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PaperclipPerfector  5d ago (text post)   21627 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of April 6, 2026

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Well put, and refreshing as intended. Truly great games, and I agree with the sincerity and simplicity. I was recently thinking about this quote from the author of Redwall on how he approaches his good guys and villains:

When I was a boy, morality was taught in school and in church but I think that is no longer true to the extent that it used to be. I try to create very clear moral signposts of what is right and what is wrong. The children who read my books are generally at an age where they need to have things spelled out in 'black and white,' without ambiguity. I often tell my readers that my baddies are bad and my goodies are good. I won't have sympathetic baddies and schizophrenic goodies in my books.

I think this is the key area where modern narratives have lost the plot. Without a backdrop if simple black and white narrative, deconstructive takes just become overly meta BS. It was interesting at first, now it has devoured the platform it stood on.

Also, from a gameplay standpoint, the Forge mode and custom maps on Halo 3 was genius. In general, like with Warcraft 3 or Skyrim, when a game allows for custom maps it often goes incredibly well, and a ton of genius works get produced. I had a blast on those custom maps back in the day.

I won't have sympathetic baddies and schizophrenic goodies in my books.

And then he wrote Folgrim the Otter, Veil the Ferret, and perpetual fan-favorite Romsca.

Its funny you should mention that because ironically I feel like the original Halo trilogy has one of the better executed "are the baddies really the baddies?" twists in recent memory.

Spoilers for a 20-year-old game & tie-in novel, but you spend a decent portion of Halo 2 playing from the Covenant's perspective, and it was a complete blindside. That said, the reveal that that the two sides have been manipulated into fighting each other by malicious (some might say daemonic) forces allows the real "baddies" to be be "the baddies", and the individual characters who valued life and fought with honor to still be "the goodies" of a sort even if circumstances had placed them on opposing teams.

Fair I totally forgot most of the plot I have to admit. But still, Halo FEELS like one of those stories at least.

I agree that it FEELS like one of those stories and because our heroes, the Master Chief, Sgt Johnson, the Arbiter, Et Al are all unambiguously heroic.

I think Halo has a genuine love for people who, out of a sense of principle, heroically place themselves in the way of danger for the sake of their people. The potential for sympathetic Elites, therefore, was there from the very first game. Elites are pretty obviously to the Covenant what you are to the humans, so even if they are on the opposite side, they are displaying the virtues that this game esteems - courage, discipline, self-sacrifice, honour. Once the lies were exposed, of course they became co-heroes.

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