I don't really expect them to constrain the devs' creative vision at all honestly.
The original Disco Elysium wasn't THAT radical at all. Yeah it introduced people to some political concepts in way more detail than your average videogame but at then end of the day in of itself the game wasn't really a threat to the current political order in any meaningful way. Yeah maybe it got the ball rolling in the slightly more right direction but they don't really care about that, to the capitalists the slight resurgence of communist thought is just another trend. And honestly they'd be right for the most part, at least as it stands right now.
The only way I can see them doing outright censorship is if a piece of media explicitly tries to say "capitalism is a fuck, it's completely unfixable and we should absolutely do a communist revolution right now right here today in real life in the actual real United States", which is currently none of them.
The original Disco Elysium wasn’t THAT radical at all
DE is subtle enough for me to have seen dozens of chuds who were 100% sure the game is a critique of communism or that its message is "politics are stupid and you should not take sides"
Which is why I think this kind of subversive media should be way more on the nose these days, otherwise a good chunk of libs and chuds alike will invent their own interpretation so they don't actually have to do any introspection.
If shit like "Don't Look Up" completely flies over people's heads you really don't have a choice but to hammer the point in very very explicitly. Currently nobody is doing this.
The most infuriating example to me is the brazilian movie Tropa de Elite (Elite Squad). If you haven't watched it, do so, it's a great movie.
Its critique of the war on drugs is about as obvious as you can get without spelling out "war on drugs = bad".
The main character is a high-ranking policeman who cannot have a regular human interaction, he's so deep into the "war" mentality that he can't see any person he interacts with as a human being... yet brazilians consider him a hero. When he's foaming at the mouth torturing a drug addict, they applaud. When he barely holds himself back from slapping his wife, they yell "yeah! that bitch!"
I've seen people saying the director didn't understand the movie when he came out and complained about people misinterpreting the message
Pre-Squidgame at least. Honestly Squidgame and The Boys are almost depressing in their existence because the fact that those shows exist and are produced (not cheaply by all accounts) under capitalist regimes shows how seriously they actually view the danger of any sort of leftist movement. Its like a cruel joke.
Eh, I think some of this is that these corporations aren’t really fun by “capitalists”, they capitalists are off playing golf and getting blowjobs in private jets. The media corps they own are run by armies of clout chasing dorks who I don’t think really consider the implications of the things they green light, they just see something is popular and fund anything similar/related to it. Even if a piece of media actually did contain the potential to radicalize a lot of people, if focus testing says it’ll make a short term profit, the corporate machine will probably make it.
Well I mean leftist movements not being even in the zip code of a legitmate threat to capital in the west is not exactly a hot take. More like an objective read of reality.
The only people that are gonna arrive to the conclusion that The Boys is an anticapitalist piece of media are actual anticapitalists. You have no idea how often shit that seems very on the nose to us completely flies over people's heads.
The Boys and Squidgame existing and being so popular and successful only cements the notion in my mind that all art produced under capitalism, regardless of the text's content and author's intent, exists to reinforce capitalism. Capitalism will co-opt anything produced under it, and as such anti-capitalist art cannot be made until we start building socialism. It's a bleak world out there
edit: also form > text / subtext literally every time. It genuinely kinda disgusts and depresses me just how meaningless everything actually is in our world (talking about media / art ofc). Culture can't inform material conditions, it can only replicate it, so we're stuck in an extremely pathetic cycle where everything we consume is basically what is already very apparent to us. It really just makes change seem less possible, knowing how successful and popular Squidgame is. That's the poisonous irony that I will carry into my grave.
Is this really true, though? I mean without external forces at work, it probably does serve to reinforce capitalism. However, I have personally been able to use Squid Game to solidify leftism in the minds of a few libs already, because having that piece of media as a point of reference has made those people more open to leftist ideas.
To make moralist/ultraliberal Harry canon and to have the union as villains, presumably
I don't really expect them to constrain the devs' creative vision at all honestly.
The original Disco Elysium wasn't THAT radical at all. Yeah it introduced people to some political concepts in way more detail than your average videogame but at then end of the day in of itself the game wasn't really a threat to the current political order in any meaningful way. Yeah maybe it got the ball rolling in the slightly more right direction but they don't really care about that, to the capitalists the slight resurgence of communist thought is just another trend. And honestly they'd be right for the most part, at least as it stands right now.
The only way I can see them doing outright censorship is if a piece of media explicitly tries to say "capitalism is a fuck, it's completely unfixable and we should absolutely do a communist revolution right now right here today in real life in the actual real United States", which is currently none of them.
DE is subtle enough for me to have seen dozens of chuds who were 100% sure the game is a critique of communism or that its message is "politics are stupid and you should not take sides"
chuds could read the communist manifesto and think it was a critique of communism, they don't do rational political thought
Which is why I think this kind of subversive media should be way more on the nose these days, otherwise a good chunk of libs and chuds alike will invent their own interpretation so they don't actually have to do any introspection.
If shit like "Don't Look Up" completely flies over people's heads you really don't have a choice but to hammer the point in very very explicitly. Currently nobody is doing this.
The most infuriating example to me is the brazilian movie Tropa de Elite (Elite Squad). If you haven't watched it, do so, it's a great movie.
Its critique of the war on drugs is about as obvious as you can get without spelling out "war on drugs = bad".
The main character is a high-ranking policeman who cannot have a regular human interaction, he's so deep into the "war" mentality that he can't see any person he interacts with as a human being... yet brazilians consider him a hero. When he's foaming at the mouth torturing a drug addict, they applaud. When he barely holds himself back from slapping his wife, they yell "yeah! that bitch!"
I've seen people saying the director didn't understand the movie when he came out and complained about people misinterpreting the message
Good point
No necessarily, I mean Amazon already produces The Boys, the most angry and depressing bit of anticapitalist tv I've seen.
The Boys is gonna end with Homelander "redeeming" himself, just wait.
:deeper-sadness:
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Sickening
Pre-Squidgame at least. Honestly Squidgame and The Boys are almost depressing in their existence because the fact that those shows exist and are produced (not cheaply by all accounts) under capitalist regimes shows how seriously they actually view the danger of any sort of leftist movement. Its like a cruel joke.
Eh, I think some of this is that these corporations aren’t really fun by “capitalists”, they capitalists are off playing golf and getting blowjobs in private jets. The media corps they own are run by armies of clout chasing dorks who I don’t think really consider the implications of the things they green light, they just see something is popular and fund anything similar/related to it. Even if a piece of media actually did contain the potential to radicalize a lot of people, if focus testing says it’ll make a short term profit, the corporate machine will probably make it.
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Well I mean leftist movements not being even in the zip code of a legitmate threat to capital in the west is not exactly a hot take. More like an objective read of reality.
The only people that are gonna arrive to the conclusion that The Boys is an anticapitalist piece of media are actual anticapitalists. You have no idea how often shit that seems very on the nose to us completely flies over people's heads.
The Boys and Squidgame existing and being so popular and successful only cements the notion in my mind that all art produced under capitalism, regardless of the text's content and author's intent, exists to reinforce capitalism. Capitalism will co-opt anything produced under it, and as such anti-capitalist art cannot be made until we start building socialism. It's a bleak world out there
edit: also form > text / subtext literally every time. It genuinely kinda disgusts and depresses me just how meaningless everything actually is in our world (talking about media / art ofc). Culture can't inform material conditions, it can only replicate it, so we're stuck in an extremely pathetic cycle where everything we consume is basically what is already very apparent to us. It really just makes change seem less possible, knowing how successful and popular Squidgame is. That's the poisonous irony that I will carry into my grave.
Is this really true, though? I mean without external forces at work, it probably does serve to reinforce capitalism. However, I have personally been able to use Squid Game to solidify leftism in the minds of a few libs already, because having that piece of media as a point of reference has made those people more open to leftist ideas.
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When oh when will we learn that fictions have consequences.