The collapse of American soft power

American soft power was that the whole world watched movies made in Hollywood and played video games made in San Francisco.

Both of those cities are now turning into ghost towns.

My real-life experience is that the normies are watching made-in-Asia movies on streaming services that have been subbed or dubbed into English, among them the infamous Korean soap operas, and the gamers are playing very old Western video games, such as the earlier Warcraft releases, and new made-in-Asia video games such as Black Myth: Wukong, Marvel Rivals, Stellar Blade, and Palworld.

The problem is that everything made in America has to be made for “the modern audience”.

And it seems that “the modern audience” does not watch movies, play video games, visit wilderness areas or parks, marry, or have children. Only “the chuds” do any of that stuff.

“The modern audience” accuses the right of being incels living in their mother’s basements, but this seems to be largely a projection, in that surveys asking about self-reported mental health, happiness, and so on indicate substantially higher rates of self-reported psychiatric illness and social isolation on the left than on the right.

One irritation about video games written for “the modern audience” is that they ram political lectures down the gamer’s throat. But even if they do not ram political lectures down the gamer’s throat, they are written as if the player had never held a video game controller in his hands before; they frog-march the player through the game and its gameplay, assuming that he is incapable of exploring the game and discovering gameplay for himself — revealing that “the modern audience” have never held a video game controller in their hands before, and is either unable or unwilling to explore the game to discover gameplay for themselves. “The modern audience” is just not going to buy a video game.

Similarly, any interaction with environmentalists reveals that they have never had any interaction with the world outside the centers of the giant megalopolises — they have no experience of the natural world they are supposedly so concerned with preserving, just as the multiculturalists have no awareness of or comprehension of any culture beyond the urban globohomo monoculture.

Hollyweird and Western Gaming are making war on their audience, and they are losing the war. Hollyweird and triple-A games tell us that beauty standards need to evolve, which is like saying that gravity needs to be more inclusive. The ladies telling us that beauty standards need to evolve also have a problem with gravity.

Even when a video game written for “the modern audience” is not explicitly lecturing you, it is implicitly lecturing you, in that the villain never has any admirable attributes. The good guys are deconstructing the difference between good and evil, even though the people writing the game intend you to like them, and the villain has only unlikable and despicable characteristics.

The villains are little people, having no greatness or virtue in them, and the heroes are contemptible people, denying the difference between good and evil.

Even if the storyline is not trying to pown Donald Trump and Elon Musk, it is still driven more by a desire to pown Donald Trump and Elon Musk than by narrative, story, the hero’s journey, drama, and character. Indeed, protagonists written for “the modern audience” do not actually have any character. They have identities, not personalities. The heroes lack heroism; the villains lack greatness. It is all a metaphor for slavery, racism, or something — not for people. Because Trump is larger than life, anyone in the game we are supposed to like or admire must be smaller than life.

The mechanics of the video game reveal that it is written by and for people who do not play video games, and the story in the video game reveals it is written by and for people who do not have a real life either. The movies and the games are written by and for nonplayer characters, by and for people who do not really have friends or spouses, do not have children, who have lost contact with their parents and siblings, and who have nothing in their lives that they actually care about. (Other than sexism, racism, transphobia, and Orange Man Bad.) The modern audience consists of social justice warriors complaining about patriarchy because they have no patriarch in their lives, and of environmentalists who have never climbed a mountain, swum over a coral reef, or walked a forest trail.

If one is going to write characters based on oneself and the people around one, “write what you know”, one needs to be an interesting person with an interesting life. These are boring people whom no one likes.

Western games are not in the business of giving players what they want. They are in the business of lecturing players on what they ought to want.

Black Myth: Wukong is the world thinking that Chinese mythology is cool, which gives China soft power. A transsexual Sesame Street puppet is not American soft power.

For America to have soft power, it needs to make games and movies about Odysseus, the Iliad, and the trials of Hercules, which respect and celebrate the original IPs in all their cheerful sexism and racism, in that they are set in a world and a culture that are not the universal modern globohomo urban monoculture, instead of reimagining and reconstructing them as vehicles for the universal modern globohomo urban monoculture.

Even if games for “the modern audience” are not overtly forcing political lectures down our throats, they are incapable of imagining that a world different from that experienced by someone living in social isolation in New York City could exist or ever did exist. The trouble with Christopher Nolan’s “The Odyssey” is that it is not really set in Heroic Age Greece, not really set in Greece during the collapse of Bronze Age civilization. Its characters, dramas, and events are all about New York urbanites inexplicably and arbitrarily dressed in poorly made Greek cosplay costumes. Nolan’s Helen of Troy is not the face that launched a thousand ships. She is a New York Human Resources Karen having a messy divorce.

Homer’s Odyssey is set in the late Bronze Age, as the Bronze Age tore itself apart to give birth to the Iron Age. Homer lived in the early Iron Age, and wrote of the dying of the Bronze Age. Nolan’s Odyssey is New York City having a cosplay event.

It is all “the modern audience” writing about themselves, when not even “the modern audience” is interested in “the modern audience”. They are boring people on antidepressants writing about the lives, personalities, culture, and activities of boring people on antidepressants. Homer’s Helen of Troy was the face that launched a thousand ships. Nolan’s Helen of Troy is a self-insert of a fat New Yorker divorcee on antidepressants whom no one cares about.