I've been a fan of the Metro series since 2033 released on the 360, and I've played that game many times. Moved on to Last Light to give it another playthrough, and I'm already having a blast with it, but god does the :so-true: "DAE gommulists are as bad as the nazis" shit really get annoying.
They start off by showing the Nazis to be literal skull measuring concentration camp building monsters, but when it comes to the commies, there is minimal ideological exploration. Supposedly the Red Line follows their ideology and there is plenty of the aesthetic with CCCP flags everywhere and comrade this and that and what not, but nothing of value is really shown beyond the same tired tropes of them being traitorous hypocritical thugs running a police state, and the game spends WAY more time emphasizing them as the main antagonists. The first game dabbled in this but it was way further in the background and there was more plausible deniability that it was just a shitty faction using the name.
The irony is that in the original novels, written by a Russian author, the communists aren't a major faction. Artyom meets a few of them and they have a warm exchange and he gets to learn about some of their theory (he thinks Che is a station). Of course, the game devs are Yoooookrainian, it's just so on the nose. Besides this, I really love these games for their world building, atmosphere, and linear experiences. Hopefully Exodus minimizes this shit, as it is the only game in the series I haven't played yet.
As a fun bonus, here is some concept art of what the Red Line officers were originally going to look like
According to the wiki the books get more and more anticommunist too until in 2035 it literally says that they turn starving citizens into pig feed to trade for food because of a mushroom blight.
Also apparently the plot of 2035 is that one guy controls literally every faction in the Metro anyways without detection or suspicion so it sounds like the books just became dogshit.
Damn that really sucks, maybe it's a good thing that the games sort of diverged from the books. Who knows, I haven't played Exodus so it could be cheeks. I'll choose to treat the Red Line as not real communism but instead a certified Khmer Rouge Moment™
Apparently Exodus was at least in part inspired by a separate spinoff book titled Towards The Light that I recall being relatively good without much weird politics involved.
Saying that though wile browsing the wiki apparently the third book in that spinoff series involves "The Vegan Imperium" which I cant tell if its a translation thing or if the villains are actually an empire of militant vegans.
The Vegan Imperium: You will eat the soy and you will like it!
Oh my god the deeper this thread gets into the lore the more I realize that this series is kind of inexcusably stupid :agony:
Fun fact, in the actual USSR, staple foods like bread were so cheap that farmers would use them to feed their pigs instead of buying animal feed
I couldn't get very far into 2035, it was just Artyom hating his wife the whole time :grillman: