The problem is that people can map fictional resistance movements onto opposite real life parties. In my college poli Sci class, both I (a known lefty) and the most conservative guy in class excitedly supported the idea of showing V for Vendetta. I guarantee the January 6 guys thought they were in an underdog resistance movement.
A witch cursed Alan Moore to have fash mouthbreathers relate to his work.
Considering what I know about Alan Moore I’m 50/50 on thinking this literally happened or is just a useful metaphor.
I think it really shows just how vast the different realities people live in truly are, and how often those individual or collective realities don’t really align with actual reality. The human mind is great at convincing an individual that their biases are the truth, when they can be extremely far from it.
Which poses a fun philosophical question: if 90% of a given population perceive something to be true, does that make it reality?
I actually have to disagree with this. They are the underdogs. Democrats and traditional Republicans are the establishment. Just because you’re a resistance movement doesnt make you automatically good. Castro led a resistance movement and now it’s a dictatorship.
I can assure you the jan6 criminals thought they were fighting for the good of the planet. I heard nothing of the changes they “almost” made and how their innocence was going to win out. Coworkers are fuckheads, had zero clue.
It’s all about the story and how it’s told. They chose to believe, poorly.
One reason for this is these shows don’t tend to show the morally questionable things a resistance has to do to be able to win. So it’s a lot easier to side with the resistance in Star Wars when they’re just fighting conventionally against the empire. I think a much better depiction of resistance can be seen in Star Trek Deep Space Nine with the Bajorans. They fought the Cardasians in a guerilla war which often led to civilians on both sides being killed. It’s a lot more murky but the Bajorans are still unequivocally viewed as the good guys since it was the only way to resist and get rid of the Cardasians and stop them from killing their people.
They blew up the death star! That was full of people. Thousands and thousands of soldiers and engineers, pilots etc. We all cheered. Id say it was pretty morally questionable.
Isn’t the death star specifically a military spaceship? You can’t just choose not to fire at a battleship just because there are engineers who won’t personally shoot at you in it.
I’ve had this argument with people before. It was a military installation so a viable target by the rules of war, you don’t need to be a combatant to be in the military. Even when they upgraded to an entire planet as a weapon they still only ever show military personnel being located there. Meanwhile the empire demonstrably killed civilians when they blew up entire planets.
Of course it’s all a bit arbitrary because people have just decided for themselves that it wasn’t purely a military installation, and that it had civilians and children onboard, even though they never showed that.
They blew up an enemy military ship that had already destroyed a peaceful planet and was in the process of killing them.
Nice try
Which presents the dilemma perfectly. Decision to destroy the planet was made by a higher-up, thus do all Death Star “employees” deserve to die?
Yea but it’s never mentioned ! Might have well been an unmanned satellite
The Palestinian struggle is one source of inspiration for the Bajorans. It boggles my mind when I read comments that ‘Bajoran’ episodes are boring.
I love the Bajorans and their struggles, both externally and within their own politics and religion. I think most people who got bored with the Bajorans were just hoping for more battles against the Borg.
They might’ve even been turned off by the focus on religion in the first place. Roddenberry was famously outspoken against religion (due to rejecting his upbringing). I think TOS and TNG went pretty far towards cultivating a large audience of atheist and agnostic fans. Many of these would’ve been pretty turned off by the depiction of religious characters in anything but a negative light. When you go from being raised religious to being an atheist who rejects all that, it’s hard to walk back to being neutral or open-minded about religion once again.
Fiction SHOULD NOT be equated to real-life.
IRL there are much more complex and serious outcomes which cannot be pre-determined. Hindsight will not save the day as consequences are terrible.
For example, here is some imaginary bullshit that will never happen…
“Things that will never happen for 500, Alex”
<imaginary BS/>
I wish North America or South America or even Europe can setup an Ashkenazi Independent Autonomous Area … perhaps Alsace-Lorraine ? Or somewhere between Poland and Russia ? Any and all Israeli and Philistine citizens wishing to live in peace and harmony can and should move there and re-integrate back into Europe.
Palestinian land should be returned to the original settlers and descendants of those lands since the fall of the Roman Empire.
Hopefully a Joint-UN-led Area of Non-Violence should be established stretching from the Mediterranean to the borders of Pakistan. No “Country” or “Border” or anything. Just Non-Violence DMZ. Any weapons or violence will be considered Death-Sentence through International-Court-for-War-Crimes.
<end-of-imaginary BS/>
We can all dream up solutions that all sound good, but IRL isnt like that. Things dont happen as they should or as we want them to play out.
In the Americas? Shouldn’t people in the Americas be returning the land to the indigenous Americans and returning to the homes of our European ancestors?
By the way, the last place my grandmother lived in Scotland was turned into a Tesco. Should I bomb it since I have an indigenous right to my homeland?
Also empires are always building super-weapons in fiction and not the railroads/bridges/tax offices and all other boring shit that empires tend to do.
The last ‘super weapon’ to be used in anger was made by the glorious republic (USA) against the Evil empire (Japan). The genocides meanwhile tend to be perpetrated with boring old bombs, shells and blockades.
I agree re: DS9 and SW with the recent but noteworthy exception of “Andor.”
What about the Maquis? That’s another side to a resistance. Most times resistance movements accomplish exactly nothing and everyone would have been better off if they just worked with the existing government to improve things. Sometimes it’s just about egos and personal vendettas more than they are about any kind of cause. A lot of people die for nothing.
