IT’S AN ALLEGORY FOR FASCISM
IT’S LITERALLY WORD-OF-GOD AN ALLEGORY FOR FASCISM
IT COULDN’T BE ANY MORE CLEAR-CUT
YOU CAN LITERALLY GOOGLE THE PHRASE “WHAT IS WARHAMMER AN ALLEGORY FOR” AND YOU WILL GET THAT AS A FRONT-PAGE RESULT
But see Krieg Imperial Guard have gas masks and I like gas masks and you know the swastika is really just religious imagery and well you know war is brutal so you really have to just do whatever you can against the fake plastic armies of Chaos and space elves and undead robots and green men and those weird things that spit acid at you so actually YOU’RE the fascist for even bringing it up to begin with!!!
No you don’t understand Krieg is inspired by a combination of all the forces from WWI which is why it’s okay for someone to paint theirs like the afrika korps and add swastika transfers.
Oh God that reminded of some chud that was trying to argue that his afrika korp “inspired” imperial guard army (complete with custom afrika korp emblems but with the swastika replaced with an imperial aquilla) wasn’t fascist and didn’t make him a fascist. Spoiler: the rest of his account was wheraboo-level Nazi tank worship including pictures of a whole-ass shrine to them he made complete with anime girl nazi officers
Warhammer Fantasy is different from Warhammer 40k, but it’s pretty much just a piss take on how horrific and shitty sword and sorcery fantasy worlds really are, cutting away all the anachronistic romance and replacing it with horror and filth. It’s basically satirizing fantasy monarchist apologia and romanticism in the same way 40K directs that towards fashy sci-fi.
Neither setting does a particularly good job with the satire though, imo, to the point that I’d almost say 40K is more “what if Judge Dredd went back into space and we took this to a whole new level of silly? Like we could do a Judge Dredd/Dune crossover with like elves and shit, lmao,” than it is even the sort of tepid and still-brainwormed satire that Judge Dredd was.
yeah top result on google is “it’s an allegory for germany” (the empire)
a little further down I found this: https://br.ifunny.co/video/warhammer-is-an-allegory-it-s-a-commentary-on-fascism-yd0RLTL29
Might be some confusion there. In warhammer fantasy, the empire is very much supposed to be the HRE: a bunch of squabbling states that are only nominally subservient to the central authority of the emperor. The Imperium of Man in 40k on the other hand is just fascism. Love to have two settings that use similar names, definitely not confusing, thank u james workshop.
It’s going to blow their minds once they figure out who the Empire in Star Wars was an allegory for.
I’d like to have this person watch Starship Troopers and then write an essay on what it’s about.
I found his essay
“Cool soldier guys cleanse the galaxy of unholy xenos”
That’s all it says, he turned in the same paper for the Warhammer essay too.
They’d probably think it was about how fascism is good. It doesn’t go far enough imo.
You can explicitly make the fascists into cartoon villains like Star Wars and still get people doing the “empire did nothing wrong” larp and unironically making support for fascists their identity through it.
That’s actually what the book is about, though! Heinlein was a classic example of a libertarian-turned-fascist. He wrote a book about how war is cool and the military is a necessary part of an ordered society. The book reads like satire because you would have to be a very dumb Nazi to read it and think “Of course we should be constantly at war with a faceless and dehumanized enemy, and create a society around that principle. This makes sense and is good.” but that’s literally what Heinlein was trying to say, or at least present as a possibility in the book.
There’s some argument that he was being ironic and leaving things to be interpreted by the audience, but if you look at his work on the whole, and his political opinions, it’s clear that he’s just a bog-standard American conservative who likes war, racism, and misogyny, but doesn’t like the government or taxes.
The actual Robert Heinlein novel is very much about “fascism is good.” Bob Heinlein was this kind of weird mix of Ayn Rand libertarian, military-fetishist, pedophilic and incest obsessed futurist who also liked cats but not non-white people. The movie was a parody of the ideas in the novel, but Heinlein took those ideas very seriously and they cropped up time and again in his books. He embraced bisexuality while still thinking that the man-woman relationship was what nature intended. There’s a lot to not like about the guy - like fathers being seduced and bedded by their thirteen year old sexually aggressive but still meek and mild daughters, with said daughters proceeding in their quest with the active help of the mother. And so on.
Anyway, I don’t know how many people that enjoyed the movie knew that it was not only a parody, but one that intentionally and in great detail directly mocked the book it was based on.
The grandaddy of the fantasy genre, Tolkein’s Lord of the Rings, is so old it’s an allegory for the evils of the Industrial Revolution.
