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selec posted:The ending of Black Panther was the most cynical deployment of identity politics in a long time in a movie. I felt this has turned out to be true of almost the entire movie. The ending's already been covered, but what I've gathered by listening to black retrospective analysis of the film as a whole, Wakanda is both conceptually and structurally unacceptable as a portrayal of afrofuturism — it takes the premise of the void/loss of robbed african self-determination, and asks the question: what would Africans have accomplished by now were they to have been spared from imperial conquest and allowed to create their own future with the same sort of empowered agency that other parts of the world kept for themselves? What would be the product of black african self-determination? Then it decided the answer was, uhh, a pseudoconfederate tribal absolute authoritarian monarchy with ritualized blood duels, topmost sociological levels of ethnostate rigidity and intentional diversity exclusion, social harmony preservation based in appeals to ethnic traditionalism, gender essentialism embedded in top circles of power, and by the way it's so obviously vulnerable to dictatorial overthrow that oops lol that just inevitably happened, what are the odds? As someone close to me put it, it wasn't afrofuturism, it was basketcase afrofascism. And there lies the worst insult — the immediate presentation of an african state allowed to evolve free of outside influence or colonial pressure and it creates a monarchist, extremely corruptible structure so foundationally flimsy that immediately falls to a coup, violent loyalist purge, and restructuring to dictatorial regime militarism — less than an hour into being reverentially displayed as the inspirational conceptual outcome of African self-determination under impossibly ideal circumstances.
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Nov 2, 2021 20:14
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Jaxyon posted:Dune(2021) is nearly unwatchable in terms of the blatantly obvious middle-eastern appropriation while casting it to be superficially "race-blind" but very much not. This all sounds like it is completely in line with Dune's intentional warning against occupiers, charismatic leaders and messianic figures on their "hero's journey" It would actually be concerningly weird of the producers to intentionally eschew the imagery of paul as literally white savior from the Dignified Royals coming to bring purpose and greater order
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Nov 2, 2021 21:11
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Sanguinia posted:To be fair, judging the material as presented rather than in the context of its original source is reasonable. 
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Nov 2, 2021 21:32
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DarklyDreaming posted:There's definitely room for a Rick Sanchez/Tyler Durden level misread of Paul Atreides. It's exceptionally common. There's a whole group of people who either love or hate the book based on a misreading of it as celebrating Paul as an ubermensch white savior.
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Nov 2, 2021 21:47
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the X-Men as parable (especially for minority rights and struggles) only works well if the X-Men are doing their thing, alone, in their own universe where the sole focus is the emergence of mutancy and the resulting reactionary societal backlash and crackdowns that result from it. Tying it into the same comic book universe where superheroes and aliens and psychic wizards and poo poo have been having their superpower duels for as long as everyone's been alive just invalidates the narrative setting. Like, mutants would appear and people would just be like "this is supposed to be news? our city gets protected from giant rhino-men and vampires and extraterrestrial symbiotes that wear themselves on their hosts by some dude who has psycho spider powers lmao" and you're not going to have a gainly scenario play out where the authorities are all like "false alarm fellas, this hulk guy, not a mutant, actually just some gamma ray mutation he had this one time, completely different thing, withdraw the Sentinels, he's perfectly ok to continue" like if he was superpowered because of a natural gene expression instead, whambo bambo suddenly its very different. As it is they have to stridently pretend like the mutants are having their civil disorder and conflict events happening in a weird bubble that just gets spontaneously ignored by the rest of superhero-kind so it is 100% only mutant on mutant poo poo, like in the mavel reboot where within one chapter magneto is literally occupying washington dc and publicly executing the president on live TV and well I guess literally every other superhero group was just out that day, what are the odds? magneto's livestreaming execucide and all our calls to the avengers just goin to vm lol drat
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Nov 5, 2021 01:44
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| # ¿ May 10, 2024 08:32 |
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The true problem with warcraft, larger than and encompassing every one of the spiderwebbed networks of other problems with the franchise's writing, is that the entire series is the veneration of Strongman as savior and protector in Times Of Great Need, which quickly becomes all times. Like it's just this all the time, ceaselessly, because it ultimately was written by 90s gamer bros who could really not do much other than write self-insert male power fantasy fanfic characters. As a specific example: the noble savage trope is bad! yet still somehow it is completely encased in strongmannism — the elevation of the savages was the parochial obligation of a strongman who must unite and uplift them. The glorious righteous autocracy on the other side is the same way. And throughout the MMO years of the lore, every player acts in service of these strongmen and can only play their part in the outcomes of these Very Strong Powerful Men Who Are The Only True Defense Against The Great Danger. It was actually quite impressive that they managed to roll all the problems of the franchise up in the same glorification issues, but as a friend put it it's 100% bepauldroned mussolinis making the airships run on time
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Nov 23, 2021 02:21
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