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I'm just gonna jump on this one, but something like 90% of the replies echoed a similar sentiment.
IMHO, NPCs are not just "normies" or "sheeple" and partisans or run of the mill ideologically captured. These are people you are having a conversation with, which has such a schizoid discontinuity dropped right in the middle, it's like their cognition straight up glitched out. Not "Why does group X vote against (what I think) is their best interest?" pseudo hypocrisy. Not people with different ethical valuations of when the overriding interest of society outweigh a person's right to bodily autonomy. Just a massive, gaping, cognitive glitch. The NPC meme isn't about people repeating the same lines. It's about the jank most NPCs in open world games display.
Like, for example, early on in the pandemic, there was memorial day, a week later BLM riots, and then a week later a massive uptick in COVID. And my local news tried to claim that all the new covid cases a week after massive BLM riots were actually caused by a new variant that spread during memorial day which took an extra week to show symptoms. They, however, are not the NPCs. They are bold faced evil liars.
The NPC is my father in law who digested this whole sale. Who one evening was ranting and raving about all these evil fucking conservatives not quarantining at home (despite the fact that neither he nor his wife meaningfully changed how often they travelled, had family gatherings, went out to eat, saw shows, etc), wanting to go to gyms, or church, or grill outside, or have social gatherings. When I pulled up a photo of a BLM protest, people just piled on top of each other in front of a barricade, his response was that he saw nothing at all wrong with that.
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