Hunger Games is about revolutionary anti-imperial class struggle
George Lucas said the Empire is inspired by America and the Rebels by the Viet Minh
The Matrix was created by a trans woman and at least partly an allegory for being trans
Divergent is shitty lib fanfiction but very obviously anti-conservative
Alan Moore was a communist or anarchist
wow these movies are just like January 6th when we resisted communism by smearing our shit on the capitol walls!! 
yeah, no shit, nobody identifies with the bad guys because they don’t consider themselves the bad guys, allegory can’t defeat negative media literacy
nobody identifies with the bad guys
The absolute fucking moment Trump re-takes office, you’re going to see Donald Trump / Darth Vader mash ups, with the Death Star blowing up a planet tagged “Woke Libs” and Vader choking a guy labeled “Biden Voters”.
I mean hell, Zelensky did that flashy promo for the war while wearing that t-shirt explicitly saying “Join the Dark Side”
You see two sides, one wearing civilian clothes and flight suits; the other wearing Nazi uniforms and blowing up planets and their brains are too fuckin’ scrambled to see which one is the side you’re supposed to root for
was always suspcious of anyone who was like “the Empire just looks cooler and has better gear/asethetics”
never got that. even as a kid. the rebel alliance had combined arms tactics, brilliant generals/admirals, special forces commando teams, used camo, carried more advanced infantry weapons and used vastly superior, albeit outnumbered, combat space craft
like how tf do you root for the human wave/swarm tactics guys who cheap out on even basic defenses for their space craft?
guys who cheap out on even basic defenses for their space craft
Hey, “good enough” aircraft can be cool
space battleships are pretty cool, imperial prop direction wasn’t exactly ugly either. basically everything in star wars had to look ‘cool’ for merchandising after all. actually thinking about it that Han Solo movie & Andor were the only installments that had the imperials looking mostly ugly & unpleasant. everything else the costumiers can’t resist making a new cool design to sell toys with
cool designs sure. battlefield tactics and their military is terrible, like both in the lore and just on screen as well
And yet, some of the worst Empireheads are the old EU nerds
They point at Grand Admiral Thrawn just like all the Wehraboos who idolize Rommel
And guys, I don’t think being a fan of the “brilliant tactical mind who fights for their empire despite disagreeing with it ideologically” trope makes a difference
just like Rommel’s ‘disagreement’ with the Nazis is overwrought and superficial; Thrawn was still a fascist, just less racist by virtue of being a Blue Guy
I dunno what to tell you here, their shit looks slick.
i was personally into the helmet design. Darth Vader has that obvious samurai helmet combined with a gas mask thing going on.
Stormtrooper helmet just look neat ig
Lucas said the stormtrooper helmets were based off the stalhelm.
The Imperial navy troopers, Imperial gunners, walker crew officers, and the Rebels of ANH all have WW2 US navy talker helmets
Sentience is a mental disorder
Rebel in the name of the status quo
lolLiterally me screaming at my switch the whole time I played the game
Wait, I thought the guy in OP was a leftist pointing out right wing stupidity.
Then i saw the second image.
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The villain in the hunger games is literally called Capital
even more exact its called The Capital
or in german: Das Kapital
it’s german for “the capital, the”
i was trying to be clever
it was good, i was riffing!
I don’t know whats going on anymorrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrre WHATS REAL WHATS FANTASY ALL I KNOW IS I NEED BIG TITS
I found a YouTube link in your comment. Here are links to the same video on alternative frontends that protect your privacy:
No metropolis that speaks german could be an evil villain!
Aha! So the bad guys ARE the communists, why else would they be named after his book?
I will maintain that Lucas’ comparison of “Rebels as Viet Minh” is restricted to Return of the Jedi, and mostly has to be with them operating in a forest. Other than that, they’re the US fighting the Empire’s Nazis in WWII.
Nope. It was the case in the first star wars as well. George Lucas was going to direct Apocalpyse Now but ducked out semi reluctantly to make his own thing which ended out being Star Wars. If anything by return of the jedi he was at his most capitalist shitbrain phase. Sf debris did a great multi part series about George Lucas called the heros journey, shadows journey and hermits journey that really get into the dude and his rise and fall. It’d very well researched and paints a pretty tragic picture, he thought every compromise.eould be the one that let’s him buy his way out of the industry and get full creative and financial freedom to make a state of the art film school and stuff and then the corporate obligations that come with that slowly destroyed those dreams. He’s a dude with a lot going on under the hood.
I’ve never seen him mention the comparison is such a specific way. What makes you think that?
I’ve never seen an interview before maybe 20 years ago where he makes that claim at all, but I’ll admit that something could exist and I could just be wrong. Anyway, to start I’d say that Star Wars is generally apolitical: the big evil empire follow the ideology of being evil and want to control the galaxy because they are evil, the rebels are the good guys who fight for good. As a result, looking to the text for political parallels isn’t really possible, instead leaving us with the much mushier realm of vibes and aesthetics. To run through some points:
- Lucas was inspired by lots of WWII films (see this article for a few examples), and basically just incorporated whatever he thought looked cool (like the rebel award ceremony in ANH being inspired by fucking Triumph of the Will. This leads to many thing being US (or maybe Allies)-coded, because most films he would have seen would have been about the americans/allies in WWII, with american/allied planes.
- Similarly, the main climax of two of the movies are big space battles. IIRC the vietnamese airforce was tiny, leading to very few aerial engagements, while WWII had many famous aerial battles.
- The war between empire and rebels is depicted as an existential struggle between good and evil. Nazis serve as the cultural shorthand for generic evil, which makes the rebels the allies by default.
- Vader is really close to the german “vater” for father.
- In RotJ the rebels launch a guerilla attack in a forest using the local indigenous people and their relatively low-tech weaponry to clown on the empire. This type of thing doesn’t really occur in the two preceding movies.
- Low-hanging fruit, but all of the main characters are white.
The one easy counter I’ll concede is that tie fighters are clearly an analogy for carrier-based planes.
So Vader might actually come from a jock Lucas went to highschool with. Meet Gary Vader https://www.forcematerial.com/home/2016/12/01/the-origin-of-darth-vader-the-name
That surprised the hell out of me cause of all the other sith names, I figured it was just short for 'invader’sinxe the other bad guys had names based off evil sounding words, Maul, idiots (like insidious), tyrannus. I guess he just made up.that theme after.
Yeah when Vader is named he is very much not Luke’s father. The connection is retroactive but Lucas sorta ran with it and made it a Sith thing by the time he got to Sidious
The tie in novels for ANH make it clear Darth Vader is just his name. Darth isn’t a title, it’s his first name.
Yup. It is clear in the film itself. Obi-Wan repeatedly calls him “Darth” like it is his first name. The Obi-Wan show even tried to play with that by the end with Obi-Wan calling him Darth once he is sure Anakin is truly dead or rather chose to be this
Lucas does super on the nose naming a lot in general and it’s just a surprise Vader was a real guys name and not just an example of that. Weird coincidence. Maybe it’s what gave him that ideas which eventually led to General Grievious
So the Nazis had taken over the whole globe (galaxy) and forced the US to hide and move between planets with secret bases and poorer weaponry?
If you substitute “western europe” instead it makes more sense, secret bases and poorer weaponry works for partisans. The US/allies in general are more represented in the space battles. I’ll admit it’s messy and doesn’t map one to one, but the Vietnam War parallel is hardly perfect either (the empire is a domestic force, not a foreign occupier, for instance). See my other longer response as well.
Eh Viet Minh were under occupation by the US backed ROV so that checks out to some degree. Plus for Endor at least, they are fully foreign occupiers as with Tatooine
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There’s a copypasta from wayyyu back about a group playing a star wars ttrpg in public when an old ww2 vet and his wife take an interest, they explain the basics of Star wars and the dude replies 'so the rebels are the French resistance and the empire are space nazis?" He gets a yup from the group, joins in and becomes squad leader. It’s one of those probably fake but damn I hope it’s true ones.
I’ve read that one before, if I recall correctly the vet was a British commando.
George definitely had the Viet Minh in mind during ANH. George was way more recently out of college then and the war had just ended. Luke’s role in the final product goes from all kinds of serial sci fi ideas to being essentially a young man of military age who has little future available, but has no real stake in the empire winning. Even wanting to join originally, despite hating it, because he sees it as his way out, an inevitability. Only for the empire to butcher his family and make him have to contend with the reality of fascism. The rebels in ANH are not exactly the viet minh, but Luke is for sure meant to be a kid who joins SDS. Remember Lucas was drafted for Vietnam but exempt due to diabetes which was genetic, having killed his grandpa. So he was saved from joining something evil, by chance and a prior family tragedy.
Looking at the earlier drafts Luke is just not that kind of character. I think last second having to bail on apocalypse now! made him approach Luke from a different perspective.
Ondaatje, Michael (2005). The Conversations: Walter Murch and the Art of Editing Film. Knopf. p. 70. Originally George Lucas was going to direct (‘Apocalypse Now’), so it was a project that George and John [Milius] developed for [American] Zoetrope. That was back in 1969. Then, when Warner Brothers cancelled the funding for Zoetrope, the project was abandoned for a while. After the success of ‘American Graffiti’ in 1973, George wanted to revive it, but it was still too hot a topic, the [Vietnam] war was still on, and nobody wanted to finance something like that. So George considered his options: What did he really want to say in ‘Apocalypse Now?’ The message boiled down to the ability of a small group of people to defeat a gigantic power simply by the force of their convictions. And he decided, All right, if it’s politically too hot as a contemporary subject, I’ll put the essence of the story in outer space and make it happen in a galaxy long ago and far away. The rebel group were the North Vietnamese, and the Empire was the United States. And if you have ‘the force,’ no matter how small you are, you can defeat the overwhelmingly big power. ‘Star Wars’ is George’s transubstantiated version of ‘Apocalypse Now.’
