Hearts of Iron IV: Brainrot
The fifth and final entry in the HoI4 modding series.
When anger spread his wing,
And all seems dark as night for it,
There’s nothing but to fight for it,
But ere you pitch your ring,
Select a pretty site for it
(This spot is suited quite for it),
And then you gaily sing:
Oh, I love the jolly rattle
Of an ordeal by battle,
There’s an end of tittle-tattle,
When your enemy is dead.
It’s an arrant molly-coddle
Fears a crack upon his noddle
And he’s only fit to swaddle
In a downy feather-bed!
Introduction
Hello, and welcome to the final article of the HoI4 modding series! You’re a real trooper for making it this far, so take it easy. This is going to be more of a victory lap with some closing thoughts at the end. If you haven’t read the other four articles, check them out through the links at the bottom of the page.
HoI4 Brainrot
Leftists aren’t the only ones who succumb to HoI4 brainrot. In fact, I’d actually say it afflicts more right-wingers than leftists, simply because I think your average HoI4 player is going to be naturally inclined towards the political right. American male youth are becoming increasingly right-wing, and your average HoI4 player is probably an American teenage boy who thinks tanks and flags are cool.
A lot of them are pretty obviously Hispanic as well. We can see from this picture above that TNO has taken its mental toll on the ideology wank/brainrot crowd. Burgundian System isn’t even a real political ideology. It was made up by the Stormfront/Antifa pervert ThePinkPanzer to provide a compelling villain for his Facepunch roleplay game. Burgundian System in-game is just “we want to kill everybody on earth: the ideology.” For this kid, being BurgSys just means he likes SS Hitler edits on TikTok almost as much as he likes Dragonball Z Spanish language dub, and he hates getting made fun of at school over his slutty older sister’s OnlyFans. A year later, his he replaced SS Marschiert im Feindesland edits for TradCath King Baldwin IV edits, so now he’s a “National Catholic.” Next thing you know, he’s going to found the Texas Empire and epically own the Bri’ish “people,” ay holmes.
Right-wing brainrot is pretty easily spotted. It’s just blatant glorification of Nazi Germany and occasionally other right-wing peripherals like Imperial Japan or Tsarist Russia. You know it when you see it, and I don’t have to describe it to you. Leftist brain-rot is less commonplace, but a lot more annoying. Good examples are the kind of awful, absolutely atrocious memes you see on /r/TNOmod or the trite you’ll find on any HoI4 mod’s TVtropes fanpage. It’s all “erm, when the hecking war criminals do a genocide” or “when the wholesome Chungus epically owns the Nazi Trumplings and defends Trans Kids.” I’m going to show you a few leftist examples and you can see for yourself what passes for humor.
I think we’ve seen enough for today. Any more, and I’d feel compelled to join the Dirlewanger Brigade.
Brainrot Illustrated
I don’t really have much to say to elaborate on this point. I think it kind of speaks for itself. A picture says a thousand words, so I’ll share some HoI4 modding shitposts that illustrate the issue at hand more succinctly than I ever could.
The TFR Resurgence
As I’ve made clear, the 2020s have been a dark time for HoI4 modding. It shouldn’t be too surprising, considering how old the game is now. We’re only a year away from Hearts of Iron IV reaching its 10th birthday, which just feels surreal to me. I had taken it for granted in 2022 that HoI4 modding was effectively over, and that we’ll never get anything like Old World Blues or Kaiserredux again. 2024 proved me wrong.
I had heard of The Fire Rises on /vst/ back in 2022 and thought it was another American collapse toozer mod. I mean, just look at this:
It’s a Balkanized America if I ever saw one. When I first saw this, I immediately dismissed it as a toozer mod that would obviously never come out. Then the teasers stopped coming, and the mod was forgotten. To my great surprise, I found out in November of 2024 that the mod actually released. And what surprised me even more, it’s actually fun to play.
The Fire Rises is set in a 2020 where everyone basically goes crazy. Instead of January 6th, we get a total American upheaval. Instead of the Ukraine War, we get the European War between Russia and the EU. Instead of general grumbling and discontent in the Far East, we get a Chinese invasion of Taiwan, which Japan and its Pacific allies must stop.
