This game is anti-woke, prove me wrong.

[Tim Thanks]

This game has some pretty anti-woke agenda - one of the essential characters is sleeping all the time

[Splinter of Chaos]

A reoccurring activity the protagonist does every night early in the game is read a book to fall asleep. Even the most casual of readers will note that on some level, perhaps the game's author is telling us it better to sleep, fantasizing of an ideal, than it is to drink copious amounts of espresso and stay up all night every night. And in that sense, Metaphor: ReFantazio is truly an anti-woke game.

However, the astute reader will examine the symbolic tapestry of the protagonists desire to realize the ideals held in this super based world inside his fantasy book, seeing it as a model for change, a beginning. The book stands as a metaphor for the world's "happy ending" and the protagonist wishes to change metaphor into metamorphosis and end the metastasizing of society's cancers. as one meta analysis might say.

But nay, go deeper and we see that this illusory world which differs from the protagonist's reality dilutes and dulls his perceptions as the rigors of cognitive dissonance confuse his actions and those around him as ideals clash with reality, hard as stone, darkening the protagonist's heart into wicked vile goo that consumes all he surrounds. From this dream of a ideal world, he must awake. And in that sense the game is pretty woke.

But if we stopped there we would still be wrong! For it is the very concept of stepping away from our ideals that pollutes the mind and corrupts society. Nay, to wake from this dream is to give up and relinquish our fate to whichever way the winds may blow and a story that will not make. Rather, to dream of change and live the dream, no matter how difficult the struggle, the protagonist must paint their utopia onto the canvas of society and hold it to society's mouth like a chloroform-soaked rag so that everyone may see this dream, too. Live the dream. Never wake up.

Based and anti-woke.

Okay, this whole post is obviously written in jest, but it actually did remind me of what I read in an interview where Hashimoto-sensei said "『不安＝つぎに進めるキッカケ』というテーマなら、 全世界の人にも理解してもらえる、 シンプルな話になると思ったんですよね。" So as a literary analysis, the idea of living in a dream and using that to enact the change we want to see is completely bogus, but I think Hashimoto-sensei would want us to see our anxieties about societal problems as the opportunity to make changes and in that sense, I feel like I accidentally landed on something not entirely wrong.