Most if not all of these have one side that is clearly in the wrong. Real life is more complicated. Conflicts are usually gray vs. grey, with both sides having identifiable faults and justifications. But even then, if you spent all your time seeing the world from the perspective of certain designated protagonists you’ll likely sympathize with them anyway.
While this is undoubtedly true, I think OPs post misses the point for a more depressing reason, people generally believe what they’re told to believe, thinking about things is hard and most people are exhausted.
It’s you. You’re acts are evil. Everyone else. Shit, I live on a miniscule amount as an art and do very well because I’m obscenely lucky and have good people in my life still does it’s magick syphoning my act’s mana for it’s purpose.
They are the best people I’ve known but they’re still evil. What they do they call a job. It’s someone else’s will and you can carry as much of the right kinds of things to do but none will ever unwrite your actions as anything but literally evil synchronized in servitude.
You want to not be evil? Burn the dollar. There is no need to damage people. Just the Talisman.
Can someone translate this to Canadian English? Thanks.
He’s an art, what more do you need to know?
Based and schizopilled.
If both sides are the same, what is there to resist?
The system as a whole.
The system is to dismantle, resisting it just denies you a normal life.
Ah, an antisystemist!
Do we say happy cake day on Lemmy? Because you have a piece of cake today.
(Well no, not Star Wars)
For the Empire!
Down with rebel terrorists and religious fanatics that want the old corrupt regime back, but can’t handle democracy!!
Long live the Empire!
Ey?
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
Watching guys shit on things is tight!!!
Yeahyeahyeah!
I read divergent and seen the movies. In some aspects it’s kind of true. Iirc, if you ignore the drama then it’s about exposing the corrupt government.
Pitch meeting in question for those too lazy to search for it
That’s a lot of presumptions. Unless they’re talking to a specific person who they’ve asked beforehand, they don’t know that their interlocutor has sided with the resistance in all those shows.
Besides the obvious fact that even if they did, the real world is not comparable to a movie.
These people don’t live in reality unfortunately. They look at any side that is “losing” and think its a cause worth supporting. It’s idiotic brain rot
Oh so you don’t understand
Hamas dindu nuffin!
Well then they’re not talking to that person
Metaphors do exist
I actually have met a concerning number of people who idolize The Empire in the original Star Wars trilogy. The one who was always loudest about it willingly moved to Florida recently and is turning sadly right wing. He used to be a super smart punk rocker, too.
Through victory my chains are broken. For the Empire! In all seriousness though, it’s fictional space fantasy. When I was a kid, watching the OG trilogy, I always supported the rebels, but as I got older I slowly became way more into the empire. Sometimes it’s just fun to root for the bad guys. Also the dogmatic nature of the Jedi becomes glaringly more obvious as you get older.
That’s strange since the movies don’t really try to give The Empire any redeeming values. It’s pretty literally and figuratively black and white.
But The Empire has a better costume department. …Man I guess I’m in.
Hugo Boss!
If Star Wars was indeed a long, long time ago, that brand has some serious staying power.
Ever since I was young, you know, I hated dissension.
Among my peer group, it caused a whole lot of tension.
When the other kids were slouching, I would stand at attention.
And I’ve always looked so good in white.
Better costumes, better toys, no restrictions on the use of force power (can choke out anyone you like).
Let’s face it, Darth Vader is one of the coolest villains of all time. Tons and tons of kids who grew up on Star Wars fantasized about being powerful like him and choking out their enemies in the schoolyard.
The Republic turned on and tried to assassinate the democratically elected leader because of his religion, and because they didn’t want to stop all the wars Republic was constantly fighting, supporting crime syndicates etc.
Unfortunately anti establishment scenes always attracts right wingers. Like how the Skinhead subculture, which was started by British working class leftist teens, was co-opted by Nazis. Or how those wellness moms and hippies became virulent antivax right wingers.
These people often don’t even know they are right wingers until these oblivious right wingers form critical mass. Not very surprising that a punk rocker became a right wing idiot.
Are they independent contractors?
Worse, an AirBnb landlord
My best read on that phenomenon is that a few people took the discussion from Clerks a little further and started arguing as a joke that the empire were just trying to establish order as. They started r/EmpireDidNothingWrong, where irony-poisoned kids began taking the joke seriously, just like the people who legitimately believe the whole “birds aren’t real” theory.
So he’s defining the current government as evil? Yeah that’s what they do.
Obligatory Independent contractors working on the uncompleted death star…
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.
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.
You either die a hero or you live long enough to become the villain…
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?
first one must define reality… if by reality you mean being alive and interacting with the world, then beliefs, even if going against fact, affect reality.
Which poses a fun philosophical question: if 90% of a given population perceive something to be true, does that make it reality?
The question isn’t all that philosophical, and the answer is yes, for those people.
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.
A witch cursed Alan Moore to have fash mouthbreathers relate to his work.
But he wrote like that so it’s to be expected, a lot of his stories are ‘what if I retell crazy right-wing fantasy but make the hero kinda lefty a bit’
Considering what I know about Alan Moore I’m 50/50 on thinking this literally happened or is just a useful metaphor.
The brown coats!
So stupid.
You watched X and sided with the resistance, but continued to set on your butt doing nothing. Your siding took no effort, carried no risks, and made no difference.
Real change takes work.
It’s not saying “do something,” it’s saying “stop supporting the evil empire in real life.”
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.
Also important: the shows show a very personal narrative about the protagonist enduring oppression themselves. The media does occasionally try to show that, but it’s hard to empathise from a distance with experiences so traumatic.
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.
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.
I think you can blame Star Trek for that view. TNG often showed families about the Enterprise whereas the original TV show was strictly ‘military’ in function. I’m old enough to have seen the OG Star Wars in theater, the Death Star was purely military. Anyone that died on it was a soldier.
A slight older real world conflict that people are forgetting was the Irish Republican Army vs the British Army. Lots of bombings that killed civilians by the IRA. The Brits tried to not kill civilians, and they mostly succeeded. But they were still often viewed as the baddies.
Revolutionaries are very often a morally dark group. They are often willing to go above and beyond to justify killing to achieve their goals. But historically sometimes, it appears to a necessary thing to do so.
Edited for extra words - drink more tea before typing I guess
yes. it’s akin to blow up an aircraft carrier.
It’s not a space ship, it’s a space station. Obi Wan says so. Yes, it’s a space station that flies around like a ship. Why does that not make it a ship? Fuck if I know, ask George Lucas.
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?
We aren’t speaking about employee in an hydroelectric dam. Even if both took part in an the economy of an oppressive system, one give electricity, the other mass murder. If they do not agree with, they think that taking part in this crime give them more chance than deserting.
Whenever You Gamble, My Friend, Eventually You’ll Lose.
They are military, not employees. Fair game.
Depends thos doesn’t it. Was it conscription or voluntary. Some of those military were forced to join the empire or have their planets blown up. Obviously many were zealots but im sure if it wasnt for vader, many of the soldiers wouldnt have joined.
When it comes to people being forced into the military is it still fair game?
No, the Empire only recently gained the ability to blow up planets. No one joined under threat of their planet being blown up.
And yes, conscripts are fair game. Unless they A) rebel against their commanders and/or B) immediately surrender. As long as they keep running the death machine, they are culpable.
Only a sith deals in absolutes!
I can only speak for myself but yes even being conscripted would put you in the fair game category.
If I am given the choice between slaughtering others or risking being shot in the back as I run away, I’m going to take the risk of getting shot.
Someone will now come in and call me a liar and I really don’t mind. I do put the value of others lives above mine on a regular basis. Volunteer firefighters do it every day.
[Edited to remove unnecessary crudeness. Old habits die hard.]
They are serving in the Empire’s Army, so yes. Despite the fact that they were conscripted. If they didn’t want to be killed, they should have organized a massive uprising against their leaders and surrendered the Death Star to the rebel scum.
Great film. I always considered the contracters to be closer to slave labourers. The empire took prisoners, if personal politics would get in the way then a laser gun would surely convince anyone unwilling to help.
a lot of em were just contractors
And Mr Stevens, the head of catering.
You know Mr Stevens?
Geoff Vader said he could kill him with a tray.
Yea but it’s never mentioned ! Might have well been an unmanned satellite
Well, it certainly wasn’t a moon!
😂😂😂
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.
I’m not arguing that Israel should just sit down and let them do whatever they want. I’m just saying that resistance is justified when it’s clear all the other side wants to do is take your home and push you and your people out. Israel is ultimately responsible for giving evil groups like Hamas support as it’s hard for Palestinians to care about their beliefs when the other side is indiscriminately killing your people and trying to either push you out or treat you as a second class citizen. All they see is a group that is trying to fight against the people doing that so they support it. Cause the only other option is to lay down and get bulldozed by Israel. Without fighting Israel has no reason to care or negotiate, and even with fighting they barely have a reason to care with all the support they get from the western world.
Also it’s pretty clear they don’t really care about the safety of their people. See all the protests against how the government is handling the situation in Israel and the fact that their indiscriminate fighting against Hamas has killed many of the hostages they’re trying to save. It’s just an excuse to expand their control and get rid of more of the Palestinians from the region.
I do agree that the goals of getting rid of Jews from the region are terrible and not possible but the solution isn’t to let them keep pushing the Palestinians out more and more. That would be like saying during the time of manifest destiny well it’s impossible to give the native Americans all their land back cause we live here now so they should stop fighting back and let us take more of their land.
Do you think Palestinians are animals? You’re talking as if Palestinians aren’t responsible for their actions and aren’t capable of making rational decisions. So it seems to me that you think Palestinians are animals and no one should expect them to act like civilized people.
And that’s where we disagree. I think Palestinians are people and therefore are responsible for their actions. What Hamas did on October 7 was a decision they made. They are responsible for that decision. They should face justice for what they did just as any other people in the world would. Because they aren’t animals, they are people that committed a horrible crime.
Ideally the Palestinian people would turn on Hamas and send the leaders of Hamas to either Israel (or the ICJ if they’re capable of considering Palestinians as humans that are responsible for their actions) to face justice for the crimes they committed. But they aren’t doing that. That is a decision they are making. Because they are people making decisions, not animals.
Because of the inability (or unwillgness) of the Palestions to remove Hamas from power, military action is required. At the very least to get the hostages out. Ideally to bring the leadership of Hamas to justice if that’s possible.
I think because you’re thinking of Palestinians as animals that aren’t capable of making decisions and therefore aren’t responsible for their actions you can’t understand the magnitude of the crimes Hamas has committed.
Please make more of an effort to think of Palestinians as people that are responsible for their actions, ok?
No I’m just saying that Israel is more responsible for Hamas than the Palestinians. If Israel wanted to they could stop their oppressive programs and the expansion of their state through settlers. They could take more care when trying to fight Hamas which it’s pretty clear they don’t right now with the number of civilian deaths and massacres that have happened. You’re trying to say instead of resisting that they should try to negotiate, but without the threat of violent resistance if the negotiations don’t go through then what reason does Israel have to negotiate? If there’s no resistance they can just ignore the Palestinians attempts to negotiate or stall them indefinitely while they continue to push them out of their homes. And yes Hamas is bad and them winning wouldn’t be a good thing but it’s understandable why Palestinians would support them when the only other option is to lay down and die. And yes their resistance is probably not gonna stop Israel in the long run, only international pressure and sanctions on Israel would actually get them to stop the terrible things they’re doing. But that doesn’t mean trying to resist is bad cause again the only other option is to lay down and let the Israel state bulldozer over you and your people.
The Palestinian struggle is one source of inspiration for the Bajorans. It boggles my mind when I read comments that ‘Bajoran’ episodes are boring.
The Palestinian struggle would get more sympathy if Hamas wasn’t involved. Hamas is delighted with the high civilian death toll because of the backlash against Israel from people who place far more value on human lives than they do.
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?
So the trail of tears is what sounds good to you.
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.
I agree re: DS9 and SW with the recent but noteworthy exception of “Andor.”
Yeah, Andor did a good job of showing the systemic repression and the agonizing choices the resistance had to make to survive.
We need more gray areas in our stories.
I’m not sure which of my endless multitude of sins or lack of action you’re referring to. Can you be specific?
Complicated problems do not have simple solutions.
Hey bruh, we joined Lemmy. Not like we’re exactly going with the flow.
Lemmy is with revolution
I would disagree with that. Unless you are willing to kill and die yourself, you aren’t much into revolution. But rather just paying lip service to an ideal while doing nothing.
And the status quo remains intact.
Like that worthless Mahatma Gandhi.
Gandhi gets all the credit because he was an easy sell for historical purposes. But the Indian people had a long history of violence and armed rebellion against the British. And during Gandhi’s time, the constant threat of from armed rebellion from the INA, before, during, and after WW2, scared the British more than Gandhi did. The INA, much like the Malcolm X and Black Panthers did for Dr. Martin Luther King, made those in charge more fearful and far more willing to deal with the “more reasonable peaceful side”.
But make no mistake, it was violence and the threat of it that brought the oppressive side to the table to concede rights and equality.
Buuut Gandhi still wasn’t that much into revolution himself.
Well, 20th-century-style revolutions are very unlikely to happen in 21st.
And the status quo remains intact.
Better than actively support status Pu.
I disagree, look around you. The Middle East is in constant turmoil. And parts of Africa also. And to a lesser extent, parts of Central America at times. Revolution is alive and well in the 21rst century.
If the status quo remains, then you have lost. Your causes you support are all worthless and failed ideology.
Counterpoint: I did not watch Divergent.
Oh yeah. I take offense really at the implication that I would have watched it.
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.
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.
That’s why The Hunger Games was successful I believe. They treated the audience not as children, but as adults who can consider complex ideas. They just want to read about people their age. Most YA considers their audience as little more than hormone filled idiots.
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.
Is the book version of the conspiracy better? I watched the first movie and thought that the supposedly smart caste was pretty braindead.
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.
