Navigating Fantasy Franchises

Join Malcolm Collins as he sits down with a special guest, Arch from the popular Arch Warhammer and Arch Cast YouTube channels. Malcolm and Arch explore the rise of the New Right, the evolution from Warhammer enthusiast to conservative commentator, and the current state of the gaming and media industries. They delve into the challenges and opportunities in the gaming world, discussing how small studios and AI could reshape the landscape. The conversation also touches on the pitfalls of mainstream media, the enduring appeal of Warhammer lore, and the future of content creation in an increasingly digital age. If you're a fan of gaming, Warhammer, or curious about cultural dynamics, this is an episode you won't want to miss. Arch: [00:00:00] Hello, this is malcolm collins.

I'm excited to have a special guest here today This, out of all of our special guests, is probably the YouTuber who I watched most before this. But it's funny, it's that the thing I knew him most for was Warhammer content, because people who know me know I love lore. If anything with a ton of lore, I love, but now he is known as a conservative, Politics commentator, so he's got his arch warhammer channel, which is just arch and then the arch cast which is his more Politics channel very similar takes to us.

I'd say very sort of New right this new right movement that we we have an episode on this where we're like It's really weird that like the online right today is descended from like the online atheist movement of like ages ago I was like, how did that end up happening? But what I wanted to talk with you about today was because, you know, you're such an expert in obviously like popular media.

I guess I'd call it like low media, the type of media I prefer video games, [00:01:00] Warhammer, Star Wars, all of that. And so I wanted to focus this conversation on two particular questions. One is, is that we have been fighting against the sort of like mind virus that's been controlling our society for a while now.

And finally, with this vibe shift over these past few months, it feels like the tide has finally, not the tide, the enemy troops have broken rank. And, and we can attempt to do something now, right? But the question is, is what does that look like? Like, what does taking advantage of this look like? And then the second question I want to focus on in this podcast is we are increasingly seeing that despite whether it is fantasy games or video games or media, the demand for it has never been higher and yet the mainstream companies don't seem to be able to produce something that that demand wants anymore.

There's obviously a ton of opportunity that's opened by this. How do we take advantage of this? [00:02:00] What does taking advantage of this look like? And where do you see the future of the media space going? So take the stage.

Okay. It's quite a lot to unpack there, isn't there? What does winning look like? I suppose is Is the first question because I don't think we know just yet.

I don't think anyone quite knows. Great question. What does winning look like? Like, in your head, like, how would you answer that? That's like, that's

a great f*****g question.

Well, that's the thing, isn't it? Because I, I have been seeing a little bit recently as well that there have been a I don't know about resurgent, but more like a creation of a new group of people who are now moving into this space.

As our side is becoming more popular, we are going to see a lot more people join our quote unquote side in essence. Like Zuck. Did you see that? Yes. Yes, exactly. Zuckerberg getting rid of fact checkers, which is an obvious attempt to kiss the ring of Donald Trump. In essence,

you're, you're [00:03:00] already moved the fact checking team that's what's left of them from California to Texas.

To try to make them sane again. Anyway, continue.

Yeah, absolutely. And this is of course, then the normal thing. Whenever a political movement gets into power, then everyone else will begin to move up to join around it for advantage. This is why Disney and all of the entertainment industry joined around the left, because they saw advantage in doing so, rather than an ideological one.

And then of course, a lot of people were hired into that company to be like, okay we need you to explain to us why it's a good thing to be progressive. You're going to be in the IHR department. You're going to hire people like you and we'll be popular. Didn't work out so much. So a lot of the, how do we continue from here is going to be studying what the left did wrong and attempting to avoid that whenever possible because we are not trying to simply recreate the left's rise to power, which was meteoric and then plungingly meteoric in the opposite direction soon thereafter.[00:04:00]

I love that you pointed that out because it's one of the things I've heard pointed out that I really wrap my brain around is that the time period of American history, while we lived through it, what we call the urban monoculture or the far left, the time period where it was a dominant culture in the world, it's probably the shortest any civilization has ever held power, it held power for like yeah, 20 years before dying.

Like it's wild that that happened. And I think that one of the things you point out and it's one of the things that I think that we all need to be very careful about is us repeating the mistakes that they made. Now that we have more power and a lot of people, you know, like James Lindsay has been calling out like the woke, right?

And stuff like that. And I think some people bristle at this, but I think he's very smart to be doing this because The biggest mistake that we can make is attempt to do what they did to us, which is impose our cultural values on people who don't want those cultural values. If we can just enforce a system of [00:05:00] cultural freedom I think that to me, that's winning enough because it might be stable, but thoughts.

Yeah, no, absolutely. I myself have been kind of mulling this over, the idea of the tyranny of neutrality, to enforce this upon everyone, to bring back the idea, if you're at a gaming table or a comics convention, make discussion of politics and religion taboo again, and allow these to be in specialized spaces where people want to bring them up.

Allow fantasy to become an escapist hobby.