The Shire, a pastoral Garden of Eden kept in a medieval-communal state where the biggest worry is how much food your friend is going to eat when they come for a visit to get high and drunk.
Mordor, an advanced state using all kinds of witchery like gunpowder and mechanical engineering, looks like hell filled with ash and dust like a factory might.
i wonder what he meant by this
Tolkien specifically stated that it wasn’t an allegory because his bff CS Lewis (whose Narnia books were explicitly supposed to be read as christian allegory with Alan = Jesus) tried to pressure him to do the same. Tolkien was Catholic and Lewis was Protestant, but they were both very religious. Tolkien felt that the approach Lewis took was too ham-fisted.
However, what Tolkien specifically objected to was the interpretation of his work as allegorical to the world wars. He would go on and on about how the ring was not the atomic bomb. He was, however, an unapologetic romanticist and he made sure his readers knew that. Saruman was the bad guy in that respect - he served evil out of greed and cut down forests and destroyed the land to serve his own ambition, the allegory with which he’s bashing readers over the head in the last bit with the Scouring of the Shire. He really liked the idea of jolly peasant farmers, the reality of actual peasant farmers not being relevant.
I think his work was colored by his war experiences, but wasn’t intended as allegorical in that respect. On the other hand, hobbits, Treebeard, Tom Bombadil, Lothlorien, and the rest were very deliberate.
An early draft of The Fall of Gondolin featured orcs in mechanized tanks.
I once got a whole room of guys to laugh when I mentioned the X-men comics are an allegory for persecuted ethnic, religious, sexual, etc minorities. That one is the most clear allegories out of any popular media, and yet people still don’t get it. The mutants are clearly oppressed, they’re not typical superheroes who are fighting crime out of some intrinsic feeling of superiority. The X-men are organized and militant to defend themselves from discrimination.
The 2000s era X-men movies are even more clear about it, although they squeeze the allegory down so that mutants specifically represent queer people. You’ve got teenage runaways, unsupportive families, and there’s a whole theme of mutants figuring themselves out around the age of puberty. There’s a line in the second movie where one mutant’s mother asks “Have you tried not being a mutant?” which is a parody of a common conservative line from the time “Have you tried not being gay?” I mentioned all of this and only got one guy on board because I mentioned the director, Bryan Singer, is gay. Then he was able to believe there’s gay stuff in the X-men.
I think some people only engage in media because it’s comforting lights and sounds they can distract themselves with
Could it also be that typical mindset of “I don’t care about (or even think of) thing unless it affects me personally”? Maybe they simply can’t see why some old cishet white dudes in the 60s would want to represent ethnic/gender/sexual minorities. Empathy on a deeper level, considering the views of others who may have vastly different experiences, and wanting to support them seems damn near impossible for most griller-americans.
You could have also mentioned that Stan Lee has explicitly stated that the X-Men are a civil rights allegory.
But yeah I have no idea how someone could consume the X-Men and not see the obvious.
ETA: FFS in First Class Magneto is explicitly shown to be a Holocaust survivor, and in the climax of the movie Charles drops a “they’re just following orders” about the dudes firing missles at them and Magneto says “I’ve been at the mercy of men just following orders. Never again”. How could you POSSIBLY be more explicit.
And the comics don’t shy away from it either.
I remember the first time I saw (and loved) There Will Be Blood I had an argument with a friend about it. He hated it and said he didn’t understand who could enjoy a movie like that–“everyone was so shitty, who am.i supposed to root for?” I was kinda floored by that, because I remember thinking it was amazing and near-perfect. To me it was like a surgical diagram, delving much deeper than some trite ethical parable into the minds of the powerful and the power-seeking, and demonstrating the world they perpetuate.
Not saying I was right when I disagreed, but I realized we were watching movies for different reasons. I had my foot in the real world, enjoying media for how it interacts with it, while he was enjoying movies as something to utterly submit yourself to. If a movie doesn’t have a good slot for him to sit in, he’s homeless in it. In some ways he probably enjoyed media more than I do.
Sometimes similar people to that revel in “everyone is an asshole” stories if what they get out of it is “therefore status quo good, pick your favorite ruling class monster to quote and emulate.” You can often tell when those stories come about and how they’ll be received when the supposed worst character is the one that is trying to improve society somewhat instead of just oinking and rolling in shit like everyone else in it.
“These are bad guys, good thing that’s not us” stories hit different than “nobody can be good actually” stories, sure
“nobody can be good actually”
This can sometimes miss its audience as the intended message. Look at how many people idolize and imitate Walter White
