I don't feel like explaining why, but, come on. You know.
Silent Hill 3? The one where a whole boatload of the subtext is about how shitty/damaging our society and its expectations are on women?
this post was submitted on 08 Feb 2026
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I will never unterstand why people admit to being conservatives, their biggest core values being ignorance and bigotry.
I think anti-woke propaganda fooling people into believing conservatism is somehow counter-culture and "cool"/"rebellious" plays a huge role, especially in the case of younger people. Those same people have genuinely come to believe that the "left" is the strongest force on the planet and the status quo due to cancel culture and rainbow capitalism, and other similar gamergate-era chud brainworms.
I really need to flesh out my thoughts on this at some point. But in the social media age especially you get to see a lot of people who’s entire life defined and like “milestoned” by their consumption and interaction with consumer culture.
Their endorsement of brands is the closest thing they have to patches on a battle vest. Your interactions with the world are literally instances of consumption and therefore it’s possible to be so far gone that you need to list out ~~everything~~ every product and property you’ve ever enjoyed and to qualify them as being perfectly aligned with your “identity”. Identity in quotes because if these people even have any culture they can’t fucking see it and they just know they have to point at things and say they’re theirs. It’s Persona, their conservativecore game™, of course.
Someone in my friend group got basically cooked by Twitter over a few years and left the groupchats recently, but there are so many instances of this. I really remember a lot of like distressingly chuddy Tintin edits?
I have a lot of thoughts on consumption-as-identity-as-consumption. I’ve had to visit Dubai for work a few times and good lord has that given me perspective. So many moving parts. Accessibility is a good thing. Being proud of having everything be accessible is a good thing. A lot more people in wheelchairs out in public than I’m used to seeing in Beirut. But when “everything” is 80% buying shoes and buying hamburgers, what are we facilitating really? If I see more types people being included in public because “public” is 70% air conditioned malls staffed by people who earn peanuts… Am I expected to clap for the open mindedness of “Now even people in wheelchairs can purchase products!” and not ask any more questions? (This is a tangential topic that’s kind of like rainbow capitalism for our region)
I know this might seem unrelated and this is just a late rant but god I fucking hate capitalism and how it sinks its mycelia into culture and taste and fucking everything you could ask to enjoy. I don’t want to look at more people being accepted and immediately assume it’s to make more sales. I don’t want to look at every single cultural or political moment, good or bad, and immediately think of the optics. I don’t want to understand the word “hobby” as “consumption community” anymore. Can we not live in the real world for a second? Fuck!
Propaganda sure is the answer. The question is if these people can be reached IRL. I am kind of fed up with not doing anything for change.
imo many people can be reached if you have some level of personal credibility, take time to understand what they are trying to say, and treat them with a baseline level of respect and compassion regardless of what they "deserve."
Many people also can't be reached short of an intervention.
I have to assume some of them buy into the idea that its "just" a different opinion .Plus obviously they dont view their worldview as bad. They have in short a very warped worldview that excuses many of their behaviours to them. (Like thinking New York is an active warzone)
It feels more more closer to rural-peasantcore that explores the dynamics of capitalist mass production slowly consuming and threatening to reproletarianize the rural petite bourgeois and artisans, while touching on Gramsci's theory of cultural hegemony and how from the material basis of capitalism the superstructure of capitalist culture grows and in turn reinforces itself into the daily lives of the people even out in the boonies.
I think you are giving far too much credit to a director who himself admits not knowing how to write women because he has no women friends or relationships.
HASHINO: When you make a true friend, it’s possible to meet up with them after ages of being out of touch, and still pick up exactly where you left off. Thinking about maxed Social Links in this way sounds about right.