This is not to say it is a great allegory, I never liked the ROTJ part of it, it plays into bad liberal stereotypes about the Vietnamese
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Well that quote is pretty rock-solid, being from someone other than George Lucas, so I’ll concede I was wrong. I will say that him flip-flopping on the origins of Darth Vader in your other link is a good example of why I thought he flip-flopped on this too; he just strikes me as that kind of guy.
I actually do agree with Lucas saying this stuff prior to around 20 years ago is true. I haven’t done a deep dive on it and a lot of good sources make the claim, and his connection to AN drives it home, but there is a lack of statements from him during that era. And yeah George is like Stan Lee without the plagarism
Revolution is when MY emperor wins.
The Kurt Russel profile picture is from Death Proof where he plays a psycho car guy that kills women.
lol, I didn’t notice it was Kurt/make the connection. I was just like, “wow this guy made a massive effort to try and make smoking seem cool. is this the 60s?”
It’s a well acted character that gets his comeuppance but it is telling the guy used it for his profile. It’s like a boomer version of a Tyler Durden profile pic.
So. Basically. Wyatt is an asshole and no one should listen to him.
WEF is a terrorist organization
Chuds think the club for capitalists is communist. An unreal amount of
.genuinely very stupid people. im constantly surprised to the degree
“Scoff, it’s Physics 101! Right off wikipedia “Electrical resistivity is a fundamental specific property of a material that measures how strongly it resists current.” See, The Resistance always fights against what’s new. Ergo, The Resistance is always, by definition, on the side of preserving the status quo.”Yes, the vast majority of proleterian right-wingers do genuinely believe they are fighting the evil system that oppresses us. This is simply effective propaganda at play.
It really is amazing to see how much they really think the democrats are Stalin and they are the kids in red dawn.
Eh, as much as I like Star Wars, the rebels and the empire are both narratively and aesthetically vague enough that people can imprint their politics on them pretty easily. The Empire can be Trump, or Biden, or Stalin or Hitler, the rebels can be communists or libertarian sovereign state weirdos. It’s just “little guy vs big guy”, the specifics of the politics can be whatever you want them to be. I think that’s why we all geeked out over Andor cuz Andor actually put some narrative meat on the rebels backstory that made them a bit more clearly leftist inspired.
I’ve grown skeptical of media that can generic “rebels” fighting generic “empires” cuz the truth is everyone thinks of themselves as the underdog, so everyone is gonna think they’re the rebels. It’s not leftist coded it’s just basic storytelling.
Vauge enough? Lol. No.
It shouldn’t really be a huge stretch to assume that anyone willing to immolate civilian farmers and build unwieldy superweapons that serve no purpose but annihilating planets isn’t on the level, but people surprise me
Vague is probably not the right word.
It’s a story that relies on aesthetics a lot, which is fine in and of itself, but people can imprint on aesthetics they like fairly easily provided they aren’t too blatant with their imagery.
There’s no real discussion of the politics of The Empire or Rebels, The Empire is just bad, the Rebels good. Sure The Empire all dress like Nazis and are clean cut white dudes with British accents, and the Rebels look more scruffy and rag tag, but I can easily perform the mental gymnastics necessary to take a right wing read of that.
In this day and age it doesn’t surprise me that people can take a story that’s very overt and wrap it into something it’s not. That doesn’t mean that it’s a correct reading.
But when the creator says the rebels are based off the Vietcong and when you combine that with the fact that he believed filmmakers in the USSR had generally more freedom to be creative compared to western filmmakers, it doesn’t seem so vague at that point.
The “both sides” argument really doesn’t work when one side builds and uses a gun that blows up planets lololol. I don’t know what was vague about the Death Star hahahaha
Yeah there’s really only one allegory in history for the Death Star and it’s the Americans nuking Japan. All the bad guys are white men with British accents and dress like Nazis. Lucas couldn’t have been less subtle. There’s no political commissars, no “big brother” posters, none of the usual vague allusions to the evil Soviets that most generic bad guys get saddled with. No one wears an ushanka or a greatcoat. The enemy soldiers are literally called Stormtroopers. They use gigantic battleships to launch swarms of fighter aircraft with which to attack the good guys. Their super-weapon is their absolute trump-card and the whole military side of the narrative revolves around destroying
America’s nuclear capacitythe Death Star.Also even though the prequels are pretty much considered a mess, they do reveal something about Lucas. Because of the prequel movies we understand them to be the story of how the Republic turned away from democracy and became the fascist Empire, but really before the prequel movies came out the established lore of the clone wars was VERY vague and was pretty much just considered the “before times” and mythologized a lot for the sake of whatever book or comic or whatever was referencing at the time. This means that during the production of the prequels with the lack of solid lore about the clone wars, Lucas made the conscious effort to fill that hole and tell the story about how a liberal democracy can turn into a fascist regime it wasn’t like an accident or anything, dude is just political like that albeit those politics are made into movies for children.
