Respawning the Hero: Metapolitics, Historical Fiction Video Games and the Shifting Strategies and Subjectivities of Far-right Influencers

This article critically examines how far-right influencers engage with historical fiction video games to articulate far-right cultural imaginaries. Through a Multimodal Critical Discourse Analysis of “Let's Play” videos and video essays, it explores how far-right influencers negotiate temporal imaginaries, antagonisms, and subject positions within platformed gaming content. Moving beyond existing work on reactionary politics in gamer culture, I draw on insights from game studies to highlight the unique character of games: spaces that enable the performance of nostalgic fantasies, particularly of heroism and civilisational struggle, whilst also imposing structural constraints disrupting these narratives. These moments of friction give way to ideological manoeuvring, as far-right influencers strategically shift between roles – transhistorical heroes, guardians of historical accuracy, aggrieved defenders of gamer culture – deploying discursive flexibility to navigate and exploit the affordances and constraints of their technological, narrative and pop cultural environments to propagate far-right worldviews. These shifting performances illuminate ontological anxieties and subject positions far-right ideology seeks to stabilise, and provoke broader reflections regarding how discourse is shaped by and responsive to its structural environment. I conclude by considering how attention to these dynamics might inform antifascist cultural counter-strategies through attunement to affective, playful and imaginative sites of struggle.