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I feel like I've been shilling this idea on Hexbear since I signed up but, to rehash it once again:

The terminally-liberal brain is so steeped in this reflexive (as in "a reflex", not as in "turning the concept inwards" - fuck I hate autoantonyms smh) equality that they take their own personal experiences and universalise them, completely whitewashing the fact that there are vastly different people, classes, cultures, worldviews etc.

It's nice to think of everyone as ultimately equal, don't get me wrong, but when that idea gets overextended then it becomes "my (hegemonic) worldview and my experience of and relationship to the world is the same as everyone else's" it becomes toxic because it becomes a barrier to truly understanding something like intergenerational trauma or the effects of serious poverty or even just understanding that some cultures are more communally-minded than individualistic.

This is clearly demonstrated by those r/ABoringDystopia posts of homeless people wearing VR headsets. Bruh, do you not spend time at home on leisure and escapism? Would you not want to engage in escapism if you were homeless? I get that you think you're special and you've done something unique in order to earn your station and that, if you were homeless, you'd pawn that VR headset and use your entrepreneurial spirit to bring yourself back to your current (earned) station but... that's not how homelessness works, buddy.

Hence why they just assume that because they confer a special degree of importance to their little social media comments then therefore so would Xi Jinping and Putin, obviously.

It's this feigned sort of overextended empathy which is ultimately chauvinistic in nature that ends up becoming a parody of itself.

Edit: One essay that really shines a light on this attitude is To Hell With Good Intentions written by the anarchist Ivan Illich who delivered this speech at the dawn of the era of voluntourism.

Libs just think that voluntourism is inherently beneficial and that they can just go somewhere and deliver a better way of living to the poor, backwards masses in underdeveloped/overexploited countries because their way of doing things is inherently superior and all that shit without a moment's consideration for what it means to be on the receiving end of voluntourism because "if my intentions for voluntourism are good and beneficial then the recipients will obviously receive this gratefully because they will also consider it to be good and beneficial" (except that's giving too much credit because I don't think people even go so far as to entertain the consideration for what recipients of voluntourists might possibly think, it's just dogmatically assumed that voluntourism = good. No question!)

Meanwhile there's troubling reports that there are "orphanages" running in the developing world which are actually engaging in rampant child trafficking in order to lure in voluntourism bucks by promising life changing experiences™ and doing good for the world™ etc. by letting westerners spend a couple of weeks teaching the trafficked kids how to say a few english words and shit like that...

As someone who appreciates KOTOR 2, I think that a lot of the love for the game comes from 3 factors:

• Nostalgia for KOTOR 1

• The fact that KOTOR 2 improved the combat system and the class/skill system, so if you liked skipping all the dialogue and getting to the part where you could swing your lightsaber around then this game feels like a significant improvement when the combat in the previous game often felt very tacked-on and like an afterthought

• The aspirational "But it could have been a masterpiece!" sort of thing, where people see the rushed development which resulted in a game that was ultimately unfinished, this cohort tends to fill in the gaps with how great it could have been rather than extrapolating from what the game really was into what it likely would have been if it actually completed its development cycle, which wouldn't have been all that much better and the lost content restoration mod stands testament to the fact that, no, the bits that got left out weren't really going to be better than the rest of the game.

I think you're right about how Revan's story just got sidelined in the second game and how the villains were kinda meh. I feel like Nihilus was a really bad choice and just a placeholder for an actual villain because they didn't bother with any development, they used in-lore reasons for why he couldn't talk and his character was essentially incomprehensible in his motives aside from The One Thing™ 🙄, and they just kinda dropped him in towards the end and it's supposed to be a big deal because he's... kinda spooky I guess? Oh wait, some characters also tell you throughout the game that he's a big deal and you should invest in his character because they said so.

Kreia I think was decent but not fully realised (see above for what that means to fans) but I think conceptually it was cool to have a greyish-to-evil Jedi as your mentor.

The game did a better job of moral pathways, especially the grey and evil ones. The first KOTOR would pose very simple situations to the player - help and do the good thing, to good outcomes, but you either have to pay extra or miss the opportunity for money/loot or you lie and/or slaughter your way through and you get that loot.

