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Culture War Roundup for the week of February 3, 2025

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There is plenty of subversion here. Take a look:

• Henry and Hans are gay for each other: https://imgur.com/a/VoNmnq0

• Musa the Malian Scholar, Physician and Explorer (who quickly went from "Al Fake" to "just a Trader" to big plot critical character with over an hour of dialogue that is part of the main story and can't be killed) lectures the player about how much more enlightened his society is than Bohemia over and over, and goes on about how they don't season dey food, you can also get relationship advice from him, or talk about jerking off, also you apparently have to defend him during a trial and if you fail it's game over with Henry getting hanged: https://imgur.com/a/P2dsthI

• Henry apparently has a Jewish step brother, who he can be gay with? and teaches him about the plight of his people: https://imgur.com/a/mooiFgi

• The Jewish quarter and synagogue in the game that wasn't historic, but added by the dev team for story purposes: https://i.imgur.com/5u0o4mG.png plays a major part in the main story and you will have to defend them from “Antisemite” (talk about anachronistic) Christians attacking them in an ahistorical invented pogrom: https://i.imgur.com/YarvjPJ.jpeg

• The main not-gay romance Option is supposedly a single mother who cheats on you with Musa, a black man, and becomes angry with you if you don’t champion him in court in a subsequent quest.

• A gypsy prostitute from a gypsy camp you're to run errands for teaches Henry about hermaphrodites: https://i.imgur.com/ZAn8Ges.png

• Henry gets humiliated or outdone by women several times

• There's a Quest about humanizing and making friends with the Cumans that invaded and pillaged Henry's village and killed his parents and girlfriend

• There's a quest where you have to help make a Golem using Jewish magic, and to do so Henry apparently has to eat dead bodies? The act itself mocked as humiliating (“from Lord’s messenger to taster of cadavers”): https://imgur.com/a/bMPqJIm

The pogrom is interesting - the head developer, who defended the child sodomy (Henry is a minor by canon) he injected, said to players you can make your own choices whether or not to engage in sodomy, but conveniently you have no choice but to slaughter your fellow White Christians beside a Muslim ally to advance the main plot. On a related note about the lead dev from Wikipedia’s early life:

Daniel Vávra was born in Rychnov nad Kneznou, before moving to Prague. He has partial Jewish ancestry.

It seems that he ignored his personal ethnic grievances in the first game, to wide acclaim, but then heavily layered them into the sequel in a way that slanders White Christian European history, while vandalizing the beloved first game.

Much media has followed this path - Joker to Joker 2, The Last of Us to The Last of Us Part 2, Hades and its sequel, etc. Rugpulls and humiliating retcons everywhere.

Crazy how in such a short time one can go from based white central european christian anti-woke pro-gamergate fighter for gamers rights™️ to just another subversive jew identified by a 7 year old tweet about some distant ancestry

I mean, presumably he made that transformation over the ~decade since the first game came out.

Edit: I read further down and apparently the studio was bought out. Propably less personal transformation and more job keeping then.

I do wonder how distant that ancestry is. Ive never seen a european remember pocahontas amounts of jewish ancestry, and people where it was easy to find around 1940 tend to not live here anymore one way or another. So either its after that, or a lot before and hes done family research.

It’s almost certainly very distant. Only a few thousand Czech Jews survived the Holocaust and almost all of them emigrated. The modern community is tiny and relatively devout as in most of Central Europe. The company Warhorse was acquired by is also run by gentile Austrians and Swedes.

conveniently you have no choice but to slaughter your fellow White Christians beside a Muslim ally to advance the main plot.

What exactly is the context around this?

it's not even that ludicrous - Bohemia actually sent an offer to the Ottomans to become a vassal of theirs (Utraquism of course being closer in spirit to Sunni Islam than Catholicism) just before they got crushed at White Mountain.

You defend a synagogue (which never existed historically) in melee against “antisemites” perpetrating an invented pogrom as part of a quest which the main plot is dependent on for advancement. Musa, the jarring negrolatry insert, is your forced companion.

Oh, another thing, the developer couldn’t bother to introduce interiors of churches and cathedrals that were strongly present in the first game (not enough time he says? But he had enough time, manpower and money for Musa and all the other crap detailed above), but he certainly did for a synagogue.

“ I would love to, but we just didnt have enough time to do it as good as we would like to.”

