you have as much agency over being born with “a magic power greater than any special” and being born “the descendant of a SUPER Special Royal Family”
So, certain people are magically entitled to power? I feel like I’ve heard that one before…
Star wars a new hope started out with Luke as an everyman. But since then it’s all become about the bloodline. Rise of Skywalker is especially bad, tearing down the anyone can be special and saying you can only be special because of your bloodline.
The issue with the Star Wars story is that it can’t end. This means Luke cannot have been very effective, because the same issues have to repeat historically to promote an endless cycle of protagonists and antagonists and battles that relate to the previous fan-favourites (because nostalgia sells).
Therefore Luke must simultaneously be an awesome hero, and also just some loser that didn’t really do anything that worked.
I think legends handled it okay, that the battle of yavin was the tipping point, but the empire still had remnants that needed to be countered by the New Republic. And the New Republic has its own problems, but faces an entirely different threat than the empire too.
Whereas with the new movies, they just hit the reset button back to episode four, rather than developing on the trajectory in interesting ways, which would have given Luke’s actions and the original trilogy more weight.
… and did so without examining why the Republic fell in the first place, or how the Rebellion could fall to the same cyclical forces. Which is the sort of thing The Last Jedi kinda hinted at? That movie was an anarchist deconstruction fanfic that somehow got filmed as a major motion picture.
The point of a successful Disney media franchise is not to provide nuance and provoke thought, but instead to sell merch for profit.
As if Lucas didn’t create star wars for that sole purpose.
Lucas capitalized on his success… anyone who grew up with 80s cartoons specifically designed to sell toys to kids can tell the difference between the two.
Well at least until Return of the Jedi…
Homie was a film school nerd who took a gamble that paid off. People that ONLY want to make money don’t take such huge risks or put so much pretentious thought into pulp. He made it to make a ton of money because it literally couldn’t happen any other way. How else do you get rich people to invest that much money?
This gets to the fact that all stories are lies. No one lives happily ever after, for we all die. No one is strong and wins, because strength, weakness, winning and losing are just perceptions that are eventually erased from time.
When you start to intuit that human psychology heavily based on such soporific narrative, you start to understand how people can be so stupid, both individually and collectively.
That seems a little glib to me. Not all stories are lies, not all stories have happy endings, some victors are known now thousands of years after their death. On a cosmic timescale I suppose that, trivially, nothing matters - but, conversely, the cosmic timescale is so vast that it doesn’t matter to us…
Also I couldn’t really parse what you were saying in your second paragraph so I’m gonna leave that there
but, conversely, the cosmic timescale is so vast that it doesn’t matter to us…
I agree, stories only matter because we lack objectivity.
I’m not sure that anything can objectively be said to ‘matter’. So, yeah, I guess? Things only matter to us because we.care about them, sure…
A new hope started with blood line. It was established out of the gate that Luke’s father was a Jedi knight and a good friend of Obi Wan.
Force Awakens and Last Jedi seemed to go in the direction that Rey and Snoke are unrelated to previous blood lines, but nope, it’s all Palpatine.
Somehow Pal… Ah fuck it, buy this robot plushie!
They tried to fix it in the last Jedi, but the fans had too much of a tantrum.
That was like the only thing I really liked in Last Jedi. Her being completely a nobody made me look upon it more favorably when I watched it, because I assumed they’d make her related and was so impressed they didnt.
Yeah, because just pretending the previous movie didn’t happen is also a shitty solution.
The Last Jedi didn’t do that.
#9 did that.
Which movie are you referencing? Last Jedi, or Rise of Skywalker? I get it for the latter and mostly don’t get it for the former.
This central idea is why I hate dune.
Having a so called prophesied savior capable of insane things coming from a distant royal family of some space empire is too stupid to believe in.
You can’t be both the underdog and the king at the same time, especially when your own supporters treat themselves as expendable.
Wasnt he like a test tube baby bred specifically to be the Messiah tho.
The tail end of a selective breeding program, but yes. The Bene Gesserit were (according to some internal hypotheses) belived to have been manipulated to expect the outcome later down the line, featuring an Atraides–Harkonnen child. But they were wrong.
You can’t be both the underdog and the king at the same time
So, you hate the New Testament, too?
Have you ever actually read it? The prophecies were deliberately spread over the universe by the Bene Gesserit. The department that does that is called the Missionaria Protectiva, they do that all over the universe so their members can manipulate the locals to be safe wherever they end up. This isn’t supposed to glorify those prophecies, it’s demystifying them to the point where religion as a whole is showcased as a mere tool to control the masses in later books. It’s supposed to criticise the thing you’re criticising.
OP is why we can’t have nice things. Because people will ignore things that should be obvious. So we’re left with everything softball pitched to the lowest common denominator
I mean, that’s the point of Dune? The ‘prophesies’ aren’t real, they’re seeded by the Bene Gesserit, the same group that spent millennia breeding the ‘savior’. And, he’s not meant to really be a savior, but their catspaw.
But also, he’s definitely not actually a savior, on account of all the death he brings. It’s complicated, but overall a deconstruction of white savior narratives and similar stories.
I liked this story better the first time, when it was called Moses
Naruto in a nutshell
This, or the humble royalty, is most fictional hero storylines. I unironically believe capitalism uses these tropes to condition the people into believing feudalism, authoritarianism, and genetic divinity are justifiable.
