games

It's going to blow their minds once they figure out who the Empire in Star Wars was an allegory for.

I once got a whole room of guys to laugh when I mentioned the X-men comics are an allegory for persecuted ethnic, religious, sexual, etc minorities. That one is the most clear allegories out of any popular media, and yet people still don't get it. The mutants are clearly oppressed, they're not typical superheroes who are fighting crime out of some intrinsic feeling of superiority. The X-men are organized and militant to defend themselves from discrimination.

The 2000s era X-men movies are even more clear about it, although they squeeze the allegory down so that mutants specifically represent queer people. You've got teenage runaways, unsupportive families, and there's a whole theme of mutants figuring themselves out around the age of puberty. There's a line in the second movie where one mutant's mother asks "Have you tried not being a mutant?" which is a parody of a common conservative line from the time "Have you tried not being gay?" I mentioned all of this and only got one guy on board because I mentioned the director, Bryan Singer, is gay. Then he was able to believe there's gay stuff in the X-men.

I think some people only engage in media because it's comforting lights and sounds they can distract themselves with

I remember the first time I saw (and loved) There Will Be Blood I had an argument with a friend about it. He hated it and said he didn't understand who could enjoy a movie like that--"everyone was so shitty, who am.i supposed to root for?" I was kinda floored by that, because I remember thinking it was amazing and near-perfect. To me it was like a surgical diagram, delving much deeper than some trite ethical parable into the minds of the powerful and the power-seeking, and demonstrating the world they perpetuate.

Not saying I was right when I disagreed, but I realized we were watching movies for different reasons. I had my foot in the real world, enjoying media for how it interacts with it, while he was enjoying movies as something to utterly submit yourself to. If a movie doesn't have a good slot for him to sit in, he's homeless in it. In some ways he probably enjoyed media more than I do.

They followed it up with:

Where's the gender dysphoria in warhammer then?

Good stuff.

You gotta start small with Yankees.

Tell them The Lorax isn't only about trees, challenge them to figure it out on their own.

i freakin hate "modern day mentality"!!!

retvrn to tradition! (eating fruit gushers and watching nickelodeon)

sometimes the ~~curtains~~ space fascists are just blue

Games Workshop fights back against fascist hate symbols in the Warhammer 40K community

All art, all stories are an expression of one's own thoughts and ideas. All stories are about inner and outer human conflict. Your characters' goals, motivations and the adversities they face will always be dictated, or at the very least strongly influenced by your ideology and world view. No fascist will ever write about a communist utopia positively. No communist will ever uncritically write about a great man pulling himself up by his bootstraps to become a billionaire. If you're an "apolitical gamer" you will unquestioningly write about whatever you're finding in the trash can of ideology at the moment. Similarly, everything you write will be tainted by "modern day thought" because everything we have ever experienced has happened in the modern day, including learning about the past. Every fantasy world is merely a reinterpretation of ours and every sapient fantasy race is allegorical to humans in some way, whether you intend it to be or not. We cannot comprehend non-human conflict and thus human conflict is all we can write about.

These people really do believe the curtains are blue, huh?

To these kinds of people, nothing is political until their views are challenged. Politics dominates every facet of their life and they only notice when a necessary change is pointed out.

Warhammer Fantasy

Europe is full of savage anglos chomping at the bit to kill each other and the only thing stopping them is the fact that there are other countries they can go after

Also, Scotsmen hold grudges

Reminds me of this classic that is never not on my mind

This is about Warhammer Fantasy. Literally every faction is an allegory/pastiche for a specific historical nation/culture.

Ah yes, the genetically modified, cloned, super-soldiers who all hail an iconic god-emperor, who in reality died long ago. They gleefully genocide their way through the universe in the name of this corpse that never cared about them in the first place. They all internalise insane amounts of trauma and death and claim it to be a good thing.

Definitely don't think about the parallels with current hegemonies on Earth that also cultishly worship long-dead symbols that justify suffering of the masses, depersonalisation, eugenics, and genocide.

To me, 40k's spes mariens were always a warning to society - This is the direction you're headed if you keep this shit up.

Dragging every single redditor into a classroom one by one and screaming paragraphs of Gadamer at them until they grasp the very basics of how we understand and make meaning