There are times where people walk away from a piece of media with a weird interpretation and are accused of “no media literacy” and it’s a bit harsh because the piece of media might be more subtle in its politics or message or whatever, but bioshock literally opens by delivering a libertarian screed and then IMMEDIATELY showing you the havoc and ruin that resulted. There’s not more than two dots to connect. It’s so on the nose. How could you walk away with a different interpretation?
There’s not more than two dots to connect. It’s so on the nose. How could you walk away with a different interpretation?
For some, I wonder if the enlightened centrist bullshit of the sequel and especially Bioshock Infinite muddied the interpretation. Infinite even retroactively fucked with the first game's story.
No no Fontaine ruined it by appealing to compassion and outrage and organized a rebellion. You are free to do anything in Rapture except whatever I don't like to see happen in Rapture
The attempt to cram in a heart symbol on ever-mutating symbols is like when the Randroids on crammed a peace button on their particular "Snoo" while talking about how they would butcher kids for stealing candy bars from their company stores.
"This is why school is a joke and teachers are worthless. I can do my own research. 'Literary analysis' doesn't sound STEM to me. Stand back, I'm going to help build the Torment Nexus now."
Nothing convinced me more to not be an objectivist more than reading Ayn Rand. They are some of the worst written political screeds pretending to be theatre. Brecht is spinning in his grave.
there's something to be said about how the protagonist from Bioshock 1 is a genetic slave with no functional identity, yet completely destroys a supposedly individualist utopia
i've never quite figured that out, but Ken Levine is a goofball. At least he knows libertarianism is gibberish and that American nationalism is racist to its core
I don't think Levine had anything to do with 2, but Infinite's writing sucked ass and 2 is arguably a better story than the original lmao
For some reason I thought he had something to do with We Happy Few too, but I guess that was just me mixing up sophomoric on the nose disappointments and assuming he had something to do with it
"It's really cool how my working conditions and state of precarity slowly get worse and worse while I build this Torment Nexus for my startup's owner, who also read the same book with autodidact expertise and also concluded we need to build a Torment Nexus as soon as possible to show how epic our startup is."
and then became convinced his cognitive dissonance was a superpower.
It is just how they interpret Will to Power, and it's really common among the hardcore and neophyte libertarians. To be fair, it is necessary to remain libertarian while reality always negatively verify their ideas.
Lol, I knew a somewhat "successful" small business owner that went this route. This 2014 or so. Never reads or anything. He posted one day on fb about being in a book club at work and the book was some self-published rich dad poor dad ripoff without a wikipedia page. Couple years later he's running a vending machine business, posting pro trump propaganda, lecturing people on bASiC EcoNomIcS. Pretty sure he's up to his eyeballs in debt.
Kicker: he briefly got disillusioned by Trump and was tempted to support Andrew Yang in 2020.
Completely missing the point. The libertarian fantasy utopia completely collapses from a lack of any market regulation. A con artist figures out how to game the society and make a ton of money by being a predatory business man, cornering the market on genetic mutations. The utopia's founder sees this and says it's against the rules to make a bunch of money, sinks the con artist's department store, then a civil war starts because there's a huge underclass that doesn't benefit from any of the utopian libertarian stuff.
I think the in game timeline from the city's founding to civil war is about 9 years. Rapture is shown as completely dysfunctional and I don't know how anyone would interpret it as anything other than a failure cooked up by an insane goofball.
Serious question. I've played the System Shocks but never Bioshock, does the game actually present a pro-libertarian narrative or is this just another case of Gamers completely missing the fucking point like with Fallout?
The later games muddied the ideological waters because development was lead by an insufferably smug enlightened centrist prick, but the first game directly says "this Randroid fever dream failed. It failed before your character even showed up."
BioShock is like 90% nonsense, so it's not surprising that people misinterpret it. Like sure Rapture failed, but the actual reasons it failed are so completely nonsensical that I wouldn't consider it to really be a particularly effective anti-libertarian story
I know that linked channel. I chanced a System Shock video (iirc) from that goofball purely just to see if an could make decent slop, and wooow is whoever runs the channel far out of touch with reality.
Idk maybe the objectivist utopia of rapture would have worked had they not installed vending machines that sell drugs that turn give the user electric shock powers everywhere
don't think that has much to do with objectivism really like that's just nonsense