Noticing marvel banter is a good tip-off, what I think is distasteful is when media is too insecure to leave serious or emotional moments sit,
First American children's media stopped grappling with difficult emotions and concepts like old age, exploitation or death and now that insecurity is bleeding into media aimed at grown adults
I think you'd need to have a very rosy look of the past (and there's a lot of survivorship bias there) to think that stuff like popular American cinema only now refuses to deal with difficult topics or emotions. It's kind of the status quo that gets broken every few decades when either a popular movement takes over (e.g. noir cinema), or someone manages to break through studio control (e.g. Orson Welles, Chaplin).
And the writing perhaps isn't as good as the first game, but I don't think the game shies away from dealing with difficult topics in any way
spoiler
The entire Niðavellir arc deals with Mimir acting on Oldin's behalf to exploit dwarves and extract resources from the realm. It explicitly mentions that they were realistically not given a choice, and that they weren't threatened directly but would have starved if they the system weren't set up.
Like there was a lot of banter involved (honestly I don't know how you fill the thousands of pages needed to fill game dialogue otherwise) but that was about as close as you'd get to criticizing capitalism and imperialism in a product with a budget north of $100 million.
Noticing marvel banter is a good tip-off, what I think is distasteful is when media is too insecure to leave serious or emotional moments sit,
First American children's media stopped grappling with difficult emotions and concepts like old age, exploitation or death and now that insecurity is bleeding into media aimed at grown adults
I think you'd need to have a very rosy look of the past (and there's a lot of survivorship bias there) to think that stuff like popular American cinema only now refuses to deal with difficult topics or emotions. It's kind of the status quo that gets broken every few decades when either a popular movement takes over (e.g. noir cinema), or someone manages to break through studio control (e.g. Orson Welles, Chaplin).
And the writing perhaps isn't as good as the first game, but I don't think the game shies away from dealing with difficult topics in any way
spoiler
The entire Niðavellir arc deals with Mimir acting on Oldin's behalf to exploit dwarves and extract resources from the realm. It explicitly mentions that they were realistically not given a choice, and that they weren't threatened directly but would have starved if they the system weren't set up.
Like there was a lot of banter involved (honestly I don't know how you fill the thousands of pages needed to fill game dialogue otherwise) but that was about as close as you'd get to criticizing capitalism and imperialism in a product with a budget north of $100 million.