i always kinda figured we happy few was just supposed to be about a fascist government forcing its populace to take hallucinogenic "happy pills" to stay complacent but then i found this fucking galaxy brain take from the devs 
on top of the dumb shit about antidepressants, like... what fucking world are they living in where everybody is pretending to be happy on facebook. like we're literally seeing an epidemic of people getting outraged on facebook over false news stories spread by the far right
(sees the we happy few devs saying antidepressants are bad because we "don't value sadness anymore," framing taking meds as a moral choice) hey that's cool. anyway it sure would be nice if i wasn't poor so i could afford therapy and the pills that would make my brain work right
the inciting incident at the start of the game is literally the main character receives some news that upsets him and he decides to stop taking his meds so he can let his negative feelings linger and this is treated as deep and wise
like they're literally interpreting antidepressants as a thing anyone can choose to take to repress sad memories and force yourself to be happy instead of like, a thing that helps people with depression function better
it would have been so easy to just make the story some There Is No War In Ba Sing Se shit why did they have to go and do this
so this got more traction than i thought it would and i'm getting some responses saying i'm off base for thinking he's talking about mental illness and antidepressants and the like here and i really just cannot read this statement and the story of the game any other way
are they LITERALLY taking antidepressants? no. it's a fantasy hallucinogen called "joy." but it's impossible not to read it as a metaphor. this isn't about illegal drug abuse, it is quite blatantly about prescriptions, as stated plain as day by the narrative director
this isn't even a case of the government or big pharma or whatever praying on folks and forcing them to take drugs they don't need. the game frames the decision to start using joy as something most people collectively agreed on so they'd forget a mass tragedy that happened
and guess what! all the folks outside of the cities, in the "wastes," who're immune to the effects of "joy"? who aren't on any prescriptions? who still remember everything? they all went Video Game Crazy like bioshock mutants or what the fuck ever!
so like, the whole message of "we need to learn to embrace sadness to be Human," even if you take it at face value, completely falls apart upon closer inspection of the facts presented by the game. but i guess it wouldn't be a bioshock-inspired game if that weren't the case
like there is just no way for me to read this statement of "people are sad so they get prescribed pills to force themselves to be happy, and that's bad" as a gross oversimplification of mental health issues
