I've been a fan of the Metro series since 2033 released on the 360, and I've played that game many times. Moved on to Last Light to give it another playthrough, and I'm already having a blast with it, but god does the :so-true: "DAE gommulists are as bad as the nazis" shit really get annoying.
They start off by showing the Nazis to be literal skull measuring concentration camp building monsters, but when it comes to the commies, there is minimal ideological exploration. Supposedly the Red Line follows their ideology and there is plenty of the aesthetic with CCCP flags everywhere and comrade this and that and what not, but nothing of value is really shown beyond the same tired tropes of them being traitorous hypocritical thugs running a police state, and the game spends WAY more time emphasizing them as the main antagonists. The first game dabbled in this but it was way further in the background and there was more plausible deniability that it was just a shitty faction using the name.
The irony is that in the original novels, written by a Russian author, the communists aren't a major faction. Artyom meets a few of them and they have a warm exchange and he gets to learn about some of their theory (he thinks Che is a station). Of course, the game devs are Yoooookrainian, it's just so on the nose. Besides this, I really love these games for their world building, atmosphere, and linear experiences. Hopefully Exodus minimizes this shit, as it is the only game in the series I haven't played yet.
As a fun bonus, here is some concept art of what the Red Line officers were originally going to look like
According to the wiki the books get more and more anticommunist too until in 2035 it literally says that they turn starving citizens into pig feed to trade for food because of a mushroom blight.
Also apparently the plot of 2035 is that one guy controls literally every faction in the Metro anyways without detection or suspicion so it sounds like the books just became dogshit.
Damn that really sucks, maybe it's a good thing that the games sort of diverged from the books. Who knows, I haven't played Exodus so it could be cheeks. I'll choose to treat the Red Line as not real communism but instead a certified Khmer Rouge Moment™
Apparently Exodus was at least in part inspired by a separate spinoff book titled Towards The Light that I recall being relatively good without much weird politics involved.
Saying that though wile browsing the wiki apparently the third book in that spinoff series involves "The Vegan Imperium" which I cant tell if its a translation thing or if the villains are actually an empire of militant vegans.
Oh my god the deeper this thread gets into the lore the more I realize that this series is kind of inexcusably stupid :agony:
According to the wiki the books get more and more anticommunist too until in 2035 it literally says that they turn starving citizens into pig feed to trade for food because of a mushroom blight.
Fun fact, in the actual USSR, staple foods like bread were so cheap that farmers would use them to feed their pigs instead of buying animal feed
I couldn't get very far into 2035, it was just Artyom hating his wife the whole time :grillman:
Back when I played it as a teenager I missed all the negative connotations of the red line stuff, it took a friend pointing out the bothsidesing between them and the reich.
I just assumed they were like a morally grey anti-heroes sort of thing you see in a lot of post apocalyptic media.
Especially since I assumed the Rangers were communists because the reich keep accusing them of being aligned with red line.
But, like, as an anti-communist narrative the whole thing falls flat until the bioweapon attack because the red line are repressive sure but the other two major factions are literal nazis and a group that uses slave labour.
From what i remember, in the book, the communists were a major faction, who artyom meets are the trotskyists who are separate from the communist faction
lmao my memories of the book are super hazy and are from a time when I was young enough that my political conceptions were prehistoric. Were the non trot communists portrayed as badly as the games?
I also dont have a detailed memory of the book, but from what i remember it was standard totalitarianism 1984 etc, though the trots were portrayed quite positively
What relevance do you think Trotskyism would even have in the environment of the Metro? Aside from constantly whining about how the other communists are authoritarian and bad for actually doing anything (I mostly kid :che-smile:)
Apparently the lore or whatever according to the wiki is that after losing a brutal war the Red Line bunkers down and focuses on being a functional state over agitating other stations too much, while the Trotskyists(Just called Revolutionaries) control like one station and a buncha outposts and focus on guerrilla warfare instead.
Maybe they wish to execute permanent revolution throughout all stations in the Metro? Not sure why Trotskyism would even still exist beyond the stereotypical "we're the good commies unlike those ebul stalinists"
That was kind of the point, i think they were meant to look as people too preoccupied with the pre-apocaliptic past, they for example said that they were taking a revenge on the fascists for the revolutionary catalonia when that history was of course completely irrelevant in the metro
lol last thing I expected from this series was a solid dunk on Trots
It was not meant as a dunk specifically against trots, but rather it was a mistake committed by everyone in the metro, people trying to imitate pre-apocalyptic past, not only trots, but also those trying to imitate USSR, 3rd Reich and hanza
Honestly not a bad take :shrug-outta-hecks:
Although these mfs could probably use a little :kropotkin-shining:
Honestly, that's what it sounds like when someone says "XYZ modern politician killed Rosa."
