that is my entire post
Literally me writing the colonial history of my conworld
"You know, that plot point feels just absolutely grotesquely evil. Like a cartoon supervillain mixed with an edgy creepypasta or something. I mean, I know colonialism was fucked up IRL, but this is just so shamelessly and gratuitously violent and inhuman and conniving, spreading an absolutely unspeakable misery and despair across an entire nation, that it just feels kind of... silly and over the top, to be honest. Like, who in real life could really just look his wife in the eyes and sincerely smile after [thing that I would five minutes later discover happened an absolutely staggering number of times in IRL colonialism and was much much much worse than I could've ever possibly imagined]?"
Gotta make it like comically on the nose too to get that real reality vibe
The people who said that Chancellor Neighsay from My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic was comically on the nose for season 8's "racism bad" episode do not know how ridiculously accurate it is to depict a settler-colonial power's Overton window as ranging from "even the children of the lesser races are fundamentally dangerous and must be kept in the imperial frontier, poor, illiterate, and ignorant so that they cannot pose a threat to our glorious empire" on the right to "the lesser races can be civilized, they just need to be taken to my residential school to be indoctrinated into our glorious empire's state religion and culture" on the "left"
Infinite genocide on ponydom
I liked FiM, but I fell off watching it somewhere around season 3 or 4
I kind of stopped looking at paranormal and or creepy stuff because it's all tame as fuck compared to the daily atrocities under capitalism.
While watching Andor, I was pretty underwhelmed at its depiction of a state that should be resisted. So an evil emperor has taken absolute power and how does that manifest? Opposition politicians get investigated for corruption, although they don't worry about the investigators planting evidence or anything. Suspicious individuals receive additional attention from the secret police, but they won't act without a proper cause. A civilian stalking a secret police agent receives a stern talking to. At one point, police occupy a building, commit some torture (only on a few people with valuable information, of course) and forbid a protest. Oh, and all public buildings look like a caricature of the Soviet Union or the GDR. Well, alright.
I feel like one could counter all of those save the last one, but the torture one sticks out big time. The method is explained to be something the Empire created by accident when exterminating children. I feel like you don't need to see them torturing people with no connection to Cassian just to get across how bad this is and how much they enjoy torture. You can't tell much of a narrative let alone several interlocking plots if you go off and spend time showing random abuses or have everyone who gets tortured be disconnected from the show.
It is a story, not an eclectic series of atrocities
I don't think those are that bad. there is a continuum of suppression described and shown. you can't avoid mention that there is the arbitrary arrest and sentencing of colossal scale to feed a slave economy, while war and genocide are ongoing on whatever fronts.
for comparison, Nazi Germany had to officially stop Aktion T4 due to public outcry. Kurt Gerstein was known by the SS to be a member of the Christian Resistance by the Nazis. he wasn't ever arrested or tortured, despite those being those being obvious tactics the SS didn't hesitate to employ on more militant organizations. Gerstein, in order to gather evidence of the Holocaust, which he passed on to Swedish and Vatican diplomats, was allowed to join the SS, even knowing he had a history with the Christian Resistance. The SS actually thought his history with an Anti-government group demonstrated he was ideologically motivated, and therefore a good candidate now that he presumably had a change of heart.
How is this any different than the US or any modern western country? Most people here don’t have files with the FBI or tortured by cops despite hating them and the US. A lot of internal deep state shenanigans in western politics and media try to follow the rules to create parallel investigations and rationalize their own behavior. Sometimes they will make up evidence like with Corbyn or Russiagate, other times they just slander people like Snowden, and other times they just give up investigations because they don’t have anything to reasonably justify it like with the Chinese professors accused of espionage while still maintaining academia has a Chinese spy problem.
This isn’t even mentioning the prison system where humanity seizes to exist. And, they DID make up evidence against Andor because he looked rudely at imperial agents which is why he was imprisoned in the first place lol.
They didn’t just forbid a protest. They literally committed a massacre because of a kid throwing a rock during an otherwise peaceful protest. Surely you’re aware of the history of Palestinian resistance? Hell, the protest itself was actually a funeral, which was directly stated by the producers to be inspired by the IRA funerals, which several were shot up by British and Loyalists. And they were not police. They were psychopathic private contractors who are outsourced to do the empire’s dirty work of crowd control, torture, maintaining occupied territory. These all sound like things a despicable empire would commit and should be resisted.
Have you lived in the modern west? It’s run by little Eichmans, not big Hitlers.
Real hero of entire series was Mirri Maz Duur. She not only got some manner of revenge for her slaughtered and enslaved people, but she also saved most likely millions of people across entire Essos and Westeros by offing both Drogo and his unborn son (and it have solid ground to count since prophecies are quite often real in that world). Pity she didn't also killed Daenerys, that would prevent yet another series of conquests and massacres and living WMD usage.
The only major exception being the Warhammer 40K canon, but even then reality in recent years has been giving 40K a run for its money
Always funny how they present the absolute horror of having to sacrifice a thousand souls a day to literally keep alive the god that protects humanity from demons, and then watching the western world sacrifice multiple times that every day to help the stock market through covid.
"You strive for victory. That is obvious. What may be less obvious is the nature of victory. There are circumstances in which you can destroy the enemy utterly, without loss to your own forces, and yet the victory may be his. In all situations, you must first decide on the nature of victory, and then take steps to secure it. Avoid the instinct of fight first and think later." ~ Leman Russ
The gentle Primarch Leman Russ would've executed every member of the US state department for gross heresy
There's more than a few parallels between 40k and real life at the moment. Space Marine GeneSeed recovery and IOF Cummandos, the US military forgetting how to produce vital components/materials, being ruled by ancient beings hovering between life and death, we have a calamity almost beyond our comprehension bearing down on us and those in charge deny its existence, claims it's exaggerated, or just ignores it completely (climate change/Tyranids/necrons)
