Ah yes, famously conservative media like One Piece, Ghost in the Shell, Gundam, Princess Mononoke, JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure, and Cowboy Bebop

  • Ram_The_Manparts [he/him]@hexbear.net
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    1
    ·
    9 months ago

    I suck at media crit and am just generally not very good with words, but I’m gonna take one last stab at this.

    The point I’m trying to make is that reading fascist intent into things like people are doing with Frieren could be just massively overthinking things.

    Look at it this way: While it’s true that, say, stories about zombies and alien invasions were originally based on a reactionary fear of “the other”, I sincerely doubt that the vast majority of people who write these sort of stories in our current time sit down and make a conscious decision of using them as allegories for immigration or anti-colonialism or whatever. They just grew up with these tropes and want to build an interesting world around them that has nothing at all to do with what connotations they may have had like a century or more ago. The phrase “sometimes a cigar is just a cigar” comes to mind.

    So fascists and socialists could both be wrong in reading these stories as supporting fascism.

    Does that make sense?

    • EelBolshevikism [none/use name]@hexbear.net
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      1
      ·
      9 months ago

      Best case scenario it’s just a menacing fantasy antagonist species for an exciting and fun adventure, and that’s ok. But if they do mean anything more real with it, it’s probably that fascism is good, just going off the track record of anime/manga writers.

        • EelBolshevikism [none/use name]@hexbear.net
          link
          fedilink
          English
          arrow-up
          1
          ·
          9 months ago

          I know there’s plenty of good manga/anime writers politically, it’s just also kind of a conservative country (and don’t get me wrong, I don’t think it’s especially conservative compared to any Western country, American writers have a bad track record too, we just block it out). I was trying to make a semi-joking point about how common nostalgia for Imperial Japan or stuff like what happened with Attack on Titan is.

    • EelBolshevikism [none/use name]@hexbear.net
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      1
      ·
      9 months ago

      Oh yeah i had a big dumb moment and didn’t notice this part,

      The phrase “sometimes a cigar is just a cigar” comes to mind.

      From a political perspective, there is no such thing. Yes, the chance of the writer being an actual Nazi is low, but when someone makes something “non-political” it is really just their baseline assumptions about what is or isn’t political.