“This is why I hate video games. It appeals to the male fantasy.” — said over a screenshot of Europa Universalis IV in which the player has restored the ROMAN EMPIRE.
Yes. Guilty. The male fantasy, in this case, is the most defensible one in history: restoring the Roman Empire at 4x speed while your trade income goes vertical.
The top panel sets up the classic complaint — video games appeal to male power fantasies, the implication being that this is a problem. The bottom panel delivers the rebuttal without a single word: the male fantasy in question is literally the Roman Empire. The Eternal City. The Senate and People of Rome. Two thousand years of civilization, law, roads, aqueducts, and plumbing, reassembled province by province by a guy in his underwear at 2 AM.
The thing is, the joke works because it’s true in both directions. Yes, EU4 players spend hundreds of hours doing exactly this — painting the map purple or red, restoring Byzantium, reuniting Rome, correcting the historical record one war at a time. And yes, there is something deeply, intrinsically masculine about the desire to look at a map and think: ‘that all used to be one thing, and I can make it one thing again.’
But consider what the male fantasy actually is here. It’s not destruction. It’s not conquest for its own sake. It’s restoration. The dream isn’t to burn Rome — it’s to rebuild it. The EU4 player isn’t playing a warlord; he’s playing the curator of the greatest empire in European history, undoing the barbarian invasions one siege at a time, re-establishing the Pax Romana, and proving to a video game engine that 476 AD was a mistake that can be corrected.
And that’s the deeper joke the meme is making: if the male fantasy is restoring the Roman Empire, then the men who had this fantasy in real life were called things like ‘Justinian’ and ‘Belisarius’ and they’re remembered for 1,500 years. The complaint that video games appeal to the male fantasy is really a complaint that men like things like… the foundation of Western civilization. Shocking.
Meanwhile the EU4 screenshot shows the payoff: the entire Mediterranean as one color, the tag ‘ROMAN EMPIRE’ sitting there like a vindication. Population, tax, trade, military — all the numbers a man needs to feel that the world is, briefly, in order. No orcs. No chosen ones. No collectible waifus. Just a map, painted correctly, and the quiet satisfaction of a 1,500-year-old wrong finally made right.
Guilty as charged. The male fantasy is the Roman Empire, and it always has been.
0 Comments