Do you ever feel guilty about enjoying liberal media?
Do you ever feel guilty about enjoying liberal media?
Title says it all.
I am a huge 40k fan and I know how problematic 40k is with its portrayal of endless war and facism. Comrade @[email protected] has put it best:
Maybe all of the 40k factions are fascist and that universe’s lore has no dialectic of class struggle and is to violent to be realistic, thus serves as part of the superstructure for fascism.
it reinforces the idea that the conflict between tribes will always supercede the conflict between classes. It’s wrong on so many levels.
And yet I can't hate it. I have a hard time taking 40k serious and seeing it as more than a silly boardgame with cool minis and (deliciously) stupid lore.
Same with B99. I know that the show is horrid copacanda, I know that shows like this prevent people from seeing pigs as the pigs they are because "funny cop show portraits them as silly and relatable." But I still like the show a lot. I like the characters and just pretend that it plays in a parallel universe were cops aren't the worst.
I just sort of suppress any critical thoughts and take those things at face value without thinking about what they imply. It's just very hard to find alternatives.
So yeah I feel terrible for finding enjoyment in this stuff even though I know I shouldn't. Can anyone relate or do you perhaps have similar feelings towards other franchises?
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No. I'm too busy seething at the incredible low quality garbage Marvel/Disney and everyone else churns out to stop and be too angry about that. I just keep reminding myself the quality of art/culture will improve after the revolution and not before. Right now I must suffer the decay and pain of having garbage shoved in my face and having other people effusively tell me how great it is. Not even getting into the propaganda which is awful, on the merits, technical/story-telling etc level it's just a wasteland out there and I weep. Lots of slop. Not that I don't occasionally find a piece I guiltily enjoy.
Though admittedly I kind of avoid the worst offenders. I mean I do enjoy older media and I guess I excuse it as it was just that way back then, they were just sexist, racist, homophobic etc (I cringe at the really in your face stuff but the casual pervasive things not so much). To me it's all an academic exercise. I know what I'm watching is a reflection of a time and place and type of thinking. I think older stuff actually helps in that I can say it just was that way whereas if you shove some 2 year old Marvel movie stuffed full of end of history liberal nonsense that raises my hackles because hey, these people are around me and they're annoying and smug and gah.
I zero in on like subversive elements in older movies too and I think in a way modern movies are much less subversive in ways that matter, end of history and all that nonsense rotting people's brains. Take just as an example Terminator 2, the main bad guy robot is a cop and he's a cop for a reason and Cameron has stated that's because cops see themselves as better than other humans, they're apart from us, they use violence, etc so in what's otherwise a mindless effects and explosion-fest you have these little nuggets to chew on. Truly dangerous to capital they're not but at least they're not full of the open militarism you see in films these days, worship for the US military, America-Fuck-Yeah stuff even if there are no military it's American scientists or cops or researchers.
Side-track but fucking fuck Arrival. Fuck the writers. Writing America as the country that has reasonable, rational researchers who discover the aliens don't want war, meanwhile the irrational Chinese/Asians are so war-like and aggressive (just like in real life the writers want to nudge you, whereas America in real life they nudge you, is just like the protagonist) they get bent on a warpath with the aliens and act exactly as the US would act in actuality in trying to rally everyone to attack them.
So I guess I could say I don't feel guilty because I get annoyed if it's too bad and then I just stop. As to guilt, it's what I have. I speak English, I live in the west, the US is the primary media creator, only China remains and very little of their content gets even subtitles let alone a dub.