The specific example that made me start thinking about this was how AC Odyssey has a sidequest where a slave doesn’t want to be freed because he thinks being a slave is cool, actually, which is both absurd apologetics but also misses that in Greek and Roman systems manumission was a form of social control that both rewarded and indebted slavers’ most loyal collaborators. That turned into thinking about how just absolutely absurdly shitty classic Greek society was in general, and how AC Odyssey made it this weird wholesome egalitarian slaver dictatorship where everything’s cool and good except for the bad mean guys who are indistinguishable in methods or goals from anyone else.
That’s also one of the things that pisses me off about Starfield so much, how the “good guys” are a pair of far right colonial empires: one is literally just the fascists from Starship Troopers, and the other are a bunch of feudal ancap dictatorships. Even the villains are just saturday morning cartoon villains who are bad and mean but don’t really ever do anything distinct from the “good” factions except be ontologically opposed to you, the main character.
Someone else pointed out recently how HOI4 ends up effectively doing Nazi apologetics the same way, where in trying to avoid giving their worst fans a holocaust button they just outright remove all the actual horror and material actions the Nazis did altogether.
And I don’t think I even need to get into how rampant this problem is in liberal fantasy settings, which are always full of apologetics for monarchism, because that’s well tread ground for criticism. It’s enough to make something like how the original Mount and Blade handled the in-universe nobles as being inherently sexist and classist pieces of shit who were obstacles for a female and/or commoner PC to fight against and overcome almost refreshing, instead of it just being like “yeah these awful pieces of shit who are all definitely mass murderers and worse are actually cool and nice to you and not really all that bad really” like so much feudal apologia media does.
And yeah, there’s a point to be made about not wanting to grapple with problematic themes and all, but where there’s the line where that just turns into apologetics for the very problematic thing you’re trying to avoid dealing with at all?
Moral dilemma in starfield: kill the ultra rich CEO who has been knowingly poisoning the soil and funding a vicious army of angry war veterans to displace poor farmers OR let him live because he is a “job creator”
The funniest part is they weren’t even veterans: there were only a tiny handful of survivors of the actual First, the rest were just dumbass fascist fanboys they found in FC bars who were all “hell yeah I would love to join your death cult and subscribe to your newsletter!” All the actual veterans were old, since they’d been locked up for 20 years and they were pretty much just the handful of officers left after all the grunts got thrown into a meatgrinder for literally nothing.
At least no one gave you any shit for executing Ron Hope, though it’s kind of weird that the FC’s only federal law enforcement agency was just like “lol, lmao” to you executing one of the literal dictators of the FC on the spot. You’d think the other dictators of the FC would be upset about one of their own facing consequences for his actions, and at the prospect that someone could come after them for their own crimes.
Ah okay. Thanks. I thought they were all veterans. But considering how large their horde was your explanation makes more sense.
Sucks that you cant kill the dickhead CEO tyrant in Neon because “essential” (i know mods can remove it and people would complain about no world impact if hes killable but still wtf) Come on Todd at least dissable the essential tag in Ng+. Like if you break a questline just make a new game+ like in souls games.
or, better yet, get rid of the essential tag altogether (except for underaged NPCs) and create workarounds for if the player breaks the questline because a needed NPC was killed off. like in new vegas.
i thought this was supposed to be a rpg, come on man.
i’ll still kill the ultra rich CEO, you don’t need to have private “entrepreneurs” to create jobs
there are other ways
It pissed me off so much when the workers were all like “I’m not sure what we’ll do now without him,” like motherfucker you’ll just show up tomorrow and keep doing the same job nothing will change. He wasn’t the one working the fucking assembly line. His major contribution to the company seemed to be poisoning the local population, not doing any actual fucking work. Also his given reasoning is that he needs to be evil so the company can stay profitable with absolutely no acknowledgment of or thought put into what “profit” means. Oh your company had to hire mercenaries to shoot meemaw and force her off her land because there wasn’t enough cash left over after covering operating expenses for you and the other board members to swim around in? You can’t fill a second pool with credits because it’s been a slow quarter? The horror 🙄
It’s implied that the corporation and workers can potentially survive even with the CEO dead so killing the CEO turns out to be the right choice. The CEO is on a goverment as well and his colleagues seem to be fine with him dead. I like the outcome but I hate that it is presented as a critical junction of that questline because the dilemma is a bit of a no-brainer.