300 is so fucked up. Imagine presenting the Spartans as good guys after opening with a narrator telling us they murder any babies they see as imperfect.
If you think that’s bad, just read about how they treated their Helot slaves.
Mandatory ritualistic beating and shaming, and a yearly actual purge to keep them in line.
Spartans are about the most pathetic culture to have ever existed.
Spartans are about the most pathetic culture to have ever existed.
They were also a bunch of idle fancy lads whose requirement for citizenship/personhood was literally “rich enough to come chill at the country club with the lads all day without ever having to work even a single day” while also being extremely greedy so that they’d buy up the land of anyone whose wealth dipped a little leading to their “eligible for military service” class consistently shrinking all the time to the point that they did major land redistribution twice in order to restore the size of their citizen class (since they were the only ones allowed to be “real” soldiers, as opposed to all the non-citizen light soldiers and enslaved canon fodder they also used).
And before you think “oh, so given their supposed martial prowess they were using that free time to stay in shape and do drills or something?” the answer is no, they were literally just hanging out drinking and eating at their rich boy clubs all day and their actual military performance was not measurably distinct from other Greek city states (including their neighbors) for most of their history, even though they liked to wank about how they were best and coolest because “remember Leonidas?” and shit, with only a pretty brief window where they seem to have actually started to try to live up to their own propaganda and managed to be a regional power before then failing again and rapidly diminishing to the point that the city of Sparta itself became lost and forgotten with the descendants of the Spartans reduced to just being some small time fishermen in a tiny village well before the Roman era.
I fo real turned off the movie (i only gave it a shot cuz my friend wouldn’t shut up about it) right then. ‘Na, this movie will make me madder from here’ i thought.
You know what’s funny? The supposedly unbiased justifications you hear from chuds on American exceptionalism or colonialism was present with Persians: they’re the more advanced society, they were far better educated and also that whole ‘everyone invades everyone all the time tho!’. The depiction of the Persians in this movie should’ve been met with accusations of wokism for portraying them in such an extremely negative light.
