As someone who is painfully plugged into online discourse to the point where I may soon just need to go live in an arctic cabin somewhere, I have borne witness to a narrative this year in the media landscape, namely across movies and TV, where right-wing media consumers and influencers believe they have defeated "woke" games and shows and those who support them, while claiming "wins" of their own. It feels like there's a new one of these that comes up every month, and I figured it was time to break down the perception of what's going on here, and the reality of what's happening.

Successes of "anti-woke" things are claimed as scalps, whether that was actually the intent of that work or not. Failures of "woke" things are purely because they're woke, not any other reason at all, ignoring any and all other factors. This happens every time, and it's time to add them all up here to show what's going on. Prepare the "cope and seethe," as they say.

Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League

• Perception -- This was a "woke" version of the Arkham universe in which characters like Harley Quinn were more conservatively dressed than previously and there were things like Pride flags hanging out in base headquarters. A consulting agency named Sweet Baby Inc. was used in development of the game to advise on making things overly inclusive,

• Reality -- Suicide Squad failed mightily because it was a live service game after Rocksteady had made its entire fanbase devoted to its single player superhero offerings, and not a particularly good one at that. It was a goofy concept, giving all Task Force X members the same guns, few differences in powers and aborting a storyline halfway through to do a live service concept which featured a dozen Brainiac copies. All based on an IP with one critically savaged movie and one box office failure in the DCEU. Supposedly woke critics scored the game a 60, one of the lowest major releases of the year.

Concord

• Perception -- A hero shooter that failed because it's heroes were not attractive enough, and they were "virtue signaling" by putting pronouns in their select screens.

• Reality -- Concord started development right after Overwatch launched in 2016 and arrived to the shooter landscape dated, with an ill-conceived $40 price tag in a F2P landscape and failing to meaningfully stand-out from its competition. Its character designs were poor, not for "hotness" reasons, but because of a lacking aesthetic that other games, with plenty of similarly sized and aged characters, had done much better. Supposedly woke critics scored the game a 65, lower than all its multiplayer rivals.

The Acolyte

• Perception -- The "woke" series featured essentially no white male characters and focused on a cult of space witches, at least a pair of which were lesbians. The showrunner is a lesbian and her wife is in the show. The series broke canon and disrespected "true" Star Wars fans. This cancellation was even celebrated by Elon Musk who declared the series "went woke and went broke," as is the eternal mantra of this group.

• Reality -- The show cost $180 million to make. It was the least-watched Star Wars show which is not a surprise given that it was trying to tell a story with wholly original characters and no connections to the Skywalker era. Every time people said it broken canon, upon closer inspection it did not in fact break canon, and critics either misunderstood the source material or were claiming Legends was still canon. Cost to viewership was the reason it was cancelled.

Stellar Blade

• Perception -- The game was a big hit for AAA newcomer SHIFT UP because it embraced the idea that real g*mers want attractive women in their games, and they were provided plenty of fan service outfits to fulfill that desire.

• Reality -- Stellar Blade is a solid action game on the whole and reviewed well among video game journ*lists, drawing an 81 on Metacritic and heralded as a great first effort for SHIFT UP.

Helldivers 2

• Perception -- A game about killing bugs and bots and without woke agendas, it was a celebration of the kind of patriotism the left fails to embrace in the modern era.

• Reality -- The entire game is based on Starship Troopers, a very clear, famous skewering of those very concepts. Journ*lists scored the game an 82 and it has been in conversation as a possible, if not likely, GOTY shortlist candidate.

The First Descendant

• Perception -- The PvE hero shooter is full of attractive women which is responsible for its surging popularity, and its live plan has so far been introducing more attractive women, to ensure its ongoing success.

• Reality -- The game succeeds mainly because it's a well-structured looter with meaningful progression systems and endless targeted farms. It struggles with RNG, however, and the game has seen precipitous playercount drops, down from 265,000 on Steam to 40,000 in a couple months, so its long-term future is uncertain.

Black Myth: Wukong

• Perception -- Games media "wanted this game to fail" based on an IGN article that discussed sexism within Game Science in the past and its success is a blow against woke agendas.

• Reality -- The game is an absolutely crushing, massive hit in China where no one is considering any of these controversies when purchasing. Again, games journ*lists scored the game a very positive 81.

The mental gymnastics here are always one of the following:

• A game considered woke fails, and the reason is because it is woke

• A game that succeeds must not be woke, or its woke aspects can be explained away as not really being woke after all

• A game is considered anti-woke for some perceived reason and it being anti-woke is the reason it is a hit

• A sentence or two from a single review or a specific tweet means that *all *woke journ*lists or players love or hate something

It's a set of moving goalposts where "woke and not woke" are whatever is convenient for the narrative at the moment. Baldur's Gate 3, the woke-ist game on planet earth won scores of GOTY awards but that's not really woke because, after all, it had attractive characters in it. You could say the same for almost every major hit of the past decade in some form or another.

On the other side, games "claimed" by anti-woke players like Stellar Blade or The First Descendant are in no way owned by them, and either review well among the supposedly woke games media and/or have playerbases far more expansive than those who are playing because attractive characters exist in them. The truth is no one is making games for this crowd specifically, which is part of what upsets them, and what has forced them to break down these wins and losses in their own minds.

This won't stop, and it's only getting worse in recent years. But it's important to understand what's going on here, and what isn't, despite what's being claimed.

!chuds