But The New Colossus is more an exercise in deconstructing than celebrating the character, tracing his stoical demeanour to a history of paternal abuse, and lingering on the links between his disdain for bolsheviks and pacifists and National Socialism's love of martial supermen. To place a man like BJ at the centre of such a shifty, incendiary fiction, a fiction that regards the centrality of burly white dudes with considerable rancour, may seem at best a missed opportunity and at worst, deeply perverse. It offers up a world of sly or stagey asides on recent political upheavals, a world in which dear old Blazko often seems a stranger - the character is, of course, literally a man out of time, having spent a decade in a coma during The New Order.īuried in one chapter you'll discover a Baltimore Sun excerpt from the 1920s that has been doing the rounds on Twitter lately, care of Trump's opponents: as it savagely concludes, "on some great and glorious day the plain folks of the land will reach their heart's desire at last, and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron." While roaming the tunnels beneath Roswell, you might overhear a chat between stormtroopers which echoes the well-known online gag about over-sensitive right-wing punditry: "so much for the tolerant Left". Wolfenstein’s social commentary is pervasive, extending from bonkers plot points such as the concluding talk show scene to the nooks and crannies of the levels and incidental writing. With spoilers right up to the final moments, let’s look at how all that holds together. Rather, the game's achievement is to show how BJ's story of white heroism risks echoing that chauvinism, and how it and toxic social archetypes at large may become instruments of resistance. Ultimately, however, The New Colossus offers no straightforward rejection of the bigotry Trump and his followers have tacitly and not-so-tacitly endorsed. MachineGames has downplayed these parallels in conversation, but Bethesda’s marketing teams have latched onto them rather opportunistically, going so far as to parody Trump’s infamous #MakeAmericaGreatAgain slogan on social media and subtweet his defence of rightwing marchers following the murder of Heather Heyer. Many of the allusions are very timely, for all the retro silliness of Wolfenstein’s Nazis - it’s hard not to draw a line between in-game propaganda about the “cancerous” press and Donald Trump’s frequent denunciations of the US media, for example. At first glance, it has a lot to say in spite of BJ Blazkowicz rather than through him, its levels and intermissions thick with references to feminist activism and race rights movements that risk being swallowed up in the bloodshed. Wolfenstein II: The New Colossus is a shooter that often feels at odds with its own protagonist, the worn-out vanilla action hero who is somehow the heart of a neurodiverse, multi-ethnic cast of socialist firebrands, civil rights campaigners, pacifists, lapsed jazz maestros and rabid UFO chasers.
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