The only difference between utopia and dystopia is the point-of-view character's place in it.
I'm randomly reminded of We Happy Few, one of my favorite games that got critically panned for its buggy launch, but was fun to play and had a great story. A Dystopian cautionary tale inspired by 1984 and Brave New World with a trippy British 60s throwback aesthetic. I promise that my gushing about it will all tie back into Movie Bob at the end.
If you don't care about all the vidya sperging, skip to the last paragraph to see how it all ties together.
The premise is in a world where Britain lost World War 2, the Germans forced everyone in the isolated island town of Wellington Wells to send their children away to Germany. But the Germans ultimately lost the war, yet the children never returned and their fate was unknown. People came angry and rioted in the streets every time they saw "breeders" having new children, and the population was miserable. So General Byng, the military official basically in charge of the town, ordered a pharmaceutical company to manufacture a drug called "Joy" that would act as an anti-depressant, a memory suppressor and a stimulant all in one. Eventually an entire system is created with machines that track the level of joy in your system, cameras, masks, all kinds of crazy stuff. Spoilers from here on out:
Throughout the game, there are a few major figures behind the Big Brother conspiracy to keep Wellington Wells in a blissful dystopia. General Byng, the cowardly general who surrendered to the Germans in the first place and built fake tanks to convince the people not to fight back against the Germans to "save lives" and is afraid of the almighty "Executive Committee." There's Doctor Verloc, the mad scientist producing the drug which is giving people brain damage and destroying the local environment, there's Uncle Jack, a television host who serves as the Big Brother figure of the regime, and the mysterious "Executive Committee." The Committee is WHF's version of The Party. An all powerful immuninati puppet master group apparently living in splendor and controlling everything.
The big twist? When you break into the headquarters of the all powerful executive committee, you don't find a shadowy organization in black suits in total control, you find a bunch of drug-addled idiots who've been fucked up on Joy this whole time and haven't done anything productive in years. There is no big brother, no Party, no illuminati. There's only a bunch of retards enslaved to the very system they created to wrangle people in the first place. There's no one leading the dystopia at all, it's basically a self-sustaining system where the people who are being victimized are unknowingly the only ones maintaining it.
This is a running theme throughout the whole game: in the pieces of lore and flashbacks to the German occupation, it's made pretty clear that the only reason the Germans were able to keep control is because they got the Wellies to do all their work for them. If there was a prison riot in a POW camp, the Germans would make the "good" prisoners kill the rebelling ones. If people were rebelling, the Germans would tell the Wellies to "fix" the problem themselves by killing the protesters. The Germans didn't need to force anyone to do anything, everyone did their dirty work out of fear. Then by the time the Germans were gone, the Wellies were making the city a terrible, oppressive place to live by wallowing in their own misery and attacking anyone who tried to move forward. Now they're maintaining a nightmarish 1984 hellworld with no leader, all by themselves, not realizing they're the ones putting the boot to their own necks.
Bob is just like the drug-addled, brainwashed citizens of We Happy Few. He has no power or authority himself, but he believes that the people in charge are all basically wizards who hold all the power and all we have to do is everything they say and the world will become a perfect utopia. He's the guy who would attack "breeders" for having babies, he's the guy who carries water for big brother because "they know what's best." He's the guy who shoves happy pills down his throat and shouts at everyone else to conform and play pretend. Because he isn't brave or smart enough to realize that there's no wizard behind the curtain.
, you stupid obsolete GQP Believer!
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