Bioshock 2 is incredible don't @ me (Patreon)

I’ve seen the 2015 horror film The Boy more times than I am proud of. I really love that movie. Everything about it is insanely funny to me. If you aren’t familiar, The Boy is about a woman who has to come take care of the son of an old rich couple who live in a mansion in the english countryside (nonspecific). It turns out the son is a doll, and she starts to think the doll is haunted by the ghost of the actual son who supposedly died, but no, the actual son is living in the walls. I haven’t given a spoiler warning for that for a couple of reasons. The first is that I clocked pretty much from the trailer that the boy was living in the walls. It is essentially the premise of the film. The second reason is that the way I enjoy this movie is not as a thrilling scary film, as a masterful execution of the genre of horror, but as a hysterical fucking wild ride. Like guys… the boy is living in the walls. What?

This fact, or rather knowing this fact, makes parts of the film that are supposed to subtly foreshadow the big twist absolutely god damn incredible. There is a scene where the father takes the new nanny outside away from the house and says “he is very much still with us. Do you understand?” and I’m just here wetting myself screaming at the TV because he could have told her “hey just so we’re 100% clear there is a boy living in the walls” and he doesn’t and… what the shit?
Even better than that though, this movie, written by an american, with an american lead and filmed in Canada, has these incredibly flimsy characters - the creepy old couple - who, if you were going along with the authorial intent, have no sensible motivations whatsoever. They hire a nanny to take care of their son who is living in the walls, but don’t actually tell her that he’s living in the walls, and then they leave forever. Who the heck does that? Well, if you’re enjoying this movie the way I enjoy this movie, these characters are actually incredibly well written. They live in the countryside in a big mansion, they can afford a nanny despite neither of them having jobs and their creepy wall-son is called Brahms. They’re Tories.

It makes total sense, and the screenwriter/director of The Boy, trying to tap into a relatable but ultimately really silly fear everyone has at some point about someone living secretly in the same place as them tapped into a much richer seam that has been exploited time and time again for excellent horror stories: class warfare. Except, this being The Boy, that doesn’t really go anywhere, those characters are just basically the worst.

It’s a pretty well established thing to enjoy things that just basically suck, and frankly I’ve been a bit down in the dumps lately, so I wanted to just roll around in the trash a bit. That’s why I’m making a video about Bioshock 2. If you came here to finally have your long-held belief that Bioshock 2 is secretly good and everyone else is wrong… well you stopped watching already. This video is about trash, and how great trash is, and how Bioshock 2 is trash, and how great that is.

Look, if you couldn’t tell already, this video is going to be going deep into the

A G G R E S S I V E     R E A D I N G     Z O N E 

so buckle in.

Come roll around in the trash with me. There are a few types of trash media, and you have to appreciate them in different ways. There's incompetent trash, incoherent trash, trash where despite the best efforts and technical competence of everyone involved, something just ain't right. There's also something I'd call - since we're getting into the taxonomies of trash here - wildcard trash. Here, the creative decisions made break the rules of either conventional storytelling or the pre-established world so much that the audience is basically just along for the ride. Anything can happen.

For example, in the last season of House of Cards, first female President, Claire Hale fires her whole cabinet and replaces them with women, justifies a previous abortion in a national address, carries a baby to term and murders someone in the oval office. That fucking owns. This last season gives no fucks, is more or less fanfiction of republicans’ worst fears of a Hillary presidency and at the same time is like some sort of darkest timeline Jacinda Arden.

People already talk about things “jumping the shark” but wildcard trash is what something becomes when it jumps the shark. All safety and rules are out the window. Also, with lots of things, you shouldn't point to one moment when it turned from good to trash. Things are usually wildcard trash for a while before they “jump the shark” and lose a lot of their audience.

Okay, so this begs the question right? What kind of trash is Bioshock 2? Well it's certainly incompetent. The dialogue is bad, the characters are bad, the storytelling is bad and the basic premise is just… awful. It goes beyond incompetent though, it fails across too many dimensions - it's incoherent trash.

Bioshock 2 is about a Big Daddy called Delta trying to get back to his assigned Little Sister, Eleanor. It's set after the collapse of Rapture and murder of Andrew Ryan, and a new faction now rules Rapture - the tankies! Okay, no, they're meant to be… collectivists? They want to “end the self” which like, even if we put a pin in the fact that that isn't what collectivists want, you'd think their plan would be to create a hive mind right?

