#how do you think of this as “boring” overton i dont. understand.

[funnyscienceman]

idk man if they just leaned into the caitvi sex scene being equally as unfortunately ill-timed as meljay's i think it couldve been slightly less egregious. by maybe like 1 centimeter. maybe a number even smaller than that.

...except maybe not so much because the context and location would have to be shifted around too for "this is romantic for the couple but terribad for the person currently dying", unless they also changed the framing to show it's not good for vi or something! but oh well! cant have nice things all the time in arcane storytelling i guess!

[dynamics-of-an-asteroid]

Dont suppose you have a copy of the interview you could share?

For you, dear anon~

His Dark Materials: Andrew Scott on life after Fleabag and Sherlock

We’ve loved him as both Fleabag’s Hot Priest and Sherlock’s menacing Moriarty. Now, he’s back on our screens in the new series of His Dark Materials. Polly Vernon talks to our TV crush

Andrew Scott is mortified. The actor – formerly Moriarty to Benedict Cumberbatch’s Sherlock, then the Hot Priest of Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s Fleabag, imminently Colonel John Parry in the BBC’s adaptation of Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials – arrives at the photographic studio, bang on the appointed hour, in a fawn cashmere cardigan with a fine gold chain around his neck, bemoaning “this terrible, terrible eye infection, which is making me so self-conscious. I’m so sorry. It isn’t that you’ve massively upset me before we’ve even started. It’s so annoying. But anyway…”

Scott, 44, is small, vivid, wiry and garrulously Irish, with a face that is not handsome so much as mesmerising, intense, sharply boned, symmetrical, startlingly expressive. Sequences of emotions so subtle and complicated that I can’t begin to identify or keep up with them ruffle his brow from moment to moment. And, yup, the whole thing is rather disrupted by his left eye. This is no light kiss of conjunctivitis. It’s a swollen, red, perma-weeping situation that engulfs the whole socket. Scott turns his face two thirds on to me, so the infection is largely hidden, which would probably help if we weren’t sitting in a brightly lit hair and make-up room with a massive, inescapable mirror fixed to one wall. “Oh God,” Scott says every time he catches sight of his reflection.

Stress?

“Let’s be honest,” he says. “Let’s not skirt around the issue. It’s being overworked and…” Scott’s eye begins weeping. “Oh my goodness. I am so sorry. Really, really very sorry.”

Wanna wear my sunglasses, I ask, holding them out to him.

“That would be a bit more weird, wouldn’t it? I actually did think about that in the taxi, but I thought that would be some sort of weird and screwed Invisible Man-type thing. I mean, it couldn’t be worse. And then we have to go and get our photograph taken. It’ll be one of those pictures where, you know, those creepy pictures… Of people crying?”

That’s what Photoshop’s for, I say.

“Anyway. Let’s just ignore it.”

I wonder if it’s particularly hard to walk around with an eye infection at a point in time where you’re not merely famous, as Scott is – a star of stage, screen and Bond film, winner of multiple awards, including, as of barely two weeks ago, a Best Actor Olivier for Present Laughter at the Old Vic – but specifically famous for being sexy.

In 2019, Andrew Scott became synonymous with, well, sex. While playing a character technically known as the Priest, whom the general public instantly renamed the Hot Priest, the spiritual support turned transgressive love interest of Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s supremely popular Fleabag, Scott became a cypher for the nation’s more exotic desires. A deliciously contentious pin-up. Ground zero on an earnest social media debate about whether the Priest’s relationship with Fleabag should be considered abusive, power imbalanced, “problematic”. And that was just for starters.

The Priest’s sexual iconography extended far beyond the limits of the show, becoming the subject of internet memes and real-life merchandise (visit online retailer Etsy for your £12 Hot Priest mug emblazoned with an illustration of Scott in priest’s robes, alongside the word “kneel”, a reference to a pivotal moment between the show’s lead characters, which takes place in a confession box, the climax of which, assuming you haven’t already seen it, you could probably take a stab at). There was an unprecedented upsurge in young worshippers, and women started bombarding social media “influencer” the Rev Chris Lee of west London with nude photographs. There was much foetid fan fiction.

