be all about bigotry and prejudice against immigrants.

The funny thing about that is that Halo/Violet has barely been in the season at all aside from an appearance in the first episode, said end credits scene, and a walk-on in the sixth episode. My impression is S4 is focusing on the Team members from the first season as Conner/M'gann were the focus of the first arc and Artemis is the focus of the current arc. Who knows what we'll get when it's Rocket's turn? My main interest in this season is the Legion of Super-Heroes and why they are involved.

And to play devil's advocate, Greg Weisman's based Martian society on the Indian caste system by his own admission and we've only had hints as to what Martian society is truly like. Frankly, I don't believe the Martian arc was that bad. It had some interesting wrinkles like "progressive" King S'turnn's hypocrisy by claiming that Green and White Martians were the same, but wouldn't permit Prince J'emm to marry a Green. A belief that resulted in his accidental murder. Then there was the screwed-up M'orzz family dynamic. Particularly, M'comm's anger towards his family, M'gann's anger towards her sister Em'ree, and Em'ree's remorse for how she treated M'gann and M'comm when they were children.

But yeah, S3 and S4 still don't have the same magic the first two seasons had.