TFR looks a lot like TNO at a glance, with a similar UI design and dark, gritty theming. It plays completely different, however. TFR is a wargame, and its purpose is to set up interesting wars that are fun to fight. Its custom mechanics are in service of this end. Like TNO, it is a heavily railroaded mod and you can only play as a select few countries that have playable content. Unlike TNO, the railroading is for gameplay purposes, not story purposes, and you don’t spend the game sitting on your hands like you would in TNO. TFR on launch also has more playable countries than TNO does six years after release, and these countries come with a full decade of content each, not TNO’s wimpy three-to-five years for medium powers. TFR delivers the experience that 2010s HoI4 players hoped TNO would deliver.
TFR also has some new tricks up its sleeve, things not yet seen in the HoI4 modding world. Not only can you lose wars in this mod, you might want to lose them on purpose. Unlike in TNO, there are no failstates in TFR. If you mess things up and suffer a coup, a revolution, or lose a war, the game doesn’t end there. In fact, it just opened up new possibilities as your country experiences changes and tries to recover. If Russia fails to conquer the Ukraine in the European War, then radical forces can take over the country and prepare for round two. If Russia smashes the EU, the European states will politically adjust to oppose victorious Russia and come back with a vengeance. Socialist Russian victory means Europe will go fascist, fascist Russian victory ensures socialist revolution in Europe, and so on. This is a huge step up from TNO, where messing up outside of specific railroaded instances where you’re meant to mess up means the game is over, kaput.
I do know of two failstates in TFR, actually. But they’re more like complete endings that you have to try to accomplish. The first is an Atomwaffen victory, where they accumulate a large enough nuclear arsenal to destroy the world, SS-Ordenstaat Burgundy style. Yeah, you can’t play the game after that, but it was clearly the goal of your organization, so mission accomplished. The second is “the American Caligula,” which I haven’t played yet but it involves something about Joe Biden becoming an autocratic dictator and being succeeded by Hunter Biden. America collapses beyond repair at that point in a fashion similar to Taboritsky’s Holy Russian Empire. You technically failed and can’t keep playing, but the goal of your campaign was to reach this point and see the beautiful, awful fallout of your actions. This is totally different from TNO failstates, where it’s like “oh you’re playing as Speer and clicked a single wrong button in the event chain. All your ministers resign and you’re stuck with Oberlander as your only remaining political ally. He has no events or focus tree, so it’s game over.”
What about the political narrative? If TNO with its 1960s politics got heavy-handed, how would TFR address the controversial, ongoing topics of the 2020s? They do it with surprising grace. Cleverly cutting the Gordian knot, TFR portrays every single country from their own point of view. If you are playing as the communist rebels in America, the game will act as if it has a communist bias and you’re on the right side of history. If you play as the Atomwaffen people—TFR’s equivalent of Burgundian System, so to speak—then the game will treat your campaign as a righteous quest for vengeance. It circumvents the political issue by treating everyone equally. You’re the player, after all, it’s up to you to choose what happens next, and you get to decide how you feel about it.
Within mere weeks of its release, the dark horse candidate that is TFR triumphantly usurped TNO’s place as king of the HoI4 modding community. I think they deserve the crown. But it’s wobbly at the top of the tree, and TFR has its share of haters. It’s safe to say that the reddit/trooncord modding community hates this mod. To them, it’s a Nazi mod because there are playable far-right factions and the game does not criticize your moral standards for playing as them. I don’t know what /vst/ thinks of the mod because I haven’t been there in years. I bet a lot of them like it, and a few of them probably hate it. The general fan outcry is that TFR has been a surprise godsend for the HoI4 modding scene, injecting a new life into it that it didn’t know it had left.
TFR is a new mod, however, and the wheel always turns. There’s a bit of a nervous understanding of this reality. This is a meme posted by one of the TFR devs themselves, making light of the fate of TNO:
As an added bonus, I was playing TFR as Trump’s America a few days ago and got these two hilarious text events:
It’s good to see that the TFR devs have a good sense of humor.
