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?
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
good news!
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!
COD is just straight up nazi propaganda. like they’re not trying to avoid their message, they want you to join the military so you can be the cool guy that kills for the empire.
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.
Thank you very much! I’m glad to see that there is still unpolitical literature out there