Playing Suicide Squad confirmed that the Sweet Baby Inc backlash was all bad faith. SPOILERS

Over the last couple weeks I beat Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League. When the game came out it was at the vanguard of a massive backlash against a narrative consulting firm called Sweet Baby Inc. The gist of the claims were that Sweet Baby Inc. was ruining games by filling them with "woke" or "DEI" material, which was causing them to suck, and then fail commercially. It was seen as this boogeyman of the industry, destroying narrative in pursuit of wokeness.

I never bought into this, of course, but I was curious as to whether there was any inkling of truth or even something that could be interpreted as true underlying the claims. One of the reasons I wanted to play Suicide Squad was to see just how woke it is and whether the narrative really was ruined. I wanted to see if I could spot any of the fingerprints of these accused meddlers. How bad was it all really?

For some perspective, I'm a cishet white guy. I'm definitely on the liberal side and probably what most would consider "woke" as far as cishet white guys go. I've never once felt threatened by diversity in video games and I welcome it because it makes things more interesting. I lived through the era of "every character is a 30-something brown-haired white American man" in the 7th generation and that was not the best era of video game protagonists. There are, of course, some cishet white guy protagonists I love, and I'm never turned off by a game just because it features a white dude in the lead, it all depends on how the characters are presented. I don't really have a political preference in games so long as they aren't hardcore fascist. I'm generally fine with Call of Duty stories and I'm fine with narratives the focus on diversity. I just want an interesting story with strong characters and moments, even if its politics don't align with mine.

All that being said, I kind of liked the story of Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League, but there are good faith reasons why someone wouldn't. It's just that none of them have to do with "wokeness."

If you want to attack Suicide Squad because of its tonal inconsistencies, you have a point. If you want to criticize it for not having a strong ending, you have a point. If you feel like favorite characters were treated poorly or that canon wasn't followed or there were better ways to tell the story, well I think that comic book narratives should have more flexibility than that, but I won't say that your arguments are bad faith. If someone tells me they didn't like that one of their favorite versions of Batman was brought back after Arkham Knight only to be murdered on a park bench I'm not going to say that their feelings are invalid. It was a stark scene, they were going for something, it didn't really work. If you want to criticize the death of Batman you definitely have a point.

It's just that none of this stuff has to do with "wokeness."

Suicide Squad isn't a "woke" game. There are some nods to diversity, like using a Black version of Deadshot where the Arkham games previously used a white one, but it's hard to claim that had a lot of impact on the game. If someone wants to try explaining how having a white Deadshot would make the game significantly better I'm willing to hear it, but you're going to sound like a racist. Meanwhile Amanda Waller, one of comics' most iconic black female characters, comes off like a raging psychopath. It's one of the least heroic and sympathetic versions of her I've seen.

Lex Luthor, for his part, does get murdered (while trying to save the planet), but then comes back in an alternative version and is among the more heroic supporting characters in the game. Yes, that's right, this game that was ruined by wokeness features an icon of rich, white, male, capitalism in a close to heroic role. Huh?

A lot has been made about how they "ruined" Batman, but he's brainwashed by Brainiac and not himself. You do get to see an earlier version of Batman in a pre-recorded video and he's just as brilliant and heroic as ever. The game isn't trying to subvert our vision of Batman, it's just using him as a villain. You know what other game took famous superheroes and used them as vicious villains? Injustice: Gods Among Us, helmed by famous icon of wokeness Ed Boon. Examining what superheroes would be like if they were evil is a well worn trope.

Other people have complained about the version of Joker that's in the game, but he's clearly based on the Suicide Squad movie version. They don't like the regendering of Mrs. Freeze, but again that's just trying a new spin on the character. If lesbian Mr. Freeze is supposed to bother me you're going to have to explain why. There's virtually no story material around Mrs. Freeze. Would it have been better as Lady Frost? Maybe. But this is post launch content and it's not like male Mr. Freeze would have done anything to help the game. The story's done by the time s/he shows up.

So I'm left struggling to figure out what the "wokeness" issue is even supposed to be here. People don't like that Boomerang literally pisses on the Flash's corpse because they find that disrespectful. But that's not woke (white guy pissing on another white guy) it's just a juvenile attempt at edginess. You can certainly criticize it and I don't think it's a good moment, but I have no reason to believe that it came from Sweet Baby Inc. They didn't write the game they just consulted on it. People don't like the fact that Superman doesn't just obliterate the Suicide Squad and they think it's a plot hole. Okay. Again, nothing to do with wokeness. It's just a plot hole. They've been around since before diversity was even a buzzword.

So I came away from the game thinking the same thing I went to it thinking. People were just angry and looking for someone to blame, and again "DEI" was a scapegoat. There are reasons to dislike Suicide Squad's narrative but unless your big issue is that Deadshot isn't white they have none of the hallmarks of forced "diversity." It's not a game where women and minorities are good and white guys are bad. It's a game where almost everyone is kind of a crappy human being. Except, kind of, Lex Luthor! And Lois Lane, she's the most sympathetic character in the whole game.

To the extent Suicide Squad disrespects comic icons it does so in an attempt to be edgy and provocative, not to denigrate them for being white dudes. When you see them in their prior incarnations they're just as heroic, selfless, and beloved as they ever were. This isn't fundamentally different from Injustice, except that they wanted a lighter, goofier, tone mixed in with some edgy violence and maybe that doesn't work for you, but it has nothing to do with politics and everything to do with execution.

You can think that Sweet Baby Inc isn't good as narrative consultants (though it's really hard to know what came from them) but there are lots of bad writers floating around video games. There's nothing new or special about that. The level of anger directed to them is purely because of their politics and their own identities. By most accounts most of what they wrote was ancillary material like audio logs and they came on board late in the game's development. They likely weren't even responsible for the stuff people didn't like, regardless of whether it was "woke" or not.

I gave these bad faith arguments a good faith chance and what they amounted to was so much whining because Rocksteady didn't make the game these people wanted and they wanted someone to blame. In doing so they lashed out at real people and made other people feel unwelcome in gaming while throwing an adult fanboy fit. For people who claim to be superhero fans they sure act a lot like villains.