Nazis and Mythic Quest

I love situation comedies because they allow creative people to convey moral lessons subversively through laughter.

There was once a brief time in America when Norman Lear had five of the most-watched prime-time shows.  Nearly every night of the week throughout most of the 1970s, a Conservative bigot and a Liberal blowhard turned on their respective television sets at the same time, and each watched their morals play out in a situation that ended in laughter for both houses. Some bigots watched Archie Bunker and laughed at themselves, but ended up becoming better people, just like Archie throughout the run of the show. Like many who dismiss Ebenezer Scrooge's spiritual transformation, many also fail to understand that Archie Bunker became a better person over those seven seasons. He didn’t stay the same, nor did anyone who watched All in the Family when it aired live. That’s the power of commercial art when applied effectively. Norman Lear recently passed away at 101, but his legacy lives on, and the potential to change hearts and minds is more prescient than ever.

But this is where situation comedy has already lent us a hand. The problem has been solved through laughter. In the third episode (titled Dinner Party) of the first season of the hilarious Apple TV Plus streaming comedy Mythic Quest, this brilliant, quirky, and barely functional group of game designers and marketers is confronted with an unfortunate assessment that their Massive Multiplayer Online (MMO) video game is a favorite of Nazis. White Supremacists are using their game to torment other players and potentially organize resources and events for violent purposes. What to do?

In Dinner Party, the third episode of the first season of Mythic Quest, the Nazi players in the MMO game show up at a public event and use the recently implemented shovel function in the game to dig a big swastika dick hole. What the game designers did next to solve their Nazi problem was inspired. This standalone episode is a brilliant example of combating hatred with art and laughter rather than autocratic censorship.

Against the wishes of the game designers and engineers, the Mythic Quest revenue team, wholly without morals and focused only on profit, decides to create a Heil Hitler emote to sell to the Nazis. An emote is a character action that players can buy and use in the game, and other players can see this action. At one point, the head game designer rolled out a new function called “Dinner Party,” where good digital citizen players are invited to bring their avatars to a designated place and make merry as a community peace protest. The Nazi players show up and massacre everyone and then perform their emote “Hitler salute” together, which means the Nazi players have effectively identified themselves, whereby the engineers promptly remove each of them to another server to stew in anger together. At the end of the episode, the stink of their presence no longer burdens the “normie” player base, which means business as usual from there.

Put Nazis in a room together, and eventually, they will start eating each other.