not to be gay or anything but what if you took me to the fair and we held hands they entire time and we shared a cotton candy and we made each other laugh and smile and you won me a stuffed animal and you wrapped your arms around me when it got cold and when we went on the ferris wheel we kissed when we got to the top and fell in love all over again,, and we were both girls.
an computer RPG where you play a villain on the path to reform: one of your most important stat is “compassion” and many of the kinder dialog options and locked behind a compassion skill check
not sure how ironic this concept is but i absolutely love when games make the dialogue mechanics themselves reinforce characterization. samurai zero does this really neat thing where, for a lot of dialogue choices, the initial option(s) are all rude or threatening. you have to wait a few seconds before the polite/peaceful/kind options appear. it communicates the idea of “this character is inclined towards violence, but is capable of overcoming those impulses” so much better than if all the options were made available at the same time
what really gets me about the argument that “americans are so selfish they can’t even care about others enough to stop the virus” is that we fucking did. the vast majority of americans, at great personal and financial cost to ourselves, went inside and distanced and took precautions and isolated and changed our lives to slow the spread and keep our loved ones and strangers safe. we did that for months, even when the government offered piss poor assistance and unemployment skyrocketed and food bank lines lengthened and the death counts climbed and parents with young children reached a breaking point, we still did it. the polling still shows that the vast majority of americans are more worried about easing restrictions too soon even if it hurts the economy. americans give a shit. we care. we made the sacrifices to give our government the time to figure out and implement a plan — to find a way to keep us safe and as healthy as possible and to use the power of the federal government to protect small businesses and feed our children and put a roof over our heads and create education campaigns to get people to socially distance and wear a mask for fucks sake. we did that, and at the end of months of sacrifice they decided that it wasn’t worth the trouble and have left us at the whims of our governors and local officials, left us at the mercy of our employers, left us to die.
americans aren’t selfish — our minority-rule government is — and it’s left us to die.
