"anarchist" is video game code for "theres hundreds of them and you can kill them with absolutely 0 remorse" and lo and behold this trailer shows more anarchists eating it than any other faction
I think my internet brain is starting to heal. I say that because the comments keep mentioning how the trailer is full of liberal soy blue hair forced diversity SJW stuff, except I just see an ad begging for corporate investment. I genuinely don't see what these comments are talking about. For God's sake, the devs refer to the game as a "product" a few times.
Am I out of touch or have g*mers somehow devolved further into madness? Do they hate it when a game has a black woman in it?
Also, this trailer makes the game look incredibly by-committee. I mean it's Saint's Row, so of course it's a shallow cash grab coasting off other games, but they could at least try to hide that's what it is.
The thing they're picking up on is that it's pretty generic corporate fair, like you said, design by committee/focus group. It's base-standard diversity and attempts at pandering to a hip player base demo they want to capture over the old player base. But the online gamer dorks have no way to talk about it other than muh sjws erasing proud white man games like Saint's Row. You know, the famously whites-only hardcore gamer franchise that they all definitely haven't cared about since the second one. Their criticism is consumed by idealism and stupidpol brainrot.
Exactly. And "anarchist" fits well into the current propaganda needs of the neoliberal world order. Like, "all this... this is all great! We live in the greatest time ever in the greatest country ever! End of history! But those angry anarchist just want to destroy everything we have!"
(They always slander anarchism with the "tearing stuff down" but never discuss the second half of it, actually building something BETTER)
I think it's mainly that anarchism isn't associated with much except smashing shit in most Americans' minds, making it a safe "apolitical"-ish target for this kind of "plot".
the white supremacist bad guy of the Trump era
I haven't seen this in any games, any examples?
He was just like a cult leader, I didn't pick up anything white supremacist from him?
White christian extremist in Montana who see's the rapture coming and wants to save his children didn't give you any white supremacist vibes?
I mean I know Ubisoft went through the whole shebang to make that entire story say nothing of any coherence and included a diverse cast of brainwashed-by-fart-gas-not-christian-extremists but it's like really out there
TFW all the jokes you want to make are secretarian :deeper-sadness:
I thought it was an ideology based around the winner of the 1973 Kentucky Derby, Secretariat.
A sad day when Americans are fighting fellow Americans. We should all go to Coney Island and share a baked potato on the carousel.
We're called the United States of America. No more of this hate and anarchy. More corn dogs and kissing your uncle. I have hairy legs.
They called Coney Island, the playground of the world. There was no place like it, in the whole world, like Coney Island when I was a youngster. No place in the world like it, and it was so fabulous. Now it’s shrunk down to almost nothing, you see. And, uh, I still remember in my mind how things used to be, and uh, you know, I feel very bad. But people from all over the world came here. From all over the world, it was the playground -- they called it the playground of the world, over here. Anyways, uh, I... uh... you know... I even got -- when I was, uh, when I was very small, I even got lost at Coney Island, but they found me. On the, on, on the beach. And we used to sleep on the beach here, sleep overnight. They don’t do that anymore. Things changed, you see. They don’t sleep anymore on the beach...
:kitty-cri:
No gods, no masters! Okay maybe some gods and a couple masters.
"we realized we were stifling our own creativity!"
so with all that new found creativity they make evil corp, muscle gang, and ravepunks?
Now, unless the trailer is showing a lot of restraint, the game does not really seem to capture the Saints Row vibe very well. But of course, the chuds get angry at non-white dudes, in SAINTS ROW of all games?
there's a real dynamic in these games where creators will put POC characters just for broader appeal, but also not put any effort into the story or game (because whites won't play a POC protag, and POC will automatically play it because they're starved for representation), and as a result, POC-heavy games often end up being really bad. Which actually hurts it even more, because now everybody associates POC characters with milquetoast cringe-inducing dialogue.
Part of it is also just that liberals suck ass at making things cool
Racism is a huge part of it, but Johnny Gat was Asian, and he looked visibly non-white to me (either Asian or Latino). But I'm sure if there was a badass Black character it'd still cause some butthurt.
But where Saints Row falls short in actually good representation, it makes up for in dressing up in a rabbit suit, having a gun that shoots explosions, and the opposite of a game that's all brown.
Yeah, overall it just looks bland and not really like a Saints Row game.
While i was watching this portion of the trailer, i remembered an old argument on chapo where someone was arguing that anarchist ideals are less demonized in pop culture than communists lol
[i am not trying to restart the struggle session - i think they're both demonized in different ways and pop culture seems to have no fucking idea what real anarchism actually is - at the end of the day they're all just trying to make us look like the enemy]
Pre BLM protests they were demonized or brought up significantly less. Post all that and with the need from the establishment to put a scary label on it and consent manufacture against it and any kind of non peacefull and peacefull mass protest "chaos loving anarchists" became an extremely usefull tag on. Especially also used for "outside white agitators" and with anything burning as an accompanying image. Red scare commie buzzwords and demonization is used extensively for foreign "enemies" ,vuvuzelas, china and weirdly in teh new russophobia wave so it wouldnt make much sense to use it here too.. Gotta take a variety of approaches and create new efficient buzzword designations when need for them arives
Here in Greece the "anarchocommie" buzzword is the most used one. Against fucking KKE or Tsipras or syndicalists or even Varufakis all the time. Anarchism is still largely inconsequencial and irrelevant domesticaly but the existance of 17N and the black bloc terrorism/violent rioting image made the anarchocommies buzzword very usefull to connect everything left wing to something immidiately "scary" and violent for boomers and chuds
oh my god you're right
i was gonna ask why all a sudden anarchists were a boogeyman, but yeah its fuckin BLM backlash
As a violent faceless mennace existing in their streets, wanting to burn their buisnesses down and have the purge yeah its much more difficult to use the Bolshevik or COMMIES scare that effectively cause historicaly post ww2 that kind of scare was a narrative about the foreign other that has secret agents everywhere and anyone can be a secret commie, about the reds that make these secretive and villainous grand plans to undermine american values and way of life and take over. Would be innefficient to try and spin those sentiments and buzzwords into THE COMMIES being the "chaotic" face covered antifa blm teens. At most in the narrative "the reds" would be the ones that finance and are responsible behind the scenes for civil rights and anti war movements to spread chaos and instability in america (and at that point you actualy saw the red scare mindset being exploited very much so as "chinese/russians" are behind blm and everything , every chinese in the US being a CPC agent ,covid bioweapon and vuvuzela and cuba being sponsors of terrorism and a threat to murika).
Cold war was just a really weird trip I had that lasted 70 years.
anarchist aesthetics have been completely recuperated by pop culture and repurposed into an emtpy fight the power signifier to the point where it's downright cliched, my proof is that the idols are aesthetically reminiscent of watch dogs 2 and watch dogs legion, it's supposed to be a dig between franchises. it's just empty fashion being regurgitated over and over.
Stoked for a new saints row game though. Gimme that wacky shit.
yeah, from the comments i get that the creative forces behind saints row are no longer at ubisoft, so the reboot seems to be a step away from where the franchise was at
I dig the cat ears but I wish the anarchist faction was a little bit more... Furry?