I like the Metro series (waiting to play Exodus until I get a new card for raytracing) but yeah the politics are anus
I also remember the red line leader's son saying that unlike with him people loved and respected his uncle, the previous leader, which runs contrary to the ontologically despotic angle the game pushes most of the time. I suppose the son could be unreliable but that makes the point he was trying to make fall flat.
I'm pretty sure Last Light goes with the "Communists are worse than the Nazis" trope, since the Red Line become the primary baddies whereas the Nazis get relegated to doing nothing or whatever.
I don't recall Exodus having any kind of shit takes on communism aside from maybe one achievement. In fact I think there's some interesting side conversations you can hear.
Yeah it's quickly shaping up to be a worse portrayal of the communists. I'm still basking in the glow of stealth killing every last nazi without getting caught.
Wasn't there cannibal nazis at the end of the game? Or were those just regular cannibals?
Don't remember which. Unrelated, but I love me some cannibals in my apocalyptic, western, or just plain creepy and remote fictional settings. They're like MSG. Just sprinkle on some cannibals and we're golden.
For the cannibals from The Road were the most harrowing, something about remote backwood cannibals is freaky as hell
The scene in the cellar still haunts me. Backwood cannibals are the exact vibe I'm talking about. I remember playing Red Dead Redemption and doing the side quests concerning the cannibals outside Armadillo up in the mountains. Cholla Springs had always been a cozy zone for me, but after that quest I could never shake the nagging feeling that they could be up there in the mountains, always watching me wherever I went.
Had that same vibe for the night people in RD2 as well as the murder cult in the north eastern region, camping at night and getting threatened at gunpoint by cannibal hillbillies was not pleasent
Exodus is essentially fine on ideological grounds - most of the game takes place outside the established Moscow metro, and the factions you encounter are more cut from a typical post-apoc dystopia cloth - raiders, slavers, scavengers, neo-religious types etc.
mid-late game spoiler
There is a really cool segment where you end up at a Komsomol summer camp; where kids who were there when the bombs dropped survived and grew up to become kinda like Soviet lost boys.
Anyways right at the start of the chapter there's a Lenin statue :lenin-laugh:, and if you shoot it you get a 'Decommunization' achievement :lenin-rage:.
edit: also, I recommend playing with Russian audio (subs not dubs) - mainly because the scripting is only synced for Russian dialogue. You may have noticed in previous Metro games that dialogue is often poorly paced or unnatural sounding, but with Russian audio it's very tight; additionally, Sam the US embassy soldier actually sounds more like an American guy stuck in Russia for 20+ years like he's supposed to
Agree, the only thing the really have to say is when a character talks to you about how there are no rich men, but no poor men either in their stations, which you'd think would really speak to someone like Artyom given he sees poverty every day.
And it acts like Artyom or the stations he's from don't have an ideology, ideology is only for extremists.
Exodus doesn't touch on it at all except that characters dress in USSR uniforms. And there's a statue of Lenin that you can break for the achievement "decommunization" :agony-shivering:
I will proudly skip that achievement. I prefer this one :order-of-lenin:
a character talks to you about how there are no rich men, but no poor men either in their stations
My favorite part of people doing anti-communism in media is when they completely fail to achieve their task and just leave me sitting there going "these guys seem pretty based actually". Like I don't even give a shit that I get betrayed and tortured, I'm literally working for a paramilitary that seized a massive military base and doesn't seem to in any way be using their resources and manpower to actually help the people of the Metro, I'm totally willing to betray them. The game's standpoint is apparently "it's actually good that a bunch of unaccountable goons are just sitting on a massive stack of weapons".
I'm sure they intended Pavel's stuff about the Metro needing some order to be interpreted as "1984 evil totalitarianism", but like, every other chapter I come across a bunch of people murdered by bandits, and the last game had not one, but three chapters focused on a station that was forced to defend itself from mutants alone (with two of those cases ending up with failure), this "every man for himself" shit sure doesn't seem to be working out.
You really know you're scraping the bottom when you can't even come up with a coherent ideological critique and just go "um, the evil communists decide to use biological weapons... because, uh, they're evil ok".
Flashback to Bioshock Infinite when the leader of the Vox Populi caps a child for literally no fucking reason other than "See? See?!! The lefties are actually the same as the mass murdering racial supremacists!!!" because the dumbass writers couldn't come up with anything better.
