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this post was submitted on 05 Oct 2024
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Political Weirdos
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I remember when FEMA-as-villain was a thing in the X-Files. Wild that it’s a conspiracy that survived so long.
And Deus Ex.
It features heavily in the DX franchise because ... well DX was written in Texas in the mid to late 90s, around the same time Alex Jones had a public access TV channel.
They quite literally could have just worked in half the conspiracies he mentioned, and that would have been about 80% of the more fantastical stuff.
I'd say they did a compelling job of weaving in batshit conspiracy stuff (it does make for dramatic storytelling, wild enemy types and locations) with ... fairly prescient actual stuff around the unchecked progression of capitalism and technology.
I can't believe I am saying this, but compared to a whole lot of modern media franchises, they actually did a lot of continuity work to make the FEMA thing make sense in HR as a plausible precursor to how much more widespread it was in the original.
I don't think it really features in IW at all, as by that point the US government doesn't... really exist, almost every where that still has a functional technological society is managed by a mixture of UN/WTO authorities and gigantic megacorporations.
Also I guess worth mentioning: DX accidentally contributed to conspiracy culture even further by 'predicting' 9/11.
When playtesting Liberty Island, enough people noticed that they'd cheaped out on the background worldbox/skybox by mirroring it, not including the Twin Towers, that they wrote it in a minor lore blurb that they'd been destroyed by terrorists in the early 21st century.
Game is set in 2052... but came out basically a few months to a year (depending on your region) before ... 9/11 actually happened.
And there had been prior terrorist attacks or attempts on the WTC involving bombs in vans and such. So if you’re writing a fictional future dystopia, it’s not an entirely unreasonable speculation.
If you actually look at what the paranoid/conspiracy minded R's believe, it's basically the x-files.
Like, seriously, some lazy but effective propaganda machine has taken episode after episode of the xfiles and made it a core belief of the right.
... I wonder if Rupert Murdoch... Nah..
Re FEMA. I was a young teen in the early www era. Alex Jones was a nobody, but he was all aboard the FEMA train. As were a number of extremist rw sites that, unfortunately, I ended up following.
That was about 35 years ago.
It's amazing what you can convince people of.