Yes I know that fascism 
is a playable ideology in Disco Elysium, but presenting fascism as with its integral ugly reality, glaring contradictions, and unsustainable death drive is a pretty leftist (and correct) way of portraying it. 
Yes I know that fascism is a playable ideology in Disco Elysium, but presenting fascism as with its integral ugly reality, glaring contradictions, and unsustainable death drive is a pretty leftist (and correct) way of portraying it.
Cyberpunk 2077. The setting is perfectly competent cyberpunk, with all the capitalist reality heightened to the point of absurdity, but V is the fucking ur-chud.
You’re in an extreme late-capitalist hellworld; the climate and most of social order is collapsing beyond repair. Your character’s reaction to this is to be a mercenary whose principle preoccupation is their own legend. Your connection with humanity at large is limited to a cobbled together network of a handful of people who morally vindicate your every action. Your story is mostly about the trail of bodies left behind by a quest to do nothing but save your own life. The most pure version of your final arc is to eschew entirely any form of collectivist solution in favor of dialing up the rugged individualist power fantasy to 11 with a on-person guns-blazing assault on a Japanese corporation (alternatively there’s now an expansion where you can sell out and be offered to become a fed because of how cool you are).
All of this while maintaining a pretense of being a morally neutral person just driven by common sense and your second amendment-given right to self-defense from hordes on interchangeable sheeple.
There’s a reason I chose the ending where
spoiler
V shoots himself in the head above Misty’s tarot shop
this annoys the living shit out of me every playthrough i do. no matter what options you choose, its always about V’s constant sense of self-importance and becoming a “legend” while casting the anti-corporate and anti-capitalist sentiments as crazy (you can lean into silverhand, but i feel like V’s dialogue options always imply that silverhand is a little crazy for believing what he believes. and by no means is he a great person, but if i was in the cyberpunk universe i would be on the exact same page as him regarding action against the corporations.)
I’ve knocked on the Become A Legend Of Night City™ plot motivations of the cyberpunkerinos before, but you summed it up perfectly.
I mean the game is set in fucking hell, half the freaks you kill kidnap people (mostly women) off the street to chop up for parts on the black market. Also for VR snuff porn. Communism was pretty much snuffed out in Russia even though the Soviet Union exists. China is also kinda fucked, Maoism was never embraced it seems according to the wiki.
Shame about the new DLC ending.
“The world is shit, even trying to improve it somewhat is naive, and everyone in it with any meaningful agency is probably an asshole” settings leave very little room for me to care about what the fiction is portraying. I’m glad I didn’t buy in to it.
I get that. Nihilistic grim dark shit is really overused in media. Personally I didn’t buy into any message the game was or wasn’t trying to push, because Cyberpunk 2177 would just be endless deserts, ruins and skeletons. I just find the established setting and lore interesting in a dark way.
I personally find the message and the setting inseperable, or at least too much trouble to be worth the effort. For me, if the central narrative is repulsive, it stains everything else I may otherwise be doing. There’s plenty of pop-nihilistic edgy fiction settings out there to choose from if I wanted that.
Hell, you’re not wrong. What kind of fiction do you enjoy? Like non-nihilistic stuff. A recent fave for me was Fionna and Cake.
I enjoy a wide range of fiction, but my problematic (yet all-time) favorite is Frank Herbert’s Dune series. It’s dark, tumultuous, full of vast and difficult-to-fathom massive political movements that span the stars, but it isn’t just ripe for change, it is dangerously ripe for change that does come and does change everything, in good ways and bad.
There are very bad people in it, there are misguided people, there are people with true and actual messiah complexes, but there are also deeply sympathetic and heroic people. It’s a complicated struggle, much like the world we live in, just expanded into the far future.
I’ve always wanted to delve into Dune! I liked the recent movie but I heard it only taps the surface of the books.
Yeah, the books feel different too, and not just in the details.
One of the main things I like about Dune was that it was the first science fiction series I ever read that had potent emotional impact for me. The characters feel alive, driven by beliefs and passions. There are literal warrior-poets. There are religious beliefs that are cast so far in the future of speculative reckoning that they are both absurd by modern understanding (don’t get me started on the Orange Bible or Zensunni) but also very immersive in setting. It feels messy and alive in ways that resonate and feel real.
If only. As you insinuate, it very readily becomes a story about not even saving your life but just glorifying yourself before you die.