saw someone earnestly argue that the popularity of star wars in the 70s was proves a majority of americans were against american imperialism and supported the tactics of the Viet Cong and i think years of shallow media analysis through narrow ideological lenses has destroyed some people's minds
this was in the context of a conversation about the new star wars show and how star wars fans now are bad. trying to position old star wars fans as just as ideological as current fans but anti-imperialist, rather than kids who liked spaceships and lasers and magic powers.
“The media you consume is inherently linked to your politics which is an extension of your overall identity” is an overgeneralized mindset I really wish we could delete
it's a facile take that offers the appearance of insight without taking the trouble to actually have any, a truism at the highest, broad-stroke level and utterly insupportable at any scale of greater granularity
Did they argue "Hanoi Jane" should never have gotten the role of Princess Leia in the original?
If so they're treading very close to a hospital "vacay"
it must be a very soft and pleasant way of existing in the world. like, people who like good things are good, people who like bad things are bad, and you never have to think about anything complicated ever. star wars is about fighting an empire, so it's anti-imperialist. easy.
No, when i saw star wars as a child in 1996 i was like, "this really says a lot about American imperialism" and then used my star wars action figures to roleplay organized community resistance
I make this comment more often that I expected but:
Don’t forget the anti-woke gamers who thought Persona 5 was mocking "sjws," or metal gear fans who drove kojima to madness by demanding more guys and violence in a stealth game about pacifism and why war is bad.
Just pressing X to scroll through War & Peace levels of dialogue, and an entire seasons of Game of Thrones levels of on screen narrative/character declaration.
(watching the walking allegory for the gestapo become the face of the franchise, who everyone thinks is so cool that a sequel of trilogies is made about him, specifically) americans reject and loathe a brutal empire, in any form 😤
In a similar vein, the popularity of The Fast and The Furious signifies the majority of the US is pro-crime, Dark Knight indicates we support billionaires punching lower-income people for crime, and Harry Potter shows we support giving children deadly weapons and making them soldiers.
I think of Star Wars shows us anything it's that people in the evil empire think they're the scrappy rebels. It's why people LARPed on Twitter as The Resistance while decrying antifa and thought Trump needed to be removed by voting.
Wild that anyone would expect the average American movie goer in 1977 to have the media literacy and philosophical bent to take that reading to heart. It's Flash Gordon, the epic cycle and space dogfighting. The anti vietnam stuff is in there sure, but it's not what the public got out of it in 77
