YouTube personality “Az” of HeelvsBabyface recently said modern AAA game studios are “boring”.
He’s right. They have nothing left to say. Nothing new, anyway. Nothing you don’t constantly see repeated on TV commercials or in Hollywood movies. The “brave” political statements you’re seeing in AAA games are the same stale statements you see spewed from all the megacorporations and see on all the city billboards.
And it’s the same messaging grade schools and even day care centers are indoctrinating young children to believe. It’s the same homogenized boring state-approved crap.
It’s been 2013 for ten years now, and some people take longer to reach their breaking point than others.
Az reached his this year in 2023, and I can’t blame him. It’s hard to accept that the hobby you grew up loving has been destroyed, and it’s a constant disappointment that fans are too weak-willed to not Consume Next Product.
The industry doesn’t seem interested in changing course anytime soon. That would require them to go against the state and actually say something daring. Since they won’t, it’s a perfect recipe for stagnation in what was previously one of the most innovative and beloved industries of our lifetime.
Context: In case you missed it, Az went viral last week for daring to have an opinion on forced gender pronouns. That is, you have to confirm them during character creation.
He was told by tens of thousands of keyboard warriors that “It’s just pronouns, bro,” which is the same thing as saying, “Just bake the cake.” If you were one of the folks pushing this opinion on Az, you were using peer pressure to goad him into doing something that goes against his beliefs.
Many are confirming past these screens and just dealing with, or ignoring it.
But the thing is, if you show the gaming industry you’re willing to accept and tolerate this, the next thing will be incrementally less comfortable than the last. And so on. If you never stopped playing video games all this time to smell the roses, you probably haven’t noticed how far they’ve already managed to push you. But your children and grandchildren will have to deal with the consequences of your complacency unless enough people wake up like Az did and muster the bravery to say, “Enough is enough!”
Treating people like garbage who stand up against the state is not The Way.
The longer you wait and the more you tolerate, the more momentum the movement has. And the more momentum the movement has, the harder it is to apply the brakes.
By now, the brakes might already be permanently broken.
Make no mistake, one day you’ll wake up and find you’ve tolerated one thing too many, and you’ll be in the very same shoes Az is in now. If people tell you to “deal with it” when you reach your breaking point, well, I think a certain amount of schadenfreude is in order.
Me? I drew my line in the sand years ago and refused to cross it. I will not give money to people who hate me and will not buy, play, or even talk about this game, which is why I haven’t yet named it.
By merely confirming that character creation screen and playing, and by talking about this “starfaring” game online, spreading awareness and promoting, you’re subconsciously helping normies acknowledge the worldview that “gender is a construct”.
That’s how indoctrination works: Forced integration and acceptance through peer pressure. It’s also how normalization, propaganda, and demoralization work.
Predictably, the internet was full of dullwits with puddle-deep hot takes on Az’s opinion, most based on out-of-context clips and misleading headlines such as, “Man RAGES Over Pronouns in Video Game”. They assumed he refused to pass the character creation screen at all and was just being “triggered” because he caught a glimpse of “he/him” on a screen. Guess he forgot that pronouns exist, they said. It’s totally no big deal, they said.
But Az was giving an exaggerated Angry Video Game Nerd-style character performance based on a number of problems he’d come across while playing the game itself, such as the “big reveal” that one of the female soldiers you’d been working alongside had to “come clean” on a secret she’d been hiding.
See the relevant 45 second clip below:
Everything’s boring when you can see it coming from a mile away. Because every AAA developer shills the exact same political message.
So of course Az correctly predicted that this female soldier was actually a man, because mainstream writers who are incapable of critical thinking are painfully predictable. The “curveball” thrown–if one can call it that–was even more laughable, as it turned out she was a clone of a male officer. How clever! That’s what passes as “innovative storytelling” these days.
Which understandably led to his now infamous rant.
Later, it turned out this pronoun thing that was “totally no big deal” actually is, as it seems modders who attempt to hide pronouns from the character creation GUI get permabanned, much like how Worm got booted from his debate club and speech team. Not to mention there’s still crazy hyenas out there who still can’t seem to shut up about Az, proving it matters a lot.
Different Interpretations than Intended
I’ve noticed how some authors cling to the meaning of their stories as the only correct interpretation.
If someone who’s read your work comes to you with a different interpretation than you intended, the last thing you should do is shoot their theories down as wrong. That person is allowed to apply past experiences and derive unintended meaning. If it makes the story special and deeply meaningful to him, why would you want to take that away?
Many fans these days don’t do that anymore because they have no imagination. They seem to get obsessed with canon interpretations and canon timelines, looking up the intended meaning and will accept no interpretations outside of that narrow definition.
But it’s okay to have a different take. For example, I was able to strongly relate to Uncanny X-Men in the 90s because I felt like an outsider in my middle school, bullied and unaccepted.
But I see plenty of turkeys online claiming that the X-Men titles were always about the Civil Rights Movement and nothing else. No other interpretation is allowed. (You know, those same tired subjects that fill 3/4ths of our U.S. history books, villainizing ourselves at the expense of us knowing much about our own country.)
There’s this patronizing “You missed the point” list which occasionally makes the rounds in comic book collecting circles. It starts out with: “If you didn’t understand that X-Men was about the Civil Rights Movement, you missed the point.”