Majority of the developers are atheists. I wish I had a quote reference, but either Tobi or Vavra stated it.

It was Vavra, and I’m sure it is right that most of them are atheists. But by that same token, it can be said that there is nothing more Jewish than an atheistic Jew.

There was literally an entire monastery in the first game along with a ten hour sequence around it.

So there was a massive decrease in the amount of Church-related content compared to the first game? I'm pretty sure that going 7 days without going inside a church was considered a major sin back then, seems odd to leave out.

Once a year a non-European trader passed by, and from that it follows a Western-African intellectual being a major NPC isn't tendentious and Afrocentric. Goes to show that Warhorse's goal wasn't to create a world representative of the time and place it is set in, but one which minimizes major parts of life and maximizes the tiniest minorities, in service of making the 2025 audiences feel at home.

That, like the proverbial newspaper, it leaves the players misinformed isn't, unlike the first game, a concern for the devs.

I don’t believe this is contrary to what I wrote, please let me know if I’m mistaken.

It makes sense that they might want some variety in terms of interiors, no?

Please. Is that what the developers said? They’ve could have added greater and more compelling cathedrals, or what have you, with all the AAA resources being thrown at it, as the game is literally titled Kingdom Come, and this robustly funded successor could have provided more awe-inspiring Christian architecture to appreciate. Why, they could invent it if they wanted to, out of thin air like the synagogue. Why not? But it doesn’t have that, those aspects are absent and that exclusion is very out of key with the original title. Instead it gets gay sex and black lecturing, yada yada, and all signs point to that not being accidental.

What was "based" about Hades 1?

It was not based, but rather the sequel more heavily catered to woke pieties and aesthetics than the first. It is not the best example, but sequels degrading, if not on an about-face like Kingdom Come, then simply unignorably further downward into wokeism, is a noticeable pattern.

And Baldur's Gate 3 shows us that people, including the white Gamers, love it as long as it's a good game.

Anacdata: the people I know that first played BG1 on launch either didn't buy BG3 or gave up on it.

BG 3 appears to have - successfully - shifted its target audience.

BG3 also did not exactly have the opportunity to plainly slander White Christian Europeans (unless they somehow made their way into Faerûn). It also did not vandalize the prior titles in the series with woke retcons.

I blindly (nearly zero prior review on social media or otherwise, because I enjoyed BG1/2 very much and decided to dive in blind only if a trusted friend could vouch it wasn’t woke goyslop) played through it on recommendation from a friend who didn’t find it catering directly to modern audiences in his own playthrough (unlike recent Ubisoft titles). I believe now that he was wrong and is not sensitive enough to know he is swimming in woke waters.

It’s mostly fine, but it isn’t real time with pause, the writing is poor but serviceable for the gameplay. The problem is aesthetics - everything is undifferentiated morality choices, spiritually genderless with no alignment system. All races are strictly equivalent, and would-be evil races are turned into sympathetic humans with some devilish window dressing. At some point in the third chapter, the designers’ jarring preference for girl bosses become impossible to not notice, everything has a sterile-feminine bent. It’s not done well. There’s apparently a whole lot of degeneracy that is avoided by not engaging with it - after I beat it I was surprised by some scenes on YouTube I never saw in game.

Much of this could be predetermined by the edicts of the 5th edition D&D rules however, which is why I never use that rule set in any tabletop setting.

It has some good moments, and the tactical gameplay loop is there, so it is worthwhile but it isn’t any sort of Infinity Engine game. There’s no successor to those.

The writing in BG3 is terrible.

The characters are god-awful. Their motivations trite or pathetic, their journeys not worth caring about. However, all that does not matter as the game emulates tabletop well enough to allow you to do some genuinely stupid shit to break it as hard as you possibly can.

Fundamentally as a work of fiction, it kind of fails. However, as a roleplaying experience, it was pretty good. I hear the Dark Path is better written, but I'm in no hurry to get back to it.

I've avoided BG3 myself, despite being a massive fan of BG1 and BG2. The shift from RTwP to pure turn-based is huge, and as far as I can tell BG3 is a 5e game, not an AD&D2e game - and I mean that in terms of atmosphere, themes, and writing style, not just mechanics.

