Nerf Discourse

I mean yeah, “fascist-coded” might apply to them, but that term feels useless for anything except winning internet arguments. What they are is “bad guy coded.” There’s no substance. We largely don’t see the qualities that would make the Empire fascist. We get close, a little bit, with Finn’s backstory, but then that gets thrown out the window. “Speeches with lots of yelling” and “flag color schemes” aren’t what fascism is.

Like, here’s the obvious thing: if you are content to rely on how a regime is ~portrayed~ to decide if it’s fascist or not, you sure as hell are not going to notice fascism in real life because you’ll be waiting for your country to adopt a more evil-looking color scheme. I mean, if we’re going to take it seriously, this is not a good way to evaluate evilness.

“Kylo Ren is a bad character because he’s a fascist” is a take, but consider: “Kylo Ren is a bad character because he isn’t a fascist.” There is no substantial ideology or intent behind his actions, he’s just angry and likes power. The Empire doesn’t appear to have a culture, let alone an idea of their culture being superior. The fight against the Empire has nothing anti-fascist about it. As handled in the sequel trilogy, it’s just irritatingly shallow. It absolutely could have been better. The seeds absolutely were there! But Rise of Skywalker was too occupied no-homoing Finn and Poe to remember to complete their character arcs.

Yes, destroying an entire solar system is ABSOLUTELY genocide, but the film spent like, 40 seconds on this, because the role of Starkiller Base is to be another round thing in the sky to blow up while starfighters go pew pew pew. The annihilation of billions of people and untold amounts of culture is an afterthought. It’s also boiled down to a single person pressing a button instead of a massive project overseen and operated by countless people, and its impact seems totally forgotten about once the heroes blow the thing up.

I mean sure, this is true of the original Death Star, but Starkiller Base is “the same plot point, but worse.” The original Death Star took almost two decades to complete, for one thing. There was at least some recognition of how meaningful it was to create something with the purpose of annihilating planets. It was still shallow but it was something. In The Force Awakens there’s nothing, there is no weight to it at all. It’s not handled at all in terms of the destruction of cultures, of entire people groups, just as a Bigger Bad. Everything is just there to mirror the plot of the OT enough to make the fans happy (which is impossible, but I digress). That entire part of the story is executed in a way that just sucks unbelievable amounts of ass.

I guess my take is that if we’re arguing about whether Kylo Ren should be redeemed because he’s a “fascist,”—that is, if we want to take this stuff seriously at all—we should talk about how terrible a job these films did with portraying fascism. You can’t even say that Disney was *attempting* to portray fascism because let’s be real, I doubt Disney has an interest in meaningful social commentary with its cash cow franchise.

That said...

Something that I find slightly bothersome is that numerous contemporary writers talked about how fundamentally hollow Nazi ideology was.

Jorge Luis Borges lived in Argentina, and during the war the population of that country was divided as to whether they supported the Axis or the Allies.

Borges fancied that, when his fascist acquaintances would talk about some Nazi victory, he would even hear a tinge of fear in their voice, because in his mind, Nazism was something you could fight for, die for, and kill for, but it was impossible to live in.

Like, there was a sense that the Nazis' barbaric destruction wasn't so much justified by Nazi ideology as much as that action was at the heart of it, and imagining what a Nazi country would look like during peace time was extraordinarily difficult.

(I'm paraphrasing material from Selected Non-Fictions published by Penguin books, I don't have it in front of me to quote)

Ironically, that also describes the TFA and TLJ’s depiction of The Resistance just as much. That is, it’s primarily a cult of personality around Leia. “She'll always be a princess to me," and all that. It damn near disintegrates the moment she goes unconscious.

I mean yeah, “fascist-coded” might apply to them, but that term feels useless for anything except winning internet arguments. What they are is “bad guy coded.” There’s no substance. We largely don’t see the qualities that would make the Empire fascist. We get close, a little bit, with Finn’s backstory, but then that gets thrown out the window. “Speeches with lots of yelling” and “flag color schemes” aren’t what fascism is.

Like, here’s the obvious thing: if you are content to rely on how a regime is ~portrayed~ to decide if it’s fascist or not, you sure as hell are not going to notice fascism in real life because you’ll be waiting for your country to adopt a more evil-looking color scheme. I mean, if we’re going to take it seriously, this is not a good way to evaluate evilness.

“Kylo Ren is a bad character because he’s a fascist” is a take, but consider: “Kylo Ren is a bad character because he isn’t a fascist.” There is no substantial ideology or intent behind his actions, he’s just angry and likes power. The Empire doesn’t appear to have a culture, let alone an idea of their culture being superior. The fight against the Empire has nothing anti-fascist about it. As handled in the sequel trilogy, it’s just irritatingly shallow. It absolutely could have been better. The seeds absolutely were there! But Rise of Skywalker was too occupied no-homoing Finn and Poe to remember to complete their character arcs.

Yes, destroying an entire solar system is ABSOLUTELY genocide, but the film spent like, 40 seconds on this, because the role of Starkiller Base is to be another round thing in the sky to blow up while starfighters go pew pew pew. The annihilation of billions of people and untold amounts of culture is an afterthought. It’s also boiled down to a single person pressing a button instead of a massive project overseen and operated by countless people, and its impact seems totally forgotten about once the heroes blow the thing up.

I mean sure, this is true of the original Death Star, but Starkiller Base is “the same plot point, but worse.” The original Death Star took almost two decades to complete, for one thing. There was at least some recognition of how meaningful it was to create something with the purpose of annihilating planets. It was still shallow but it was something. In The Force Awakens there’s nothing, there is no weight to it at all. It’s not handled at all in terms of the destruction of cultures, of entire people groups, just as a Bigger Bad. Everything is just there to mirror the plot of the OT enough to make the fans happy (which is impossible, but I digress). That entire part of the story is executed in a way that just sucks unbelievable amounts of ass.

I guess my take is that if we’re arguing about whether Kylo Ren should be redeemed because he’s a “fascist,”—that is, if we want to take this stuff seriously at all—we should talk about how terrible a job these films did with portraying fascism. You can’t even say that Disney was *attempting* to portray fascism because let’s be real, I doubt Disney has an interest in meaningful social commentary with its cash cow franchise.

That said...

Something that I find slightly bothersome is that numerous contemporary writers talked about how fundamentally hollow Nazi ideology was.

Jorge Luis Borges lived in Argentina, and during the war the population of that country was divided as to whether they supported the Axis or the Allies.

Borges fancied that, when his fascist acquaintances would talk about some Nazi victory, he would even hear a tinge of fear in their voice, because in his mind, Nazism was something you could fight for, die for, and kill for, but it was impossible to live in.

Like, there was a sense that the Nazis' barbaric destruction wasn't so much justified by Nazi ideology as much as that action was at the heart of it, and imagining what a Nazi country would look like during peace time was extraordinarily difficult.

(I'm paraphrasing material from Selected Non-Fictions published by Penguin books, I don't have it in front of me to quote)

Ironically, that also describes the TFA and TLJ’s depiction of The Resistance just as much. That is, it’s primarily a cult of personality around Leia. “She'll always be a princess to me," and all that. It damn near disintegrates the moment she goes unconscious.

politically and economically, the pokemon games are pretty much a socdem utopia. everything you need is free, nobody seems to be meaningfully impoverished, and nothing is expensive enough that a child can’t buy it with a bit of work, but also a guy can charge you ten bucks to look at his mansion as your child friend comments “this is how the rich get richer!”

If you are doing a weird fad diet, I feel no obligation to cater for that, you should just eat a smaller portion.

Similarly if you keep kosher or are not eating meat on a Friday: I don’t particularly feel the need to accommodate different people with different dietary restrictions differently and specifically if they are all able to eat the same vegan, gluten-free curry alternative.

I suspect most people act more or less like this: If you already spent all of your food accommodation budget on your allergies and religious commandments, you can’t afford to be a picky eater. If it’s easy to accommodate you, for example by just not putting sausage on the pizza, there is no reason not to accommodate somebody, but if you’re already gluten-free, it’s unreasonable to demand gluten-free pizza. If it’s a small gathering, having pizza might be weird in the first place if two out of five people can’t eat gluten. But if the cook ensures that the big shared family pizza pie is gluten-free for your sake, you shouldn’t make a fuss because there are some onions touching your slice of the pizza.

One of the more interesting arguments he makes is [paraphrased] “Muslims and Jews who refuse to eat meat that isn’t halal or kosher should simply not eat meat, because the slaughtering process required by their religion is a violation of those animals’ dignity and their right to the least painful death possible. I am not asking anything of them I would not do myself - I have been a vegan for 40 years. There is nothing in their scripture that requires them to eat meat.”

and it’s already been decided that the things that men have, women can also have - even if it’s the most basic, rudimentary stuff like ‘ripley, in aliens, is a woman who can shoot good and lift weights’.