Yeah. Well, and there's so much you can do with fantasy. So one of the things that I've been working on recently, some people know this, I've been funding the development of a game. And when we were like deciding on game worlds what we've ended up focusing on is a post apocalyptic LLM based world where we're sort of like automating everyone, but we were looking at doing an Izakaya world.

And one of the Izakaya things I was looking at doing is, oh my God, can we have like a historic sibling? Hold on, you mean Izakaya? Hold on. Hi, sorry, [00:06:00] they go all in on their historical tropes. Like, can I have like a native American civilization? That's like the most extra like as techie thing ever. Can I have like Middle Eastern and Magi floating on magic carpets?

And I was like, it was genies and stuff. And I'm like, it's so wild that we lost this world of being able to like lean in to ethnic and religious tropes, even though Like the Wokies might have a problem with like a Magi on a magic carpet, like dressed up like a, but I don't think Middle Easterners would, they'd find that dope.

Like, so yeah, the, the new worlds that are accessible to us is really exciting, but then how do we not? overplay those world's hands. And I guess people would be like, Oh, well look at Warhammer. This is an example of overplaying into rightist fantasies. And yet even there, you know, we seem to be, what are your thoughts on that?

Well, all entertainment goes in [00:07:00] ways. Right, so things will be popular and then things will, you know, in popularity again. We had an era of a lot of very high flying, very positive heroes. Like the, you know, the original Soup man, for example, the Boy Scout. And we grew tired of that after a while. And then we started looking for darker soup man, evil soup man.

And now we've been doing that for so long that it's two has become boring and we are looking back to Bright Soup man again. A well-functioning entertainment ecosystem in one is one in which you have. All of these things. You don't have one of them to an exclusive extent. You have opportunities to play 40 K.

You can play Lord of the Rings. You can watch Superman. You can pick and choose whatever you want. The problem with having the overarching political narrative that we've had with the left was that it needed to dominate everything. 40 K needed to become more progressive. Superman needs to be more progressive.

You've got to get rid of a truth, justice and the American way and so on. And then you just have everything be the same slop.

Oh, do you think, by the way Wizard [00:08:00] News, because I've heard some people arguing this, but the evidence doesn't seem that strong to me, do you think female custodians are out now?

I don't think so. GW barely spellchecks their own rulebooks these days. So, until they, like, make some sort of pseudo official announcement, and maybe the next codex that they only were men, always were men, I'd assume they were in. But at the same time, the female custodians were obviously a bit of a forced marketing stunt to begin with that they still have not actually produced any models for them.

So,

yeah. Well, okay, so here's a question for you to the initial questions. Do you feel like the big game studios can reverse course in time to financially save themselves? I mean, obviously Ubisoft can't, but what about the other ones?

That is a very interesting question. Now Ubisoft Tencent is smelling around them because China, of course, sees an enormous opportunity here to sweep in whilst the Western entertainment industry is weak and just take over everything.

I mean, Marvel [00:09:00] Rivals was a huge wake up call for them where they're like, hold on. We can, we can take all of this just by having women be attractive again. Well, we're going to do that. And so whether or not Western gaming industries, they don't have to just like refocus on becoming profitable. They have to do so while some of the largest corporations on earth in China are actively competing against them.

So yeah, it's going to be an uphill battle.

Malcolm Collins: I'll add, I think it's. I, I shared in the private chat of this tweet, and that this is an issue, I think largely of staffing. And I think that one thing that means that maybe this war can be won is AI, that basically teams can be made very, very lean, very aligned and less bloated.

Because when it comes to executives who say they feel pressure from stakeholders to engage on issues like Yeah, I want

Arch: to pull up that graph actually. That was really fascinating to me because I had bought into this narrative that this was all like downstream of [00:10:00] BlackRock and the funders.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah, and this not about funding.

This is about employees at these major companies being like, we need to have LGBTQ plus rights highlighted here. We need to talk about climate change. We need to talk about gender equality. And I think once we see developer teams get really small, game studios get super small and boutique and super powered by AI, we will be less likely to be caught up in culture war issues.

But I'm curious to see. To, to hear what your thoughts are on that. Like, I want to make

Arch: clear the poll that you're talking about. So there was a poll done recently what it showed was that if you're looking at like, where are CEOs feeling pressure to make things woke?

It is predominantly. from employees and not shareholders. So if you look at something like reproductive rights, 91 percent of the pressure came from employees, 15 percent they felt pressure from stakeholders, LGBTQ rights, [00:11:00] 92 percent from employees, 10 percent from stakeholders. This is gender equality, 90 percent from employees, 10 percent from stakeholders.

This is predominantly something that is coming inside the house,

Malcolm Collins: The key to fighting woke ism is to fight the rare, loud threatening and manipulative woke individuals. Specifically individuals within companies. Or to make CEO's are power players and not afraid of these individuals anymore. .

It is fortunately not that we need to defeat black rock or something like that.

Not that I wouldn't love to defeat BlackRock. It's just a much harder task.

