With its heavy 1984 allusions and authoritarian post-Soviet Eastern European dystopia setting, is Half-Life 2 devious anticommunist propaganda? Discuss
With its heavy 1984 allusions and authoritarian post-Soviet Eastern European dystopia setting, is Half-Life 2 devious anticommunist propaganda? Discuss
While on a surface aesthetic level you've got a lot of 1984 stuff, I'd say the Combine could be interpreted as closer to a colonial empire, just on a cosmic scale - they're doing incredibly brutal and enviromentally-destructive resource extraction (like literally draining the oceans), and they're running a pretty cheap (by interstellar/interdimensional empire standards) operation, heavily relying on local forces and technology and only throwing in the high-tech alien assets when things get bad. Breen could essentially be viewed as something akin to a comprador (and there's presumably a lot more lower-ranked administrators managing the other cities).
I always liked Breen's character and how he's essentially just an impotent figurehead/middle manager.
While I'm sure he's managed on some level to convince himself of the same Neil DeGrasse Tyson Bazinga Epic Science shit he tries to sell to others (Just think of the sentient fungi and intelligent clouds we'll get to meet! Brain uploading! Immortality! Trust me, the Combine are totally going to reverse human extinction once they see how hard we've embraced Volcel Thought, Logic and Rationality :so-true: ), I'm sure deep down he fears the Combine and knows that humanity's days are numbered, that the Combine don't really give a shit about the transhuman Combine Overwatch beyond their usefulness in pacifying the local population and that there's certainly no glorious future awaiting him or the rest of humanity as part of the Universal Union.
Yeah, I always got the impression that the Combine were basically just going to use humanity up, just like how they're doing with the natural resources - extract whatever value they can, and leave behind a completely barren planet, kind of like Tyranids in a way.
Humans could be used as laborers (I'm assuming there must be some kind of industry running on Earth, someone's gotta make all those MP7s, although I don't know if there's any bits in the lore clarifying that, I feel like it'd be kind of weird if all the citizens were just sitting around doing nothing all day), or as bodies to "enhance" and turn into soldiers (just as how a bunch of their fancy tech, like the gunships and the striders, were originally actual aliens, which were subjugated and turned into half-machine tools of war). During Nova Prospekt, Breen threatens the troops with "off-world assignment", so it's possible Combine soldiers have already been used on other Combine planets (and since that's a threat, they probably weren't exactly some elite force, but cannon fodder sent in to die suppressing some rebellion).
They've blocked reproduction, so it seems like they're not even interested in breeding humans for some nefarious purpose (the way they presumably are for the species that serve as the basis for synths) - to them, we're just a resource that they might as well get some use out of, but not valuable enough to otherwise cultivate.
There is one specific thing that they want out of humanity, which is teleportation tech - that's why they capture Eli and Breen personally talks with him to try to convince him to join them. They want the secret to the tech, since their teleporters are fucking trash. But beyond the few surviving Black Mesa scientists who were involved with that, they probably don't consider any other humans particularly relevant.
Not sure how the plot will develop if Half-Life 3 ever happens, but one of the things I like about the setting is that unlike in most other scifi stories, humanity isn't especially important to the broader universe, or Gordon Freeman some destined Chosen One.
(Compare this to something like Halo, where the Covenant is eradicating humanity specifically because they know that they are the actual true inheritors of the precursor "gods" their entire religion is based on or how the later games retconned Master Chief into just such a destined Chosen One whose coming was encoded into humanity's genes by said precursors)