THAT CERTAINLY MAKES ME FEEL BETTER. COME TO THIN OF IT, IT SEEMS LIKE YOU CAN ONLY FORGE THAT KIND OF FRIENDSHIP WITH SOCIAL LINKS OF THE SAME GENDER. OPPOSITE GENDER SOCIAL LINKS WILL REVERSE QUICKLY. DOES THIS MEAN TRUE FRIENDSHIPS BETWEEN PEOPLE OF OPPOSITE GENDER DO NOT EXIST?
HASHINO: I’ve never successfully forged a true friendship with a girl in real life.
SOEJIMA: Neither have I.
HASHINO: I guess that means we couldn’t implement it into the game because we don’t know what it’s like. (laughs)
I like your conclusion here, it's fun for many reasons to retroactively fit themes and messages like this into works that do not deserve it (and believe me, Persona 4 does not deserve it), but I also think sometimes it is fine to call a spade a spade. Persona is a pretty reactionary series. It's fine to like it anyway. I don't. Nocturne and SMT4 are more subversive with their writing than any Persona game I've ever played, and Nocturne barely even has a narrative.
I'm talking out of my ass, my entire schema was me going 
To be fair to you I think you are still on to something, sort of! My wife reminded me that they do hammer it in pretty frequently that Big Business is coming and pushing out the local customs and culture of Inaba... I just think it's kinda low-hanging fruit anyway.
It's more of a common observation one can make across rural regions in mixed economies around the world with regard to capitalist expansion into new markets erasing local peculiarities and subsume the formerly closed economic circuit into the wider world market and slowly erasing regional differences in favor of more profitable global cultural or economic trends.
In Persona 2, the gay romance option is canon. In Persona 4, the gay man must remain in his closet. Yeah, they got that one right I think.
I do not remember parasite Eve or dino crisis being conservative, but I was also 9 or 10 when I last played them....unless that's what makes them conservative? How they're always nostalgic and looking back at a "better time"? Feels like chuds would hate them though since they have strong female protagonists.
Parasite eve is about landlord rights. All those cells in your body claim they don't owe you anything. You claim you are entitled to their surplus labor.
hot anime woman
That's it. They've got fucking DOA Xtreme Beach Volleyball on there. Pure goonerslop.
That was gonna be my guess. I've seen chuds fawn over Nier Automata and I'm just thinking, this game has some very blatant themes that are the antithesis to chud thought. I guess chuds think like:
Woman bad > Unless they are fuckable and I can goon to them > But if they have any kind of agency or thought that's bad > But booba
Aya Brea is a cop and the game shows cops in a good light, I guess, otherwise there's nothing very conservative about the game, it's a story about an alien trying to take over the world.
Yeah persona 4 is one of the less debatable ones. The whole game is about accepting your assigned role in society. It's actually pretty shitty in a lot of ways, and if it weren't for it having interesting "Monster catcher rpg" battle mechanics and Persona 5 having a somewhat anti-status quo message, I'd probably hate the series tbh.
I don't understand how anyone could think the Fallout series is conservative though. The whole series makes fun of US cold war paranoia.
It's also very funny that most of these are just interactive US army recruitment ads, like Call of Duty.
I don't understand how anyone could think the Fallout series is conservative though. The whole series makes fun of US cold war paranoia.
Well, from a certain point of view, you could say it has a pretty dismal outlook on humanity constantly reverting to wars for land and resources even after being blasted to the stone age. No wasteland polity could be considered even remotely socialist or thinking about moving beyond the value form, aside from the Vaults ironically in a roundabout way, or the Followers who never really grow beyond being a wandering group of idealists (I've seen people claim the Minutemen are, but IMO it's a bit of a stretch). That said, I think even the newer games have more depth beyond that, and there is something optimistic that Humanity will band together and cling to life no matter what, often times rejecting the seemingly "easy" path of individual opportunism for a greater good.