In Defense of Alternate History Tropes
Before we wrap up, I want to discuss something about those cringey, trope-filled HoI4 toozer mods from the previous article. I’m not inherently against alternate history tropes. And since everything’s kind of been done before, it’s not like you’re going to discover something new in the realm of alt history. Generally, ideas are cheap. Execution is what’s more important. When it comes to making an alternate history scenario, you don’t need to focus as much on sheer originality, but instead take established conventions and put a novel spin on it to make it interesting. More than this, however, you need an actual story to tell and characters to fill it with. And a good character tells a good story more than the other way around.
I also want to talk about contrivances. Let’s return to that screenshot of The Iron Dream’s California conflict.
I already listed all the strikes against it in my previous article. But what gives? I’m guilty of some of the exact same things. I also have a project where America collapses into a bajillion warlords, and some of these factions are based on Fallout: New Vegas factions, and some of them have really cringey names or contrived backstories. Am I just a hypocrite?
Well yeah, kind of. And like PinkPanzer on the Facepunch board, my Fallen Continent series also got its start with text-based RP games and niche alt history forums that I regret ever participating in. But, though I say it who shouldn’t, I’d like to think I have done so with more tact and thought put into it than some of these toozer mods.
If you go on the reddit comments section for these Iron Dream teasers, you’ll find that the developer has an answer to every question and criticism that comes his way. They aren’t good answers, but he’s always got something to try to swat away the accusations that his mod is a neo-Nazi wankfest. They are, as you might say, contrivances. For instance, why is the historically more right-wing northern California home to a socialist revolution, while the more left-wing south is ardently conservative? Well, says the developer, a complicated chain of events has led to things getting mixed up. Okay, sometimes life is like that. After all, it was the more conservative Bavaria that attempted a communist revolution in 1918 and not the more socialist north. The problem is that he employs one after another of these contrived excuses.
When writing a story or just doing a worldbuilding project, you need to treat believability as a currency that you can spend. You have a set amount of it, and certain things you do expend that currency. You can get away with some things, but not everything you want to. If you want ideology-swapped California, okay, but that’s going to cost you some currency that you won’t get back. When you run out of believability currency and start overdrafting your account, your readers/players/viewers lose their suspension of disbelief and your story comes across as hackneyed and trite. If you’re finding believability at a premium, you can change your genre and target demographics to get away with more.
If you are writing an alternate-history geopolitical thriller set in 1960s America, it’s going to be very difficult to get readers on-board with dragons or a sentient AI computer-god. Those are going to cost a lot of your believability currency. But if you’re writing a fantasy story, the audience is coming into it taking it for granted that things like magic and monsters exist in its world, so writing a dragon into your story costs very little currency. Sentient AI overlords, likewise, would cost very little currency in a science fiction story. If your alternate history is getting too outlandish, you need to move it beyond the realm of pure alternate history and into something like science fiction. And that change should be accompanied with an appropriate shift in tone. Fallout does this excellently, using the nuclear apocalypse as a massive coupon to redeem all sorts of fanciful ideas for minimal currency.
Alternate history tropes aren’t bad, they just need to be executed properly in a situation where it feels appropriate. I’ve read some fascinating Southern victory stories and some dreadfully stale Southern victory stories. They’re working with the same tropes, just applying them in different ways at different levels of intensity. And I can’t go too hard on this Iron Dream guy. He seems like a teenager (if you see his reddit account he likes to draw doodles about TNO and make TNO-themed wojaks), and I guarantee you that whatever I was writing at his age was much worse. I’ve got a complete libretto of a Legend of Zelda opera lying around somewhere deep in the bowels of my fiction writing folder on my computer, and I wince with every line on the occasions that I go back and read it. So if you have any cringey stories or worldbuilding scenarios, don’t take it personal.