Blowing up a planet is just a generic “evil thing”, it’s like kidnapping a princess or burning down a village. People can imprint their values onto it, if you point out that their side has done the equivalent of planet blowing uping plenty, even more than the people they perceive as “The Empire” they can just dream up some justification.
Back to Andor, Andor shows The Empire doing evil shit that’s a much closer analog to actual evil shit actual empire is doing in the world right now, it’s harder to deny your side is The Empire the (though CHUDs will always at least try and pull off the mental gymnastics to do so).
Edit: also idk where you got “both sides” from my comment, my argument wasn’t that Star Wars isn’t clear on who the villain is, quite the opposite, just that’s it’s politics are vague enough that people can imagine the villains as being anyone they don’t like. CHUDs see the Empire as culture-Marxist woke SJWs just as easily as leftists see the Empire as the U$A.
Andor was almost too good for star wars
the whole “the empire is basically using slavery and ramping up the horror to try to build the death star (analog for first atomic bomb) as fast as possible before the risk of a popular revolt becomes impossible to defend against”.
the fact you could tell their political and military hold on power was very flimsy at first and they had to use liberal institutions and direct military occupation but had to move carefully at first.
if the whole “I DECLARE AN EMPIRE” thing palps did in the prequels could be retconned it would be almost perfection
explains so much in the end and deeply tied to material reality it breathed life into what i thought was a dead franchise and i dread the next season with how rushed it’s going to be
“I DECLARE AN EMPIRE”
that’s a good bit idea for those solidjj videos
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i know i just wish he didn’t say the line
could have just declared himself “lifetime chancellor ushering in a new Imperium” and by the next installment people are talking about palpatine’s “Empire” and then just “the Empire”
I love it because it is so blatant. I want Star Wars to be cartoonish with that shit honestly. Lucas making his Nixon/Bush stand in declare himself Hitler is just funny
Yeah people need to remember these are movies for children and that hamfisted nature should be expected.
The Ewoks get a lot of shit but they’re like very clearly a jungle militia á la the viet cong, albeit with George Lucas’ weird racism about them being some sort of tribal backwater.
Even with that, I see a lot of “noble savage” good guys in lib media too, the hero’s find some tribe of hippies who worship a tree or whatever and they help them fight the cartoonishly evil corporation run by a slug demon or something. Libs just see them as hippies who love nature and free love and CHUDs just see them as trad who are free from 5G towers and the idea the earth is round. There’s no actual anti-colonialism analysis there just vibes.
Again I like Star Wars and think Lucas was trying to be progressive in his own 70s boomer way but it is mostly just a SciFi fairy tale with good guys and bad guys with some vague left v right coding, vague enough everyone can put their own spin on it.
I generally agree on your statement with the vagueness here, especially once you factor in stuff like the force and such, but I don’t think a chud is going to look at an Ewok and think “based, this is me”. They’re too cute coded for that
Probably not, but still if you asked a Chud Star Wars fan about the Ewoks they’d probably pull something like that out of their ass. They’ve probably never thought about it much till someone inquires them about it, then they manifest some sort of explanation for it.
FYI, I’ve met a decent number of CHUDs who have a fetishized admiration for Native Americans. As stupid as that sounds they seem to be into the idea of society of trad men who hunt buffalo all day. Of course they think the US was totally justified in genociding them and that modern Native Americans are all lazy drunks but they think the aesthetics are cool cuz it lines up with their BS imagine if independent men living off the land or whatever.
the hero’s find some tribe of hippies who worship a tree or whatever and they help them fight the cartoonishly evil corporation run by a slug demon or something
Based and Ferngully: The Last Rainforestpilled
for the rest of american history people who dislike the current president are going to imagine themselves as a guerilla fighting force waging protracted people’s war from the mountains. then when their guy finally wins the election, the other side gets their four years to do it.
Bit idea: Voting for Biden as a kindness to Trumpers so they get a chance to live the fantasy
Why are we referring to Alan Moore in the past tense as if he’s dead?
He’s a chaos majick practitioner and has become a lich years ago
Fair.
I found a YouTube link in your comment. Here are links to the same video on alternative frontends that protect your privacy:
