Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 8797666" data-attributes="member: 4937">But again, I think you are missing it.  In any other story where unsanctioned federal agents are suppressing the crusading journalist's bombshell expose the motives those agents have are selfish, greedy, corrupt, and well evil.  In the trope story, there is some villain who is engaged in nefarious selfish and destructive actions that the journalist is trying to expose.  And so the journalist is trying to do good and if the journalist succeed they'll leave the world a better place.  So the journalist is therefore "a good guy" or even heroic, and the federal agents opposing that journalist are minions of a villain.But while the journalist may believe that he or she is in such a story, they aren't.  They are in fact a well-meaning minion of evil similar to say Syril Karn in the Star Wars Andor TV show.  Presumably journalist is undermining the very walls that hold the roof over everyone's head and if the journalist is allowed to proceed death is going to be the most  welcome and non-horrific of the outcomes.  The agents aren't acting to protect a villain who is misappropriating funds so they can live in comfort, or misusing power for their own selfish goals or betraying the public trust.  The agents are actually working in the public interest in the very largest and truest sense and the journalist is working against them.  The irony here is that the Arc Dream crew have created a setup that seems to suggest the shenanigans that governments get up to are justified, however shady they may seem on the surface, and that those that work against their governments are in fact villains.  The game is subtly pushing the very philosophy that I think that they would superficially oppose, and the very argument made by the most corrupt and authoritarian governments. Because unlike the real world, we have in the CoC world demons that can be fought by military and paramilitary means.  We have an evil that is tangible and incarnated and can be opposed by force and violence.  And so Lovecraft's nightmare world, and this is deliberate, is one where might makes right could be justified.  This isn't because Lovecraft for all his many faults was a fascist - he's literally writing out his own nightmares as his world view crumbles around him - but I think there is an irony here that the Lovecraftian world by necessity requires at the least a sort of species-centric fascism.  It is humanity versus the universe because the universe and its gods are blind, twisted, and evil.</blockquote>

Verification