KOTOR 2 made you think about the consequences of your actions more and there wasn't always the clearly obvious righteous path but instead you had to grapple with means vs ends and the ramifications of your choices. There was less [console the orphaned child and give them money to help them get back on their feet/kill the orphaned child and loot their bloodied corpse] options and more morally ambiguous options.

Kreia was supposed to be the fleshing out of the whole fall to evil thing and she did an okay job of it most of the time. If you played the game purely lawful good then she would have been frustrating but if you played it other ways or you weren't certain of your path then she is a more interesting deuteragonist than Bastila, who would just demand that you always take the lawful good path and chide you if you didn't, which wears thin really quickly. (This is from someone who has set out to play the game as evil multiple times and yet has failed and fallen to their better insticts every time lol, and this is also at the cost of Kreia chiding you for doing the right thing, for doing the wrong thing, or for trying to do the right/wrong thing and it backfiring due to circumstances, leaving you feeling as though there was no way to appease her because whatever you do she's likely going to be disappointed in you regardless.) She was, imo, a very clear swing-and-miss at representing something close to representing the concept of Wu Wei because the problem therein is to have a fallen/ultimately evil character who also represents neutrality/neutral-good - those two sit it direct contradiction with one another so it got muddled up in the story. Hence the beggar scene.

Being able to crack characters open and bring them to be your apprentices and to influence their alignment was a pretty cool mechanic that helped flesh out the story imo.

The game was really reaching for gritty realism (see: Atton being an actual representation of a rogue character rather than a caricature of a rogue who once was self-interested but decided to join up and now they're part of a merry band of do-gooders without any real justification or development, also the drab setting for most of the game) and a subversion of the tropes (which, in combination with the gritty realism, often devolved into outright edgelordism) but it often fell short of this lofty vision.

I think ultimately what the game was attempting, and failed to achieve, was a truly introspective player experience where there were more shades of gray than any clarity on anything - will Kreia be the final villain and if so, why is she on your side and why does she not do Big Evil Stuff™? (Which explains Nihilus being largely absent from the game, although that turned out kinda bad.) Why do I not trust the good characters a lot of the time and why do the evil-coded characters make compelling cases (sometimes)? Why is it that I can't always do the correct thing but I am forced to choose between imperfect options? Why do I find myself at odds with my Jedi mentor? Is there truly right and wrong? Are the means justified by the ends and what are the implications? etc.

I think one thing that needs to be kept in mind is that this game came out when the subversion of the trope wasn't itself a massive trope and gritty realism, while popular, hadn't reached peak saturation yet and so for a lot of people who grew up with the game it really did feel groundbreaking due to that context. I think this bookends really well with the discussion on Seinfeld happening elsewhere on Hexbear - people look back on Seinfeld and ask why it was considered so great at the time but they often don't understand that in the context of when it was produced, it was pretty groundbreaking for comedy and its influence was so significant that for a person going back to watch it after its run, it seems like Seinfeld is just rehashed and worn out. But that's not because of Seinfeld itself, it's because it changed the shape of comedy that came after it (for better or worse) such that it doesn't feel groundbreaking at all looking at it retrospectively.

It's a bit like if we were to watch an early husband and wife sitcom like I Love Lucy or something - we'd know all the tropes, we'd see all the punchlines before they landed, we'd consider it a tired and worn out concept despite never having watched it even though, at the time, it was so influential and groundbreaking that it effectively shaped the direction of its entire genre. Sometimes things are just a product of their time and that means that they don't always age that well.

As a massive fan of the middle era of Final Fantasy games: Final Fantasy 9

Hear me out.

The combat was really slow and clunky, even for a turn-based RPG (yikes!) and the sheer amount of time you spent waiting for the black swirl to finally disappear and for the camera to pan into the battle got so damn tedious. It was like a full 30s of punishment just to get into making your first action in a fight, I swear, and those fight encounters came thick and fast on the world map.

The soundtrack was thematic but really uninspired and unadventurous for an FF game

The skill development was closed in and didn't really allow for much choice in what skills you could learn and half of the skills you did learn were mostly useless unless you looked ahead in a game guide or you reloaded a save to deploy the relevant skills for the upcoming boss battle.

Plus you basically needed foreknowledge of the game or a game guide to know how many items you'd need for the synthesis mechanics, or otherwise you'd be learning one skill on one character for ages before you could use that single item to teach the next character their skills, often the same ones.

