The post before that was amazing too

Based and Nausicaa pilled

What you’re attributing to diegetic essentialism is the Thermian argument: using in-universe lore to deflect criticism. Slightly different thing.

Diegetic essentialism is when people (including leftists) flatten all meaning in a work in order to put media into boxes. The examples given in sigmarxism are Beasts of Chaos and Tau being written with superficial anarchists/communist aesthetics, so therefore BoC are anarchists and Tau are communists. (Neither of those things are true)

We do this because we need to let our in-group know that we’re watching the “correct” media, that we’re completely unproblematic because the media that we consume is completely unproblematic. (It doesn’t work that way)

Let’s use Attack on Titan as an example

I think it’s somewhere in season 3-

There’s a moment where the main character, who’s basically spent his whole life being taught to hate a dehumanised enemy, finds out that the “monsters” who destroyed his life are people exactly like him, scared children who were also taught to hate a dehumanised enemy: him.

And that shoe dropping makes such a potent anti-fascist message, because it lays bare in narrative form exactly how fascism fails, how it warps and distorts history in order to perpetuate a lie, because we’ve been with Eren from the start and seen his journey, and his shock at this revelation is echoed in the shock of the audience. It’s legit good storytelling.

And if AoT ended right there things would’ve been fine, but oh well.

My reading of AoT: AoT is the single most incompetent anti-fascist story ever told, that it warps right back around into endorsing fascism and anti-Semitism. This is because Isayama is a liberal: the moral of his story is “an eye for an eye makes the whole world genocided”, which is an idealist idea of fascism, a child’s understanding of fascism. Eren revealing himself to be a petulant manchild committing genocide because he’s afraid of losing his mother figure is supposed to be tacit condemnation, but Isayama still lets him get away with genocide, like the liberal he is. We’re just supposed to feel bad about it.

Anyway, going back to diegetic essentialism: anyone who asks “Is X piece of media ______” is deeply unserious and more often than not simply looking for validation of their own political beliefs. Art/media criticism is about deeply and seriously examining human subjectivity, to explore what that tells us about the world we inhabit and the people who inhabit it. Within us there are multitudes, and not even authors have the authority to dictate the meaning of their works- we have to determine that meaning for ourselves.

Plus the entire premise seems to be a nihilistic parable about how fascism is right and you need to wipe out rival civilizations before they even know you exist, or they'll do the same to you

I see this take all the time here, and then when I (a person who read the book) counter that it's a Sci-Fi parable about Chinese foreign policy from the perspective of the Chinese (you need to keep your head down and not draw attention to yourself or the evil ~~Trisolarans~~ American Empire will come get you, humanity is the China stand in in the novel) white people yell at me for being some kind of asian chauvinist.

Being Open Source.

The software’s codebase is ideologically communist!

Was in an interview with the CEO on a Milsim gamer channel: https://youtu.be/FJs_kqHrzzQ?si=3Zy-kgXDPXLF8qxm

I don’t have a timestamp sorry, on my phone atm

The original Helldivers came about because the devs read Edward Snowden’s book and started memeing around the office about US propaganda and foreign policy

I was on board until

like just make the love interest a middle aged office lady if you're writing for straights ffs. Or if you really need to capture the horny teenager market set it in highschool like every other piece of Japanese media

: “So are ya Chai-nese or Japanese?”

Latest indie darling blow up videogame fad that you'll hear less of in a month or so. I say that somewhat derisively but I think it's pretty normal, Lethal Company was the last one and that was a neat little horror co-op game imo.

I think the reason word of mouth is spreading so much can be attributed to two things:

1. It's somewhat edgy, misanthropic and subversive take on Pokemon/Nintendo's family friendly aesthetics. I can't say much about this as I haven't played the game myself to judge just exactly how much is being played straight and how much is satire (and I don't plan to), but I'd guess people who grew up with Pokemon as a franchise have been looking for that edgy take and are reacting to that, and the resulting controversy is driving the engagement algorithms (I mean just look at hexbear lmao), and

2. it's fulfilling a niche that Nintendo hasn't by being an online multiplayer Pokemon-esque game that's not turn-based; just judging based on some of the clips I've seen but working together with your friends to catch a high level Pokemon-alike actually does look kinda fun. This one's really on Game Freak for allowing Pokemon to go stale by playing it safe and not innovating the game design at all, so Palworld coming in to steal Nintendo's lunch money here's pretty deserved, I think. (Although yeah, I guess Ark did it first but the cartoony character designs are doing a lot of heavy lifting in making the on-screen action legible).

Guy published a book titled "How to Blow Up a Pipeline" and hasn't been arrested yet, idk maybe if I try and "Gotcha" him now in an interview it'll work

If they read Malm’s fucking book they could have read between the lines of the examples of direct action he gave in it…