Then defeating Sharon.

which implies to me that this is predominantly a governance question as well. The larger and more sprawling a studio is, the more it is likely to get caught up in culture wars or ruined by cultural trends. The smaller a team is, the more they can.

Autistically focus on whatever the subject of the game is like, whatever makes it cool, like the [00:12:00] lore and the design and the changes in, in, in, in kind of, of really cool gameplay. Anyway, do you think that these studios can get small enough or that enough small boutique studios can sort of take over the market to make things cool again?

Arch: Potentially we have seen a rise in indie developers for quite some time now. And I mean, the size of the studios is absolutely a thing. Because a lot of these companies will basically, well, they'll hire people on the assumption that they know what they're doing. So if you hire a marketing executive, you presume that he knows about marketing and what the market wants.

Often they don't. And then you also have More often than not. Exactly. That, that hires based on politics. So if you've got one dude, who's like, okay, I'm going to get the best person for the job. And then you've got another, I'm going to hire the person I like, the person who aligns with me. And then they get more power.

Then they hire the next guy who thinks like them and who is like them. And then you have bloat where you've also got this was the thing it's creative assembly, which [00:13:00] has like 900 employees now. Jesus. They were hiring people because people in the company were like, you got to get a job here. The benefits are incredible.

And they were just making up positions.

Oh my God. And this brings me to something that we often say is the way companies went woke is they were at first like, Oh, we've got to hire more diverse people. Okay. We need to hire somebody who's incompetent, but like fit some diversity metrics. Where can we stick them where they won't do any harm?

HR. HR doesn't actually build anything. HR doesn't actually do anything. And they conveniently forgot that HR does the hiring. Oh! And that's what led to what you're talking about, I think.

Exactly. Like, I mean, it's, it became the world's largest market. Like, entertainment is enormous. And so much like government it becomes a place where everyone needs to find a position for their friends and family and cousins and everybody else they know.

If it

Malcolm Collins: really is that bad, it's no wonder that things got as crazy as they did. I, I, I would be [00:14:00] shocked if they didn't just when any organization gets that big, it's going to happen.

Arch: Do you think these companies can, like, do you think it's only going to be small companies that take over or do you think that there's any hope for, or if you were going to give advice for the large companies out there, like how do they fix this?

Well, again, that's the problem, because you've got the reverse issue with China, which also have enormous companies, but they are aligned in the opposite direction politically. Like, China is no less censorious than the West, by any stretch of the imagination. But they're, they're leaning in an opposite direction to them.

And they are more of a collectivist grouping. So they have an easier time maintaining these large functional hierarchies without being ruined. And since they are now also in a position where they are producing what people actually want to buy, they are going to have a very large advantage. But AI, as you mentioned is an excellent potential leveler.

I mean, we're already point now where we can have AI make art and programming. So. What is the reason why we can't have one guy essentially do the work of 10 making art, [00:15:00] making programs, making design documents, et cetera. Like that is a competitive advantage. The West can take advantage of.

As somebody who's designing a game right now, that's using, you know, AI, LLM based AI, because for a long time, we said video games had AI.

So I find it very weird. I mean, like, no, like actual AI in games, which is to say a lot of the quote unquote programming that I am doing. Is writing story or writing characters, which is something that like anyone can do. And I'm even using AI to help with this, the degree to which games of the future. And I mean, near future, I mean like next year or the year after that are going to be like one guy writing to an AI.

I want a game that does X. How do I do that? And who can win in that environment? I mean, I just don't see how companies can even begin to compete, you know? Yeah.

I mean, the, the end goal that I would like to see is the democratization of entertainment where [00:16:00] everyone can do whatever they want. Like, instead of having the Lord of the Rings trilogy, you have 5, 000 trilogies made in 5, 000 ways.

Some focus more on this thing. Some focus more on that thing. Some of them are even diverse and woke. Like you've got Black Aragon over there. Yeah. Everybody gets to make their own take on anything and everything. That's how we liberate entertainment.

Malcolm Collins: And if it's good, people play it.

Arch: Yes,

Malcolm Collins: it's now the fear

Arch: is that the companies will take monopolies here.

Like that's the danger that they are the ones with the money. So they go, okay, we're going to make an AI, but only we're going to be allowed to use it.

Yes, well, it's funny that you mentioned that. I wonder if this is going to lead to new ways that fantasy universes can explode or be used because games, you know, you know, as much as, as much as you know, I'm not a fan of where Warhammer has gone recently, what they did with their license in video games is very interesting.

They basically gave their video game license to like, Any team that wanted it which led to this extreme explosion for a period, I think they've got a little more [00:17:00] restrictive now of Warhammer based video games where and I don't know of any other brand or license that's been this loose with their license.

But it's led to a lot of really high quality content and a lot of attention that the brand wouldn't otherwise see Do you think anyone else has learned from this? Do you think they're gonna continue going in this direction?

Maybe It was a lot of exposure, which was good. It produced a lot of good stuff, which was also good.

