The kid became Ronald McDonald...
-
To be fair, if my kill count was at 69420, I'd need a REALLY good reason to kill one more
If I were at 69419, he'd be dead without a second thought
If you missed 69420, don't worry about it, because 69422 is 69420, too.
-
I get the vague impression that this is meant to subtly influence western society into believing that the masses aren’t truly people, that only the ones steering our collective wheels are actually human. Green arrow basically said as much for like… 5 seasons. Then it got weirder.
I get the vague impression that this is meant to subtly influence western society into believing that the masses aren’t truly people,
Well, people can think two things at once. And whilst people may think that non-fleshed out nameless movie henchmen "aren't truly people", I don't think they apply the same standard to random people irl.
-
You might not have played the game but you are spot on. No other piece of media is as guilty of this as TLOU2. Ellie literally travels hundreds of miles and kills hundreds of people on her path to revenge, then I'm supposed to believe she has some epiphany during the final fight and she decides to not kill her target??? That target being the whole reason the game exists??? Totally ruined it for me.
"Some epiphany" is a brilliant way of indicating you had no idea what the fuck was going on.
Let me ask a different question: How does letting Ellie kill her improve the story?
So, hour zero: Ellie says "I'm gonna kill that bitch."
Hour 40: Ellie says "I have killed that bitch. Damn, that was tight. Like a cold Pepsi, that was hella refreshing."What message is this communicating to you? What can we learn from such a story?
-
One of my favorite aspects is the way the ludonarrative/gameplay ties with the story.
::: spoiler spoiler
The enemies start showing up in unrealistic numbers, one of your dead squad mates shows up as some kind of mutated monster - it feels like the classic escalation in difficulty because you are playing a video game. But this is happening because your character is delusional and perceives it that way.
:::I’ve always wanted to teach a high school/community college elective where we read Heart of Darkness, watched Apocalypse Now and played Spec Ops - to see how the same narratives in themes are used in entirely different settings and with different methods of storytelling, but how ultimately they all reach towards the same message about humanity and war and cruelty.
The older Call of Duty’s (maybe the newer ones, haven’t played since Black Ops one) often had messages/quotes that were pretty anti war when you died, but were ultimately sabotaged by the story. Spec Ops is probably the best game at understanding how to use the FPS mechanics as part of its storytelling.
wrote on last edited by [email protected]Sooooort of. I read 'heart of darkness' when i was way too young, but 'apocalypse now' and 'spec ops: the line', while similar, are clearly biting at different targets.
Where the central theme of 'apocalypse now' might read as 'there is no civilized war, it is only ever madness, and to believe otherwise is not only madness, but incompetence. You play as children at heroism, and it is a lie. There are no heroes here. Not on your side, at least.'
'Spec ops: the line' could be read as 'what the fuck is erong with you people? Why do you even do this? What the fuck is even in it for you?' With literally the first scene being the implicit 'you've heard this story before, we both know you have, no part of this is new to you. so why the fuck are you so god damn stubborn about not fucking getting it?' Scolding less the pissed off 19 year olds who do the atrocities, and more the entire society that keeps allowing them to be so staggeringly violently stupid.
-
"You should feel bad for utilizing these gameplay mechanics we designed the game around. You monster!"
wrote on last edited by [email protected]That quote reminded me heavily of Dishonored. As much as I love the game, they punish you with a bad ending for killing people and using all the cool powers provided to you (most of which are lethal), which I can concede that it is kinda dumb.
-
Sure, there is that difference. But the series doesn't even address the fact that he's already killed hundreds of people. Intentionally or not, it's still absurd to hand wring about killing when you've already killed hundreds of people, accidentally or not, and the one person you're worrying about taking down is literal genocidal maniac. To me that just sounds like not being willing to take responsibility for your own actions. Intentionally or not, Aang killed hundreds of people. And it's not like he never went into the Avatar state again after taking out the Northern fleet. Hell, he fought Ozai while in the Avatar state. Maybe he should have just "accidentally" killed Ozai while in the Avatar state and just washed his hands of moral culpability, just like he did all the other people he killed before then.
Regardless, Aang found a way to make peace with the fact that he had taken hundreds of lives. But when the person in question is someone of power and renown? Then it becomes something to fret over.
wrote on last edited by [email protected]Hell, he fought Ozai while in the Avatar state. Maybe he should have just “accidentally” killed Ozai while in the Avatar state
Remember that he didn't just enter the avatar state during the northern water tribe attack, he spiritually fused with the raging ocean spirit. I feel like that gives him a bit more moral innocence than just straight up killing people on his own. It's also worth noting he almost did exactly this. After smacking his back on the rock and reawakening his avatar state, he barely regained control before straight up killing Ozai.