The playable characters were all one note and they felt like they were written as placeholders with the intent that somebody else would develop them from caricatures and cardboard cutouts into something with motivations and character arcs later in the development. Mild spoilers ahead but it's an ancient game by now so deal with it.... Vivi, the soulless facsimile, was ironically one of the only characters who had narrative development but that was mostly plot-driven and he didn't really change from being a naive child who asks babby's first existential questions, and the story just kinda developed around him.

Zidane just wanted to chase girls and... that was about it.

Steiner was just a mild antagonist towards Zidane and whenever he had a place in the story it was "I'll protect you, princess!" or "I am sworn to the Queen, the realm, and to the princess. But how can I uphold these vows when they conflict... yet again? Oh well, never mind."

Garnet/Dagger was just another typical FF love interest trope and for a quarter of the game they just decided that she'd be mute because they were too damn lazy to bother writing any dialogue for her so she was effectively sidelined.

Eiko is an exception to this - she was a developed character with an arc but she came into the game so late that she barely had any time in the spotlight.

Freya was just "I am longing for my long-lost love, Sir Fratley" and then, when Fratley turns up in the first 1/3rd of the game he's just like "Oh, um, I have amnesia. Who are you again? Anyway, I guess I'll be going now. And I'm taking your relevance to the storyline and any opportunity for character development with me. Goodbye!"

Amarant was an antagonist who just swapped sides out of the blue and just shook his head at decisions, and he came into the game way too late to feel involved in the story in any way.

Quina was the typical gag character which is fine but when the rest of the party has less of a story arc than your gag character, you're doing something seriously wrong.

The setting was fine, although not to my tastes, and the world map felt constricted and very railroad-y: you could only visit a couple of places most of the game and often you'd leave a location only for it to become permanently inaccessible which ruined a whole lot of opportunities for development of the setting. A lot of the places you'd get to visit would be closed off/sidelined from the game after the first visit, if not blown up, and this made any investment in the locations feel useless; why would you bother to explore characters in a city when the last few got destroyed and this one is probably 5 minutes away from being blown up next? Even if it survives, you're probably not coming back here anyway so the characters here are probably going to be inconsequential. And by making most locations inaccessible for large parts of the game/the rest of the games, this often creates a lot of missable items (or events).

So much of the setting was one-note, filled with bland architecture and bland characters that were barely indistinguishable from each other.

FF7, by comparison, had the sprawling undercity slums, the furturistic overworld, the hippie canyon that was an uncomfortable pastiche of vaguely Native American-esque tropes, the mysterious village of the main character with the ominous mansion and an even gloomier mountain range that you get to explore, the adventure casino and the downtrodden slum miners' village beneath it, the military installation/city thing, the beach resort, the reactor town with the eco-resistance fighters set up in it, the post-WWII largely-Japanese (but also kinda Chinese) village which was trapped between two worlds...

More than this comparative lack, a lot of the FF9 locations felt really underdeveloped and like one-note variations on vaguely mediaeval themes. Burmecia is the perfect example of this chronic underdevelopment - it was supposed to be an entire city and when you get there it's a couple of streets and a few unoccupied houses that somehow, inexplicably, lead to the courtyard of the throne room/castle. And that's it. An entire setting which is supposed to be one of the biggest cities in the Mist Continent (according to the story) is just... a few empty streets and not even an actual castle or royal residence to explore. Instead of being an opportunity for Freya's character development a couple of the residents who were actually still there just say "Freya, you're back! Protect the king!!" or "Freya, you rescued me. Thank you for returning to Burmecia in its time of need!"

I guess the mini-games were pretty fun though?

All in all idk why FF9 gets the accolades that it does. To this day you'll regularly hear people raving about FF9 as their absolute favourite from the series and they'll wax lyrical about the character development and the setting.

Ask them how a character developed from their introduction to the end of the game, though, and they'll fall silent. Or ask them which locations of the setting were the most compelling and they'll just explain why they loved one of about three locations that were actually more developed than the rest of the mostly-forgettable locations that you're forced to trudge through.

I suspect that it's just a nostalgia kick for people who were in that sweet spot of forming core memories and when they first played FF9 or something.