It produced some hot garbage as well, to be fair. And now they've got more protective because one of the interesting things in like back in the day we used to have a lot of crossover stuff. Like company used to do a lot of fun things. Like you would have a Conan with Howard, the duck or whatever.

Whilst now everybody's trying to build their own walled gardens, particularly with, with streaming becoming the next big entertainment thing. Everyone wants to carve out their own market and then protect it aggressively against all competitors. So, I don't know. I, I fear the day of like this, like.[00:18:00]

Liberal interpretation of IPs is probably past at the very least unless we do some serious reworking of IP laws, but who knows

I can think of one So so with streaming I'd note I don't know if you saw this But it fell 23 percent year over year this last year in the united states, which for that's insane That's like a quarter less people, watching So the streaming wars might already be over to an extent with them eating each other But when we talk about people who have done a good job of building a universe and letting anybody build in it Scott Cawthorn.

I, I cannot sing this guy's praises enough. If people don't immediately know who that is, that's Five Nights at Freddy's guy. When people would make fan ripoffs of his game, he would go to them, he would fund them to make real games that they then could go sell. Now, of course, anybody who knows the Scott Cawthorn story, I might do a whole episode just on him.

He's been pilloried by the left because he donated to conservative politicians. He's got like seven kids. I don't know if you know this. But anyway he's been very [00:19:00] good at supporting the fan environment and the, the creator like circle environment. And it's paid off very well for him, but I haven't seen anyone else play the Scott Cawthorn game in the way that he has.

Yeah, and I think that is a good idea. You mentioned you're working on a game, I'm working on a setting myself as well. Ooh, tell me about it! Tell the fans! Very secretive at the moment, as we're very early on. But we, I am too, very much so interested in having people come in and be part of it. Like, I want to offer license to people, where it's like, okay, you wanna write a story in my setting?

That's okay. We're going to have to approve it before it becomes like official, but if it has quality standard and it's up to like, it's respectful to the setting, I would like to take that and publish it for you. Like bring in more enthusiasm.

Oh my God. Yeah. So hold on. I have a question for you. How are you, because this is the other big thing right now, if you're creating something, how are you using AI in what you're creating and, and how are you thinking about it as a creative tool?

I'm using AI to fact check [00:20:00] myself, basically. I basically ask it to find holes in what I'm writing. Cause the AI is quite good at that. Like, discovering little things. Like, cause it'll ask questions like, how does this work? And I'll be like, oh, I hadn't thought about that. Okay, I'm gonna have to write why and how that works now.

I love that. Yeah, no, I have found that even just today, I was really surprised to see this. Well, I'll write something where like, like if I was doing Warhammer, it'd be like, okay, this is how like this space Marine chapter works. And then I put it in an AI and I'm like, what other interesting things do you think this space Marine chapter would do or traditions they would have?

And, and while like 10 of its ideas might be junk, like three, I'd be like, that's.

That's the thing with AI. It's not necessarily that clever one time, but you don't need to do anything one time. You want him to make a drawing for you. Okay. Maybe nine or s**t, but you make it have produced for you a hundred drawings and 10 of them are going to be good.

Yes. Yes.

Okay. So as you move into this space, are you looking at, if you don't mind me [00:21:00] prying a little bit, is it going to be a video game? Is it going to be like a tabletop game? Is it?

Both we'll do tabletop first, simply because it's easier. So we can have a product out quicker and then we can use the eventual assets to digitalize it further down the road.

Cause this, these things do need to be digitalized in the modern age. Nobody's going to have the infrastructure of games workshop with brick and mortar stores all over the place.

I'm really glad you're doing this, by the way, because you're clearly a lore nerd. And one of the things about the video gaming hobby that I remembered growing up is if I wanted interesting and out there plots that were against the mainstream, like, not within mainstream narrative, like, Video games is where I could consume those these days.

It feels like they're pretty isolated to anime like At all, right? Like and if we saw was in tabletop and stuff like this and I know that you'll create something like this Genuinely interesting lore again. I'd be so excited

Oh, yeah, like, the the east has had a [00:22:00] almost monopoly on creative stuff for a while now because they'll do anything They'll do like okay Isekai is popular, but the main character is a vending machine.

This is a literal show, by the way. This is a literal show.

This is a thing. And, like, they let's them do crazy stuff. Like, we had this back in the day, too. There was a video game called Messiah. Where you played a baby angel who was sent to Earth to defeat Satan. Oh! And you would take over bodies!

Malcolm Collins: So I wanted this game so bad. I read about it in PC magazine, and then I saw it in stores, but I didn't have enough money to buy it back then. And then later when I wanted to buy it, there was no way to like go and find old games. This is going to be weird today for kids. But like if a game was like five years old or something, At one point in my life.

It's just nothing you could do. , you'd have to like go to stores that specialized in old video games and like they would have any random, specific game that you had missed.