Wrong.

They want to take the memories of everyone in the community and put them into Eleanor so she can be the ultimate leader… or maybe so she can live on with them inside her… or… are you starting to get why I'm classifying this as incoherent trash?

It heavily borrows from the aesthetics of 1984, but the crucial thing that makes 1984 so scary is that Big Brother is powerful and everywhere and backed by loads of people and Dr. Lamb in Bioshock 2 is just kind of… some lady? She's just some lady. She wasn't even in the first game… and Rapture is in ruins. Everything's fucking wrecked. But somehow her supporters have made bland grey uniforms to show they're collectivists because… communism?

Then there's the actual level design. For Bioshock 2, the dude who created the most fun level of the first game was made creative director and honestly it really shows. The gameplay is more fun. It just is. It rocks.

But the main story of the game gets you to fight to the top of a level and then decide whether the person there should be spared or murdered with a giant drill… I own a drill. I have killed no people. According to Bioshock 2, I am a moral superhuman. I am ethically transcendent.

The politics of this game are so fucked because it exists only as a response to Bioshock 1, it only works as a “right but also the left is bad. Also, what about Communism”. It feels like forced negativity - making a strawman instead of a believable enemy. On top of that though, Bioshock 2 takes the position that morality is an absolute system of rules. The game had multiple endings depending on your actions in which Eleanor learns to either be a good person or an evil bad murderer. So the game simultaneously makes the worst possible “both sides" argument and claims to be a moral authority. That's what people in the middle of the spectrum who are happy with the status quo are like all the time. This game is the perfect storm of not understanding politics, both-sides-ism and just plain old terrible writing, that makes it centrist liberalism personified.

There's a problem with Bioshock 1, and it's that it tries to make objectivism absurd to take it down, which is redundant. You don't need to make libertarians look ridiculous. Libertarians already do that better than you ever possibly could.

In that way (here's the aggressive reading) Bioshock 2 isn't a bad game critiquing collectivism; it's an amazing game critiquing liberal critiques of collectivism. Bioshock 2 is incredible, don't @ me.

What separates an aggressive reading from a hot take is value. Ayn Rand, read by a leftist, is satire of Ayn Rand's beliefs. Atlas shrugs opens with two wealthy 11 year olds questioning whether it's a good idea to help people or not.

The community of leftist content creators can sometimes be just like the community of fans of terrible movies. We get together with people we agree with to laugh at something wrong. Paul Joseph Watson is to political discourse as Neil Breen is to cinema. Charlie Kirk is the Tommy Wiseau of understanding debate.

Stefan Molyneaux is the Godfrey Ho of racist hot takes. He has hundreds of hours of content, he's only known to people far down the rabbit hole and, well everything he makes is incomprehensible gibberish.

I said earlier, I've been feeling a bit crap recently, and when I do I like to roll around in the trash a bit. 

In lieu of good movies to watch I'll enjoy bad ones. If I don't feel up to watching something complex and good, I’ll happily laugh at a shitty ninja film. Under an oppressive environment of fascist politics I’ll enjoy laughing at conservative bullshit if I can. It’s a depressive behaviour for me.

Look - does reading Ben Shapiro’s shitty, shitty, awful, unintentionally homoerotic, absurdly racist, shitty novel, make me happy? Yes. But does it make me happy in the long term? Yes, it’s really bad. There’s a plot where a “race hustler” orchestrates a kid getting shot by a cop so he can gain political leverage. Why do people take this guy seriously?

Still though, we have to make positive, good content about things we like, because we can’t just roll around in the trash forever. 

Youtube can be a fertile climate for forced negativity - there are channels called like “I hate everything”. Shit. This isn’t meant as an attack on the actual channel “I Hate Everything”, I just tried to come up with a generic forced-negativity channel name and that’s literally the best thing I could come up with.
Listen: On this channel, I don’t want to do debunking or reactionary videos about people I don’t like. I’m happy to confront ideas, but most of all I’d just like to talk about things I like, even if what I like about something is that it’s really, really, really bad. I hope that makes sense...