I don’t even mean a bad thing, necessarily. I mean a thing that is made to normalize the status quo, pave over inherent contradictions in late stage neoliberal capitalism, make even the idea of changing society somewhat seem evil or impossible, and have lots of performative gestures that hide the stench of affluent arrogance. :zizek-preference:
I know it came out well before 2020, but I finally got around to seeing Iron Man 2 and I stopped at the instant Tony Stark said “I’ve successfully privatized world peace.” It was bad. Very bad. The original movie was entertaining even if it had some painful deliberate adjustments to the comic book character to make him more like :my-hero: but the sequel played out like Ayn Rand fanfiction, especially the big smart awesome genius giving a speech about how the evil government and the ungrateful moochers were taking the sweat from his brow and so on and so on. :zizek:
The flood of MCU movies wore me out to the point that I stopped watching them and because of that I have only seen maybe half of them by now. Maybe it was a mistake returning to try watching Iron Man 2 because I now have even less interest in seeing anything MCU ever again. :zizek-fuck:
The Legend of Korra
Lol yeah. Two of the heroes are cops, one is a girlboss CEO, the other is a war profiteering capitalist who incited a civil war so he could sell arms.
Meanwhile, the villains are all people who “meant well but were too extreme”. Like apparently wanting equality for people without magic can only manifest as Amon, who wants to take away everyone’s magic, and is actually magic himself. Caring for the environment can only manifest as Unalaq, who actually doesn’t care about the environment and wants to destroy the world. There are no alternatives - support the oppressive status quo or be a villain.
The portrayal of anarchism actually baffles me in Korra, because they pretty much had it correct with the air nomads. In ATLA, the air nomads were peaceful, freedom loving people with very little hierarchy and no bigotry. But in Korra, anarchism is when there’s no rules and no bedtimes and everything is chaos and it’s completely individualistic. Like, Zaheer kill the earth queen and literally tear down the walls separating the rich and the poor - and then they go off to commit genocide against the airbenders for some reason? That is a completely incoherent ideology, yet the show treats it as the only outcome of anarchism.
Also Kuvira is an actual fascist who puts people in concentration camps, but she’s the one villain who gets mercy. You want to dismantle unjust hierarchies and remove barriers between nations? We are going to fucking murder you. You want to ethnically cleanse your nation? No biggie, house arrest with your family. The last straw for the good guys is when Kuvira tries to retake land that was colonised for fucks sake
“Communists, environmentalists, anarchists and anti-colonial revolutionaries are all bad faith actors only pretending to have an ethos to whip up support among the masses. Also anti-colonial struggle is literally fascism.”
Man I just wanted more magical martial arts fights.
If you ignore all the bad politics Kora is fun, but with the writers of Disco Elysium it could’ve been grand. Still one of the few shows in which girls had cool actors with agency to identify with.
About the only thing semi good in Kora with current politics is that she needs help and collectives are stronger than individuals.