Arch: Yes! Yes! Continue, [00:23:00] sorry. Like, that was just an off the wall concept. It's like, okay how do we do an action game that has nothing to do with action? Where you're basically helpless, but you gotta control people. Like,

okay.

There you go. And baby

angel taking over bodies. I, I love it. That is a really good point.

Okay, so

Well, no, I mean another thing that I think about it I was telling simone about this and it's actually really interesting and I don't think people have really internalized how big this is going to be For the future of gaming as a medium and if people don't understand why are they talking about games?

Games are a bigger like money spent medium than I think, tv and movies combined right now. And and so where gaming goes is where culture goes in the future. And it's I was thinking about oh, how do I promote? Like my game when i'm ready to launch it i'm like Oh, I just need to piss off games journalists and then reach out to people who I already know are my friends Like, you know side scrollers who's what the number one [00:24:00] gaming podcast or like grums or something like that?

I'm, like, oh, they'll all promote like if you are I think slightly Centrist these days like like just not captured by the virus And you want to create a game? There could not be a better time in history to do it right now.

Yeah, and I mean, that's the thing too it's an easy accusation to level against the the anti woke quote unquote that everyone's just really negative, that hating on everything.

It's not really true. Like, we would like to promote good things, and we do so when we can. It's just that the mainstream entertainment, which is what most people know about and talk about, Is bad and the only way to get good out of that is to criticize the bad until the company goes Okay, that's not what you want.

Let's try something else.

Yeah so i'd encourage people to get on that because I think that they'd find more promotion than they otherwise would expect At the beginning of this we we asked a question. I want you to come back to it. What does winning look like to you? [00:25:00]

Ah, yes, that's a difficult question.

I mean, I genuinely just think it will look like an increase in entertainment quality again. Honestly, a return to the, the 90s, 2000s, where we were allowed to do more stuff. It means both frankly, straight up attractive people in screenplays again, and more adventurous stories as well. Like, I would like to see Both superman and batman returned to the old school and then we can construct off that again We need to kind of reset a little bit because then you can have a batman beyond the darker batman While still also having the hero batman instead of now where every iteration of him He's just darker and angrier and more upset and depressed about things

I hear that another thing that i'd like to see in terms of a return is the While we've had a lot of good indie games come out they typically make themselves work by being very light on [00:26:00] lore.

And we haven't had great lore in a long time. I'd actually argue that maybe Five Nights at Freddy's represents somebody trying to re inject a new lore environment into gaming because people are hungry for it. Are there any games or properties that you felt recently where you're like, I've really enjoyed this lore and it's new?

Hmm, like a dense lore building setting. In gaming, I would probably reach back to Kenshi, but that's not exactly a new game either. Because mostly, honestly, I find it more in anime and manga, as you mentioned, that they have more freedom and ability to build larger, more interesting worlds. Whereas in gaming.

We're kind of stuck in a bit of a quagmire of this. The roguelite era. Yes, where you haven't been able to, like, build the large world. See then, [00:27:00] it's also a thing to remember as well that if you're going to build a large universe, it takes a very long time too. And if you're spending that time trying to get a video game off the ground, well, that's not cheap.

Like that's going to cost you tens of thousands of dollars and years and years of your life, you know? I mean, how long did it take Tolkien to create his world?

This is a really good point. Well, and, and one of the, the, the things was Tolkien's world is it has become so ubiquitous that alternate fantasy settings has struggled to get off the ground almost.

Yeah, I mean, one of the issues is that we are right now dominated by a handful of cultural entities. You've got Lord of the Rings, you've got Star Wars, you've got Disney, Marvel, DC, and these have kind of created the, the, the fantastical canon of our time. So trying to reach outside of that is very difficult because it's become the orthodoxy.

Like, It's one of the [00:28:00] reasons why I think Black Myth Wukong did very well, because people saw that for the first time and were like, I've never seen this before. A monkey with a giant staff, huh? Okay. What are, what are these weird gods that are popping up everywhere now? Where's, what's this mythology?

This is nothing like what I've seen.

Really good point. Well, and you mentioned the orthodoxy, and I'd also say here that the orthodoxy has been shifting. There's been a few properties that have had an outsized impact. Warhammer is one of them. I think that within this generation, especially among the dissident group, Warhammer's really big.

Another one that's been really, really big and we sort of use as like the, the one that our show references most is Starship Troopers. Which has had a hugely outsized impact on, like, culture and tropes and world building of our time. And I would like to see more stuff built taking ideas from these shows.

And I think when people have done riffs on these shows, people have been very excited about it. Like Helldivers, obviously, as a Starship Troopers rip off. And [00:29:00] I think you could do more interesting, Religious people in space ripoffs than Warhammer, like Space Crusades.

I mean, it itself ripped off Dune enormously, for example.

Yeah, yeah. Well, and Dune's another one that's come back now. Like, people didn't rip off Dune for a long time, and now everything's like Dune.

Yeah, so, I mean, it's, it's the old saying that creativity is a myth in essence, like new thinking. You've got to find different sources of inspiration and build upon it.

