this post was submitted on 10 Feb 2026
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That's true. I just, I don't know. As I said, why make it a prion disease?
Maybe just because a widespread prion disease is catastrophic and a more standard plague might have seemed to the devs to be more containable due to modern advancements (whoops), or because it being a prion disease could be rhetorically convenient for apologists for capital who can then pathologize their political opposition, which would not apply as well in the case of widespread tuberculosis or something.
It's a fraught strategy, but many authors like to demonstrate a widespread social trick by first tricking the audience with it (this gets used for racism allegories all the time), so the prion brainrot story is more likely to be viewed by some of the audience as credible than historical and easily-debunked examples. The reason it is a fraught strategy is partly demonstrated by threads like the current one.
between that and measurehead pointing to the revolution just being brain damage after the fact, i think you nailed it, this is why they chose a prion disease
I suppose. Just seems like there'd be something deeper to it. A prion disease seems deeply metaphorical, brain being slowly eaten, mad cow disease, all that stuff. Seems like they put as much thought into that as they did the rest of the game, so I just want there to be some big significance to it I guess.
The people most affected by a prion plague would also still tend to be the ones who are vulnerable in general (because the rich at least have a better ability to quarantine, among other things), so the most ardent supporters of the socialists are the most disproportionately infected, and we have seen how capitalists will seize on whatever they can to pathologize their opposition. I think it's meaningful, but the metaphor is that people who were left by the ruling elite to have their brains eaten and are protesting that condition have their protest blamed on the brain damage and not the neglect that caused the brain damage. That is more persuasive a lie than if they were protesting having their lungs destroyed.
Prions are the coolest, fancy protein grains what make more grains till your brain is a scrambled old heap.
besides the writers just finding it cool it avoids worldbuilding an authentic epidemic, as there hasnt been prion outbreaks to scale irl. if you did a flu people would have expectations for how that shouldve went
me personally i think it's because it's a setting with sci-fi elements and they needed a cool medical name for a deadly disease
in literary terms though? i think if there was a allegorical reason for a prion disease, it was to represent the brainrot of the capitalist monarchy that the communards rebelled against. the old government allowed something to fester that was eating away at the minds of its people, and the people rose up against them because of that