Here's a little gaming effortpost for the treat piggies matt

PoE story summary for those unfamiliar

Wraeclast is a dark fantasy world with several fallen empires that each fell victim to an event called the 'cataclysm' that made people go insane, causing the fall of those empires. The game is set some decades after the Purity Rebellion, an event in which various rebel groups from the periphery of the Eternal Empire banded together to defeat Emperor Chitus, a despotic and corrupt ruler who was experimenting on people with virtue gems. The emperor's thaumaturgist, Malachai, retreats into Nightmare by sealing himself inside a beast in the north, where he hopes to achieve immortality.

The game starts when you, an exile from Oriath (island nation off the coast of Wraeclast and host of the Templar empire) embark on a quest for revenge from the High Templar Dominus who exiled you. After defeating him, and his successor Avarius, the exile continues on to slay the gods which broke free after Innocence's (God who was inside the High Templar) death. The exile then continues to get exponentially more powerful and defeats Kitava, god of hunger/corruption, and triumphs over their present day cataclysm.

Often, discussions of PoE's story remark on the themes of liberation and how surprisingly progressive it is, especially for a game with a hardcore gamer chud audience. The cast of exiles includes an indigenous slave who is exiled for killing his masters, a lesbian hunter exiled for shooting a noble who told her to stop hunting in his property, and a himbo duelist who also murders a noble in a duel for insulting him. However, the campaign's arc is much more reactionary than revolutionary or liberatory, and the game ultimately reinforces a Nietzschean 'ubermensch' archetype with the latter half of the narrative. Furthermore, I argue that the power fantasies of the ARPG genre are predisposed to bend in this direction.

Nietzsche is all over PoE. The historical empires of Wraeclast were all condemned by their search for immortality: the Primevals, the Vaal, and the Eternals, all doomed to fall because they wanted to last forever. The Templars are no exception. The exile's role in the Templars' fall is then to become the cataclysm, the punishment for their hubris. The repetition of the same history, eternal recurrence, and the failure of humans to surpass their vices is Nietzsche. These empires each became Nietzsche's 'last man,' haunted by greed and decadence.

Therefore, the liberatory arc of the exile who overcomes historical oppression, kills their master, and becomes free must be understood through the lens of will to power, in contradiction to a Marxist conception of class power. This is the story of an exceptional individual's triumph of will: the Marauder begins as a slave throwing off his shackles, but when does he liberate the rest of the Karui? By killing Kitava, overcoming the basebess, a moral victory, the Marauder is not liberating his people: he only liberates himself.

This general attitude is actually apparent all throughout the second part of the campaign. God is literally dead and we have killed him, now the conflict is against vices represented in the form of other gods.

Then we can generalize this criticism to the ARPG as a whole. The player slays masses of mindless enemies that do not put up a fight; they're morally inferior, aesthetically inferior, basically bugs. As much as Mao tells us that reactionaries are paper tigers, to depict some kind of revolutionary or liberatory struggle as Gigachads slaying the cringe bugs is ahistorical. That's just not how it works. The power fantasy, as an archetype, limits our understanding of class struggle and the mass movement.

Further reading: Actually Existing Fascism