If you consider Word of God important, Chris Avellone clarified from the start that he never intended for Fallout or its takeaway "War Never Changes" to be anti-capitalist but rather some generic doomer muh human nature spiel, and tried to insinuate the perfidious Chicoms were just as much to blame for the nuclear apocalypse as the literal fascist American empire, as if that makes it a critique about communism too. Funnily enough, people give Bethesda and Toddy shit for trying to tear down the "rebuilding civilization" aspect of Fallout in favor of a generic Mad Max kind of setting, but Avellone originally intended for another catastrophe to reset the West Coast's progress to 0. That's what Lonesome Road was supposed to be about in theory (which is laughable given that the Wasteland has gone through far worse than fucking Tunnelers).
Of course, he's become unhinged on social media over the years and sucks off 
so you can dismiss anything he has to say. Death of the Author and all that.
Fallout is conservative coded. If you don't analyze the themes deeply, as a conservative wouldn't, you get a game markedly free of any liberal aestetic. You get multiple kinds of fascism you can join. A fundamental distrust of outgroups. Gun worship. Boomer music. I am pretty sure most the characters are white and male like in most video games but I can't be bothered to check.
“conservative coded if you don’t analyze the themes deeply” is very generous. i feel like fallout is pretty blatant with its satire. conservatives just continue to be the least media literate people on earth and despite the games doing all but literally saying “we’re making fun of your dumb ass worldview” they still think its glorifying conservatives and capitalism
Maybe. Don't we usually ironically appreciate their satire of us? They love fascism and hypocrisy so we really aren't hitting them hard when we make fun of them about it. They liked American history X. Satire is especially ineffective against them.
From what I remember of playing New Vegas years ago it was pretty diverse
Edit: Actually never mind now that I think about it it probably was mostly just different looking white people
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not to mention all the mysogyny of most japanese games like this.
Can someone make the progressive/liberal case for Ocarina of Time?
I love the game and don't really care either way, but it does kind of feel pretty standard save the princess fantasy.
Classic Zelda games always twist the save the princess trope a little bit because Zelda is rarely only a damsel in distress, she's a ruler with magical powers and who acts in ways that affect the story. Sometimes she can even be a pirate lord or an assassin. Not saying it's feminist, but less stupid than, like, Mario I guess
Oh, definitely. Zelda is far from a helpless damsel, but idk if OoT or some of the other games are all that progressive either.
She's probably at her most pivotal in the most recent big Zelda game, TotK, imo.
The princess plays a man for the majority of the game, though it’s not even like they’re trans. As soon as it’s revealed it’s her, she goes right back to a dress
I think that there are other angles to look at Sheik as besides it ("it" being the act of taking up a masculine persona) just not being trans representation. I generally think stories where women pretend to be men to accomplish some aim (e.g. military enlistment) have a progressive bent because the fundamental conceit of them is that society puts women in a dehumanized position as being less capable than men, as "imitating men" when they try to act as human beings, so by hiding their sex they circumvent the obstacle of this bigotry and disprove its basis by accomplishing whatever they are trying to accomplish "as a man."
While the persona of Sheik wasn't made of this purpose in a direct in-universe sense, I would argue that it at least serves it on a more meta level by showing the player someone who is highly competent to judge on their own merits before they are revealed to be Zelda.
Perfect Dark? They hate women characters
Fallout 3 tracks for a couple reasons. I was gonna object to it, because for me the canon ending is when you activate the water purifier and clean the Potomac river, giving free clean water to the Wasteland. However, the evil ending is to add the Enclave's FEV (Forced Evolution Virus) to the purifier, which kills any mutant, ghoul, mutated creature, and a lot of humans who have invisible impurities. The Enclave is basically the ultra conservatives.
