this post was submitted on 28 Apr 2025

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The Military Entertainment Complex: (lemmy.ml)

submitted 2 days ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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[–] [email protected] 65 points 2 days ago* (last edited 16 hours ago) (5 children)

Metal Gear Solid 2 plays out like this. Spoilers below but it came out in 2001 so whatever

The bad guy is a former President that knew his job was just as a figurehead, nothing more. He found out the hard way that even his orders came from a cutout.

He recruited "terrorists" to take the sitting President "hostage" so they could "force him" to detonate an EMP over the east coast. The plan is to dismantle the shadow government (actually AI) running the government/censoring public opinion and hopefully free the country

You play as the wide eyed idealistic special forces infiltrator, trained heavily through VR and sent to "rescue" the sitting President from the "terrorist leader" and learn that everything you know is wrong and you were given orders by the AI all along

[–] [email protected] 38 points 2 days ago (1 children)

I beat that game once and this is the first time I had any idea what it was about, thanks for a solid explanation

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[–] [email protected] 16 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago)

This is tangential to the main point you are making, but:

... I also always interpreted Raiden as basically Kojima more or less openly mocking or taunting the western player base of... well, mostly white male, naive/emo/astoundingly insecure children.

I remember there being absolutely massive backlash when MGS2 came out with tons of 'gamers' just calling Raiden a 'gay little effeminate f@ggot boy' and shit like that.

... Which I found quite funny in a meta-ironic sense.

And then of course, if you....actually do play through the game... well, from Raiden's POV, .... it basically is a shonen, a coming of age arc, making mistakes, struggling, being confused... but ultimately getting his shit together just enough to ... well maybe not " "save the day" ", but avert utter catastrophe...

... as well as Raiden develops maturity as a character, reveals that... he actually has a lot of extremely serious trauma in his past, and he genuienly becomes a hero as he comes to terms with, and overcomes much of it.

...

MGS2, where Hideo Kojima dared to ask: What if an action hero wasn't an absolute badass with a gruff voice?

(took western culture almost 20 years to even come up with the phrase 'subversion of expectations'...)

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[–] [email protected] 24 points 2 days ago (2 children)

There's like two way it could end when a superhuman being try to change the status quo for the good, one is through the courtroom, which is slow and boring, another one is to forcefully take over the "bad" government and force the "good" on people, which we have seen in something like Injustice.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 1 day ago (3 children)

The court decisions are only worth something if the legislative made proper laws and the executive is enforcing them.

But assuming superhuman capabilities the most obvious choice imo. is to use these abilities to help lift the most discriminated out of poverty. And if then the forces of the status quo come to take it away again, then he needs to fight them directly.

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[–] [email protected] 34 points 2 days ago (1 children)

I haven't watched those films in a while but isn't one of spiderman's things "fuck the police, help the poor"? I know he runs a food bank in the new games

[–] [email protected] 30 points 2 days ago

It's inconsistent, to put it mildly. Spider-Man is generally a working class hero and is also an impressionable kid constantly struggling under the pressure to do good. Sometimes that puts him at odds with NYPD, sometimes he comes out in favor of the Super Registration Act (he flip-flopped later)

That's what happens when a thousand writers contrivute to one canon.

[–] [email protected] 22 points 2 days ago

which movie is this referring to? I've been plugging away at the mcu movies and most of the time the enemy is the nazi spinoff faction seeking to subjugate all of humanity that embedded itself in multiple parts of the government. I only watched one of the other spider man movies and don't remember anything about it

[–] [email protected] 12 points 2 days ago

This reminds me of a reel on Instagram where the singer Aurora said something along the lines of "Isn't it weird how the «villains» want to break the status quo while the «heroes» seek to restore it?" and in the comments there were ones that said "For this nonsense people become leftist" and exactly right below that another one said "For this nonsense people become right-wing".

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