Other than the Maquis, we mostly tell the stories about resistances that were successful. This serves to romanticize the idea of a resistance and makes people feel that victory for a resistance is inevitable. It’s not. Most of the time it’s just causing death and destruction so that a few resistance leaders can have power over people before the resistance movement fades out.
Nearly every resistance movement ever has been pushed by outside actors. It’s extremely rare for these outside actors to have the best interests of the people they’re supposedly supporting. Countries don’t have friends, they have interests. This aspect of a resistance is rarely portrayed in fiction too.
While I do generally agree there are times when working with the government isn’t possible, much like with what’s happening in Israel. Israel has shown they’re not gonna make things better unless they’re forced to. Sure you can argue the resistance isn’t gonna work and is just a way for the leaders to have power but that doesn’t mean resisting in general isn’t justified. Even if resistance is futile it doesn’t mean that trying to resist is bad.
Israel’s primary motive has always been the safety of their people. Currently there’s Israelis being held against their will in Gaza.
It’s not really all that complicated really. Biden is doing his best to get Hamas to release the hostages, but Hamas just isn’t doing that. Israel isn’t going to just say “I guess it’s fine for Hamas to do whatever they want with our people”.
With the Palestinian resistance, it’s a “you either die a hero or live long enough to become the villain” kind of thing. If land was taken from you, sure the people that took it from you have done you wrong. But if you’re using violence because to restore the ethnic makeup to how it was in a history book, then you’re a fascists. Over time it has changed from the first to the latter. They should’ve taken taken the deal offered in the 1990s but they chose to continue using violence instead. So now if there ever is a Palestinian state it will be much worse off than it would’ve been had there not been a resistance. People could be living good lives, their families would be safe living in a Palestinian state if not for this romanticized resistance. As the resistance continues a potential future Palestinian becomes more and more diminished.
This is the problem with the romantization of resistance, and war in general. We have a strange respect for Germans who fought to the bitter end in WWII and we don’t respect Italian soldiers who surrendered at first contact with the enemy. Personally I respect Italians who refused to fight for Mussolini over the Germans who fought to the bitter end for Hitler. Similarly I also don’t respect people who fight for the authoritarian Hamas who are only hurting the Palestinian people.
The world would be a better place if we didn’t romanticize using violence for lost causes under authoritarian leaders.
Also though the idea that any resistance is just good people forced to make difficult choices that upset them is crazy - a lot of ‘resistance movements’ are brutal and cruel because that’s what they belive in, Lord’s Resistance Army is a resistance movement against the powerful and so they say evil government - their leader Kony is not a heroic movie character.
Even if like many here you hate Isreal it’s still very difficult to ignore the evils hamas have committed, certainly their leader living in Qatar is not luke Skywalker or Morphius, he’s an awful person who believes awful things.
Yeah that’s definitely not something that’s shown as much in media. The fact that usually resistance groups that do well tend to be the more extreme ones. Probably because of their beliefs they’re willing to fight back in ways other groups wouldn’t which limits those other groups’ effectiveness. And then because the more extreme groups are seen as more effective at resisting the occupying power they end up getting more support from the people than more moderate groups.
But at least in the case of Israel part of the reason Hamas is able to have so much support from the people and power is Israel’s fault for all the terrible things they’ve done to the Palestinians. In media when the evil government does evil things the resistance gains support and the same things happens in real life even if the resistance is also doing terrible things. They’re seen as at least better than the oppressors who are actively killing their friends and families.
They identify with protagonists.
Also, Divergent should not be on the same list as the others.
More seriously though, it is frustrating.
I have never seen Divergent or read the books. The Pitch Meeting episodes on YT were more than enough
Counterpoint: I did not watch Divergent.
It was derivative. You missed out on nothing. Hunger games did it way better.
Okay, most of this is fair play, but saying hunger games did it better? You take that back right now.
Divergent just didn’t have the nuance, character depth or world building that the Hunger Games had and I’ll stand by that opinion. The divergent movie was a let down to tbh, the book was better. Still not as good as the hunger games tho.
Hunger Games depicted revolution’s harsh but necessary sides in a realistic way, and that elevates it above all other YA I’ve ever read. Granted I stopped reading YA novels after 16 but still.
Katniss has a real personality, real desires, and loses things because she (thought) she decided to lead a revolution. Only to find out that she wasn’t in charge at all and only a figurehead at best, and herself became a victim of the revolution. Nonetheless the revolution was absolutely necessary.
The world of the Hunger Games is much bigger than the teenage protagonists and that’s… missing in most of young adult fiction.
I didn’t watch either. I don’t feel like I’m missing anything. There are so many other excellent dystopian films-
Brazil, Children of Men, Blade Runner, Logan’s Run, Gattaca.
I guess I prefer such movies that aren’t YA-oriented… although the BBC TV adaptation of The Tripods back in the 80s was amazing.
Life isn’t like a movie. A movie has the liberty of making things black and white or easily understood. Real life is full of shades of gray and history, which shapes beliefs and opinions.
Right? I mean I get there are problems in the world, but this post is literally saying “you’re stupid for not joining a resistance (apparently any resistance) because you enjoy movies where the protagonist resists something.”
What an insanely shallow take.
Incorrect. This post is literally saying exactly what it’s saying and nothing more. That’s what “literally” means.
What it’s implying is that the reader, who supposedly rooted for oppressed proletarian resistance groups fighting against evil empires in various famous movies, contradictorily and blindly roots for evil empires oppressing proletarian groups in real life.