What people sharing this list don’t seem to understand (yes, they ‘re the ones who are actually missing the point, projecting as usual) is that it’s perfectly okay to admire characters you think are cool and heroic, and you don’t have to share a character’s skin color, gender, or sexuality to understand how they might feel when they’re bullied or outcast.
Storm used to be cool to everyone in the days before gender-was-a-construct. She used to be powerful yet gentle, saving the world for the good of all mankind while deeply caring about her friends as if they were family, but also was willing to risk her life for defenseless strangers no matter their gender, skin color, or if they happened to have the X gene. She was the shoulder for newcomer Kitty Pryde to cry on precisely because she was so emotionally strong, and even took up her mantle as leader of the X-Men. She had a deep connection to her life as Ororo–and her homeland–but never let it get in the way of humanity’s best interests.
Now she’s been politicized, retooled as a symbol for “minorities” and “female empowerment”.
So if someone like me wanted to still be an active fan of this character, I’d have to be very die-hard (and a glutton for punishment) since the messaging surrounding her storylines and dialogue are now written specifically to marginalize and belittle people like me.
She’s gone from, “I will protect my friends at all costs,” to, “Slay, queen yaaaas.” Instead of following Professor X‘s vision for a future where all humanity can get along, she’s sided with Magneto, believing in Mutant supremacy. Instead of trying to save the world for everyone, she’s more interested in creating a racist ethno-state.
The depth is gone. She’s the same as that clone soldier in the clip above: Radicalized, a borderline villain, a dreadfully boring person with no ideas of her own, and state-approved.
Fortunately, I do still love the character. The real character. The one from the 90s animated series. The one from Marvel vs. Capcom 2. The one that debuted in Giant-Sized X-Men 1 and was awesome all the way up through issue 300, and maybe a little bit beyond that.
But this new Storm? Not the same character. As far as I’m concerned, she’s not canon. So I don’t have to love her or even like her, no matter how much the new guard of comic creators stomp their feet.
Anyway, the Civil Rights analogy simply doesn’t work because these mutants are armed to-the-teeth with superpowers, sometimes at nuclear bomb world-ending levels. They’ve got us outgunned, BIG TIME.
And, unlike us, they can’t be disarmed. The 2nd amendment is wired into their DNA and can’t be regulated into impotency. At least, not without mRNA-altering vaccines. But good luck getting that into them.
They can fight back like nobody’s business. But fight back against what, exactly? The only reason un-super people in their comic book world are able to stand up to the X-Men at all is due to pseudo-scientific inventions like the Sentinels, technology that few have access to and cost millions or even billions of taxpayer dollars, technology we’re simply nowhere near. And even if we were, only the elites would be able to afford them, and unfortunately, they’d side with the mutants.
Many of these mutants can’t be held in a jail cell. They fight back against regular people with ease, and having a gun is nothing compared to being able to shoot lightning from your fingertips when you’re apparently unarmed. There’s sleeper agents everywhere that look just like you and me, and there’s no telling which of them can electrocute anyone they want in the blink of an eye, even in “gun-free zones”.
Which would have the general population understandably paranoid.
People don’t fear mutants because they’re “different”, they fear them because they’re unpredictable as heck, moody, get their powers during their unstable teen years, and (go figure) it’s not uncommon for them to develop an outrageous god-complex along the way.
They’re the very definition of loose cannons.
Which is why if you were to imagine yourself in the Marvel universe, you’d imagine yourself with superpowers. Because being a superhero is way cooler than being un-super. Obviously.
Therefore the whole “mutants are an analogy for being gay” thing also falls completely apart. The analogy is far closer to “everyone wants to be special”. And schools have indoctrinated children into believing that being gay and transgender is special. Thus completing the required mental gymnastics.
So really, I see regular people’s reactions to these mutants within the X-books as realistic and rational, no matter how unhinged and irrational the writers try to make them seem.
The other realistic reaction would be to treat these people as living gods, complete with cults built around them to worship. People who can fly or shoot fireballs would be instant celebrities in just about any universe.
There’s a particular panel in Uncanny X-Men that always makes me laugh. A man bravely points a gun at the team of mutants as they’ve been wreaking absolute havoc upon a city block and destroyed his car. (Of course, he was portrayed as an unhinged coward.). Someone like Rogue comes up, crushes his gun with her bare hands and says, “Careful with that gun, Sugar, or someone might get HURT,” hurling the poor guy a football field’s length away, probably to his death.
A tad hypocritical, I would say.
Realistically, no one would have the guts to pull a gun on someone in a superhero-dense world, because there’s no telling what kind of f’d up powers could be used against you in retaliation.
“I’ve always tried to do our stories so that it didn’t matter if you were of the white race, the black race, the brown race, or whatever. Social issues I try to get in the background or underlaying plot, but never to the point of letting it interfere with the story or hitting the reader over the head.”
-Stan Lee
Subtlety was, is, and always will be key.
I know I just said that too many fans take canon interpretations to heart, but Stan said this quote in a much saner world. The fans obviously didn’t take his words to heart. I guess they took the corporate state-approved interpretation as canon, instead.
Nick Enlowe 
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