Your take is my take too.
Unlike what some people seem to think here, I'm not about "morality play" mandates in fiction. That said, making sure that the :frothingfash: and :le-pol-face: have less of a chance to latch on to a work is a good idea.
I don't think it's exactly necessary, but for me a lot of the time it just ends up... happening? Sometimes I'll have been working on something for a while, blink, and realize I've encoded my politics into my work without noticing. Ultimately, any articulation of emotion is inseparable from one's world view and ideology. The way I make a fictional society evil or the way you make a story cute or creepy depends on that individual ethic. Still, the emphasis you put on that connection is up to you, and not everything has to be a deep interrogation of the human condition.
Recently I rewrote a story about deep sea scientists trapped inside a dead whale. Is there ideological significance to the dead flesh's dominion over the living, the swarms of scavengers picking sinew off bone, the slow corruption of the characters the longer they hear the still-beating heart? Probably, but that wasn't what I wanted to focus on. I just thought it would be a cool story.
I disagree. I think all leftists should be making leftists art. It would help to organize people a lot faster then if all leftists just made marvel fanfic
Not all art needs to have a message. It can just be vibes. Vibes are good. If all art was serving a purpose outside of itself the world would be substantially more boring. I adore Charli XCX, and her music has no political content other than like "I miss you" and "I wish you came to my party" and "fuck I miss my friends from covid." Art can just be for art's sake.
not all art is political come on.Explain to me the political message of pong
as long as you avoid creating explicitly reactionary or liberal art just do your thing baby
do you guys think that it’s crucial - or even necessary - for a work of art to convey leftist messaging, if its creator is a proponent of those ideals?
I would say no, don't cram it in if it doesn't fit. Art can just be art, it doesn't also have to try to make people understand theory
Quinton Reviews and The Jimquisition coming out as communists was a large part of the reason I decided to make the jump from vague progressive to outright socialist. I literally had no idea until the reveal, and was a pleasant surprise when it dropped. Two of my favorite channels who had provided weeks of entertainment were not only not fascist, but were literally the opposite. Woah. Would I have made the jump earlier had I know about it earlier? Maybe? Either way, I think there needs to be more room for people with socialist values who don't make it their brand. Sometimes not subconsciously loading videos with fascist propaganda is enough to sway minds.
That being said, hiding anticapitalist/prosocialist messaging in plain sight is praxis, even when it's done (usually by accident) by liberals. I'm also pretty sure Jerma is some form of anarchist.
Wait, Quinton Reviews is a comrade? That's cool as hell, I always just assumed he was a lib without checking.
So did I. Then he just one day does a random video of just him in his house. Then the camera pans down and he pulls up the literal communist manifesto. Spends the rest of the video talking about his political views.
EDIT: actually it might have been Das Kapitol or Kropotkin. I can't remember exactly, but it was one of those overtly and popularly communist books. The video is long-gone now, so I can't confirm.
My head is full of the failures of receiving leftist messages in media, unless completely upfront about it
should every word out of a leftist's mouth convey a leftist message? this premise has caused a lot of self identified leftists on sites such as twitter and reddit and tumblr to say inane, foolish, pointless, and counterproductive things in the hopes of contributing something, anything, to The Discourse and therefore to The Struggle.
"The personal is the political"
If you're not conveying a positive message, why are you creating art?
There's a shitload of other reasons. I didn't draw as a toddler for political reasons.
Depending on your definition of politics, you did. I can't imagine you were writing out a treatise in crayon, but what you decided to draw certainly had to do with your nascent understanding of the total complex of relations between people living in society.
I don’t really know what it should be, but I feel “what’s the leftist message” is the wrong question to ask. Like it’s a good idea to consider how your work could be interpreted, but trying to stuff it into any kind of rigid framework is going to kill the whole process for you at best. Better to just take early feedback and adjust when you’re not getting a reaction you expected or wanted.
I really feel like if you have genuine convictions your work can't help but reflect them. Not that you shouldn't write inherently thematic stories, where you start with your big message and work backwards, if you want to. But I think I would find it creatively stifling if I was constantly asking myself if my work passed some internal litmus for political ideology.
You don't need to, but if your plot and characters are well made, it'll come out naturally.
Now that doesn't mean you can't have the muse of history march up centre stage and DECLARE THAT THE THEME OF THIS GAME IS THE INEVITABLE COLLAPSE OF CAPITALISM AND THE STRUGGLE OF THE WORKING CLASSES in the prologue. But you need to decide to do it.
For an example, both Tolkien and Lewis essentially wrote Christian apologia as fantasy. Both did it well (well, Lewis did some of the time). One just wrote what he wanted and let the themes pour out. The other decided to write open allegory.
What you don't want to do is write a story that isn't explicitly socialist, set up your characters naturalistically, and then shoehorn in themes just because. That's how you get abortions like the all-female Ghostbusters. Make it natural and let the characters do what they want, or make it deliberately artificial and stylised.