The endless story of justification is powerless in the face of time, as time reduces all individuals, groups, bloodlines and ideologies to memory, and then to total obliteration.
Maybe we could spend less time justifying being shit to each other, as it is wholly without lasting merit, and - instead - create a world based on human decency. That won’t last, either, but at least it would be moral.
The opposite of this is when Useless Loser Salaryman Was Born into The Other World As A Financial Consultant And Took It Over Using Only His Accounting Powers?!
On occasion we have that story, where just some basic high school algebra and chemistry levels up the tech of the good guys enough to turn the tide of war.
Sasaki and Peeps… Would not recommend. Anime is sus af
In the fanfic sequel the poo people are kept addicted on magic-suppressing opioids and mind-dulling cigarettes provided by the Special owned industrial pharmaceutical companies. It’s been this way so long
Eveyone knows people who don’t smoke can’t be trusted. The temple priests say so every Sunday service.
Captain Picard drops by, breaks the opioid machine, peaces out.
deleted by creator
Modern efficiency has streamlined it to around forty minutes.
Heh, Korra is literally this, but being royal was a total coincidence. And I guess you could say she “reset” the reincarnation bloodline.
And Ozai played with this too, deliberately marrying the descendent (Ursa) of a super special Poo Person (Avatar Roku) in hopes of producing superior children. And it kind of worked.
at least they explored the power dynamics, like yeah if some people are just mundane, some people can fucking shoot fire from their hands or make the ground swallow you whole, and ONE person is effectively just a god, then it makes sense for a lot of the mundane people to just want this all to stop because that’s fucking terrifying.
But also there are (were?) things in the avatar universe that mitigate the power imbalance, like the avatars being raised to recognize that they have an extreme responsibility to use their powers wisely, and thanks to the whole reincarnation thing it’d presumably be difficult for the avatar to suddenly become evil since every previous avatar would screech at them and for all we know they could just force the avatar state to send the body to its death and exiting the avatar state just before death.
thanks to the whole reincarnation thing it’d presumably be difficult for the avatar to suddenly become evil since every previous avatar would screech at them and for all we know they could just force the avatar state to send the body to its death and exiting the avatar state just before death.
There’s an ATLA comic that kind of refutes this, where Aang just straight up shuts out Roku. It’s… not the best comic.
Anyway, I think the idea is that the Avatar is fundamentally the same soul reincarnating, the same empathetic petty thief that stood up for anyone that was oppressed. That’s just part of their nature, sometimes to a fault. Even Avatars with a screwed up childhood like Kyoshi and Korra turn out that way.
The mitigation is often the plot, where their power isn’t particularly useful to solve their problems. A poignant example is when Korra just turns herself into Zaheer to save the Air Nomads, fully expecting to die (though the gravity is not very explicit since it’s a kids show, as is true across both TV shows).
, and ONE person is effectively just a god,
Another thing I find amusing is that “common” people just treat the Avatar as some random joe, with lines like “Avatar, huh? We still have one of those?” or Bolin’s grandma who clearly holds more reverence for the Earth Queen than the Avatar.
As far as fantasy series go, I think it does a good job of making all the Beautiful Special People feel mundane.
Imagine living in a world where some people could flatten entire cities.
This comic brought to you by the National Heritage Foundation.
Aaaugh thank you, I’ve been trying to find this for like a year.
How bout something in reverse? In Tales of the Abyss, the protag is set up to be someone special born in royal family, but turn out he’s just a clone of an actual royal person and he have to learn to fight and accept this conflicting feeling for the rest of the game
There was something in that game that made it insufferable to me, but I don’t remember what it was. Everytime I picked it up I would play for 5 or 10 minutes and put it down again, until I eventually quit it.
It’s not helping the game is long. If you’re interested in anime they make an adaptation as well, you should check it out.
Gotta make people accept that rich dynasties owning everything is valid.
Once upon a time in a magical land of soviets people realized that dynasties owning everything was never valid.
And nothing went wrong.
and nothing has gone wrong in the rest of the world either, definitely do not look at the quality of life in america, ignore the fact that a significant amount of americans are illiterate.
I genuinely think the main ideological function isn’t even as much to promote that, as it is to focus personal dreams and fantasies towards wanting to become a part of the “winners”. Not that it isn’t part of it, just by normalising it as status quo even within fantasies, but I think even more powerful is to have people fantasise about being one of the chosen ones eventually.
Quick reminder that stuff like this is not planned like in some conspiracy, but just a result of dynamics happening (almost exclusively, rare exceptions) unconsciously the way ideology springs from the material base.
Skull-with-sunglasses Shaun did a whole thing about Harry Potter as neoliberal high fantasy - arguably arguing that it stems from the tribalist worldview that hierarchies are inevitable and all we can do is shuffle around who goes where. Harry becomes a wizard-cop because he’s the right kind of person to wield power. Things are good because he does them. To people in that conservative mindset, asking why he didn’t question that power structure is like asking an apple why it didn’t fall up.
How about this story about a young English boy that gets bullied by the poo people, until he finds out he is actually super special. And then he fights the super specials that want society to be structured around birthright, because he has a special born fate to stop them. All while the super specials have used their amazing magical powers, able to literally mold reality to their whims, to create their own version of liberal capitalism.
That can be attributed to X-men and Harry Potter
But I’m sure there are more
And after all that our bloke decides to become a copper.
