Permanently Deleted
This is really going to sound silly, but the game is one of the only examples of successful leftist dogwhistling. Liberals seem to come away thinking the game is very nuanced and fair, because it depicts a wide range. Fascists either seem to immediately smell the commie stuff, or they’re the same as libs and believe it’s wide open to interpretation.
Literally my favorite part of the whole game is when
you find the last living communist and he calls you a liberal
to be fair
spoiler
the last communist has literal brainworms from living next to a giant praying mantis cryptid and has had his mental faculties degrade to the point that he is a bitter reactionary sniping at random people from his crow’s nest.
Yeah, even the corrupt union officials and the dogmatic racist guy dogmatically stuck in the past are done in ways that are somehow affectionate to people who’ve actually done leftist stuff.
Only a leftist gets the idea of “these are the worst and most annoying people in the fucking world, but unlike all the other worst people in the fucking world they’re on the right side of the barricade.”
Love when the people “dogwhistling” thanked Marx and Engels for their political education while receiving awards for the game .
The lead writer also has a bust of Lenin in his office. I think moreso than dog whistling, it feels like the writers have inhabited leftist spaces in a way that I haven’t seen in other media. Some of the stuff might come off as a quirk or a shallow dunk to people not familiar with the Type Of Guy, but I absolutely know the nerdy dudes who are major theory heads and have alienated several friends because of some minor dispute about the theoretical canon. And it makes the ending of that storyline charming in a way that I don’t feel like people outside of these groups will fully appreciate.
Sometimes I read or watch something and it’s full of novelty. Every character has a backstory that I’ve never encountered irl and acts in ways that are unexpected to me. Disco Elysium felt more like a look inward or like holding up a mirror. I’ve never
spoiler
faced down a rogue military death squad
but I’ve done enough that setting was the novelty, not the people
Yeah but modern liberals and fascists have no idea how to confront open, vocally affiliated communism, it shuts down their brains because they’ve just used socialist and communist as insults for more than 30 years, not as a political reality to confront. They also see how characters will treat the main guy as goofy and naive when he says leftist things, so liberals will think the game itself is dismissing those leftist things. All the leftist characters are deeply flawed people in various ways, they’re corrupt or they’re personally racist or they get into petty disagreements.
it’s dogwhistling for us because we seem to be the only ones able to see through that. The game is still endorsing leftist movements despite the criticisms, the mocking irony, the kind of hopelessness some characters have.
