Soma Spirits: Rebalance

I didn't write it but I can guarantee this game wasn't written as political commentary.

...I'm sorry, but that is itself an incredibly White Liberal thing to say. All art is propaganda whether you intend it or not. That's just the way it works; you're presenting your own vision of reality, of how you think the world works. We live in a society.

I completely believe torch60 did not intend to make a political commentary with this game, but he did anyway. When you make a game with multiple endings and you say that one is the "correct" one, that is an ideological statement. When that "correct" ending is about finding compromise between two ideals, that is an ideological statement. When you make a story where a cruel tyrant is secretly a misunderstood good guy and the idealists trying to stop him are secretly comically evil monsters who decide that if they can't get what they want they're going to kill everyone, that is an ideological statement.

You may not intend for any of these things to correspond 1:1 to a real-world issue -- most art doesn't -- but people are going to draw those connections anyway, because that's how experiencing art works. There are a lot of people who believe in the Golden Mean Fallacy ("the correct choice is always the midpoint between two extremes") and who, as a corollary, believe extremists don't actually mean it when they say they want to make the world a better place and are just making up problems to manipulate people into changing the world for their own personal gain, and this game validates that worldview 100%.

I want you to look at all the people saying BLM doesn't actually care about racial equality and just wants an excuse to get away with crimes, and then I want you to look at this story where Dissonance lies about unchecked idealism necessitating intervention to avoid catastrophe and then when called on his lie reveals that actually he just wants to kill people, and I want you to think about how someone who already believes the former is going to interpret the latter.

You even say here: "all conflicts are personal or horizontal". I believe this is intentional because the question isn't "who is right or wrong in this power difference" but more "what is the right way to feel and handle when presented with a complex problem".

Yes, and that is an ideological statement too. When you make a story about Meaningful Choices and Deep Conflict yet you only portray a small subset of real conflicts, that's a deliberate choice. Again, the game takes a real-world vertical and systemic conflict -- the exploitation of workers under capitalism -- and bends over backwards to make it an "individual" problem. That is a deliberate choice to avoid talking about systemic problems, and that oversimplification validates the conservative party line that systemic problems aren't real and everyone is individually responsible for their own choices.

The message isn't meant to be that arguments should meet in the middle

Except you can't get the good ending unless you do exactly that. I can believe this for each individual choice (since there's no compromise option for them), but if, say, your base emotional response is that four people need to be less sorrowful, whoops, we're gonna berate you for being stupid enough to believe Form, no good ending for you. You literally cannot "win" the game unless you meet in the middle. This is baked into the mechanics. If this was the intent, you should be able to uncover Form and Dissonance's deceit and get the true ending regardless of what choices you made in the worlds.

Look, I get that talking about systemic problems is hard and uncomfortable. They're hard to wrap our heads around and they don't have easy solutions. But that's exactly why art should push to talk about them and why I'm disappointed when it takes the easy way out instead.

But I do think if you're reading into the power dynamics of a sentient cardboard box or ear of corn, you may be thinking about it a little too hard...

This gets into another thing I wanted to bring up, which is that it's really hard to take the choices seriously with the cartoony aesthetic. As I said when I reviewed the original, so much of these types of personal happiness vs. societal responsibility conflicts are circumscribed by limited resources and physiological needs. The reason we can't just do whatever we want is that at the end of the day, someone needs to put food on the table. But that's really hard to evaluate when I can't tell if these creatures even have physiological needs. Where are the Berry Potions and Lifeforce Nuts coming from? Do Heart and Soul actually need to eat? Soul argues that the forest will suffer if Acre doesn't become the next tree, but like, how? Eternal winter typically means that living things will die, like, permanently, but Mason and Glacia talk as if it's only a temporary thing for both the organics and the snowpeople. Why do the Maltose Mines even exist, are they performing a vital service or a luxury? Why don't they just quit if they're so annoyed with Lemondrop, what's keeping them there?

But an argument in favor of fascism is something that it is not nor was it ever intended to be, nor is it a stance I believe in or ever stand for.

No, obviously not. I do, however, feel it is an argument in favor of centrism, which is often an unintentional enabler of fascism.

The worlds as a metaphor for bipolar disorder... Some things do make more sense in that light, but I would not have guessed that was the intended allegory if you had not told me. The repeated theme of personal happiness vs. societal responsibility is what muddied that for me; that is something I associate with political ideologies, not with personal experience, especially when the player is taking the role of an arbiter for other people.

If you wish to avoid political implications in the future, I would recommend avoiding plots about a group desiring to change the world fighting against a group desiring to restore a past era, because that is kind of the core of politics.