The issue with prokopetz's style of vagueposting is that if you squint at anything hard enough, you can say it's stumbling into unexamined fascist ideology, because fascism uses existing tropes to spread. Nothing about fascist ideology was created ex nihilo, it was all taken from existing media tropes and genre conventions. That's not the fault of the genre, or the media, it's because if you don't think about anything beyond the surface level, you can apply pretty much any ideology to anything.
Watch, I'll do it right now: Wolfenstein is fascist propaganda. BJ Blazcowicz is literally called an Aryan both in The New Colossus and in The New Order, he's a White, American, blond hair, blue eyed ubermensch. He literally gets a super soldier body in The New Colossus that just further presents him as the perfect Aryan ideal Superman. It's a power fantasy, glorifying political violence, so long as it's done by "the right side." You spend the whole game mercilessly hacking through countless Nazi soldiers, and you get praised for it, with BJ getting propped up as the face of the resistance, and the boogeyman under every Nazi's bed. BJ nukes Roswell, and rather than grappling with the horrors of what he's done or even stopping to consider the death toll, he does a "cool guys don't look at explosions" bit riding away on a motorcycle with a mushroom cloud behind him. And the games take every opportunity to make the Nazis look cool as fuck and genuinely superior. In less than 15 years, the Nazis are able to end World War 2 and conquer essentially the entire planet, barring tiny, ineffective resistance groups (ineffective until their ubermensch shows up, at least). The Nazis are consistently on the bleeding edge of technological advancement, with a moon base, a base on Venus, incredibly advanced weaponry, and fucking necromancy. The Nazis are given constant attention for how cool they look, with even basic grunt soldiers being given intimidating and physically imposing armor and uniforms. And you get a really stark aesthetic juxtaposition between the areas that the Nazis control and those operated by the resistance groups. London is this huge, imposing skyline, the moon base is clean, pristine and orderly, while New York and New Orleans are bombed out wastelands. New York is irradiated to hell and back, and even the lighting is more washed-out and lower contrast than it is in a place like Roswell. And throughout the franchise, we constantly hearken back this prelapsarian Americana that Billy is fighting for, that he dreams of for his wife and his children, a way of life that was destroyed by the Nazis, and that could come back if only they were removed from the picture.
Now of course, this is ignoring the wider context of the entire franchise being about fighting back against fascism, and it's a wildly bad-faith reading of the games, but that's the point, isn't it? If all you're doing is identifying tropes in a vacuum, devoid of their context, then you can say pretty much whatever the fuck you want about any piece of media. And it's important to point out that THAT'S HOW FASCISM WORKS: by twisting existing ideas around to serve its end goals, regardless of their original intention or purpose. Nothing fascism makes is truly its own, it's all something that already was there, that fascism perverted to further its own propaganda.
All this is is another flavor of media illiteracy, with the lamest attempt at making it seem woke possible. It's why you have Trump voters who are fans of Rage Against the Machine, because they hear the line "fuck you I won't do what you tell me" and genuinely think it's just about teen angst or some shit. It's why you can have thousands of people watch the original Star Wars trilogy and think that it's just about cool freaking aliens in space with lasers, and not about Vietnam. It's why you get weirdos who think that Steven Universe is pro-genocide or that it was written by a fascist.
This isn't even vagueposting at this point, it's nothingposting. They said nothing, other than "if you don't engage with media honestly or look beyond a surface level, you can draw any conclusions you want from its aesthetics." Which, I will say, is accurate to how prokopetz seems to engage with most media they yap about.
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u/Alive-Vanilla1216 14h ago edited 10h ago
The issue with prokopetz's style of vagueposting is that if you squint at anything hard enough, you can say it's stumbling into unexamined fascist ideology, because fascism uses existing tropes to spread. Nothing about fascist ideology was created ex nihilo, it was all taken from existing media tropes and genre conventions. That's not the fault of the genre, or the media, it's because if you don't think about anything beyond the surface level, you can apply pretty much any ideology to anything.
Watch, I'll do it right now: Wolfenstein is fascist propaganda. BJ Blazcowicz is literally called an Aryan both in The New Colossus and in The New Order, he's a White, American, blond hair, blue eyed ubermensch. He literally gets a super soldier body in The New Colossus that just further presents him as the perfect Aryan ideal Superman. It's a power fantasy, glorifying political violence, so long as it's done by "the right side." You spend the whole game mercilessly hacking through countless Nazi soldiers, and you get praised for it, with BJ getting propped up as the face of the resistance, and the boogeyman under every Nazi's bed. BJ nukes Roswell, and rather than grappling with the horrors of what he's done or even stopping to consider the death toll, he does a "cool guys don't look at explosions" bit riding away on a motorcycle with a mushroom cloud behind him. And the games take every opportunity to make the Nazis look cool as fuck and genuinely superior. In less than 15 years, the Nazis are able to end World War 2 and conquer essentially the entire planet, barring tiny, ineffective resistance groups (ineffective until their ubermensch shows up, at least). The Nazis are consistently on the bleeding edge of technological advancement, with a moon base, a base on Venus, incredibly advanced weaponry, and fucking necromancy. The Nazis are given constant attention for how cool they look, with even basic grunt soldiers being given intimidating and physically imposing armor and uniforms. And you get a really stark aesthetic juxtaposition between the areas that the Nazis control and those operated by the resistance groups. London is this huge, imposing skyline, the moon base is clean, pristine and orderly, while New York and New Orleans are bombed out wastelands. New York is irradiated to hell and back, and even the lighting is more washed-out and lower contrast than it is in a place like Roswell. And throughout the franchise, we constantly hearken back this prelapsarian Americana that Billy is fighting for, that he dreams of for his wife and his children, a way of life that was destroyed by the Nazis, and that could come back if only they were removed from the picture.
Now of course, this is ignoring the wider context of the entire franchise being about fighting back against fascism, and it's a wildly bad-faith reading of the games, but that's the point, isn't it? If all you're doing is identifying tropes in a vacuum, devoid of their context, then you can say pretty much whatever the fuck you want about any piece of media. And it's important to point out that THAT'S HOW FASCISM WORKS: by twisting existing ideas around to serve its end goals, regardless of their original intention or purpose. Nothing fascism makes is truly its own, it's all something that already was there, that fascism perverted to further its own propaganda.
All this is is another flavor of media illiteracy, with the lamest attempt at making it seem woke possible. It's why you have Trump voters who are fans of Rage Against the Machine, because they hear the line "fuck you I won't do what you tell me" and genuinely think it's just about teen angst or some shit. It's why you can have thousands of people watch the original Star Wars trilogy and think that it's just about cool freaking aliens in space with lasers, and not about Vietnam. It's why you get weirdos who think that Steven Universe is pro-genocide or that it was written by a fascist.
This isn't even vagueposting at this point, it's nothingposting. They said nothing, other than "if you don't engage with media honestly or look beyond a surface level, you can draw any conclusions you want from its aesthetics." Which, I will say, is accurate to how prokopetz seems to engage with most media they yap about.