Most right wingers don’t bother reading even enough theory to tell you that the Communist Manifesto isn’t actually the foundational text of communism

Real talk: I literally called out a chud on this and gave the reason why it's not the foundational text of Marxism (and why The Principles of Communism is clearly a much better candidate for this title.)

Do you know what his response was? He literally invoked the death of the author. For a non-fiction text. I'm not even kidding.

That's tantamount to giving a driver incorrect directions while reading a street map and then defending yourself by saying "But art means whatever the viewer decides it means!!"

If the Wehrmacht and the Waffen SS aren't clean then explain what happened when Stalin took them to the cleaners, you tankie 😤

I'm not the person who you responded to.

I'm talking about the targeting of ethnically Russian Ukrainians in the eastern part of Ukraine (the Donbas region.)

There has been attacks against these people going on since 2014. Thousands upon thousands have died and more have been wounded in this low-grade civil war that became the prelude to the war between Russia and Ukraine.

Here's a western article filtered through western intelligence describing the situation with some glaring oversights, namely that there has been ultranationalist paramilitary forces operating in the Donbas (Azov, Right Sector, C14, National Militia, OUN et al.) with tacit approval from the Ukrainian government since 2014 and that civilian targets have been routinely been used by the military and the paramilitary groups.

Here's a short article written by a former USAID officer (!) published by The Atlantic Council (!!) that describes the problem with far-right militias in Ukraine, just so there's no accusations of bias from me in this discussion.

They've literally been targeting civilians who are of the "wrong" ethnicity for nearly a decade now. If that doesn't count as an attempted genocide, I don't know what would.

Also that's some cheap framing of the discussion btw. Fascism isn't "don't play defence". I take it that you have gotten your picture of fascism from a particular, well-known YouTube series. If so, that series is critically flawed and it does a bad job of defining fascism and how it functions. But that's a different discussion altogether.

Are you asking about the political implications of denazification for East Germany?

I'd say that the fact that Nazis were effectively eradicated in East Germany is proof enough that it turned out well for them.

Or are you concern-trolling about the Berlin Wall or the economic underdevelopment of east Germany comparative to West Germany devoid of any historical context or something like that?

The Gehlen Organisation, which later became absorbed wholesale into the West German state as their intelligence apparatus, was literally just a bunch of Nazis headed by Nazi lieutenant-general Reinhard Gehlen.

Was the government Nazi? Well, that entire arm of the government certainly was!

I tried to read this article but I teared up too much and I couldn't see to be able to keep on reading.

If Yoko Ono were still alive she'd write an song with an odious, racially-charged comparison between Hillary and black people and everyone around the world would come together every year on November 9th to listen to this song and to mourn our collective loss.

Objectively, in my subjective opinion, it's a cool looking symbol. And so is the swastika. (Cancel me now!)

There's no minor coincidence that cool looking symbols that are simple enough to write/carve/etch became embedded in historical traditions and what you did as a kid is probably where a lot of runes and other symbols started from as well.

It's just a shame that fascists coopt this shit and ruin it for everyone. Take heart at the fact that we are fighting for a world where, some day long into the future, these symbols will be able to be used again (ignoring the fact that the swastika is commonplace in the east in Hinduism, Jainism, and Buddhism for argument's sake lol) without there being anything besides a historical factoid that some nerd will drop to mention that these symbols were associated with this political phenomenon that was called "fascism", because fascists themselves will be little more than a historical footnote.

This link is almost certainly going to get caught in the censor so I'll post it in full so people can find the entry on it but I think that people underestimate just how much political pressure came from the dual forces of internal liberation movements alongside having the USSR as a viable alternative to the hegemony of liberalism.

(Relevant podcast episode: Actually Existing Socialism: How the Soviet "threat' benefitted workers in the west w/Alice Malone [58:58])

There's no small amount of disgust I have for the fact that this saying became a punchline in the US when black people were literally still being lynched. But it must have been a real knee-slapper for privileged white Americans to throw around, right?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/And_you_are_lynching_Negroes or search for "and you are lynching n*groes" and check out the Wikipedia article. Then check out the entry on Emmett Till and his lynching, if you aren't familiar with the case, and tell me that punchline isn't the most cynical bullshit you've ever heard of.

It's (still) Her™ turn