There is also a slaver faction you can join. You will need to enslave (or kill) their first target, a sniper called Arkansas, in order to get in, and there's an achievement tied into doing so (collecting all the Bobbleheads, the slaver leader has the one that increases your bartering skill or charisma, I forget which, and you can freely take it and any of them without offending anyone). Getting past Arkansas in any way is also tied to a major side quest, so you'll want to deal with him one way or another. (You can also just run through the area he's sniping, but you also have to watch out for landmines.) Anyway, once you enslave all four of the people they want you to, the leader tells you he has a very particular client and he wants the youngest girl you can find. You find her in a town where turning 12 (or 13?) means you're exiled, so it's a town of children. The youngest girl is called Bumble, and she trusts you immediately. It's implied that the client is a Trump/Epstein type but it's never spelled out, and a few fans deny that's what's going on (e.g. "maybe they want her small hands to work on electronics") but the whole thing feels extremely perverted.
The game also deals with themes of racism and bigotry, mostly to non-feral ghouls (people affected by radiation and mutated). There's a quest where you find an apartment tower besieged by non-feral ghouls who just want a safe place to stay, but the people inside don't want ghouls as neighbors, so they hire you to kill all the ghouls. If you do so, the wasteland's talk radio DJ, Three Dog, will hound you about it for the rest of the game. The alternative is to disable security and let the ghouls take the place by force. This will also get you on Three Dog's shit list (as it should). There's a way to broker a peace by appealing to the merchants of the faction, and this seems like a good ending... until the ghouls just kill the residents anyway, and guess who Three Dog blames for it. Yep, you're the asshole no matter what you do, unless you ignore the quest entirely. (You will need to go in for one of those bobbleheads, though. One of the merchants has one.) Fun fact, also related to this place. The first town you come to, Megaton, has an undetonated atomic bomb in the middle of town. An emissary of the leader of the human/merchant faction wants you to detonate the bomb. This gives you a penthouse in their tower. He also has a quest where he wants you to assassinate several non-feral ghouls, but to satisfy him, you have to shoot them in the head.
If you're a conservative, there's a lot to love about Fallout 3.
It's still one of my favourite games, as a progressive.
It is really telling that the Fallout 3 interpretation of the Enclave is so popular amongst fans that they keep clamouring for more of it.
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ah, all the games I loved when I was 14 years old
Damn. Half of these games have a plain white or black background with really boring, gritty cover art.
Then you have freaking Mega Man Zero with its incredibly stylish, colorful logo and Three Houses with its eye-catching cover art where Claude is levitating upside down
It looks very funny to me
honestly Fire Emblem Three Houses and Fallout 3 are probably the only games on there that aren't conservative
Silent Hill 3, centres a lot of its horror on misogynistic treatment of women and the good ending involves the protagonist, Heather, using a pill to abort the monster that a religious order are forcing her to carry.
Idk if I would confidently call it a feminist game per se, but the kindsa people compiling "conservative core" lists would if they actually interacted with its themes.
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Bioshock and MGR are explicitly anti-conservative, the chuds are just too dumb to notice it again.
STALKER: ShoC's story is too mid 2000s shooter to be taken seriously by any means but having said that I do not get how you get conservative out of it unless you start at brainworms. ShoC paints the anarchists as the only thing keeping the zone from being genocided by the monolith while the law and order folks occasionally shoot some dogs in a safe zone.
People taking reactionary interpretations of MGR kills me. "Nah man, in the end you realize Armstrong was based" or whatever.
They made Senator Armstrong too cool, they gave him a sick character design and voice and made it too easy for stupid people to go "he has a point you know" but I agree that MGR is also not intentionally conservative
I'm sorry to say but falling for ingame propaganda is duncemaxxing
Chuds hear Armstrong say "Make America Great Again" and go woooooaaw.
I see my smoking hot, eyeliner-wearing, robot ninja man tell Armstrong he's a moron and literally rip his heart out while also recognizing the entire point of the game is an EXTREMELY obvious critique of post 9/11 US foreign policy and the war economy writ large.
Also Mega Man Zero, a game about joining a robot resistance against a human-supremacist government that's genociding Reploids to solve a post-apocalypse energy crisis. Zero does fall into being a badass sigma male archetype a la John Wick and that's probably all they go off of 
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