Premium Episode 228: Hearts of Iron Cross (Sample)
Nazi video game mods, mercenaries reincarnated as giraffes, and teenage twitch streamers LARPing their way into Russian national chauvinism. Liv is back in the pilot seat and she doesn't disappoint, regaling us with a twisted tale involving a game called Hearts of Iron 4, "Hyperborea wave", and the Ron DeSantis campaign retweeting sonnenrads. Plus Jake asks the pressing question: what if Littlefoot from The Land Before Time was in The Sopranos?
Subscribe for $5 a month to get an extra episode of QAA every week + access to ongoing series like Manclan, Trickle Down and The Spectral Voyager: www.patreon.com/QAnonAnonymous
Liv Agar: http://livagar.com / http://linktr.ee/livagar
Music by Pontus Berghe. Editing by Corey Klotz.
http://qanonanonymous.com
Welcome, listener, to the 228th premium chapter of the QAA Podcast, the Hearts of Iron episode.
As always, we are your hosts, Jake Rakitansky, Liv Egar, Julian Fields, and Travis View.
In July of this year, many were shocked after an official campaign Twitter account for Republican presidential hopeful Ron DeSantis retweeted a meme edit made by a supporter that depicted the candidate standing in front of a spinning Sonnenrad, a symbol originally created by Himmler for the SS and frequently used by neo-Nazis.
The video in its entirety is a discordant array of meme references which are rather hard to decipher by themselves.
With a Kate Bush song playing in the background, a depressed looking Wojak in a dimly lit room reads news headlines talking about Trump's political failures.
A door then opens behind him and the room is filled with light as he looks in awe at DeSantis' glowing silhouette.
Oh, who could forget that beautiful silhouette?
What follows is a confusing compilation of footage of rockets launching off into space, B-roll of Miami residents hanging out at the beach, and headlines describing DeSantis successfully deporting immigrants and cracking down on LGBT rights.
Without any context related to the bizarre internet subculture where this meme originated, it almost feels schizophrenic.
And the icing on the cake of discordant references, the spinning sonnenrad behind DeSantis at the end, makes it hard for me to imagine how anyone working on a real American politician's campaign could think this video would work as a means to convey DeSantis' supposed superiority to Trump.
Yeah, he, like, walked into, like, his son's sleepover and they were all just, like, vaping and playing video games that Ron didn't understand and he's like, you guys, you guys do the comms.
You guys handle it.
But there's one missing thread to this story that, in its own way, contextualizes what's going on here.
Well, maybe besides explaining why the DeSantis campaign thought retreating the video would be a good idea.
And that thread relates to a real-time strategy game called Hearts of Iron 4 and the bizarre online internet subcultures that it has inspired.
The reach of these subcultures has been surprisingly massive, and yet much of their influence is subtle enough that you only really notice if you know what you're looking for.
And I happen to have logged over 1,500 hours into the game, according to Steam.
Holy shit!
Okay.
Okay, Liv.
Wait a minute.
Wait a minute.
This episode has become different.
Could we not have your episodes just picked from your most played on Steam?
Is that what you're doing?
You're just going through the top five?
How many hours have I poured into this?
I think I am just cursed to collect some form of esoteric knowledge about these insane communities just in any of my spare time.
But how many of those were playing as the Fourth Reich?
Listen, I do not roleplay as Nazis.
I do not support any Nazi warfare.
Okay, we'll see.
We'll see.
Hearts of Iron IV, or Hoy IV for short, was created by Paradox Interactive, a fairly small Swedish game studio known for making complex grand strategy games.
The throughline between many of their more popular history-related games is that they're very difficult to learn, typically taking tens if not hundreds of hours of playtime to understand the mechanics, and they have a very open sandbox structure, allowing the player to take control of various historically existing states or dynasties and push them in whatever direction they please.
I have to say, I have tried so many times, because I'm a huge Civilization fan.
Love it.
And I have tried with Stellaris.
I have tried with, what's the medieval one?
The Kings?
Crusader Kings?
Crusader Kings.
And I'm just like, I just, I don't know.
There's a point at which I just go, now, I'm just gonna, I just can't get over the hump.
Hopefully one day, because I do know they make some of the best strategy games out there, in terms of what they call the 4X genre.
Oh, man.
I remember playing Close Combat on the Macintosh because a demo of it came on the Macworld CD.
This is how you used to get demos.
It would come in a magazine on a CD.
Close Combat.
Little guys running all around.
You put them behind hedges.
You know, you shoot.
There's little blood splatters.
The graphics are nice.
But this is not that game.
Wait, so the whole, that's not even a Paradox game?
So you're just, the whole setup is just to say there's this game I barely remember playing on an ancient platform and then the conclusion is I didn't play that, this is not that.
Could you name other things that this episode is not about or games that this doesn't cover?
Yes!
Well, please, be my guest!
What else is this not, Jake?
Yes, there was also a game on that same Macworld demo CD called Myth.
Now, this was a real-time strategy game that used polygons very early on.
I believe it was called Myth, I could be wrong.
I might have the name of the game wrong.
In which case this would make this sidebar even more pointless.
But the point is to leave this in, leave this in, don't edit it out.
I'm not editing out.
I want to add to this.
Years ago, I downloaded some ROMs to try to play old Capcom arcade games.
Okay, yeah.
And I played Cadillacs and Dinosaurs, a game in which you beat up dinosaurs, humans, robots, and other stuff as you progress from left to right across the screen.
And you drive a Cadillac?
Well, the Cadillac can come for backup and kind of shoot.
It's like a kind of special.
Cool.
This is not that.
That's you.
That's you.
That's you, Jake.
This is not that.
There are- The problem with this is not that is that there are infinite things that every single thing is not.
And you- *laughing* *laughing*
I- My brain just ballooned.
Like, I can see the universe.
I am Dr. Manhattan because of what you're doing here.
Oh my god, I'm quitting this show and I'm starting a new podcast called This Is Not That.
And it's just gonna be all shit like this.
We'll pick a topic, we'll pick a topic, somebody will do a ton of research and work on it, and then within five minutes I will derail it.
At the end of the episode, after everybody's thoroughly disappointed, I'll just be like, and this is not that.
Tune in, tune in next week for another look.
Yeah, you know, that is actually like, that's next level though.
Usually there's a tangent, but it comes from some even vaguely related thing.
Instead, it's literally just, this is not that, which is no better way to ruin poor Liv's episode early up.
Of course we're keeping all of this in.
This is, this is magic.
Magic.
Podcasting magic.
You've been listening to a sample of a premium episode of QAnon Anonymous.
We don't run any advertising on the show and we'd like to keep it that way.
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