That said... I actually hate the way he solved his unwillingness to kill the fire lord. An entire season of struggling over it and then suddenly some deus ex machina lion turtle pops up out of nowhere with no foreshadowing and just gives him the answer right before the final fight. Super lame and unearned ending to his moral struggle imo.
-
It is so insidious when they do that with any piece of media. Use minority groups as a shield against well deserved criticism. It'd just been a thing in entertainment for so long that I kinda ended up tapping out and focusing on indie stuff more.
I literally cannot imagine creating something that is so incompetent, so shit and then using trans people as a shield to avoid taking responsibility for me delivering a shitty product.
Worst part is that I think it was almost deliberate. It just felt so hateful and like every decision was crafted to specifically hurt the fans and, as you say, gaslight them by accusing them of hating minority groups. So fucking disgusting. If you look at the teaser scene that was published way back before the game's release, where Abby is getting hanged, she is suspiciously more feminine looking. Why did they change that? To piss off the gamers.
They also made every single ad seem like Ellie was on a revenge rampage because of Dina's murder and that Joel was either going to join her or that his "ghost" would be by her side as her mental health tanks.
My friend and I had a lot of theories about the story of the game back when those teasers came out.
And then they go and create the most cruel, mean spirited murder scene of a beloved character that everybody already expected to get a send off in this game and afterwards they act smug and/or like victims when the fan reactions roll in.
They knew what they were doing. It was so gross. Joel's murder was probably one of the most physically disturbed reactions I have jhad to a piece of media because it felt like personal hatred directed against the player. Like, where the fuck did that come from, asshole? All I ever did was enjoy your game.
Are there some asshole fans out there who fit the stereotype of a sexist gamer? Of course there are, but the vast majority of fans are just normal people whose only crime was to get invested in a story, a world and its characters and we all got punished for it.
To me, that is behavior from a creator that I will never support and too many creators in the hollywood/LA sphere have had this gross attitude towards fans for too long. When you treat an entire fan base with disgust because of what a small minority does, you are no longer a professional who deserves their time and money. It literally is the equivalent of going to a restaurant and the chef going up to your table and spitting in your food because he had a few shitty customers the other day. Like good fucking luck bringing new customers to your restaurant in the future.
I'm really excited for The Last of Us 3, whenever that finally happens. For a while, I didn't think a Part III could even happen, but luckily Druckmann said some time ago he'd actually come up with a concept for what a Part III might even be, and I'm just so ready for whatever exciting, messed up stuff he's got in store for us!
-
Plus I thought Avatar Yang Chen's argument was amazing. She told Aang that his duties to protect people as the Avatar outweighed his spiritual need to be a pacifist.
Yeah, but she's forgetting about Aang's cultural duty to his people. He's the last Air Nomad. If Aang intentionally takes a life, then that cultural aspect of the Air Nomads is dead forever in his eyes.
-
This post did not contain any content.
Did Elon make this meme?
Needs not cringe -
This post did not contain any content.
Batman is super full of shit in this department
-
For me, the best version of this is Avatar: The Last Airbender. Aang spends an entire arc lamenting how he may need to spill blood and kill the Fire Lord. Meanwhile the very same Aang had previously sunk an entire naval fleet single-handedly.
How many thousands of sailors, most of them probably people drafted against their will, did you kill that day Aang? Remember when you literally sliced entire ships in half? Your hands cut through steel, would you have even felt the flesh you were cutting through? Or how about all those ships you sank? A fair number sank instantly. You think everybody got out safely from those ships? Or how about that time you destroyed that giant drill machine, the one manned by thousands of soldiers, outside the walls of Ba Sing Se? You think everyone managed to miraculously escape that fireball? And those are just the major battles. How about the hundreds, perhaps thousands, of fire nation soldiers you casually tossed around like rag dolls with your powers of air, water, and earth during dozens of minor skirmishes? What are the odds you managed to toss all these men around like playthings and NOT have a few of them have their skulls bashed open on rocks when they hit the ground wrong?
The point of this is not to condemn Aang's actions through the series. His actions were fully justified, as he was fighting a war against an expansionist colonial military power. What he did was an objective good. But by the time he's hand wringing about having to kill Fire Lord Ozai, Aang had almost certainly already taken hundreds of lives. Hell, he probably killed hundreds just in that final climactic battle against the airship armada. The Hindenburg disaster saw 1/3 of the passenger and crew parish. And that was from an airship that crashed when it was already landing and close to the ground. Aang was dropping ships from miles in the sky. Maybe some soldiers with fire bending powers could somehow slow their own descent enough to survive, maybe they had some parachutes. But there's zero chance that Armada didn't have a fatality rate at least comparable to the Hindenburg disaster.
So Aang blithely kills hundreds of conscripts without a second thought. But then he has a crisis of conscience that takes multiple episodes to resolve, and that crisis of conscience is all about...Fire Lord Ozai? This is like if someone nonchalantly participated in the Firebombing of Dresden and then suddenly developed complex moral doubts about putting a bullet in Hitler's head. Aang had already killed hundreds of people that Ozai had sent to their deaths. No one was forcing Ozai. He wasn't a conscript. He had full autonomy; he's the absolute ruler of the Fire Nation. He doesn't even have a Congress or Parliament to answer to. He has absolute total moral responsibility for every evil thing the Fire Nation has done. Yet, when it comes to actually holding the powerful accountable, suddenly Aang wants to talk about the morality of killing.
Aang is carrying an entire culture on his back. If he loses his way as an Air Nomad, then the genocide of his people is complete, and the world will never again be restored to balance.
-
"Some epiphany" is a brilliant way of indicating you had no idea what the fuck was going on.
Let me ask a different question: How does letting Ellie kill her improve the story?
So, hour zero: Ellie says "I'm gonna kill that bitch."
Hour 40: Ellie says "I have killed that bitch. Damn, that was tight. Like a cold Pepsi, that was hella refreshing."What message is this communicating to you? What can we learn from such a story?
It's just a video game, dude. Video games are entertainment, not where you should be drawing lessons from.
As a corollary to this, yes there are some learning games, but TLOU series is not Mavis Bacon Teaches Typing.
-
Fucking Moon Knight. That dude’s whole thing is killing mother fuckers at the top, he prides himself on being a murderer of murderers and crime bosses and he’s not going to give a fuck what you think of his moral stance, yet at the end of the Disney+ series he decides he’s a fucking universalist or some shit? Fuck that! Moon Knight is a straight up murderer, he would be the first person to tell you that he is a murderer and that he don’t give a fuck how anyone feels about it.
Also, they didn't use the song Dead Moon Night by Dead Moon when there was a dead Moon Knight. Fuck that show.
Yeah, but Steven and Marc haven't reached that point in their character development yet. They don't fully understand who they are and what Moon Knight is. They don't know about Jake. Jake does kill people in cold blood. The implication is that in season 2, Steven and Marc will have to come to terms with that, just as they both came to terms with each other. This is an origin story.
-
Batman is super full of shit in this department
Batman allow innocent to be harmed just so he can uphold his moral high ground.
-
Yeah, but Steven and Marc haven't reached that point in their character development yet. They don't fully understand who they are and what Moon Knight is. They don't know about Jake. Jake does kill people in cold blood. The implication is that in season 2, Steven and Marc will have to come to terms with that, just as they both came to terms with each other. This is an origin story.
They should have made a show about a different character. They did Moon Knight wrong.
-
Yeah, but she's forgetting about Aang's cultural duty to his people. He's the last Air Nomad. If Aang intentionally takes a life, then that cultural aspect of the Air Nomads is dead forever in his eyes.
She also didn't know he'd magically find a magical being that would give him to power to permanently strip Ozai of his powers.
-
They should have made a show about a different character. They did Moon Knight wrong.
wrote on last edited by [email protected]Not many Marvel superheroes with schizophrenia and DID. I value the show because of the representation. I've never seen such a good depiction of plurality on TV. And I'm also a fan of Moon Knight in the comics. My favourite run is From The Dead. I love the sass with which he informs the somnologist that a Paladin of Khonsu is well qualified to treat dream problems.
-
That quote reminded me heavily of Dishonored. As much as I love the game, they punish you with a bad ending for killing people and using all the cool powers provided to you (most of which are lethal), which I can concede that it is kinda dumb.
Ohh i do hate that. I don't remember if 1 did it but they will change the hostility of people toward other NPC when you're in high chaos in 2. Like in low chaos the npc would be nice to each other and talk about getting out of karnaca, but in high chaos the dialog changed and they straight up murder their friend. It's unsettling that the dev basically blame you for the change of their action.
DOTO fixed this for me. I can chose whether to kill or not to based on my situation, not the ending and invisible system.
-
I found Watchdogs 2 weird in this regard. You steal money from random people, who often struggle themselves, steal cars like nothing, murder a suburb’s worth of people, and still you’re “the good guys”?
Well that's just how evil capitalism is
-
I played and liked the first game, but when I read the reviews of part II it reminded me of the torture mission in GTA5, which I absolutely hated. So I skipped it, and I'm glad I did.
Trevor scares me. He feel so real.