I mean, that's the reason why BlackRock started investing in 40k, because they were looking at and thinking, Could this be the next Star Wars, maybe? Let's get in there on the ground floor.

I, I, by the way, I think that we, as civilizationally, are so blessed, because it's such an unlikely timeline to be on, that somehow somebody destroyed the Star Wars brand.

Like, how did that happen?

Why is it good? I mean, it's good because it opens the door for other people, I guess, but Yeah! [00:30:00] Disney managed to destroy one of the biggest entertainment entertainment institutes ever, like they had I did a video on this a while ago where an insider was talking about how Disney had basically only got Ray left and they're asking themselves, like, how the hell did we take this setting?

And all we've got is Rey. Where's

Luke? Where's Han? Where's Chewbacca? Leia? This in like, internal memos or something, like, Rey is the one chara And they believe that's all they have left. Now, actually, they might have like, Mandalorians could still be interesting, or like, But they can't see that, because Mandalorians are fascist, right?

You know? Where Actually, that'd be a pretty good setting. I think that'd be really cool. If you did wonder in the Mandalorian Wars. Oh, did the Mandalorian Wars even happen anymore? Or was that wiped out with the new continuity?

I don't know. I mean, right now, I think the latest thing was that they were going to do a super prequel of the first Jedi, presumably rising up against the ancient Sith empires, which [00:31:00] It

Simone Collins: could

Arch: be interesting.

I

know the

lore, if I remember correctly. Yes. Right? Like I mean How do you How do you pick that up?

I'm kind of imagining almost like a Jesus story. Where like the first Jedi begins rising up against the Sith Empires, founding in essence a new religion, beginning to explore the tenets of creating a new faith.

That could work. But I guarantee you the tenants of the news faith will simply just be diversity, equity, and inclusion.

Yeah, oh yeah, and you know what I would do? If I was, if I was running the Star Wars franchise, what I would do is I would go and look to see what Star Wars fan fictions are most popular.

I would then reach out to those writers and hire them to do my show and my writing. Because you know they've become popular in an environment where they're not financially rewarded and the fans like them.

Well, one of the problem is they've also tried to destroy those, like, they had Thrawn, who was a very popular villain character, and they called him an Ahsoka, and they made him an idiot, so.[00:32:00]

Yeah, well, and also, how did they, this is, this is actually something I have a question of, because I loved Clone Wars, like, the original Clone Wars, right, like, it was great and then the guy who did Clone Wars, wasn't he the guy who did, like, one of the more recent bad things?

I, I think so, but, like, This, too, is like a a people who are established in this kind of setting kind of thing the the reason Batman show with Harlequin being a, a fat Asian psychologist, that was Bruce Timm, the creator of Harlequin, who did that to her, like Really?!

Yep, that was Bruce

Timm. Sorry, I remember correctly, Harley Quinn was created for that 80s Batman cartoon, right? Like, that epic version of her.

She was created for Batman The Animated Series by Bruce Timm.

So this, this comes to, we did an episode called the Wachowski Effect. We're, we're like, why is it that you can have a good creator who becomes terrible after they transition?

Like, I was like, you know, you get the same guy [00:33:00] who wrote like Mass Effect 2 is doing like Dragon Age Veilguard. Like, and I was like, okay, well maybe gender transition does something to your brain, but it's like, maybe it's not gender transition. Maybe it's just like the woke ideology more broadly makes you a shitty writer.

It definitely is, at least in part, because one of the things with the clone wars, because you've got the two clone wars, the first cartoon animated series, which was incredible. Then the 3D CGI one, which had its moments, but it was definitely of lower quality. But one of the things George Lucas really like imparted onto his people when he was doing that was like, watch World War II documentaries.

I want this to be a war series about war things and war and conflict and action. Whereas now, like, look at Ahsoka, look at their recent thing. Like, it doesn't have an authenticity to it anymore. Like, the only reason why Mandalorian became popular was largely because of Grogu's, like, little dumb babies.

Like, oh great, babies are cute, therefore it sells. Where as Mando's own [00:34:00] adventures, I mean, he's basically a spaghetti western character now who wanders from place to place saving people for no particular reason. Did you, by the way, actually watch Ahsoka? I did! I got through that thing. Did you watch Acolyte?

I did watch Acolyte 2.

I am so sorry! You're, you're I cannot Lost good

television.

I just watch cultural critics complain about these things. I

can't bring

myself.

No, Ahsoka was painful. Particularly considering,

Ahsoka's one character that could have been really interesting. As she was always portrayed as Fallible, you know, that she didn't quite know where she was.

That's a bit of an interesting growth story, but she, she never grew up. That's, that's the issue. Oh, that would

happen in the show, she never really, ugh.

Yeah, no, she's basically the same character, like, 17 years later, she's still this whiny brat who's looking for other people to save her and guide her along the way, like, [00:35:00] Anakin has to show up and go like, no, Ahsoka, please, you can do this, d*****s.

