I don't like to do posts at fractional hours, but I just finished Velvet Assassin and I figured I might as well talk about it. The ending was bleak. An elite German strike force called the Dirlewanger Brigade attacked the village around the hospital and Violette had to try and save the villagers.
She failed. Despite killing dozens of Nazis with a machine gun and repelling the attack, she was too late. The church where the villagers took shelter was already on fire. Then there was a second Nazi wave, Kamm survived with burns on his face, and Violette's last words were "I fall into nothing." Over the end credits, Violette frolics through an autumn field that is surely symbolic of something (the afterlife, maybe, or perhaps Violette's disconnect from reality when she can't cope with the fact that she failed to stop the Nazis).
I'm going to go out on I limb and take a political stance here, but I really don't like the Nazis. They make me angry. I hate the way they take liberties with other people's bodies for the sake of ideology. I don't understand how it's even possible to come to the conclusion that you can roll tanks into another country and take their land and kill their people. It's not behavior that matches any sort of civilized standard of conduct. Any sort of justification you could come up with for that would have to be so transparently vacuous and self-serving that it is shocking that it could ever stand up to scrutiny.
Yet the thing that annoys me most about the Nazis is the way that people never seem to learn the right lesson from their atrocities. It's always our enemy that is as vile as a Nazi. Their violence is always unjustifiable cruelty, whereas our violence is a regrettable necessity in pursuit of the valiant defense of our ideals. And it never occurs to us that we are engaging in the exact same systematic dehumanization as the Nazis engaged in as a precondition to their conquests. Sure, the scales are different, but so are our needs, and so much greater is the danger of being a rogue nation today. The weak can't petition the strong, nor defeat them in a peaceful forum through the force of superior merit. And as much as we say we have higher standards today, the powerful rarely (if ever) prosecute themselves when those standards are violated.
The Nazis' great crime was that they constructed the world as a simplistic romantic ideal and then cast real people as the villains. And yet even today, even after all that we've seen, we take the justifiable use of force for the preservation of human life and we somehow transform that into violence against populations. Because evil must be defeated and bystanders don't matter, accidents don't matter, pain doesn't matter. You can avoid these things. You may even prefer to avoid these things, but only if it's easy. And it's never easy enough. The innocent always bleed. And that's never too great a price to pay to fight the villains we've created in our imaginations.
The interesting thing about Velvet Assassin is that the Nazis aren't these paper villains. They are perhaps crueler than any other video game faction - an over-the-top group like Caesar's Legion is arguably worse, but there's a certain abstraction to their villainy that doesn't quite compare - but despite that cruelty, they are also recognizably human. When they speak of hunting down Jews or burning bodies, these are not cackling villain monologues, but workplace conversations. There are cracks in the facade - some of the Nazis feel regret, and others are afraid of their own hierarchy, which makes the pride some express in their work all the creepier and more relatable.
This focus on the humanity of the Nazis makes Violette practically unique among video game protagonists. She kills Nazis, but is not unreservedly a hero. She always has the right goals, but she is nonetheless a terrible figure, a remorseless killer who takes pleasure in her violence and pride in the terror she sews amongst her enemies. The game portrays her, for all intents and purposes, as a murderer (this is shown especially in some of her more extreme kill animations - they sometimes stray right into horror movie slasher territory). Yet, like the Nazis, she is not inhuman. War has made her cruel, but it's never implied that her cruelty has made her an unintelligible monster (or, if it has, it was due entirely to her situation, and not something innate and defective inside her).
I think this is what comes from developing a WW2 game in Germany. All too often in video games, Nazis are treated as basically orcs. They are generic bad guys you can kill with a clear conscience, because they are not like us. But how could a German think that? The Nazis are their no-too-distant ancestors, so the terrifying truth of their humanity can not be denied, yet neither can the horror of their deeds. Velvet Assassin is an admirable effort to reconcile those truths (even if, at times, the writing ventured into the overwrought). Its Nazis are some of the nastiest I've seen in any media, not despite their humanity, but because of it.
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