Author likes little stories about growing up, making choices with your time and which emphasise the importance fo mundane things. Their own games do this.
How wholesome games give rise to un-wholesome fandoms
But! This is distinct from “wholesome” games, which the author says they find distasteful.
Examples of distasteful things in wholesome media: - Pokemon’s happy fun friends fans yelling at some developers about 3d models - Stephen Universe is a very wholesome show, and the fans bullied two of the staff members off the internet because they had posted ships, in a personal capacity, the fans did not like.
Why are these media about being kind to people having such terrible fans (there’s probably other examples).
Author posits 3 reasons: - Firstly: within fandom, people surrender their own personal views and opinions to allign with those of broader fandom (as espoused by the loudest or most popular people within the fandom). Then there is conflict between fan groups who have different “leaders” with different opinions, and also between fan groups and the people who make the show. - Secondly: people seek comfort and when something is uncomfortable to them they react with hostility. Yes. people do not like to be challenged :(. if your comfy story has a moral, but people are reading it to be comforted, then when they are confronted by the moral they get offended. - Thirdly: (and this is the crux) people think playing wholesome games makes them inherently wholesome people.
(Since also have a phenomenon whereby people politicise consumption of media so that they expect all media to obvious say political things they agree with. This is bad because it’s lazy advocacy.)
Okay this piece is cool but god do they need an editor (I think they said this themselves lol).
“The way art says things is through normalizing ideas, not preaching.”
Learning requires humility. I should get better at admitting what I don’t know.
okay we get the idea, you think “wholesome” games and “cosy” fiction makes for easily weaponized mobs. the appearance of wholesomeness has no correlation or causation with actually being “good” or “wholesome”.
Propaganda, Nostalgia and Simplicity
Ahhh, the author was made to watch a lot of Christian propaganda when they were younger.
Art is not instructive, it’s expressive.
OKay they’re talking about accelerationism now? not sure why. Ah right, fascist propaganda is about giving up your will to the leader (see point 1 above) and accelerationism says that by giving in to capitalism, you’ll let it win and then consume itself and then everything will totally be good afterwards.
Ah okay, one argument fash use to convince you to give up is to appeal to nostalgia, to the cozyness and comfort of the (imagined) past. They successfully make this argument by presenting lots of Nazi film posters.
Making me think about how much i like Alphonse Mucha’s The Slav Epic, sure it’s not Nazi-ism but it is ethno-nationalism, even if it is from the perspective of a minority. It still proceeds by the usual propagandistic path of presenting a (in this case mythical) past. It’s very beautiful whilst is does… I wonder why did he paint it.
The issue with fiction is that it doesn’t stop you from lying about how the past was, or lying about anything at all, really.
Tl;dr: life was simpler when you were younger. Don’t you want everything to be like that again?
The whole thing about degenerate art during nazi germany was that art should be simple, agreeable and stereotypcically heroic; there is “no risk of unwanted, random, personal, or unclear interpretations” (Dr. Nausikaä El-Mecky). The art was meant to persuade you to be subservient by making that seem appealing (comfortable, easy to understand).
I guess I’m somewhat lucky in that I’m predisposed to enjoy complexity.
Fascism
Damn, Eco in Ur-Fascism: “There is in the future a TV or Internet populism, in which the emotional response of a selected group of citizens can be presented and accepted as the Voice of the People.” Thank you Murdoch.
Companies, advertisers, fash propagandists “are preying on good vibes.”
The past they present is a myth. It is not real. Projecting it into the future (prepping) is equally harmful and unrealistic. Community preparedness is the only actual name in the game. Self-sufficiency is not.
How does this relate to Becky Chambers/Legends and Lattes? Is it twee pastoralism? I feel like Becky Chambers is not, that still realistically grapples with emotions and complexity and so on, even if it is safe and fairly comfy.
This is all sorta like that stuff about MBMBAM being “good vibes only”. Remember that Sarah Z. video from yeeeeeaaars ago?
This is a Review?
So. That was a lot of set up and now we’re going to talk about the game “I Was A Teenage Exocolonist”. It seemed to the author that this game was going to be wholesome exactly in the terrible way they just described. But it was not.
Someone dies, a young kid. Your age. Your choices also have major impacts on how the game ends. But in this game you are a 10-year-old, so it reproducing the softness and wholesomeness is appropriate. And yet! People still get hurt, and die and lose hope and bad people show up. It’s still realistic. The game treats you as though you are growing up and becoming an adult (Philip Pullman raises his head).
It turns out they were sponsored to review this game and write this article? And they just spoke about their opinions on cozy art for most of the review. Lol. Should’ve been two articles.
They think all the characters look samey and would dress more differently to express themselves as written.
Hopepunk vs. Real Hope
Punk is not automatically good. (I think the author misses the fact that the punk in solarpunk/hopepunk means “aesthetic”, it’s a malapropism from “cyberpunk” and steampunk). And wanting a better world is also not automatically good. (Goose chasing nazi meme: “better for who? better for who?!”)
Very pretty art can be made by horrible people. It looking nice is their goal, that’s how they get you. (Tbf, very bad art can also be made by horrible people. It’s not a false dichotomy)
I hope this author likes Ursula K. Le Guin, otherwise they have not “gotten” her. I was a Teenage Exocolonist feels a lot like Always Coming Home, to me.
Dunking on fash gives them air, gives them publicity. Block, defederate, isolate. Do something actually harmful to them.
I wish this person were more specific and less “people think…”, or gave explicit examples of works, I agree that they’re right, I just like writing that’s grounded in specificts.
Then the piece got personal and quite engrossing. It still needs an editor.
TLDR
There is a mechanism by which works which are trying to appear comfy/safe can accumulate particular toxic fandoms. In three steps: 1. Fandom centrers itself around the opinions of loud voices (universal) 2. Fans don’t like to be challenged/made uncomfortable 3. Fans feel that being a fan of a wholesome media makes them wholesome.
The author then goes on to explain, which many examples and very long windedly, how desiring comfiness is the same emotion fascists prey on to make you be a fascist too. It’s nostalgia, pastoralism.
There’s a lot of pastoral art out there, and some of it claims to be “hopepunk”, when in reality it’s neutral/reactionary because it doesn’t present a realistic picture of human reality, of conflict, of how change comes about. It’s too simple.
Hope requires acknowledging the bad things exist, and it’s hard, and must be paired with real effort and real change and realism. This whole piece was basically an argument for realism in media, especially media purporting to be progressive.
My review of their review
Wow, this was a review? Terrible review. Pretty good op-ed though. They could really do with an editor, and I wish they had used more specific examples of the phenomena they were talking about/tendencies they were criticising.
my takeaways:
- i should seek out art that challenges me
- i should make authentic art that represents my feelings
- i think me and martin should play “i was a teenage exocolonist”
- i should avoid fandom and do more stuff irl lol
- god they need an editor