Yeah I have Gosh, I was just thinking it would have been interesting to do a show that followed on that character who betrayed her in Clone Wars. She's still alive, right? Because she was taken by a prisoner by the Jedi. Yeah, no, they killed her

off in Tales of the Jedi.

Oh, they did?

Yeah, they, they killed her but she, she Cause, I actually quite liked that episode where they framed Ahsoka for the bombing of the the temple.

It was

great at making

the

Jedi look evil.

I was like, oh, I totally get the

cis point

here, you know,

like

You know, cause she comes out like that you've become corrupted. And she's standing there in front of the Emperor going like the Republic is no longer what it was.

Simone Collins: Yeah.

Arch: Yes,

Simone Collins: yes, that was such a way to do the

Arch: Jedi are actually bad because the Lokes always want to do the Jedi are actually bad, but that's like a good way to do the Jedi are actually bad.

They're judgmental setting [00:36:00] their ways.

What was the other just nerding out about shows here at this point, which I like, I like. Okay. So, what, there was another setting where I was like, Oh, by the way, other brand that destroyed itself is Star Trek. Like what the heck? There's so few brands left.

I, I wonder if Warhammer can be used. Like, do they, do they catch on? Because Warhammer could be great to be used. I feel like Starship Troopers, somebody's gonna buy this and do something with it eventually.

Malcolm Collins: Shouldn't we just build new lore though? I mean, I like the earlier point you both made, which was, hey, this, this leaves room for disruption.

I think it's really sad that we've devolved into a world of cinematic universes and prequels and sequels and all of this, because I want to see. I want to see new ideas and, you know, we admire Tolkien because he created something. Now, of course, he was riffing on plenty of old themes. I'm not expecting people to create entirely new ideas and they shouldn't.

You know, let's [00:37:00] riff. I mean, wait, Malcolm and I have recently been doing episodes and having a lot of conversations about the Omegaverse, for example, which I wouldn't say is like, this is not a universe I want to dive into, but I think it's a really good example of taking dynamics and presenting them in a novel way and creating all this lore and having it be like genuinely weird and novel.

I want weird and novel. Let's talk about the pressing issues or not, but like emerging issues that are happening now. Like what is happening to our society was what is changing about the nature of humanity and what lore can we build around that that helps us think about it and wrap our minds around it.

I mean, a lot of what Tolkien helps people wrap their minds around were like the great wars for example. What can we create with lore now that helps us. through the reality we live in.

Arch: Absolutely. Like ideally we should have more new stuff as well. I think a lot of people are just like focused in on the established settings because it's, there's a degree of nostalgia there.

[00:38:00] It's comfortable. Yeah.

Malcolm Collins: And you know, it's safe. Like, you know what you're getting. And sometimes I think a lot of us now turn, especially to more passive media consumption or like when there's so much choice, We're tired. Like, we, we've spent the whole day making decisions. We're done making decisions. Just like, I want to know what I'm getting.

I want to have a good experience. I get that. It just, and I guess, yeah, there's the question of how do you break through the noise? If you have a billion tiny game studios and a billion tiny creators creating new universes, You know, how do you, how do, how do you get an audience? How do, how do people even find it?

And here's the

Arch: question. Because I actually want to look at where they've somehow made good products. Like how did it, how did Arcane happen? Oh yeah, Arcane. How did that happen? Yeah, that was surprising and unexpected. He says on how Arcane happened.

I think Arcane is an interesting example of a, a product that has just like a smattering of a little bit of [00:39:00] current year politics in it.

In that it's got a very diverse cast, all female, etc. But the quality of the writing is such that it all becomes ancillary. Like you don't care anymore. It's good enough to outweigh all of this. Cause there's also a fear of having your your gaydar, your woke girl. are overtuned to the point where you become the feminist, like you can't enjoy anything.

And Arcane was just, it was obviously a bit of a labor of love. They wanted to do this. All of the characters are well executed. They're beautifully animated. They have their own stories and histories and it makes sense. I didn't like the ending of the second season because it comes across as too much of a We need to have sacrifices that don't matter because they're all actually really alive, etc.

Well, I will say one thing that people don't know about the League of Legends lore is a lot of people view it as like slop lore that Arkane was working for. But one of my friends who I knew because I was supposed to be in his class at Stanford and I delayed for two years was Aaron Estevez. [00:40:00] And he was the creative director when they were developing most of those characters at Riot Studios.

Now people don't know what show he's a showrunner of. the original avatar of the last airbender so a lot of the lore that went into arcane was created by the guy who created the original avatar of the last airbender which is one of the only good woke properties to exist in this era

yeah like league of legends has a lot of lore there's quite a lot of dead storytelling back there

So, okay.

So I'm very excited about this idea of creators going out there and creating content. And I love to hear that you're creating something now because when I've watched other popular creators before, something I haven't seen is the creation of video games or content that aren't just like. A joke, like, okay, for example, like zero punctuation created a game, but the game was like a joke about zero punctuation, like [00:41:00] angry video game nerd created a game, but the game was a joke about like angry video game nerd.

