#this ramble

50s sci-fi exploited the fears of Soviet infiltration and nuclear disaster, so there was quite a trend of alien invasion movies. The trope of the technological and emotionless enemy took shape here, with aliens that had frightening (I guess?) forms and were set on destroying the earth. They had no reasonable motivation, just wanted the earth and humanity gone mostly, which mirrored a bit how Soviets were perceived - just The Threat that exists to attack USAmerican people.

The fear of ideological indoctrination into communism (which just stood for A Thing Other Than USAmerican Values) was explored in movies like Invasion of the Body Snatchers, where aliens take over by creating replicas of each human and replacing them when they went to sleep. The takeover is sudden, while the person is in a vulnerable state, and the protagonist must stay in a vigilante state to avoid possession.

This loss of self and identity —of humanity, which plays a major role in sci-fi— was enhanced in the 80s in Star Trek: Next Generation with the introduction of the Borg, a transhumanist species that alters their own bodies since birth where each member is a part of a larger collective consciousness.

The Borg are a threat that won't listen to reason or compassion, but rather than being just an agent of chaos they simply act on logic: their goal is to assimilate every species they deem worthy to absorb their knowledge on technology, so they can enhance themselves as a unity further. They destroy to grow, which has at least more complexity than the aliens of old.

While anti-communist propaganda of the prior decades equated collectivist ideology to conformism and submission, depicting it as a loss of emotions and identity like in Invasion of the Body Snatchers, Star Trek took this trope several creative steps ahead and made the Borg become assimilated to the collective so early in their life they do not have a sense of self, always talking in plural pronouns. When separated from their companions, the collective, they still refer to themselves as ‘we’ and fail to understand the concept of an individual.

Sci-fi moved on from the immediate threat of the Cold War, delving into more universal and philosophical themes of identity, but the enemy created in the Red Scare continued to be used for these ideas. The Borg, complex and creative as they are, still mirror the perception of the Soviet Union as an expanding empire whose people have been brainwashed into pursuing collectivist ideals and technological development (this one courtesy of the race with the US).

Sci-fi notoriously provides ground to project society's fears and anxieties, which are ever changing with the years, and the Soviet Union was dissolved long ago, yet the monsters of fear and anxiety sometimes go back to wearing the costume of the Soviet caricature.

The Matrix was released in 1999, one year after Dark City. Both contain similar themes of autonomy, with a protagonist that must fight his way out of a fake world designed by an echo of anti-communist propaganda —in The Matrix it's robots who take over the digital avatars of people at will and share a collective consciousness, in Dark City it's aliens that take over the corpses of people and share a collective consciousness.

However, neither of these movies really has an intent to follow the footsteps of its predecessors regarding these tropes, they just use the costumes. Freedom and self determination do play into the propaganda as a contrast to the conformity and submission of The Threat, but it is entirely possible to explore them via these tropes without falling into ideological warfare.

Which is not the case of Legend of Korra which, while not strictly sci-fi, it does have elements of steampunk. And the use of the tropes in Korra feels almost like an afterthought, like they weren't even needed from how explicit the anti-communist message is. In the year of our lord 2012.

What the series does mainly is establish socialists as frauds and adherents as fools. Amon has a personal grudge against benders that he disguises as a social problem, the text utilizes the idea that socialists make up or exaggerate oppression in order to gain power, and there's no real inequality to begin with. He takes away people's bending abilities, leaving them as a shell of their former selves, quite like the identity loss in Invasion of the Body Snatchers.

Now where does Arcane stand in all this?

Viktor’s motivations are legitimized, the inequality between the two cities is sufficiently explored. This monster wears the costume, but it's humanized.

It's a huge jump from Korra’s ridiculous propaganda, but I still have an issue with it: it's condescending.

Collectivism has a history of negative portrayals in USAmerican media, is it such a jump forward if the motivations of such apparent monster are legitimized, yet the outcome is the same? It's Viktor’s desire to eliminate the suffering created by Piltover’s oppression that causes the final destruction, not Piltover’s pursuit of progress or increasingly fascist policies.

This of course doesn't antagonize the noble cause of Viktor's motivations, which is nice all things considered, since Korra has proved it can be worse, but it does warn against disturbing the status quo. If you try to make things better, you will fail, you will make things worse; the current state of things is the only choice, it's safer and realistic, and though your intentions are good, a better world than what we already have is impossible.