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Palworld reaches 1 million concurrent players on steam and becomes the first hit of 2024
(lemmy.world)
this post was submitted on 21 Jan 2024
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Yeah so it doesn't really matter what the "lore" is. Like if I write a book series with a slave race but I put in a line where a representative of the slave species, let's call them uhhh mouse-elves, says "oh master we love being slaves!" that doesn't actually change anything meaningful.
There is always this disconnect between the fact that in Pokémon, Digimon, SMT, whatever else I'm forgetting for all the "no this is actually good clean fun" (ok smt goes a bit darker but still very sanitised) the creatures exhibit almost 0 agency and at the end of the day mudkip is facing down a moon sized laser beam from a galactic god. Further in the media around at least Pokémon trainers are legitimately worried when their "pets" are overmatched or hurt.
So as much as they say "oh it's ok because mc gobbledygook" there is an enormous dissonance between what the audience sees/what the player does and what the media presents it as.
Also I note you're not vegan, so it's utterly bizarre you're concerned about the imaginary welfare of animated fantasy monsters but not actual earthlings we share the planet with and murder for pleasure.
also edit: I never graduated highschool, I was a bit busy being abused, I do have a masters and the ruins of a PhD though. I would tentatively suggest you focus your outrage on actual real problems and not kinda lazy filtered through a different culture and language parody of a genre advertising jokes.
You can just say Harry Potter. I'm not going to defend JK Rowling.
If you're critical of Pokémon's lazy handling of its own premise, why are you castigating people for being critical of this one?
If people are making pro-worker or anti-animal-abuse arguments, and "wow, animal slaves isn't cool" is certainly one of those, embolden them. What are you doing?
I don't even know what your position is anymore. It's bad for a very tongue in cheek game to make a joke about lack of labour rights for monsters in their advertising, but it's fine for other monster collectors to just not acknowledged how disquieting the premise is because they explain it away by lore, but when Rowling explains something away by lore it's not excuseable because lore doesn't have any material impact on what people are implicitly writing about?
I think you should probably just learn about the game before having an opinion about it. It is very unserious. It is parody homage, and also just dumb and cute. It's like getting worked up about mario kart encouraging teen destruction derbies or something. We're not looking at something like the skeezy line blurring between Hollywood and the usaian MIC as the usaian department of war requires films to adopt pro imperial stances in order to grant access to military hardware which in turn makes movies more visually appealing.
It's just a ridiculous little toy going "Monster collectors are very silly hey?" where you can pat the cute mammoth in the spa and also work 100 cats to depression making bombs.
This doesn't have any meaningful impact, if you want to improve the world go do a weekend at your nearest animal rescue, volunteer your time teaching your local language to migrants, or promote a Union at your job.
Oh you know what actually, this post might help you understand why I am the way I am.
https://old.reddit.com/r/Sigmarxism/comments/11wt3kp/the_plague_of_diegetic_essentialism_or_how_i/