If the new punk rock is to be politically correct, then it's not punk rock. The woke activist invasion of popular media since 2015 continues to ignore the reality that they are not "rebels", they are villains, and their delusions are becoming more embarrassing for them with each passing year.
Woke tropes have become poison for any brand seeking a wider audience or greater profits, to the point that activist media projects must now be funded by governments and NGOs through DEI initiatives just to pay developer salaries. The goal? To saturate the market with multicultural ideology and LGBT propaganda until the public was forced to accept it and consume it as "normal." The agenda has failed.
Every new woke product seems to bomb harder than the last these days and that's a good sign for the future. Video game players, a market which now dwarfs movies and TV streaming, are rejecting woke material en masse. Case in point: Dustborn.
The aggressively advertised game features a cast of queer activist "punk rock" characters that set out on a road trip across an America controlled by "conservative oppressors" that are really uncool. Set in North America in 2030, The American Republic is under the iron fist of "Justice" and The Puritans, a fascist police force presided over by President Samuel Ward. California has gained independence and is now Pacifica, a corporatocracy ruled by the wealthy few. Texas has seceded, rebranding itself as the libertarian Columbia.
Hilariously, players fight the fascist government by using the "power of words" to gain allies and divide their enemies. Characters can also build up their "trigger meter" to really punch the patriarchy.
As the developer, Red Thread Games, notes:
"Dustborn's story is a story about being different, about being an outcast and outsider, about having to hide who and what you are from the authorities, from society — even from your family...
Last but certainly not least, it’s a story about the power of disinformation, propaganda, and language, and about how powerful words can alter our perception of reality, hack minds, and change the world..."
Dustborn embraces the the leftist ideological fallacy that words are magical weapons that need to be controlled and policed at all times by the woke devout; the only people apparently enlightened enough to dictate language. The game was released this week to the deafening sound of crickets. On gaming service Steam, the project garnered a maximum of 83 players on launch day. A total flop of epic proportions.
One might find it ironic that a game about rebel queers fighting the government was actually co-funded by government through the Creative Europe Programme of the European Union (at least $168,000). ESG strikes again.
The notion that popular games dealing with America need to be adjusted for "modern audiences" and the cast needs forced diversity to be "authentic" is based on a popular leftist fallacy that all of America is the same as or should be the same as New York and LA.
The collapse of Dustborn comes not long after the uproar over the impending release of Ubisoft's 'Assassin's Creed: Shadows', another highly marketed woke game set in feudal Japan. Leftist developers claim that the game is based on "true historical figures", yet the primary protagonist is a gay black samurai (there was never a black samurai in feudal Japan, let alone a gay black samurai. The idea is based on faulty evidence provided by a fraudulent historian who worked with Ubisoft and who is now under investigation by the Japanese government). The game is expected to suffer dismal sales upon its launch in November.
Public support for woke media is dead.