Baldur's Gate 3 and Starfield could be a Barbenheimer moment, but gamers demand blood

Pop culture loves mashing two things together. Usually in memes or on t-shirts. Hey look, it’s the Village People but instead of spelling out YMCA they’re doing Loss.jpg or something. Yo, what if Pikachu was Darth Vader. Here’s Picard ripping a phat bong. Etcetera etcetera. Endless. Mind numbing. The death throes of a civilisation ready to burn. Still, one genuinely nice thing to come out of a meme borne of the sheer juxtaposition between two tonally disparate things is Barbenheimer: the cultural phenomenon of marathoning both Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer and Greta Gerwig’s Barbie on the same day. The order you do it in has been the subject of much debate, but the idea is to embrace the tonal whiplash and just have a great time taking in the latest works of two respected auteurs. They are wildly different films, of course. Well, so I’m told, I had a baby six weeks ago so by the time I next have a free afternoon we’ll be on Barbie: Endgame (I just did the thing I moaned about earlier, but with a knowing irony so as to pre-empt criticism). But it’s been interesting, and perhaps inevitable, to see people comparing their themes. Though they have been thrust together as an unlikely pairing precisely because of how unlikely a pair they make, people have been finding all sorts of intellectual commonalities between them. Many articles have been written about how Barbie and Oppenheimer are both fundamentally about the same thing – though nobody can agree on what the ‘thing’ is, with candidates including death, love, parenting, forgiveness, confronting regret, or the importance of impeccable tailoring. Read more