Its not really "no one" since its relatively common to dunk on Orwell on the left now, but this essay points out some really good points if you read it really critically, such as the worker-substitute animals being essentially mentally challenged by biology despite the intellectuals/party leaderships attempts to genuinely educate them for the better. This is basically echoed in 1984 as well where the only people the party actually needs to "brainwash" and manipulate are the middle class intellectuals and white collar workers, the proles are essentially cattle that can be pacified with the most uncultured and lowbrow entertainment out there.
It really demonstrates how Orwell remained British upper class at heart, wishing for a nice pretty aristocratic socialism if even that. Both this and Isaac Asimovs critique of 1984 also point out how Orwell despite writing literally during the worst Nazi slaughter of Soviets and in the years afterwards as the details of the holocaust became clear, he barely spends single words let alone full sentences talking about the Nazis at all. Seems like even after the war he was unable to summon any true emotional animosity towards Hitler.
Also in general with a lot of media it feels like authors love to create worlds with fundamentally different divides in society between people, and then also try and make some political reference or statement out of it.
AoT seems to still have people split on what the fuck its message is but overall making a message about genocide and persecution by blood seems to be slightly off if that blood also literally inherently gives the people with it the potential to become willing or unwilling living weapons on par with WW1 era weaponry.
BNHA just recently had an all lives matter arc where theres essentially a race riot by people that have quirks(X-Men powers but umami) that deform their appearance, during which a flashback reveals that they have suffered several waves of pogroms in the past and are still regularly discriminated against, but then they are also shown trying to burn down a hospital, and their whole movement is run from the shadows by an evil organization that wants to topple western Hero society. This did get some pushback from the fanbase during publication but a large chunk just told everyone to shut the fuck up and look at the funny pictures, and I didnt see any wider acknowledgement of this at best ill-advised arc and at worst literally racist anti BLM propaganda, even the AoT shit I recall for a while periodic discourse over it being supposedly a fascist story.
Seriously just begging authors to shut the fuck up about real life social movements if they cant put in the effort to transpose those movements and messages into the premises of their artificial world.
Oh yeah also this isnt "sus" in that sense but I thought it was a dogshit move to make the ultimate "message" of the Rebuild movies to solve the problem of lifelong trauma by just retconning the trauma out of your life in the most literal sense, and also get married to solve those problems. Unless it was meant to have 0 message at all in which case thats still worse than what the original show managed with its ending.
The BNHA arc kinda reminds me of the way Faunuses were treated in RWBY. They're set up as a discriminated minority with legitimate ongoing grievances, but then the authors try to "both sides" it by having their liberation group go too far by doing terrorism and not caring about innocent casualties so that they can be the bad guys. In the end you get some liberal idealism about changing peoples' hearts but you just know that the underlying problems haven't actually been addressed.
Weird how when hack writers try and be morally gray they turn oppressed peoples into antagonists who do performatively evil shit, Im sure that isnt reflective of any societal anxieties though.
Haha oh man I was watching My Hero with my spouse and just kept saying, wait am I supposed to support the non-heroes because they make a pretty good point.
wait am I supposed to support the non-heroes because they make a pretty good point.
The villains are all basically fash-adjacent libertarians who make real, cogent critiques of the dysfunctional system but then their desired solutions range from "but what if the status quo was bloodier and more brutal in training its enforcer class?" to "clearly it needs to be even more stratified into a brutal might-makes-right hellworld," to Tomura's "lol, lmao" scorpion mentality shit.
Even X-men has this problem to some extent. You’re supposed to feel for the mutants and understand that the way humanity treats them is wrong, which obviously it is. But also some of them have the power to end the world so it’s not exactly the same as being afraid of black people having equal rights. It makes some level of sense that parents would be nervous having a girl in their kids class who can kill them with a single touch, or a guy who shoots lasers out of his eyeballs at all times
Theres literally a mutant in the comics whos power randomly activates one day and it turns him into a zone of death where anyone near him spontaneously combusts, like yeah no shit you would wanna invent a cure to prevent that, absurd to have a roulette wheel rolling at all times where the most realistic good outcome is the kid becomes a controllable living weapon, worst case scenario they become an uncontrollable weapon, and top jackpot they maybe get some power to help people that science cant do.
https://redsails.org/jones-on-animal-farm/
Its not really "no one" since its relatively common to dunk on Orwell on the left now, but this essay points out some really good points if you read it really critically, such as the worker-substitute animals being essentially mentally challenged by biology despite the intellectuals/party leaderships attempts to genuinely educate them for the better. This is basically echoed in 1984 as well where the only people the party actually needs to "brainwash" and manipulate are the middle class intellectuals and white collar workers, the proles are essentially cattle that can be pacified with the most uncultured and lowbrow entertainment out there.
