Stumbled across this article from August 22nd of last year. It's a tranny eagerly promoting the possibility of a gay romance in KCD2.
https://www.thegamer.com/kingdom-come-deliverance-2-hans-henry-queer-romance/
Hasn't Warhorse delivered everything this tranny asked for?
Vavra decided to have his cake and eat it, too. That's it. That's the whole story. He's an opportunist and a liar. And half the anti-woke crowd are so desperate for relevance that they're willing to circle the wagons for a traitor who sold out to the woke mob for a few extra shekels.
Edit to add: consider the timeline. This tranny journo was playing a preview build of the game almost six months ago. If the gay romance had been explicit, don't you think he would have been singing its praises?
Vavra deliberately withheld the gay romance from the players because he knew it was a betrayal. He fully intended to blindside us. When it was leaked, he played stupid while his sycophants came to his defense.
Then IGN gives it a 9/10 and releases a "how to be gay" guide five minutes after their review goes up? Obviously some games media were in on the deception.
Hot Take: Games like Dustborn, Concord and Dragon Age The Veilguard will be the worst things to happen to gaming in regards to stopping woke aspects. While they explicitly failed, their extreme nature resulted in a push of the Overton Window so that dumbasses will inevitably defend woke/socjus/politically correct/etc elements under the absolutely retarded idea that "it could be worse". Which is a lot of what we've been seeing with KCD2. Everyone is still fresh from Veilguard in their mind and they're thinking that the sudden muslim, the surge of jews and the gay-washing in the game are not actually that bad because it could be worse like Veilguard. KCD2 isn't "actually" woke, that's only for games like Concord and Dustborn.
I swear, be prepared for this and point it out as such. Call people on holding relative faux-"principles" rather than objective standards that don't need to worry about lesser or greater evils, only that it is in fact evil.
You are 100% correct. We already saw this with Baldur's Gate 3. I can't remember what woke abomination came out around the same time (was it Forspoken?) but it had the exact same effect. Lots of people defending BG3 as a "good game" because whatever other woke slop was out was far worse.
Death by a thousand cuts and two boiling pots.
You have the one pot simmering with wokeness, ready for the frog to hop into when the boiling pot of wokeness gets too hot. Veilguard was too hot, so you have a bunch of easily swayed people hopping into the simmering pot of KCD2.
Bingo! And it's kinda funny, because in my mind, BG3 is the case that has MORE woke elements, it's just done in a better way. And I'll admit that. BG3 is a more competent game in both gameplay and writing. Credit where credit is due. But it's still woke.
Contrary to popular coping, wokeness is not inherently an issue of quality. True, most woke games are of lower quality, but that's not the inherent connection nor issue. The issue is the political messaging. The stance of pushing agendas. It doesn't matter if it's poorly done or well executed, it's still pushing a political agenda. And if I'm honest, I wouldn't want a politically motivated game that pushes an agenda I agree with either. Explore ideas, sure. I don't actually have a problem with a game including these choices, but you NEED to have the balance to properly explore them. Limited by the technology of the day and time constraints that lead to a rushed ending, I think that Fallout New Vegas does a reasonable job of this by offering 4 different paths to explore the ideas of governance. It has paths I disagree with, but it still explored them, and it doesn't shove it down your throat as to which is right or wrong beyond a very rudimentary karma system.
But having the inverse. Having the option to actually do evil things for rational reasons is important if you're creating an examination of these ideas. THAT is the difference between a political narrative and a political agenda in a piece of media. And far too few understand that.
I’ve been a broken record on this lately, but I think we’re seeing a perfect example of the downfalls of arguing by proxy. Disaffected lefties use “quality” as a proxy to attack woke media because they don’t actually object to the political and cultural content. No, the problem for people like Critical Drinker is that unskilled creators make leftism look stupid. The leftist values themselves are not seen as directly connected to and responsible for the shit storytelling.
This proxy strategy is effective at first because 90% of all media sucks regardless. So you can always rail against incompetence in general and then reliably catch woke media in that crossfire. But then you’re giving a pass to leftist propaganda so long as it is deemed to be “of quality”. It’s like fighting replacement immigration by only objecting to illegal immigration. Eventually your enemies will just legalize the invasion, and then you’ve got no argument to stand on.
All of this is to underline the critical importance of arguing for explicit and specific ideas. I oppose all immigration that threatens to harm my nation. I oppose all media that pushes degenerate and evil leftist politics and culture. I’m fine with politics in video games as long as they are my politics. I’m not interested in exploring gay stories no matter how “well” they are told.
Yeap you are correct, nowadays i'm even hearing "its not woke just cause it has gay characters" from the supposed anti-woke crowd.
Soft disagree, I think you're describing one hand clapping. I think that overton shift you mention happens mainly because of much more sophisticated subversion in the form of KCD1&2 (2 doesn't work without the bait of 1), BG3, Ghost of Tsushima, and most likely Witcher 4. On their own, Dustborn, Veilguard, etc. actually are incredibly damaging to woke ideology, because they give even normies an idea of what to look out for to help realise when they're being shamelessly propagandised to, and they suck.
The problem is when the masses are simultaneously being brainwashed by other more subtle shit that their herd is still forming a protective circle around.
If I thought our enemies were playing 5D chess I'd agree with you harder, and I do agree with the kernel of your point, but I do think the devs are true believers in the message and messaging potential of the games which have disastrously flopped. I'd like to encourage them to make more in order to keep destroying themselves. But it's true that they are at the same time a big distraction.
