Totally agree with the point that media is insincere because in some cases the people making it literally hate what they are doing.
I have written
a lot about Halo and its conceptual and spiritual roots. I think it's one of the strongest examples in Western gaming of
the divine and the decay. The spiritual core of felt interests, passions, and intuitive connections which built it, and the process of compromise, democritisation and decay which finally reduced it to this. I've also
spoken a lot about this. There's about 12 hours of me talking about Halo top to bottom through every single level on youtube.
Halo is an interesting and distinctly 90s America case. Video games were a not too closely scrutinised industry still, and in general culture had thawed out a little. This gave rise to a trend in American nerddom I call 'Dark 90s Libertarianism'. Curtis Yarvin libertarianism. Edward Neumeier writing Starship Troopers as a sincere lionisation of idealised neoclassical politics. A lot of
proto-chud stuff was in the air. Nerds were reading books and asking questions. A lot of these guys laid the early intellectual groundwork and connections that would explode into the new dominant online right wing culture in the 2010s. This game wasn't made by evil rednecks. These guys went to collitch, like Neumeier they knew their classics. The last pre-internet Rome guys. Or the first of the
new ones.
Halo is a work which undeniably grew out of those roots. The eye of ZOG stopped watching these guys so closely, and as a result they stopped watching themselves. I don't know if there was
any consideration going into Halo CE of what they maybe
shouldn't be doing. Even though they were accountable to Bill Gates. So just by kind of following their own interests, trends established earlier in their work, science fiction and pop-media they liked, they created something irresistable. And something libtards feel instinctively
that they should be scared of. And they're so much more right than they know. Well... most of them.
I am on record saying over and over again that Moviebob has one of the best reads on Halo of all time, next to that of myself it might be the best spoken out loud appreciation of what these games are and always were. Bob is right until he
draws back, even he can't even really consider the possibility of Halo actually being what it is to the extent that he suspects. Take it from someone smarter than Moviebob who has looked further, it's more. The deeper you dig into Halo the further right it looks until you realise it's fundamentally about reviving aryan root-culture to save civilisation from abrahamic corruption.
Note towards the end, he says he's not going to be so hard on Bungie because we're eventually shown downsides of the Spartan Program, and he shows footage from
HALO 4, made by 343 Industries. Under
THE OBAMA PRESIDENCY.
My friends and I, in more media-literate circles, use a term a lot. "Troll's Remorse". People who used to have fun, used to have some edge, used to get mean, draw lines and decide people were bad, taking it all bad and either burying it or seeking penance. 343 Industries were Halo's Troll's Remorse arc. The edgy free-range educated libertarian nerds of CE-era Bungie made exactly what Moviebob is talking about, either in an act of deliberate iconoclasm towards the faggotry of mainstream American culture and a testament to everything they loved and valued, or more likely, they just wanted something cool and didn't really think about how extreme they were getting until it was all said and done. Bungie themselves, what was left of the core team, got worn down into just making weaker, less character-driven works. But 343, the inheritors of the brand, they spent a decade on active ideological "correction". You can yell at them about
weapon sandbox balance, or
boring confusing villain motivations but the actual problem here is that they are faggots who have been conditioned to feel fear whenever they see something cool. You can't
direct that class of person into making something good with your
notes. While the 90s dark libertarian proto-chud, if you just leave him alone and let him relax he'll make something
awesome. You leave him alone for 20 years he'll become a Nazi and make something
revolutionary.
Halo: Combat Evolved is what something approaching spiritual health looks like. The culture which produced this was healing and growing in strength. By contrast, what do Halos 4, 5, and Infinite feel like? They look to me like arrogant self-mutilation followed by desperate insincere and superficial scrambling to imitate the past. Rather strong parallel for the trajectory of America across these games. I could elaborate
much further, but might spare you all for now.
Sibelius, you are
very right to draw attention to the class of person working at 343.
Joss Whedon deserves to be burned at the stake for ruining all forms of media.
If Joss Whedon was a pure champion of the libtard ideology, exactly what they wanted exerting force over the world, then The Woke wouldn't have conspired to destroy him. Alongside Harvey Weinstein (old falling power-player) he is the only man who can be said to have had his career destroyed by
'Me-Too'. If you read accounts of him written since, it's clear that it's not the upset girlfriends this is about. There are constant anecdotes of him calling people stupid assholes for their shit script contributions. Joss Whedon was a white guy who really cared about his work, and his fundamental problem was
that he took it all too seriously.
I haven't seen much of his stuff because all American television strikes me as vomitive, but I understand he was writing visual anime homages into his work, he was looking for hot or cute women, he wanted tv to be
fun. Yes he wrote
powerful women in that obnoxious nerd way. But shit, Hayao Miyazaki also writes 'Strong Women'. And what they have in common is that they want to have sex with their heroines (especially based in Miyazaki's case since he had the balls to make his all 14 years old). Which goes back to the yoghurt ad I started on. Superficially that crap looks like Miyazaki, but the roots of Miyazaki's work are his appreciation of nature, nazi war machines, and his worldview which is fundamentally a kind of hypocritical hippie national socialism. When you feel this in your heart all of the fine details don't need notes. You
feel what's right. Everyone in the yoghurt ad is some kind of Sowetomaxxed gook-spigger hybrid. Miyazaki's movies are all set in the eternal aryan victory timeline. Nobody needs to discuss this at Ghibli. It goes without saying.
Whedon wrote strong women, but they have at least as much in common with anime heroines as whatever the fuck is happening on American tv now. He wrote retarded quirky dialogue. But he wanted to have
fun. I think in how he wrote speech he was like a Tarantino with less taste. Comic books instead of Scorsese. He was more neurotic, thoughtful, purposeful and audience-oriented in his writing than any of his peers. He was naturally set to dominate in a complacent media environment. It was his domination that brought about his undoing. He was a pioneer for attitudes that could make tv and American pop-culture better, or destroy it all. His work feels like the end of boomer tv, boomer culture, static boring world of mainstream culture about nothing.
You want to burn him at the stake. Did you forget that already happened?
These authors don't exactly hate what they're working on - they like it, but ironically.
Which is even worse.
They like it hypocritically. Which is
even worse.
