RandyLahey

funnily enough, the imperialism games, especially imperialism 2, are very fun and much more honest about what they are

but yeah the civ games certainly work as ruling class sims and i do still love them, especially when they embrace their board-gamey origins and dont try too hard for rEaLiSm

and in the first one, a 50% chance that your declaration of war would be overruled by congress, to represent the peaceful nature of dEmOcRaCy

ive always kinda wanted to write a bit of an essay on the intense liberal ideology baked into almost every facet of the civ series (and not just its laughable 'government types'), but never quite got around to it. theres so much, down to how nomadic and non-urban peoples are 'barbarians' to be destroyed so their land can be properly tamed, to the linear flow of technological and social progress as represented by government-allocated beakers or whatever, to even just the conception of the city as the atomic unit of human societal organisation, etc etc etc. and of course the complete lack of any vision of the future or 'victory' beyond either military or soft-power conquest of the globe, or liberal democracy in space for no discernible reason, like it cant even conceive of any greater goal for humanity, like it might as well be francis fukuyamas civilization

the sid meiers civilization series - the flow of world history as filtered through the mind of an apolitical 90s american nerd right at the 'end of history', with terminal western highschool textbook brain

and dont even get me started on sid meiers colonization...

i think people mostly arent aware of the whole catholic monarchist chud aspect

and its just easy for people to empathise with a dude who wants to blow up the british parliament, its relatable yknow

perhaps an obvious one but im gonna say black panther, not just for killmonger being based and them having to make him kill his girlfriend for no reason to make him look like the bad guy, but for its portrayal of the international rules-based order

borrowing from an old comment, the thing that i found most interesting about that movie is that killmonger completely plays by all the countrys rules to come into power - he comes from the appropriate royal bloodline, he gets the backing of one of the major feudal lords, he comes in openly and challenges the sitting monarch who accepts the challenge without coercion (and as we saw earlier in the movie, challenge to personal combat is a normal and accepted means of transfer of power), and then he wins decisively and kills the sitting monarch (as far as anyone knows). all of this is ludicrous crusader kings shit and an absurd way to run an enlightened modern country, but he plays by the rules.

and the very second that somebody they dont like gets into power, what is the rules-based "liberal" response? pro-royalist military coup, openly backed by literally the cia. they only find out the black panther guy is alive later, so they still think hes dead when they throw it all into motion but that doesnt stop them. and the movie is written in a way that makes this seem like the obviously logical and honourable and correct thing to do, and that these are the good guys that you should support. and at the end stability is restored, and even though hes a hereditary monarch without even the figleaf of parliamentary oversight, hes pro-western and he says nice things in speeches so thats basically the same as democracy right?

like even in the most woke lib "pro-black" blockbuster movie, cia-backed coup is just seen as the obvious response to any thorny political questions.

but hey, they did open one (1) community centre at the end so the injustice faced by black people worldwide was pretty much solved :liberalism:

ive read way too many 40k novels lol (yeah i read theory) and theres a huuuuuge disconnect between the different writers. youre absolutely right that the eisenhorn/ravenor books in particular are all about how incredibly dogshit the imperium is, and other books do make this clear as well

but with a lot of the space marine focused ones you can just feel the authors jerking themselves off as they write (someone should compile all the bits from the horus heresy novels where they first describe each of the primarchs in particular lol) and they are often really uncritical or apologetic about not just the space marines but the imperium itself

and of course the video games mostly go no deeper than "yay space marines"

another thing that nobody mentioned yet is that the imperium has the space marines who are the heavily-armoured genetically-modified superhuman special forces guys, and then the vaaaast majority of the army are the imperial guard who are mostly just conscripts with shitty guns who get sent in human wave style to die en masse

there are various themed imperial guard regiments that have distinctive uniforms and fighting styles of their planet. the most popular amongst warhammer nerds are the death korps of krieg, who resemble gas-masked wwi soldiers with a german-style helmet. purely coincidentally, they seem to be most commonly painted in feldgrau colour schemes

It really doesn’t help that GW constantly oscillates between “the theocratic fascism is really self-destructive and stupid and is why the imperium is a decaying wreck, and having an autocrat and his large adult sons in charge of everything totally fucked it all up in the first place”, “the fascism isn’t great but it’s necessary and justified because it’s the only thing saving humanity from unimaginable horrors that vaguely resemble whatever ethnic group you’re most afraid of”, or “the space marines are unambiguously good heroes with honour and piety who keep everyone safe, yay for the good guys”

fuck me, my subconscious definitely picked up on some kind of extra racial weirdness when i was going through all this shit arguing with people on r*ddit, but yeah it didnt quite click until you mentioned it that this is exactly what it was

and yeah im just realising as well that there was lots of talk about religious persecution etc, but very little talk about islam - rarely called "islamophobia", and i have a strong feeling that if you looked at all the articles with this in mind youd find that as much as they focused on religious buildings that they really downplayed "mosques" in favour of other terms or generic "houses of worship" etc (this last bit might actually be legit though, it does seem from my very limited knowledge that their version of islam is a bit different in its religious buildings from "mainstream" islam)

this shit probably should have been immediately obvious but there was so much other bullshit to wade through that i guess i didnt really notice

Also the same problem as New Vegas, you can have the best writing and the best voice acting, but it is 100% impossible to take any of it seriously when it's coming from Oblivion faces