It doesn't need to be 5D chess. I think that these games were made in earnest, it's just going to, in the long run, work out better for them because dumbasses that don't understand the issues (or never really cared) will use those games as benchmarks for what's unacceptable while allowing pretty much everything else through because "it could be worse".
I don't think the woke/socjus/cultural marxist/politically correct/[insert different name same thing here] are some hivemind of co-ordination. I think a lot of those people think Dustborn, Veilguard, Concord, Forspoken, etc were all major missteps and that even they don't see the usefulness of such titles to actually use them as scapegoats for the most part. A handful probably do, but that would be it.
You're right about the trend of successful start with tainted sequel, but that's merely the basis of slowburn gradual change. Fabian Socialism is a brilliant example of this, where the explicit goal is to go slowly to get more people to accept the changes over time. This explicitly requires things like entryism, manipulation, subversion, etc to achieve these goals. THAT is a co-ordinated effort. But these flops? They might be damaging to the woke brand, but as a social contagion, they're a massive boon for them, since it facilitates that slow growth they're all about. Just about everything less than those titles is now allowed because "it could be worse". It allows them to be introduced and not inherently rejected because "it could be worse". Arguments from relativity are these freaks bread and butter. They can never argue on objective grounds.
At best, this is a speed hump. A way to slow down that actually HELPS their cause by proverbially boiling the frog. Unless a failure causes actual reversal, it's not really a loss for them, but a loss for us as there is now something to point to and say "I don't know what you're complaining about, it's things like Dustborn that you hate, and this is nothing like Dustborn, this is still good".
I think we agree more than we disagree but the unresolved issue is what's causing the slide towards more acceptance of wokeshit (which I agree is happening). The overtly woke disaster-flops are setting a low bar for victory by creating an impression of 'anything which isn't this woke is fine' - we basically agree on this too.
I guess my point of contention is who's to blame for the continuing slide, what the points of focus should be and what can we say about it. For this, my focus is entirely on the less obvious wokeshit. This to me is the threat and vulnerability all in one, because they're smarter ideological vectors, but they take more work and talent to set up. Any hack can write a Veilguard, a Dustborn, a Depression Quest, and on their own they backfire more often than not, but it does take some talent, setup and vision to make a propaganda vehicle like KCD2, or BG3, or even Disco Elysium. Elysium is another interesting candidate because it was an explicitly political game, and the devs themselves fellated commies in award speeches, yet since it was innovative in certain ways and enjoyable enough (for its niche) it inspired its normie fans to argue that it wasn't a commie game - which it quite obviously was, to anyone who isn't politically illiterate. Imagine how much harder it would have been to call a spade a spade if they hadn't sucked off Engels and Marx on stage.
Like you and current_horror discussed, wokeness is not an issue of game quality or enjoyment. Some, however, can't ever bring themselves to see things that way. Allies who get duped into enjoying propaganda are a huge issue. soctatic_method made a post about people being in too deep in a terf/tranny thread and he called it sunken cost, but it's more complex and extends to a much wider range of issues, I feel. It's a question of identifying with a particular message or piece of media and feeling personally attacked when any part of it is criticised.
It happens in fuckin steam sales ffs; I've seen it happen (countless times actually) where someone who criticises a sale price for a product will get attacked by those who already paid for it at the same or worse value. To them, they're implicitly being called idiots for not being equally critical of the deal. In the exact same way, those who enjoy more subtle wokeshit immediately become defensive of the entire product when anyone else points out that it might be ideologically manipulative on a level less obvious than fat female chars or cringe speeches about non-binary shit. 'How could it be manipulative?', they seethe, 'I didn't detect myself being manipulated.' Well even if you think you weren't, the media is reshaping the acceptable landscape of debate.
Anyway what I think is required is just calling a spade a spade. I don't want to ban KCD2, Tsushima, Elysium, Witcher 4, BG3, whatever, but there should be zero tolerance for any discussion where their explicitly ideological inserts are not mentioned. Anyone who tries to defend them should be forced to reexamine their credentials in the culture war. You like da sloppa? Fine. You admit it's an enemy action? No? Take a leave of absence, private. Just play videogames, you earned it, but now shut up.
In contrast I don't care what anyone says about Veilguard, AssCreed Shadows or the latest wokeflop of the month, I think they destroy themselves on their own. On balance, I think they're a positive. It's the other shit that makes them a part of an insidious coupling, imo, but I'm open to other ideas on it all.
I'd say it's largely irrelevant. Does it ultimately change how we should approach this issue? Not really. The best thing to do is to be firm and explain that just because something else is worse doesn't make this not bad either, that lesser/middling/greater evil is all still evil.
And we're not going to really bother tackling people who are actively pushing the shift since at the end of the day they're not going to change their opinion on this and the only way is to simply stop them in the first place.
And I have to disagree on this point because it goes back to an earlier bit you said: "the media is reshaping the acceptable landscape of debate". Even though it's a flop, it still reshapes at a form of comparison. It becomes the new perimeter of the landscape of debate, and that's incredibly important because the edges define what is and isn't acceptable. THAT is the issue. These flops don't result in their ideas being acceptable, it results in everything leading up to them being acceptable. And THAT is the threat. We can mock the idea of 'pulling a barve' or some polyamorous bullshit, but everything leading up to that? Sodomy in a Christian game within a world that explicitly outlaws it is now acceptable and fine.
The issue isn't that these games/pieces of media help push the agenda, it's that they provide the idea of "this is too far", where everything before that point being considered to be not too far.
And yes, it works in tandem. I agree that this wouldn't be as big an issue without the subversive series that turn against their original audiences. But it's still an issue. It could even be argued to be a chicken and egg situation. It's because you have both that this is a cycle that works off each other so well.