Lately I have been watching a friend play BioShock Infinite, something to which I paid little attention at the time of its release. At first the setting and the story were attracting me, as they pertain to my field of interest… but later in the story, after acquainting us with an archetypal capitalist, I noticed that the story was getting a little ‘darker’—in a familiar way—and it soon devolved into what I feared: another subplot about how much revolution sucks.
I’ve seen it already in The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles and Metro 2033, so I know how it goes: first the writers lure you in with a display of the prerevolutionary situation, and at first they portray the revolutionaries positively, but as the climax approaches the revolutionaries go around suddenly committing atrocities without any clear rhyme or reason, nothing can be done to prevent it, ordinary people hate it (so the revolutionaries abuse them too), and the lesson is that revolution is no better than the prerevolutionary situation.
Why do revolutionaries go through the trouble of making revolution? Not because the material conditions (whatever those are) made revolution inevitable, no. It’s because revolutionaries are stupid and unreasonable. Simple as that. That’s probably also why they commit atrocities, and also why they can’t figure out how to keep their supporters without resorting to coercion or violence.
The message, it seems, is an advertisement for conservatism: ‘Yes, we’ll admit that things may be awful now, but no matter how awful they may be, anything else would be worse, so just shut up and do nothing.’ They don’t state it outright—possibly because of how embarrassing it would look—but that is the only conclusion that I can draw. (Otherwise, the only alternatives are either that the writers wanted to subject innocent people to their angsty, immature whining, or they simply wanted to waste their time, both of which would be bafflingly unwise of them.)
Is there anything inaccurate about my observation? Because otherwise, I don’t know why these presumed professionals would suddenly subject us to this lazy and shallow writing.
These revolutionary type storylines are definitely written like that on purpose. I'm noticing more and more that the "villain" of a story often starts out quite relatable, they want something that most of us want or at least understand, they want a more equitable and humane society in many ways. And then all of a sudden, for no reason at all in terms of the story narrative, they do something violent, and then they're definitely the "bad guy" cause they did violence. Often the "good guy" even says that they agree with the "bad guy" in principal, but if only they just went about it in a different way - namely non-violent reform, asking the government nicely, etc.
This is just another way in which the cultural hegemony of capitalism reinforces the perception that there is no alternative, and if you want to improve things you must work within the bounds of the system, lest you realize that it's the system itself which is the problem.