Closing Thoughts
I have a complicated relationship with Hearts of Iron IV. It’s my most-played game on Steam and also one of my most hated. I played it so much as a teenager that I had pretty much burned myself out on the game by the time COVID came around. Nowadays, I get stuck in a weird cycle that I can’t seem to break out of. I’ll ignore the game for six months, get a hankering for it again, reinstall it, play it a lot for the rest of the month, remember all the things I dislike about HoI4 and get sick of it again, and finally uninstall until I pick it back up again six months later. I’ve been dancing this tango for like three years now. November and May are my HoI4 months for some reason.
This month is neither November nor May, but I’ve been on a HoI4 kick the past few days anyway. The reason why is that I’ve been sick this week, and decided to boot up the game and check the subreddit for the first time in a long time to see if there was anything new besides TFR. I saw that Iron Dream teaser, it set me off, and got my creative juices flowing. I don’t know why, but I always get a lot more writing done when I’m sick.
The game and community are in some ways awful, but in other ways they get a bad, dare I say undeserved rap. For all its gameplay flaws and toxic ideology dress-up doll fantasies, it does scratch an itch that no other game really can. I’d call it one of those “don’t knock it ‘till you’ve tried it” things, but Paradox grand strategy games take so long to learn that you can’t really easily try it. That’s even more true given how much damn DLC you have to buy to get the full experience nowadays. It’s easier when you’ve been playing EU4 since launch and just fork up another $10-20 annually for more stuff. Not so easy for the outsider looking to get started. HoI4 isn’t a game exclusively for autists and certainly not for trannies, but you’re going to find quite a few of them nonetheless.
I was actually a HoI4 modder for a little while. I had my own custom airplane graphics mod that I made for myself and never released on the workshop and was kind of-sort of associated with Axis of Evil, but never in any official capacity. I ran a few errands for them with GFX stuff, that sort of thing. Were there insane wignats? Sure, but everyone was a little crazy in 2021. My real stint was when a Welsh fellow—we’ll call him Ryan—invited me to join the team for a mod called Make America Again. It was an American collapse mod like Bring the War Home, but set in 2020 and with a jokey, memey atmosphere. I was the developer for Molossia (a micronation in western Nevada) after the first one quit. I didn’t like having to work on an organized mod team and quit right away, and the work I did for Molossia was thrown out by the guy who took my place. But I still hung out with Ryan and some of the other MAA people after that. Like Axis of Evil, sanity was at a premium among some of the MAA developers, and things didn’t end well between Ryan and I—he ended up as one of those far-right transsexuals I warned you about in the TNO article. MAA wasn’t a total toozer mod, it did actually release in a playable form, but it wasn’t very good. It was left to the wayside and forgotten, and TFR’s release in 2024 reminded people that it used to exist and was very stupid and low-quality in comparison to what TFR accomplished.
The characteristic levels of autism I’ve described at length across this series aren’t solely confined to Hearts of Iron in the first place. It really affects any game that attracts Sensitive Young MenTM to its playerbase: games with steep learning curves, complex systems, high skill ceilings, and demand some level of base intellect (not necessarily intelligence, but intellect) for the most satisfying results. Fallout: New Vegas is a popular example of “autist game,” and I’ve referenced it several times before. If you remember the Fallout: The Frontier debacle, you’d realize just how similar it is to the calamity that befell TNO. For some other people, it’s games like Factorio or RimWorld. I wouldn’t even blame it on the games themselves, I think it’s just a product of the times. If a game like HoI4 somehow came out 30 years ago, you wouldn’t see the kind of madness that’s come out of the game today.
If you’re into writing and worldbuilding, then don’t let what I’ve said these in these past five articles discourage you. Go crazy. Write what comes to your mind, even if it’s stupid and retardedly gay. Make mistakes. Abuse tropes. Just get your ideas out there, find a way to express yourself, and as you grow and mature you just might find that the quality of your writing has matured with you.
Index
This is Part 5 of the HoI4 modding series on my Substack. Click the links below to access the other parts.
Part 1: Introduction
Part 2: Kaiserreich
Part 3: The New Order
Part 4: Toozer Mods
Part 5: Brainrot
The best part of hoi4 mods is being permabanned from their sub reddits for being marginally transphobic
Does TFR reference sab's rates or is he just the sab seen on the news?