Can we get people who have proven that they understand lore and content in a way that the public isn't? likes to also want to create games.

Well, I think it, it requires a certain drive, which I do believe is quite rare because you, there's a, there's a lot of effort placed into this, like creating a game, creating a universe, it's a lot of work.

You need to write a lot, need to think a lot. You need to have a lot of money. You need to be financially stable enough to pour thousands into this. I mean, Yeah, just, just on the idea of having the free time to do it as well. You know, if you're working a regular job and you come home late in the evening, you're then going to sit down and write for two or three hours.

It's exhausting, of course. And there's also a degree of like being scared. Like it's easy, it's safe to make a joke game because your fans will play it and they'll love it and they'll be in on the joke, but trying to [00:42:00] create something serious. You are putting a lot more of yourself out there at that point, which of course comes with the risk of failure.

It's a great point. Actually zero punctuation, I should say that while he has created a joke game in the past, right now he's creating a real game. Which actually looks pretty interesting, so we'll see if it ends up doing well. I don't know if you followed the drama with him and the like woke company he was working for like firing him and then falling apart

A little bit.

They seem to have created their own little studio now yahtzee and that crowd and they seem to be doing fine. So i'm happy for them. Yeah,

i'm excited to see that. Well Uh anything else you want to what was the other topic here? Oh, yeah What should we do now? Like if you have an audience now and you were part of this fighting against wokeism You Now that the ranks have broken, what should you be doing to capitalize on this?

Because I feel like if we don't, the pendulum's just going to swing back and hit us in the face.

Well, you need to stabilize the victory, first and foremost, because we are [00:43:00] getting a little ahead of ourselves. Like, the left are still the ones in possession of the levers of power in governance and in the industries.

And so it's all well and good to pat ourselves on the back and say that we are winning, because we are. But, like, there's another three, four, five years before we see the true fruits of what we've created. Yeah,

Malcolm Collins: that's why I would say there's still amazing consistency in all of these large studios. The employees are still there, and the call is coming from inside the house.

So Yeah.

Arch: And like you said, like, the work has also started, like, twenty years ago, but we only saw it from, like, the last ten. It was, like, in 2014, where most people suddenly went, like, Something weird's going on here. And then another three or four years before we understood what was going on there. Like, all of these cultural changes are slow and take a lot of time.

And there's also, of course, the worry of the pendulum swinging too far in the opposite direction. And then we just have to chase after it and argue with those people as well. So, solidify the victory. Just keep [00:44:00] doing what everybody is doing. And then start looking towards creating your own stuff. Because you will eventually have to, presuming we manage to win, you will have to transition away from criticizing the bad to creating something good.

Yes. And we've got to create our own things. And I think that's a big thing that I would really galvanize the audience to do is start creating. There is room now, you know, you've got a giant market and you've got the big game studios in retreat and unable to compete against you. This won't be the case in five years.

Yeah, you got to get started

and so I really appreciate what you're doing on that front. And I, I appreciate your channel as well. But yeah, it's great to have you on. It was a pleasure. Thank you very much. And by the way, I

Malcolm Collins: mean, for like the five of our viewers who don't already watch both arch and arch cast.

Check them out on YouTube, really, really great content and really great annotation of like what's going [00:45:00] on in both like the gaming world, but also sort of in larger culture, but through gaming lens, I'm completely outside of the gaming world. I cannot play anything that doesn't like pay me money, but I love your content to dive

Arch: into for a modern audience.

If you don't know Warhammer lore, you should know Warhammer lore. Because it's one of, one, it's culturally relevant and it's becoming more culturally relevant the same way Tolkien's works were and it is really good lore. And the reason why I like it is lore, and I've talked about this before, I haven't heard any, like, big Warhammer channels talk about this, but it takes a simple Woke question when I was in high school, there were so many people that was like, what if like Everyone who believes any religion or something like that?

They bring that religion into existence by believing it So like muslims get a muslim heaven and christians get a christian heaven and and warhammers like yeah But if that was true, you'd get power spirals around really simplistic emotions really quickly That would [00:46:00] then create gods that would finally Functionally be evil from our perspective and so the only way you could fight them with through emotional control and like stoicism and and and that Turning on the head of a common thought experiment.

I find really fun.

Oh, yeah, because of course they're the chaos gods themselves they're simple animalistic creatures at that point. Okay rage fuels me I'm going to make more rage happen.

Yes, yes, now it can interfere with reality and create feedback loops. I love that. Well, it was great to have you on

Speaker: Here you go. Um, mm.

I want popcorn too. I'm really on the nice train. I have popcorn too. You sure are. I want popcorn too. The Titan wants popcorn too? I'll get you some popcorn. Um, you should have a little bit of popcorn. Can I get some popcorn too? Here you go. I'm, I'm [00:47:00] really on the nice train. Mm. Thanks.