It really demonstrates how Orwell remained British upper class at heart, wishing for a nice pretty aristocratic socialism if even that. Both this and Isaac Asimovs critique of 1984 also point out how Orwell despite writing literally during the worst Nazi slaughter of Soviets and in the years afterwards as the details of the holocaust became clear, he barely spends single words let alone full sentences talking about the Nazis at all. Seems like even after the war he was unable to summon any true emotional animosity towards Hitler.
he literally said that verbatum
I thought the Hitler quote was pre-war? But if its post-war thats even more hideous.
deleted by creator
Also in general with a lot of media it feels like authors love to create worlds with fundamentally different divides in society between people, and then also try and make some political reference or statement out of it.
AoT seems to still have people split on what the fuck its message is but overall making a message about genocide and persecution by blood seems to be slightly off if that blood also literally inherently gives the people with it the potential to become willing or unwilling living weapons on par with WW1 era weaponry.
BNHA just recently had an all lives matter arc where theres essentially a race riot by people that have quirks(X-Men powers but umami) that deform their appearance, during which a flashback reveals that they have suffered several waves of pogroms in the past and are still regularly discriminated against, but then they are also shown trying to burn down a hospital, and their whole movement is run from the shadows by an evil organization that wants to topple
westernHero society. This did get some pushback from the fanbase during publication but a large chunk just told everyone to shut the fuck up and look at the funny pictures, and I didnt see any wider acknowledgement of this at best ill-advised arc and at worst literally racist anti BLM propaganda, even the AoT shit I recall for a while periodic discourse over it being supposedly a fascist story.Seriously just begging authors to shut the fuck up about real life social movements if they cant put in the effort to transpose those movements and messages into the premises of their artificial world.
Oh yeah also this isnt "sus" in that sense but I thought it was a dogshit move to make the ultimate "message" of the Rebuild movies to solve the problem of lifelong trauma by just retconning the trauma out of your life in the most literal sense, and also get married to solve those problems. Unless it was meant to have 0 message at all in which case thats still worse than what the original show managed with its ending.
The BNHA arc kinda reminds me of the way Faunuses were treated in RWBY. They're set up as a discriminated minority with legitimate ongoing grievances, but then the authors try to "both sides" it by having their liberation group go too far by doing terrorism and not caring about innocent casualties so that they can be the bad guys. In the end you get some liberal idealism about changing peoples' hearts but you just know that the underlying problems haven't actually been addressed.
Weird how when hack writers try and be morally gray they turn oppressed peoples into antagonists who do performatively evil shit, Im sure that isnt reflective of any societal anxieties though.
We all know the 'hearts and minds' strategy the US employed in Vietnam, Iraq War 2, and in the War in Afghanistan famously worked very well
Haha oh man I was watching My Hero with my spouse and just kept saying, wait am I supposed to support the non-heroes because they make a pretty good point.
Big "I will now kill this puppy in order to prove my goals wholly unreasonable and evil" energy.
The villains are all basically fash-adjacent libertarians who make real, cogent critiques of the dysfunctional system but then their desired solutions range from "but what if the status quo was bloodier and more brutal in training its enforcer class?" to "clearly it needs to be even more stratified into a brutal might-makes-right hellworld," to Tomura's "lol, lmao" scorpion mentality shit.
Even X-men has this problem to some extent. You’re supposed to feel for the mutants and understand that the way humanity treats them is wrong, which obviously it is. But also some of them have the power to end the world so it’s not exactly the same as being afraid of black people having equal rights. It makes some level of sense that parents would be nervous having a girl in their kids class who can kill them with a single touch, or a guy who shoots lasers out of his eyeballs at all times
Theres literally a mutant in the comics whos power randomly activates one day and it turns him into a zone of death where anyone near him spontaneously combusts, like yeah no shit you would wanna invent a cure to prevent that, absurd to have a roulette wheel rolling at all times where the most realistic good outcome is the kid becomes a controllable living weapon, worst case scenario they become an uncontrollable weapon, and top jackpot they maybe get some power to help people that science cant do.