To be publicly defined by so much sex, as Scott still is, a year and a half after Fleabag concluded, and then to be encumbered by something as visibly unsexy as an eye infection, I can see how that might make a chap self-conscious.

Scott isn’t here to rake up all that old Hot Priest stuff, mind. He’s here to talk about the second series of His Dark Materials, a lush, expensive fantasy drama based on the Philip Pullman books, jewel in the crown of the BBC’s autumn schedule. The series was filmed through 2019 and the beginning of 2020 and had all but wrapped before lockdown. Good timing, as it turned out, because the extensive post-production processes, unlike shooting, could be completed in isolation.

Scott’s Colonel John Parry is an explorer, the missing father of the central character, 14-year-old Will Parry. He’s a man who slipped into a parallel universe some years earlier, acquired a “daemon” – an exterior animal-formed expression of his soul, a female osprey called Sayan Kötör, voiced with public-pleasing symmetry by Phoebe Waller-Bridge – and never found a way back to “our” world and his son. I speak as a fan of the books, which you might describe as a darker, existential response to Harry Potter, although honestly? They’re better than that. The show is great, a deft, rewarding interpretation, and Scott is an exciting prospect as Parry.

Did he jump at the part?

“I did, actually. It was definitely something I was into. We were doing a play and it seemed like a fun thing to do.” Scott is one of those who slips into the third person when speaking about himself in a professional capacity.

Had he read the books?

“Yeah,” he says. “I think they’re extraordinary. The truth, but told on a slant. I love the way Pullman tells children about spirituality or religion in such an extraordinary, intelligent way. He doesn’t speak down to them. He talks to children’s souls.”

Given that Pullman effectively kills off God through the course of the books and Scott’s a lapsed Irish Catholic who has suffered his share of shame on account of the church’s grip on his homeland (more on which shortly), I’d imagine Pullman’s books talked to Scott’s adult soul too.

Presumably, he didn’t have to audition. Presumably, he never has to. Too famous for auditions?

“No,” he says. “Although I’ve always thought auditioning is a pretty good thing to do.”

Why?

“Because you’re able to understand, ‘Oh, this is the vibe here.’ You think, when you’re an actor, you don’t have much choice, but I’ve always felt like auditioning is a good opportunity for you to go, ‘Oh well, I don’t much like you either. I think you’re dreadful!’ ”

I don’t care that you didn’t give me that part?

“Yeah.” Scott becomes playfully, theatrically defiant. “I don’t care!” He flicks aside an imaginary rejection with a churlish hand.

Will John Parry and His Dark Materials be enough to eliminate all residual overtones of Hot Priest sexiness from Scott? Maybe. He is a fine actor, no question, entirely transformed from role to role. I saw him play Paul, a narcissistic, fame-addled touring rock star, at the Royal Court in 2014 in Simon Stephens’ Birdland, back when his deeply sinister Moriarty weighed almost as heavily on Scott’s reputation as the Hot Priest does now. I’d watched him become someone else entirely on stage. “Oh, you saw that?” Scott says, pleased.

I quote, “Am I cancer?” at him, his defining line from the play, as evidence.

“Oh Jesus. Oh f***ing hell. Oh my. I’d forgotten that line. ‘Am I cancer?’ ”

The Hot Priest association hasn’t left him yet, which is why I find myself asking what it’s like to be the very definition of sexiness.

“You get invited to more parties.”

Better parties?

“Yeah.”

Better than during his Moriarty phase?

“Definitely.”

It must be fun to find yourself le dernier cri in sexy, according to the whole nation.

“Yeah, that’s fun,” he says. “I didn’t really like being associated with scary. It’s not what I’m interested in being, in life, being intimidating to people. It’s not part of my nature, whereas being sexy to people…”

That is part of his nature?

“Well, they’re very different things.”

They’re both about having power over people.

“I suppose they are, yes.”

So did Scott, bored of scaring people, say to Phoebe Waller-Bridge, writer and star of Fleabag and a long-term friend (they met in 2009 while starring in Roaring Trade at the Soho Theatre), “Write a role for me that will make everyone think I’m just really, really sexy now”?

“That’s such a good belt. Are they two ‘Gs’?”

“Exactly.”

——————————

Andrew Scott is not the easiest interview. He’s utterly charming. Really, just a delight. In between prostrating himself for the offence of his eye and apologising for not turning up the first time we were scheduled to meet (ten days earlier; a delayed Covid test result meant he couldn’t make it), he ensures I have a good time in his company. He is playful. He makes me laugh. His every utterance is delivered as a grand performance. (“Shhhh! Just… Shhhh!” he implores, placing a finger against his lips while expressing frustrations over the mindless jabber of social media, and he does it so powerfully, he compels me to be quiet, breathlessly to await delivery of his next line.) He finds elegant ways to flatter me. He laughs at my jokes and is terribly taken with my belt.

Yeah. For Gucci.

“Oh. Ha ha! I thought it was the Golden Globes. I love the Golden Globes. Ha ha!”

And of course, he’s Irish. Clichédly, melodiously Irish, which makes everything sound softer and jollier than it might otherwise.

As for the actual business of being interviewed, of answering straight questions with straight answers, finishing off sentences, offering more than a slip-slide of vagaries punctuated by vigorous hand gestures, none of which translates into print? He’d rather not.

He tells me, as he’s told other journalists before, this is because he’s interested in navigating the line between “privacy and secrecy”, then says he’s aware he’s sometimes “got away with secrecy under the guise and respectability of privacy”, as if signalling potential incoming slipperiness, which means I prepare to throw every trick in the book at him.

First up: amateur psychology.

Might Andrew Scott’s gayness be at the heart of his reluctance to speak more freely? Perhaps. This is no scoop. He’s been out for almost as long as he’s been famous. “I mean, as a civilian, I was quite young [when I came out], you know? But then, as a celebrity…”

He tails off, allows me to fill in the blanks. This is another of his evasion tactics. I can’t very well quote Scott on the presumptions I make about things he never quite says.

He had to have another coming out?

“Yes. And I have another one coming up.”

He has another coming out coming up?

“Yeah.”

So that will be, what? Tier 3 gayness?

“Tier 3, yeah.”

Scott grew up in Ireland at a time when it wasn’t legal to be gay, which could certainly seed an enduring reluctance towards carefree openness in a person. He invokes the concept of shame more regularly than the average interviewee. He was born in Dublin in 1976 to Nora, an art teacher, and Jim, who worked at an employment agency. He has one older sister, Sarah, and a younger one, Hannah.

He was shy, so started attending a children’s drama course.

Did that help?

“Yeah. Acting to me is not pretending to be someone else. It’s more like, this is who I actually am. The lie that tells the truth,” he says. I am none the wiser. He was clearly talented. He went from adverts to his first starring role in a film aged 17 (Korea, directed by Cathal Black), won a bursary to art school but took a place at Trinity College Dublin to study drama instead, and ditched that six months in to join Dublin’s Abbey Theatre. He’s been gainfully employed in the field ever since.

How Catholic was his upbringing?

“Well, there were Catholic priests in my life,” he says. “None of whom I wanted to have sex with.”

Does it amuse Scott to know he inspired a mass fetishising of priestly ranks? That in 2019, the Hot Priest would make, “Can you have sex with a Catholic priest?” one of the most googled terms of the year?

“Absolutely f***ing mental,” he says.

Homosexuality wasn’t legalised in Ireland until 1993, when Scott was 16.

“I always think, if I’d had a boyfriend then, which I definitely did not…”

No?

“No.”

He knew he was gay, though?

“No. No, no, no, no!”

Was he suppressing it or not thinking about it?

“I would say suppressing. Definitely suppressing. I don’t believe people just don’t think about it.”

An upbeat, cheesy jazz remix of something or other starts playing outside the room.

“Oooh, this is the soundtrack for this bit of the interview,” says Scott. He wiggles his shoulders to the music.

I switch to strict dominatrix interviewer mode. Focus, I say. You were about to tell me something good.

“Oh, shit, was I? OK. I think what’s really insidious is that people don’t ask you about sex or… People wouldn’t say, ‘Are you gay or are you [straight]?’ And the lack of directness is very damaging. They just didn’t go there.”

Does he think his family, friends, the people closest to him knew then that he was gay?

“No,” he says. “I don’t think they did know. Or maybe they have a suspicion, but they think, I want to be respectful, so I’m not going to ask about that. Then [when you do come out], people say, ‘Oh, I’m glad.’ You know? If you do talk about it. So I suppose what I feel now is, talking about sex or sexuality is important. Really important.”

Having said that, “There’s still getting rid of the shame. In a situation like this, 10 or 15 years ago, I would have been…” He fakes shock, horror. “Oh no! Polly’s just asked me about [he switches to a whisper] that.”

Scott will talk about his sex life only notionally. No specifics. For 15 years, between 2001 and 2016, he was in a relationship with the actor turned screenwriter Stephen Beresford (Scott starred in Beresford’s 2014 film Pride). Ever since, he’s refused to answer questions about his romantic life.

And he’s not going to talk about it now, I presume.

“No.”

What if we talk about it opaquely?

“OK.”

Where does he see himself, domestically, in an ideal world? Married with kids whom he’ll, I dunno, adopt or have via surrogacy?

“I like it. It’s bold. Am I going to adopt or…?”

Get a surrogate?

“I definitely think that’s something I would be open to.”

Great, I say, with blatant sarcasm. Thanks. How specific.

“Ha! I’m sorry. OK. Have I got any children at the moment? No. How can I… [explain]? OK. I was with a friend of mine in Dublin…”

His partner?

“No, no, no. Not my partner. Ah ha. I see what you were…”

Teasing. Yes.

“Ha! Yes. So, I was with a friend in Dublin and we were walking around and he was looking at apartments and I was like, ‘What about this place here?’ You know? And he said, ‘No,’ and I said, ‘Why not?’ and he said, ‘I don’t live a heteronormative life, so I don’t want a heteronormative house.’ ”

What’s a heteronormative house?

“Two up, two down thing. He goes, ‘I can live in a loft or a weird space. I don’t need those things.’ He was so proud of it. He really owned it. I think where a lot of one’s pain comes from is when you go, ‘I should want that.’ And so, to answer your question opaquely, I have kids I adore. I love children, genuinely, and I had a very happy childhood. But I also feel, if I don’t have kids, that’s all right. I think I would’ve attached a lot of shame beforehand, with not living a particularly heteronormative life… Even with being gay, there’s a sort of way of being gay that’s acceptable. And I don’t feel that any more.”

He feels you can be unacceptably gay?

“Exactly. Exactly!”

I ask when shame shifted for him and Scott says it was when Ireland voted overwhelmingly in favour of same-sex marriage in the 2015 referendum, which felt, he says, “like acceptance, genuinely. And I remember going out to this gay bar in Dublin and this girl came up to me, this cool Dublin girl, and she said, ‘What are you doing here? You need to go down to, I don’t know, blah, blah, this bar in some park.’ She was saying, ‘This isn’t the right gay bar for you. This is some shit gig,’ when the fact I’m in a gay bar in Ireland [at all] is a miracle to me, and then some person with a half-shaved head is telling me, ‘No, you need to go somewhere cooler.’ ”

His left eye starts weeping again.

“I’m so happy about that,” he says. “Even though I’m crying.”

I ask Scott if he has a game plan when picking roles, if he plots his course from Sherlock villain to Bond quasi-villain (he played Max Denbigh in Spectre) to sex icon, and, if so, what next? “No. Jesus, no,” he says.

We talk about the totalitarianism of social media, which he isn’t on, and share a mutual despair over it. “I thought it was something one would associate with the right, but actually, now it’s [the left] that is very ‘you’re this’ or ‘you’re that’. I find that quite frightening. It actually makes me feel ferocious.”

Is he not worried about being cancelled, of somehow saying the “wrong” thing, according to Twitter sensitivities, then having a thousand voices mobilised against him, demanding his firing, in the style of JK Rowling?

“I’m not,” he says. “I refuse to be. A very intelligent person I was talking to recently was writing a book and he said, ‘I’m going to get a sensitivity expert to have a look. I don’t want to get cancelled.’ I found that frightening.”

Is he rich? “Rich is the absence of worry about money,” he says. He can’t remember the last time he worried about money.

That must be nice.

“Of course it f***ing is. I think it’s a miracle. I really do. I was working in a French theatre in London for nothing – none of us was working for anything – and I remember the artistic director of the theatre talking about the fact we weren’t earning any money as some sort of virtue. I remember feeling really annoyed about that, like this isn’t good.”

This leads to an inevitable conversation about how the arts are suffering with Covid, including a segue down the Fatima route, the much shared government advert that depicted a young ballerina and suggested she retrain in something called cyber. “Her name’s not even Fatima,” Scott rails. “I think she’s called Desire’e. From New York.”

I mean to ask him about his experience of filming The Pursuit of Love with Lily James and Dominic West, stars of their own recent off-screen micro-scandal in Rome, just in case he lets any scurrilous insight slip, but our time’s up and it’s not as if Scott has much form on offering up scurrilous insight anyway.

Still, I feel grateful to him for meeting me halfway on the other stuff. And so I say goodbye to Andrew Scott, the UK’s foremost gay heterosexual lapsed Catholic faux-priest lust icon with a troublesome eye infection.

[beesmygod]

netflix’s new horror movie “bird box” sucks ass and not in a funny, enjoyable way: a review

first im going to preface this review with this: im sick. i caught a cold on the way home from reno and spent the day recovering watching this garbage instead of doing anything that required a working brain. i knew i wasn’t going to get anything mind-blowing but “bird box” teeters heavily on “insultingly bad” instead of just “bad” and it kept me mad about having wasted two hours of my life for a solid 24 hours straight.

so if this review doesn’t make sense, its partly because im sick, and partly bc this movie doesn’t make sense. this review is also impossible to structure because i dont even know where to begin. maybe here: the directing is derivative, boring and bad. its like watching paint dry. the whole movie looks like your grandma’s house smells.

to re-iterate: this movie is 2 hours long. i’ll save you 2 hours by telling you that you never see the monster, ever. sandra bullock admitted to laughing out loud repeatedly on set at the monster when it was revealed to her which lead to it being cut from the movie. if we had seen the monster, maybe the movie would have been bumped up from a d- to a c+ just because the mental image of a long green baby with john malkovich’s voice is pretty funny.

the bird box, probably

for a movie about a monster, this movie has a serious monster problem. in that the monster is not a problem. the monster (which is never given a name in the movie) can’t seem to actually do anything to you if you don’t look at it. its only power seems to be making you kill yourself when you see it (unless you’re crazy which, thats a whole other kettle of fish. give me a minute). so if you don’t look at it you’re fine? there’s several points in the movie where the monster is physically close to them but doesn’t actually do anything except beg them to take off their blindfolds and look at them. its almost pathetic. as far as i can tell, the monster’s only powers are to make leaves fly upward for no reason (i.e. to indicate its in the area without the camera having to focus on anything specific) and yell at you. but, like, as long as you don’t take off your blindfold (and somehow, people do in this movie) then you’re probably fine.

now, if you’re “crazy” (I KNOW YOU’RE ALREADY ASKING QUESTIONS HOLD ON) then looking at the monster turns you into a stereotypical evangelist for an eldritch horror. you run around saying “crazy” things that read like enemy npc chatter in ps2 era survival horror game. for example:

then, you spend all your time trying to get people to look at it by holding their eyes open. “bird box” does not bother to explain what “crazy” means in this context. according the the story, roving gangs of tokyo-drifting escaped asylum patients rule the post-apocalyptic landscape of the pacific northwest. its impossible to tackle how many layers of like morally wrong it is to yet again shove the mentally ill into the role of antagonists  (im getting exhausted just thinking about piling up all the reasons this is so fucking bad) to the point of making them a fucking enemy class. its almost more succinct just to point out that “bird box” thinks mental illness is an on/off switch you toggle rather than a spectrum. i know this movie is a relic of the past (dec 2018) but i feel like this is such a basic fact about the world as we know it today that the decision to ignore it makes me wonder if the writer was operating under the assumption that horror monster “rules” need to be clearly defined as though they were conceived for use in a videogame.

if_crazy=“yes”,  then bird=box 

speaking of the titular “bird box”: the movie is called that because they literally keep birds. in a box. the birds tell you when the monster is coming, so you can put on your blindfold. but heres the thing: the monster makes GGGGRRRRRROOORRORORO sounds nonstop when its running around in the area. you know when it’s coming. you can hear it coming from a mile away. so there’s really no point in having, a bird box. at one point the monster is so loud they can’t hear the birds over its roaring. whats the point of the birds? as it turns out, the birdbox, is useless. much lIKE THIS MOVI

this movie is a never ending cascade of cliches and stolen plot points, characters, ideas. it steals from “the happening” (blatantly, its the same movie right down to the ugly color scheme of every frame), “dawn of the dead”, “pontypool”, “the mist” and pretty much every post-apocalyptic monster movie ever. bd wong is confirmed as a gay man literally 2 minutes before he dies on screen. the black comedic lead dies next. a pregnant woman is introduced and you’ll NEVER guess what happens to her. you could set your watch to this movie. its pathetic. 

welp, he’s dead

i’m going to link this guy’s deconstruction of the weird incestual overtones that are also impossible to miss and interpret without wanting to die. 

im getting exhausted again. this movie is not fun bad. this post is to serve as a warning to the curious. in fact, im going to spoil the end for you, so you truly understand why i’m so fucking mad. i want you, right now, to imagine based on what i’ve told you what the most hackney, cliche, stupid, moronic ending twist could be to this movie about a monster you can’t look at. fully form it in you head. dare to imagine the dumbest thing you can.

ready?

YOU SEE

[wanderingtycho]

An excerpt of Tycho rambling about Wolfenstein II

Okay so for the past couple weeks, I’ve been playing through all of the new generation Wolfenstein games from Bethesda and Machine Games, having platinumed both Old Blood and New Order. I’m currently one trophy away from platinuming New Colossus(take a wild guess as to what trophy it is), and I was discussing some of the games themes with two friends of mine over Telegram. 

This isn’t going to be me doing a proper review or evaluation of the game, this is just a sampling from that conversation, keep in mind one of my friends chose to omit their contributions so the context is a little skewed.

Hope you enjoy my inflammatory ramblings, I’m half tempted to muster a proper critique of New Colossus because I’ve been spending so much time with it, but I’m really lazy so here’s my off the cuff ranting.

Me: New Colossus is fucking nuts man. I’ve made it halfway through the game thinking “I wonder how BJ is gonna get the outfit he’s wearing on the cover?” and then they answered that question in the most what the fuck manner possible. 

My Friend(who shall be referred to as “E”): I heard it was nuts. The one clip I saw was so nuts that I decided to not buy the game lol Eh, maybe I'm just being a picky asshole again lol.

Me: It's worth picking up, I love any game that takes the risk of mixing disturbing subject material with absurdist comical elements. Having played both back to back, I can say there was a definite retooling and redesigning of a lot of stuff between New Order and New Colossus, and I think NC is the superior game overall as a result.

Me: is that an unpopular one? I knew some douchebags were butthurt about the marketing campaigns, but I dont think anyones gonna throw a fit over me saying its better than New Order.

Me: I mean, I'm not saying I dont fancy the position of unpopularity, it seems to me a lot of negative attention towards New Colossus is from people who're either A. racist scumbags in their own right who dont appreciate a video game portraying people who share their ideologies(Nazi's, the Klan)as the bad/incompetent guys. Or B. standard run of the mill privileged white male gamers who just dont get the humoristic overtones and satire that the narrative is presenting.

Me: The ignorance part is true, but I'm of the opinion that ignorance is held and espoused by that particular subset, hence why the biggest "criticism" of the game I've seen goes along the lines of accusing the story and narrative of being "SJW, liberal pandering power fantasies" because the main cast consists of Jewish characters, many black character who're also members of the Black Revolutionary Front(1960's civil rights group), neurodivergent characters, gay characters basically all the groups of people the Nazi's tried to exterminate. The main character, however, William Joseph Blazkowicz, is a stereotypical all American square jawed Aryan white male soldier that comprises a vast majority of video game protagonists because again, game companies are encouraged to appeal to that repeating demographic(hence why Booker DeWitt is on the cover of Bioshock Infinite, and Elizabeth is not). And William’s features and status as that stereotype are brought up frequently over the course of both games, its a plot point, when this white westerner warrior is forced to confront the reality that before the Nazi's took over in this fictional world, minority groups were already being oppressed by the American government and people, not just the Germans.(In the words of J, "Before Hitler, before the Germans, YOU were the Nazi's.") and the second revelation: while the war was going on, there were plenty of Americans back home saying they should just let Germany win and take over the world, that America and Germany should fight together to ensure the white mans superiority, hence why when America surrendered to the Nazi's their transition of power went so smoothly(For real life historical context, 50,000 American Nazi's gathered in Madison Square Garden in New York to express their support for Hitler and the Third Reich in 1940, so American Neo-Nazi's isnt an outlandish concept.) These shocking realizations are shocking to William and most likely to the white members of the audience base, who have been told their entire lives that all Americans are and were totally opposed to Nazism, because America is always the hero and never to the antagonist. While William grapples with this internal and external conflict, the brainless saps who lob accusations of pandering and SJW agendas get pissed, because their natural knee jerk defensive reaction whenever these subjects are brought up is to shout it down and decry it as attempts to exploit "white guilt". So yes, Wolfenstein is a power fantasy game, but it includes themes and ideas that spoil the already existing fantasies of pasty, privileged white gamers who've grown used to getting exactly the message they want out of their consumed media, and throw a hissy fit whenever elements they dont approve of are included in a mainstream product.

.

Me: Exactly, BJ is a great character because he's a stereotype, but the creators are self aware enough to understand that he's a stereotype and that lets them invert a lot of things to make him interesting and engaging rather than a milquetoast slab of boring white bread. Also as an aside, this really tripped me out because at one point BJ goes back to his childhood home in Mesquite Texas, which is where I grew up to.

Me: Also, didnt include this in my massive paragraph, but I wanted to mention how at the beginning of the game William is wheelchair bound because he was blown up by a grenade at the end of New Order. You get a suit of powered armor that lets you walk again, but your health is halved and they make it a point to say that his legs wont work again and he is now impotent. So again, you have this character who's an embodiment of white American masculinity not only physically disabled, but his dick doesnt work. Two themes that likely interfere with the power fantasy the aforementioned pissed off douches were trying to have, rather than appreciating the game as a parody of power fantasies, again people missing the entire point.

E: Also, I watched a clip of the game and it was stupid ridiculous and over the top that it just shattered my suspension of disbelief for the game.

Like how do the nazis take over if they're so incompetent that 20 of them and their 2 war machines can be murdered by one pregnant woman?

And how does the rebellion still talking like they're taking risks when the one dude they send out comes back with a billion nazi scalps?

But like I said, stingy asshole. Maybe I'll pick it up when it goes on sale for cheap.

Plus I could also be just mad at Bethesda.

But then again I did really like Prey.

Also, I heard the game was short.

Like shorter then New Order.

Me: Like I said, I think it's worth buying, and I got it cheap at 30 bucks. As for the realism factor, it's an Id game, gritty STALKER esque accuracy and believability isn't what I expect from them. Short? Not that I've experienced, it's structured and progresses differently but I'd say both games are of comparable length and content.