jasper (he/him)

anyway you guys wanna see more of the completely necessarily horny theseus and minotaur sculpture by canova? because it’s my favourite thing and i legit want to know if canova intentionally made it as homoerotic as he possibly could because

well

from forcing an entire group of people to wear nazi armbands to the author’s own personal beliefs, do not sit here and say we’re looking too much into it. fuck off. fascism is on a global rise and it should scare you, and any decent person with common sense should be against any type of media depiction that is advocating for fascism/nazism/war crimes/ethnic cleansing. it’s beyond “it’s just a piece of fiction.” MEDIA INFLUENCES REAL LIFE. if you think media doesn’t influence real life and real life opinions, you are seriously deluding yourself. i don’t really know what to say beyond that.

I understand the appeal of these franchises. Hell I used to be into them myself. But please realize that when you consume fascist media, you’re internalizing the same messages my Eren Jaegar fan student has. When you’re being repeatedly asked to sympathize and root for characters that are bad people who do terrible things, you start to excuse and rationalize those behaviors. You start to be desensitized to actions that should rightly elicit horror in you.

I’m not saying that watching Attack on Titan automatically makes you a genocide apologist. I’m not saying that we can’t think critically about the media we consume. I’m not saying we can’t have media from a villian’s points of view either. What I AM saying, is that framing is important. And unfortanely it’s almost impossible to get away from the positive framing of fascism in AoT and Hetalia. And if you spend too much time in a warped frame, you’ll warp to match. It’s really not worth it to keep engaging in that material.

I think it’s worthwhile to also mention that my student’s aspiration is to become a soldier. He wants to emulate Eren Jaegar in the defense of America. And I hope you can see how dangerous that mindset is for an armed forces member. A soldier should be able to make tough choices. A soldier should NOT be willing to do “whatever it takes” with no limits, self-justified by a sense of extreme nationalism. Yeah. That’s what you’re internalizing, folks.