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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   3288 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for September 26, 2025

Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.

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Wait, I think that might actually be the art from Hades 1. Hades 2 is this

Slightly less masculine, slightly more lesbian.

Which I suppose partly undercuts my point about it changing. I think it's largely deliberate. They're trying to portray a sexual character but not like... actually sexy. They're trying to say "this character is sex positive, but we're not trying to appeal to straight white men, because that would be gross.

This also is related to the race-swapping of many of the Olympian gods to be black or Asian. Again, it's not like super obnoxiously egregious: it's not like the story goes out of its way to talk about them being oppressed by the white gods or something. But it's anachronistic in an obviously post-2010 progressive way.

Unfortunately your second link is broken (it goes to some decade old reddit post), so I still don't know what the Hades 2 version looks like. But it sounds like the devs are kind of slaves to the culture war, and feel the need to make everything reflect it. Which is unfortunate.

I wouldn't say "slaves to". Again, it's not too egregious, and not enough to ruin the game. But their earlier games didn't seem to have this issue quite as badly. Or maybe I just didn't notice as much because they were original fantasy worlds so they weren't race swapping classic mythology.

You can tell throughout the time that they're definitely left-leaning. Bastion had a bunch of stuff about xenophobia and colonialism being bad. I never finished transistor but it was generally anti-establishment. Pyre had a made up religion that was abused by corrupt leaders to excommunicate people they don't like. But it's never so terrible that it ruins things. None of them are ever obvious and stupid ripoffs of current events, and Pyre still has you participating in the religious rituals because it wasn't the religion itself that's bad it's just the corrupt people exploiting it.

And most importantly the core gameplay remains good enough that it makes up for the slightly offputting lefty vibes (with the exception of Transistor, which I didn't find very compelling)

But yeah, they're clearly embedded in lefty culture, if not the actual war part of it. And they seem to be gradually slipping further and further into it.

Try: https://old.reddit.com/r/TopCharacterDesigns/comments/1cctx3h/aphrodites_design_from_hades_and_its_sequel/

Thanks! Weirdly the second iteration looks way better, because she actually looks female in that one. No idea what happened in the first game.

It's the wrong way around. The armed one must be from H2, because the unarmed version was in H1.

Yeah I figured that it was the H2 version first, then the H1 version. So I did have the right order in mind when I said that the second iteration looks better.

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