It’s very strange, you can tell the writing for this game is all-timer level great because people can have wildly divergent interpretations of the game’s ultimate tone. It’s either one of the most depressing and defeatist games ever made, or one of the most optimistic and hopeful. And both interpretations are equally valid.
(I’m more in the optimism camp, for the record).
Thats kind of the point, they’re so (deliberately) underfunded they have to farm out jobs to subcontractors which boil down to “vigilante goes to place, murders a bunch of people”.
Yeah my first run (Reformist but lost the war) I funded Health and Education thinking I would get prompted for a new budget annually and initial investments there would pay off Keynesian-style.
But funding Law Enforcement is actually extremely important if you intend to
root out the Sollist deep state root and branch.
Which I did to a maximalist extent in my second, successful run.
You: I know I can get history back on the right track.
René: The “right track”? This is the right track! The only track. (he gets visibly annoyed) This is the world we shaped, a reflection of what we are: cowardly, ugly, and numb. And there are no second chances. We don’t deserve them! You just can’t go back and restart — that would make everything MEANINGLESS! (a shadow of pain comes over his face)
Empathy: There’s something substantial moving in him, trying to get out.
Volition: He would sooner die than let it surface.
You: What is it?
Empathy: Regret.
You: Regret about what?
Pain Threshold: (as the camera zooms in on Gaston) Him.
You: Him?
Pain Threshold: There’s tenderness in the carabineer’s look. Tenderness that’s curdled into pain or something darker.
You: Ex-love, ex-tenderness…
Pain Threshold: Even worse, a love aborted and smothered, stamped beneath his brilliant boot heel.
René: (you catch the old carabineer’s gaze slowly leaving his opponent’s wrinkled face as his dark eyes meet yours — whatever turmoil raged in him a moment ago is quelled for now)
Conceptualization: Like the last rays of the evening sun gently kissing the day goodbye, before giving way to unfathomable darkness.
Volition: Willed back into the darkest unexplored depths of his mind — never meant to be shared, seen or confronted.
Composure: A true master of his emotions.
Inland Empire: Hopelessly alone behind the unbreakable walls he spent a lifetime erecting. No one will ever know him.
No details but
it’s incredibly depressing. Because that’s all it could ever really hope to be.
However it does genuinely have one of my favorite moments in the entire game.
It isn’t that nuanced in its portrayal of fascism (or for that matter hustlegrind Ultra mindset or pretentious ironic detachment cynicism for that matter) but in my personal subjective opinion that’s fairly accurate because those lines of thinking don’t require much thinking to maintain and analysis of those beliefs threatens them fundamentally, so it’s rarely done.
If you pursue the fascist path in dedicated fashion it actually does get quite nuanced. I won’t elaborate more on what I mean by any of that.
As far as I know though Ultraliberal is only ever a caricature because that’s exactly what it is and what it deserves.
Lmao you went Dictator, defunded the military, joined CSP, didnt promote Lucian, and didn’t form the Anti-Corruption Police, didn’t you?
I’m pretty sure thats the route you have to take to alienate literally everyone in the cabinet and have every possible bid to overthrow you go off.
You mean the police procedural, right?
Because classic mystery stories focus way more on what actually solves murders - detective grunt work like alibis, motives, timelines, etc
Picture after this was told to the Coal Mining Enjoyer:gigachad:
I mean real talk I suspect the two leads are animated using some measure of rotoscoping or motion capture and that’s the main reason for it
Also funny thing about this, the real message of the film is about why all forms of public transportation are bad, so yes this is one of the most lib films ever
No they’re not named. But what it does explicitly state is that the discontent against the noble Romanovs was literally fermented by demons, and the male lead in one of the palace servants and helps her and her mother escape. Then in the next scene the opening musical number is the people of St Petersburg Petrograd Leningrad singing and dancing in the streets at the rumor that a Romanov princess survived, and they quickly shut up when a commissar (hammer and sickle on his cap) looks at them angrily.
I also have to say, it’s a really strange choice that the two leads (and members of the royal family) are the only characters designed to look like real uncanny people, and everyone else looks like a caricature.
“Turn your actual prayers to a deity that may not exist into commodities to buy and sell.”
:jesus-cleanse:
And Jesus went into the temple of God, and cast out all them that sold and bought in the temple, and overthrew the tables of the money changers, and the seats of them that sold doves, And said unto them, It is written, My house shall be called the house of prayer; but ye have made it a den of thieves. — Matthew 21:12–13
He might do extensive research for each season of the podcast but in this one there is very much a gaping hole that could have been filled by reading Red Petrograd.
He at least did a good job of emphasizing how every non-Bolshevik faction completely fucked up their position in between February and October 1917, thus throwing support to the Bolsheviks. But he pretty firmly turned against the Bolsheviks in his narrative after October in a very Orlando Figes kind of way. Thankfully he is covering how the Whites continue to be so incompetent and reactionary that everyone else has no choice but to support the Bolsheviks as the lesser evil. But a major tell is that he puts a lot of emphasis on the Bolsheviks dissolving the Constituent Assembly, ignoring how if the Constituent Assembly was even remotely relevant to the interests of the masses it would not have been so trivial to dissolve it.
The Nazis had to continuously pursue their revanchist aims and win in order to maintain popular legitimacy. The German economy was also disastrously overheated and on the precipice of catastrophic collapse, which was only prevented by going to war, getting insanely lucky against France, and then plundering continental Europe for needed raw materials and wealth. The Nazis had maneuvered into a position where they had to go to war for their regime to survive, by design.
They also, like all fascists, were ideologically incapable of objectively evaluating the perceived strength of their enemies. Hitler gambled that Britain and France would back down again, and gambled again that the Wehrmacht had the capability to defeat them quickly.
How Hitler could have won:
Don’t start an unwinnable war
These public trials and executions were held to the overwhelming approval of the public, pretty much for the purpose of mollifying widespread popular fury toward former Batistiano thugs and terrorists who had made the masses suffer and killed their relatives for years. Historians believe they most likely prevented a bloodbath of mob justice that would have killed hundreds more indiscriminately, and the trials were the method by which the revolutionaries established their authority and re-established some semblance of rule of law.
If you were tried and executed because of these trials, it’s because you were a close collaborator with the murderous Batista regime. “Police chief of Santa Clara”, yeah, I fucking bet he was.
Back when we thought this shit was gonna last like three months a trailer dropped for a horrific film about how the pandemic led to an Orwellian police state
I still wonder what happened to that movie
More like radlibs who adopt the “anarchist” moniker as a lifestyle brand name
if your rule led you to this point, of what use was the rule?
:alex-aware: