This tweet made me realize that life under late capitalism is just like playing a shitty early-mid 2000s MMORPG. You know the kind, if not WoW then something legally distinct but with almost identical gameplay. You wander around open fields for a bit, trying to square the grandness of what the narrative tells you (you are the Chosen One, the single hero destined to defeat the evil and set the world right) with the bleakness of your actual situation (you have been magically bopping giant rats for 40 minutes and there don’t seem to be any fewer of them). Also, there are 47,921 other Chosen Ones all wandering around doing exactly what you are, but you can mostly only team up with them in superficial and temporary ways.
This reminds me of the massive cognitive dissonance between the heroic attributes foisted upon player characters in the main campaigns of Pokemon games - giving you an easy path to defeating the evil team/corporation and winning the championship - and the post-game battle-tower/battle-frontier content that repeatedly kicks your teeth in and tells you to git gud (nevermind the cutthroat PvP meta that’s had over 20 years to develop, longer than Pokemon’s primary demographic has been alive). I’ve started convincing myself that the “you can become the champion/you’re defeating the evil team” story beats, considered in combination with the extremely cramped geography of each region, is all an elaborate Truman-show-esque ruse designed for each protag as an entry-level crash course to teach the fundamentals of raising and training pokemon, with every NPC (except maybe some of the rivals) performing an act almost every step of the way.