And as far as I can tell, yep, BG3 is pretty woke. I remember when the jokes/memes about sex with a bear were going around, but beyond that, it strikes me as very much a post-Critical-Role type of D&D, focused on misfit characters and with a lot of snark. It just does not look like Baldur's Gate to me, in any way, and to be honest I rather resent the fact that it claims the title.

The shift from RTwP to pure turn-based is huge,

It's a huge improvement and I say that as a massive fan of BG1 and 2. DnD (whether 5e, Basic or ADnD2e) was built for turn based play. Now I would certainly prefer if BG3 was either ADnD2e or 3.5E based (as 5e is definitely not...great) but it is definitely better off as turn based.

As for sex as a bear, well you have to remember Forgotten Realms was created by Ed Greenwood who is the very definition of a horny player. Canonically any NPC who does not have a defined sexuality is pansexual in the Forgotten Realms. And his self insert character basically gallivanted around banging powerful goddesses and avatars and what not including gender swapping. The bear sex part is very true to Forgotten Realms probably about as much as dead gods coming back to life (or Mystra's chosen being in relationships with her). It's part of it's "charm".

That's a very subjective call - I would say that RTwP was the central mechanical pillar of Baldur's Gate, so making a BG game without it feels like missing something essential. At any rate, I massively prefer RTwP to pure turn-based, and I feel RTwP better represents the flow of actual gameplay in tabletop D&D (where you do actually speed up, slow down, skip or rush at times, and then go moment by moment when it matters). It was therefore a design choice that both suggested to me firstly that BGIII isn't very interested in imitating its predecessors, and secondly that it not be to my tastes.

As to sex... certainly Ed Greenwood was a dirty old man, and always has been. (I have no idea what you're referencing with canon, though I would not be surprised if Greenwood has gone on to say free-love things on the internet. For however much you think that's worth.) However, Greenwood was never the only person who worked on Forgotten Realms, and in particular Baldur's Gate comes out of 90s, TSR-era AD&D, which had deliberately put more emphasis on narrative, worldbuilding, and indeed morality. That was the peak of the Paladins & Princesses era of D&D, and it showed.

It’s Divinity: Original Sin III with a Forgotten Realms skin suit.

Overall I think you're basically correct, though in fairness I still enjoyed BG3. One of the gripes I do have, though, is the writing. The worst example is Karlach, a tiefling you can recruit to the party. She talks like she just strolled in from Reddit - casual tone, liberally using modem day profanity, etc. She's also not the only one, though she is one of the worst offenders. It's such a stark contrast from BG1/2 where they went out of their way to not make dialogue sound modern day, with concrete guidelines for writers on how to achieve that. I hate it.

It's not even the presence of snark by itself - BG1 and BG2 contain plenty of jokes. There are also plenty of characters who use casual language. This page over-selects for comedy, but even so, there is a lot of casual silliness. Lines like, "For someone who supposedly has her soul tainted by the evil of a dead god, you remind me considerably of a chipmunk with a sugar high and a death wish" easily fit that kind of Reddit or Twitter-informed search for a perfect one-liner.

Even so, I think you can still tell that the writing culture of 1998 or 2000 was very different to that of 2023. I think for me a lot of it is worldbuilding as well? One of BG2's advantages was that it is substantially based on the 1997 boxed set Lands of Intrigue, and that set had quite good writing and a level of detail and verisimilitude that the game could make use of.

I also wonder if it was the intended audience as well? Not to go full GamerGate, but in 1998 and 2000, the hold of progressive ideology over the American video game industry was not yet complete, and I feel like there was at least the aspiration still to make games for a wide audience, and one less politically polarised than today.

It seems that he ignored his personal ethnic grievences in the first game, to wide acclaim, but then heavily layered them into the sequel unfortunately.

Many such cases, but people are becoming aware of the symbolic language and methods used by these people to push their propaganda onto audiences, so it's going to fall flat. I wasn't going to avoid the game just because of the optional gay subplot or the black character talking about how his homeland is superior, but the Jewish Esoteric Moralization is going to be a hard pass for me.

Unless, instead of the main quest objective Infiltrate the antisemites' meeting you had the option of running the antisemites' meeting I'm writing this game off as another victim of subversion. The fact the main quest centers so much around literally defending Jews is much more egregious than the other stuff.

Unless, instead of the main quest objective Infiltrate the antisemites' meeting you had the option of running the antisemites' meeting.

Worked for Mr. H, but this game is set a little earlier than that.