Because the thing is, most of the time you don’t get the happy, clean, we win! ending of Newsies or The Prom. You get wins that feel like that in the moment, sure. Moments like in Promises when you’ve finally gotten them to listen to you and you’re hugging your friends and feeling like nothing can possibly go wrong now. The union gets a contract. One of the biggest demands you had was met. You feel invincible. Courageous in a crowd.

But then a year later you’re right back on the picket line, because corporate found another way to screw you, or you have to go back and renegotiate for the demands you didn’t get on the first round, or a new problem has come up that no one could have foreseen. And maybe this time, not all your friends from the first protest are there with you. Some of them got too burned out to continue fighting, or they fell out of the group socially, or worse they stopped believing the cause can be won. When progress feels slow and it feels like you’re alone in believing in it, doubt comes in.

Change is cyclical in the way any given cause rotates between action and planning, riding waves of public outrage to make big pushes and quietly accumulating support, raising awareness, negotiating the results of whatever the latest push has won. A lot of the time during the slower parts of the cycle, it can feel like you’re not moving at all, or even like you’re right back where you started. You look back on all the work you put in and wonder if any of it was worth it. Maybe you were just being naive to imagine the way the world could be. Maybe you came all this way to fail.

And you know what? Maybe you did fail. Maybe everything you tried was doomed from the start. But what really defines you is what you do next.

Do you still believe in the cause? Do you still begin to sing fight for it again, even if it didn’t turn out the way you wanted this time? That is the important thing. That is the thing that Hadestown understands so well.

I feel like looking back on big social movements from the past, learning about them in history classes or reading about them in books, they feel a lot quicker than they were. It seems like these fights were won, clean and happy, almost overnight. Even if you’re told the months or years between important major events, it’s hard to fully understand. You don’t learn about the cycle, or how frustrating and exhausting it can be.

Hadestown is so effective as a protest media in part because it’s about the cycle. Orpheus and Eurydice and the workers lose and win and lose every night. But the ending still says that it was worth it to try, and it salutes the birds that sing in the dead of night—the people who keep the fight going even when things aren’t moving fast, even when they don’t have a crowd to make them courageous.

ROUND 2 — Match 75 of 138

Rhys (Tales from the Borderlands)

Problematic because: "he works for hyperion, which is basically the huge militarised company that has been making pandora worse for years, and his big early plan is stealing a briefcase of company money so he can buy a vault key before his boss does and use it to climb the ladder himself. he also spends a lot of the story being tempted by handsome jack, the dead dictator ceo whose ai ends up in his head (who rhys is implied to have a crush on), and depending on player choices he can accept jack’s offer of power and betray his friends. so he’s not super EVIL like jack, but he is absolutely a self-serving corporate idiot for a decent chunk of the game, and his bad decisions put a lot of people in danger." Propaganda: "rhys is so funny because he begins tales like “i am going to win capitalism” and then within about five minutes he is being scammed, shot at, haunted by handsome jack, and emotionally bullied by everyone on pandora. he’s absolutely a hyperion weasel at first and i will not defend him from that, but he’s MY hyperion weasel. i love that he’s pathetic and ambitious and trying so hard to look cool while constantly failing. vote rhys because character development is funnier when the character starts as a linkedin villain."

vs. Bloody Mary (The Wolf Among Us)

Problematic because: "Well first of all her backstory is that she's the woman the Bloody Mary myth is based on so she's killed countless children. She's the Crooked Man’s enforcer, which means she’s the person who shows up when the debt racket, blackmail network, and forced silence scheme need muscle. She helps kidnap Crane after Bigby and Snow catch him, shoots Bigby with a silver bullet when he’s distracted, nearly finishes him off with the Woodsman’s axe, and later helps the Crooked Man escape through the mirror when Bigby confronts him. She also shows up at the foundry where the Crooked Man makes silver bullets specifically to kill Bigby, taunts him from the mirrors, and attacks him again before forcing him into full wolf form." Propaganda: "Crane is pathetic, Georgie is sleazy, the Crooked Man is all talk and leverage, but Mary is the one who makes Bigby look genuinely vulnerable. She comes in late, shoots him with silver, takes Crane, and suddenly the whole investigation feels like it’s dealing with someone who isn’t scared of the sheriff at all. I like her because the game doesn’t overexplain her. She’s not asking for sympathy, she’s not giving you a sad little monologue about why she became this way, she’s just having a fantastic time being terrifying. The mirror powers are cool, the design is great, the voice performance is nasty in the best way, and her final fight is one of the few times Bigby really has to become the monster everyone keeps accusing him of being. She’s not morally complicated in the same way Vivian or Bigby are, she’s just a very effective reminder that some people in Fabletown are dangerous because they enjoy it."