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This article on ‘Political Fantasy – How Steering Into Real Life Improves Your Stories’ was available earlier through the Gamerbraves Newsletter. Sign up for free to gain access to more articles about news and trends in the gaming industry and community.
Original Article:
In some corners of the internet, the word Political is so sensitive you’d swear it was a landmine. Everywhere, people fear the dreaded P-word. They long for the good ol’ days when stories weren’t pushing some sort of ‘woke agenda’ and were just about normal fun action, like Captain America decking Hitler.
In truth though, what a lot of people claim to be “political” is often just the whining of fanboys upset that roles aren’t just going to straight, white men anymore. This feature won’t be going into that, either. Instead, I wanted to talk with you guys about what actual political storytelling is.
An important part of this discussion is the admission that, yes, all stories are inherently political. Whether you want to or not, anything you create will inadvertently reveal how you see the world- which is what political values are. Even the MCU, as tastelessly bland as it is, is on some level, political. The first Iron Man has Tony Stark question the ethics of selling weapons in the Middle East, while the less-than-stellar Iron Man 2 almost puts together a rational thought about private ownership vs federalization of Tony Stark’s walking war crime machines. Whether they meant to or not, you can deduce what a movie thinks a good person looks like, and what their ideals are.
For every “when you think about it…” movie, there is a louder, much more upfront counterpart. Kamen Rider Black Sun is hilariously overt in its political views, almost to a fault. Its message isn’t that far off from many other minority rights stories- the downtrodden Kaijin deserve to be treated like people and prejudice is stupid.
Unlike many other series that often stop the message there, however, what makes Black Sun so overt in its messaging is that it has a detailed explanation of how it got there. The series goes into great detail explaining the origin of the Kaijin, as well as that neat coincidence that most Kaijin is from some real-world minority group in a piece of dialogue so devoid of subtext I needed to make sure Hideo Kojima wasn’t in the writer’s room.
Some, naturally, have criticized Kamen Rider Black Sun’s writing for being too preachy. The closing shots of the series go all-in on the real world, paralleling the Civil Rights movement as well as the George Floyd protests before dropping its key message: action, not demonstration is needed.
That being said, I have a great fondness for just how hard Black Sun goes for its message. The primary antagonist of the movie draws many parallels to the late Shinzo Abe, and even upon defeating “the bad guy” the story makes a point to say that it was never just one guy- it was a whole system and its new head is just better at hiding it.
It isn’t just Kamen Rider Black Sun, either. The Shin Hero series has been notoriously political, with both Shin Godzilla and Shin Ultraman scathing criticisms of Japan’s political culture. It’s barely even clever- Shin Ultraman features characters practically looking into the camera and telling on the writers’ thoughts on nuclear weapons. Spoiler alert- they’re not great. Shin Godzilla instead features every liberal’s greatest fantasy- a bunch of elderly politicians being blown up by an irradiated kaiju, allowing the younger generation to take over and actually solve the country’s irradiated kaiju problem.
These stories are great specifically because they pull themselves into the here and now. We’ve had plenty of stories pander to the fantasy of stopping a big world-destroying laser, sure. But by asking questions about the world we live in, they stick with you in a more meaningful way. Despite being an antagonist, it’s hard do disagree that watching Shadow Moon burst the head of a racist wasn’t, on some level, satisfying.
A well-placed political message can even outlive the series itself. Bioshock is an amazing piece of political commentary, which the game mainly uses as the backdrop for its otherwise blase plot. It’s a stunning takedown of libertarianism and Objectivism- and how a lot of the time people claim that freedom from tyrannical governments is actually just Capitalists wearing a fake accent.
No one remembers fighting the final boss of the game, or even how you got there- but anyone who played the immersive sim will probably be able to recollect the riveting speech about the eternal glory of Rapture, played over the ruins of the city. It’s a high the Bioshock series has tried desperately to recreate, with mixed success.
Of course, as the consumer, there are also dangers when it comes to political media. One thing you’ll often see especially among younger audiences is the conflation of consuming media with activism. That exact catharsis I explained from Black Sun is just as likely to backfire on the consumer- putting out their potential to do anything meaningful since they’ve already watched the grasshopper man on TV murk a bunch of racists.
There are also the coat riders- these are people who usually don’t have any interesting to say about a topic, but will be happy to co-opt political messaging to claim their stories are bigger than they are. The best example of this is Quantic Dreams’ Detroit: Become Human– a story so disproportionately full of itself it’s impressive David Cage didn’t do all the game’s interviews with his arm in a sling from patting himself on the back.
In the game’s attempts to explain the plight of minorities by pretending they were robots, it includes some of the most hilariously tone-deaf scenes ever- including a Black woman telling the skinny white android that she “knows a thing about oppression”, as well as the meme-levels of quoting Martin Luther King in the most shallow way. To top it all off? Cage denies the game ever being about race, despite borrowing imagery explicitly associated with the Civil Rights movement.
I remember watching the first Gal Gadot Wonder Woman movie back whenever that came out. It posited an interesting thought- Diana spends the movie chasing after Ares, the God of War who is controlling the Germans so they can wage perpetual conflict.
When she seemingly defeats Ares though, the bad guys, are still doing their bad thing. For a second there, I almost thought the movie was about to say something interesting- something about power structures and war and profiteering, even. Then the real Ares shows up and defeating him actually solves the problem. It’s a crushing disappointment that highlights just how afraid some studios can be when it comes to telling meaningful stories- if there’s no big bad guy to make racism and war disappear, how will the audience know when to clap?
I guess my point is that I’m not calling for all movies to be inherently critical of something. I’ve met enough dudes at parties who feel the need to tell me how gacha is killing the games industry to know that you don’t always need a moral high horse. But the best use of critical messaging will always be detailed and sincere- something that will take way more than a writer with a sign on their wall that says “My own MCU??” written on it.
