Ask The Tropers

I know nothing about the game either, but it's taking massive liberties with the explanation.

Anyone who writes "is pretty clearly" and "is fairly obviously" is just stretching. It needs to be trimmed based on length alone, but I don't think it should be there at all. Just my two cents.

No example needs to be 687 words long. Thirding the fact that I know nothing about this game but this is pure stream-of-consciousness nonsense.

Courtesy link: Arknights

Also, the entry is not one Wall of Text. It's split up as so:

• Applicability:
  • There have been... questions about the precise nature of the messages Arknights is trying to send with its choice of how to depict Reunion, the primary antagonist group.
    • Reunion is a group of oppressed individuals who are "othered" because of conditions beyond their control (namely their infection with oripathy) — prejudice we get to see first-hand as Rhodes Island members also must deal with it — and Reunion members have decided to take to violent means to achieve their liberation. Their aesthetic has a distinctive "anarchist" or possibly "anti-fascist" vibe to it, with lots of facial concealment (especially via mouth bandanas for the lower-rank units) and hoods... which also happens to be a fairly common image of the protestors in places like Hong Kong. This aspect, at least, does appear to be coincidental (the HK protest movement contemporaneous to the game's international release began in June 2019, while even the earliest trailers for the game from 2017 already depicted Reunion using their present aesthetic) but for many outside of China, it does feel very unfortunate. There have also been a number of objections to the Reunion mooks being depicted as they are, as it seems to perpetuate the idea of anti-fascists being "terrorists", when the vast majority of terrorism in the 21st century◊ has originated from the political far right. And then there's questions, especially in the U.S. (with a long history of the oppressed seeking redress of wrongs done to them and often feeling a need to resort to violence to defend themselves) of just what the game is saying by seeming to frame Reunion as being wholly in the wrong for resorting to violence.
    • The counter-argument mostly coalesces around the fact that Reunion militarizes very quickly (they graduate from "guys with molotovs" to heavily-armored SWAT-style troopers, lumbering axe men, exploding spiders and guys with literal jet packs pretty rapidly in game progression) and that a number of the Reunion leaders don't seem to have the same zeal for the theoretical cause of the group that the rank-and-file (and Talulah) do; this argument largely boils down to the message being "militarizing for the purpose of ending oppression only results in you becoming the new oppressor and welcoming those into your fold who are useful, rather than those who believe in your cause" and that it is, perhaps, commenting on the arc of the Russian Revolution and CPSU (with bonus points for the game's story kicking off in the world's equivalent to Russia) and even, through heavy allegory, the arc of the Chinese Communist Party. As the game's first arc is still in progress, it's a bit difficult to say for certain what the final message will be, but the whole thing does tend to inspire, shall we say, debates. That's all we'll say on this matter.
  • Lungmen has been a particular headache in this regard, even for Hypergryph themselves; the city is pretty clearly a stand-in for Special Economic Zone cities of the 21st century in China, with the most obvious parallel being Hong Kong. The initial emphasis, however, is fairly obviously more meant to be on the pressures it faces with inequality and wealth (with the first story arc having an emphasis on the cycle of hatred and revenge that stems from poverty, sudden deprivation with no safety net, and the resulting desperation & violence), and is meant very much to come across as "Hong Kong by way of magical unobtainium supertech cyberpunk"... and then, a good hot one month and some change after the game's launch, the HK protests and the events around them began, which offered completely different allegorical readings of the game's events and made the topic of Hong Kong period incredibly sensitive in China (and internationally, made the Lungmen chapters stick out a bit more). There's a decent bit of suspicion that the notable delay in the game's sixth chapter coming out (five months after the fifth) may have had to do with Hypergryph having to consider if and/or how the story had to change to ensure no one in power (or in the domestic audience) took issue with the narrative.

Also, Applicability sounds like a YMMV-equivalent to Omnipresent Tropes. Like, literally, this is Wild Mass Guessing but about the theme.

Honestly, I don't think this example applies to Applicability, since applicability is contrasted with allegory, and the examples here focus on Reunion as allegory for anti-fascists and Lungmen (or whatever) being an allegory for Hong Kong.

Glancing at the Applicability page, an awful lot of the examples come off like this. (Sorry about the wall of text, forgot copy-paste doesn't preserve formatting!)

^ - Could you remove your wall of text then? Or Stick it all in a Folder until you bullet it?

^^ What you need to do is copy and paste from the editing screen or the source screen.

^^ Copying and pasting does preserve formatting if you copy from the page source rather than just the text on the page.