#university of copaganda and fascism

[lesetoilesfous]

anyway here's my thoughts on veilguard.

i liked it! i really, genuinely enjoyed it. there were moments that made me cry and truly moved me. there were plot twists that really surprised and shocked me. i felt emotionally impacted by the game. i love so many of the characters - both companions and npcs. it's beautiful. it's fun to play.

is it a perfect game? of course not! a) there's no such thing b) gang, i thought we knew this?? it's a game that's been in development for a decade, more than 3/4 of the team got laid off, it's had its usp constantly switched around lord knows how many times. it was never going to be perfect! i went in with my expectations underground and came out with a game i liked much more than inquisition.

neither inquisition nor veilguard were ever going to be like origins and da2. the creative team changed massively between those games. but also, the world changed! the industry changed! the climate in which people were working changed! for goodness sake there was an entire pandemic!

we were never and are never going to get games like da2 and origins again because the world is different now and that's ok. it's good to have new things!

could there have been more conflict in veilguard? sure. could it have been more politically and socially sensitive? maybe. but you know what? i work in media and i know how incredibly fucking hard it is to get any kind of purse-holder to sign off on one explicitly trans character, let alone nine (by my last count): specifically and lovingly designed across a wide spectrum of voice and appearance to illustrate that non-binary is not 'girl-lite' or a third gender, it's just not binary.

we went from vivienne being BALD in inquisition because they couldn't be fucked to design afro hair to a game where it is literally not possible to have an all-white or an all-male team for the first 5 or so hours of the game. one of your team members is a south asian woman with a prosthetic leg and at no point is her disability fetishised or exoticised.

god knows its not perfect but gang i really don't think y'all are recognising how fucking much good stuff we got in this game. literally, please, give me the title of another AAA game that has this much explicit trans rep. that has this many major characters of colour written with care and thoughtfulness. this many companions who are people of colour and essential to the plot. do you know how hard that is???? and everyone got fired!!!! it took 10 years!!! despite everything they got all this through!!!

like. it's not surprising to me the game is gentler than earlier entries in the series. earlier entries in the series are also, often, VERY RACIST. as far as earlier entries in the series are concerned: transgender people don't exist (except Krem, of course, but he is one character in a very big game). they are so obviously trying so hard and in a landscape where i literally cannot think of any other game of this scale and budget that is trying at all, yeah, i'm giving them a pass!

the things that drove me nuts in previous DA games were the christian fascism, the genocide apologism, the white supremacy, the 'peaceful protest' crap, the copaganda. veilguard doesn't do that and it's amazing and heartbreaking to me that so few folks in the fandom seem to value that.

there's this thing that happens whenever a piece of media is actually, truly diverse where fandom attacks it much, much more savagely than media that is actually racist, sexist etc (supernatural vs steven universe, star wars vs dream daddy, etc). people translate the fact that it takes them a little longer to connect with characters they're unused to seeing in fiction into meaning that the art is 'objectively bad'. and then assholes with money use that violently negative reaction to justify continuing to make games without trans people or brown people or a majority of female characters.

"look! veilguard did that! nobody liked it!"

please. consider why you are reacting so much more harshly to a game like this than you did to a game where you literally led a catholic inquisition, planted your flag in indigenous people's land, and had the power to enact military law on anyone unlucky enough to come across your army of religious zealots, up to and including executions.

no one is perfect. fandom isn't activism. consumption of media isn't activism. you're allowed to dislike things and you're allowed to yell about it on the internet and it's my responsibility to block content i don't want to see. i get that.

but just in case anyone else is feeling the way i am: i liked veilguard. i think they tried really hard. i think a lot of the team got fucked over by asshole bosses and worse executives. i think the game obviously got cut short and rushed, which we knew before it came out. and i still think they wrestled a fun, emotionally impactful game out of that housefire, and that that's worth celebrating.

[inklingofadream]

I just had an epiphany about why I so dislike the watchmen/Alan Moore generally/etc "superheroes as fascism" argument. Which, it's obnoxious mainly because so many people who are into that theme are smug, have to be right all the time even though you're literally trying to enjoy a spidered man and not bothering them at all, kinda people. that's not the epiphany.

It's that it feels super incomplete, like it's insisting there's only one type of superhero (or even specifically one type of batman/superman/etc) story, which there's not. Even ruling out stories where a non-allegorical world destroying force shows up and the only option is the justice league or whoever, the superhero-as-fitting-the-fascism-theme is not the only thing happening.

The epiphany being that to me at least it feels exactly like insisting that murder mysteries are universally copaganda because you watch a lot of law and order and criminal minds, completely ignoring your ms marples, your Jessica fletchers, and so on. Yeah there's a strain of moore/nolan-esque superhero stories that are really fashy, intentionally or not, but like... there's a zillion stories where its very much FRIENDLY NEIGHBORHOOD Spiderman, not judge jury and executioner Spiderman, yknow? It's not an incorrect argument, it's just not as universal as its fanboys pretend

[multitrackdrifting]

Going to fire off a hot take for once but spoiler warning for Across The Spider-Verse underneath

So there's people on twitter saying that they feel that Spider-Verse is copaganda, and obviously, no person or representative of any community can speak on behalf of others - everyone is different but I feel like challenging this idea nonetheless because it doesn't hold that much weight.

There are a couple moments that might give people pause:

1) Gwen saying to her father that he's in his position so that bad cops can't be in his position (you don't have to spell out this dynamic, I'm not 5 y.o.). Basically "bad egg" rhetoric

2) Miles and Gwen's fathers are cops that are shown to be decent people but it's rarely if ever framed that it is because they are cops.

I think the notion that the movies (plural because the first movie is also accused of this) that it humanises police and is pro-police is just an argument by aesthetics.

In ATSV one of the major plot points is that Gwen's father completely rejects her role as spider-gwen because he had assumed Spider-Man was a murderer that had killed Peter Parker of her universe.

In criminology there's a phenomena that has a decent amount of literature studying "police culture", and the whole alienation and rejection of his interpersonal bonds in favour of his duties as a police officer [creating a literal us. vs them paradigm in ones own community], while it's not a literal attempt by the authors to discuss that idea it incidentally explains it either way how incapable he is to love his own daughter and fight to protect her because it conflicts with what he is tasked with doing as an officer of the Law.

Of course, I think it's just best to hand-wave a lot of these arguments as an overly critical look at a movie that is largely not about these cop characters rather than a story where they are present, and they're not particularly described in a positive light despite what Gwen happens to say to her father.

In the scene where she says that she's just being conciliatory because that's what she knows her father as, this detective that's raised her as a single-parent some "by the book cop" but the movie showed how flawed he was as a person despite supposedly being a "good cop".

If you can't take that in and like just be objective about it then you're not really interested in the dialogue and you're just saying thing because the aesthetics are there but the ideology is not.

I generally have a no discourse rule I try to adhere to but this shit is just ridiculous man, it's such a good and heartfelt movie with really careful character writing and it's mostly about fate, freedom & identity - not whatever some person on twitter is fixated on.

The copaganda you're actually scratching at is a symptom of the super-hero genre and its relationship with law enforcement & the military industrial complex (which the MCU is far more egregious with) - it's not a primary feature of Spider-Verse specifically.

You know what Gwen's dad does to mend his relationship? He quits his job as a cop because it's not serving the community if he can't even do right by his own daughter. And the whole spider-society trying to uphold and protect fate and prevent people from defying the canon is more of a commentary on power structures than anything, I don't even know how you can conceive of this idea unless you hinge everything on the comic book super-hero genre itself having somewhat uncomfortable elements of fascism that are nigh-inseparable from it [which means that every Spider-Man would be at the mercy of this very idea].

It's not gonna hold I'm afraid because that's not the angle of attack people are taking and honestly, it's very fake deep as someone who has actually read the literature they're doing a very flimsy job of explaining.

I criticise pretty heavily in my own analysis that taking a bad faith interpretation of a work that is not even saying the stuff you're alleging is not critical analysis, it's just an "ass pull" argument. Gwen's dad literally had her at Gunpoint and kept her there after he knew she was Spider-Gwen because his authority as a police officer overwrote his concern for her as his own daughter.

The movie showed more dysfunction with cops (and authority like the Spider-Society) than it did endorse them but if you can't understand that argument because you're fixated on the copaganda train then yeah like, there's no serious dialogue to be had with you because the mere shadow of an object, is proof of its presence even though it's not talking positive about the air force, or the CIA or whatever the hell which is super prevalent in MCU movies by comparison.

With my admittedly limited knowledge of the broader spidey canon, the comics aren't even anti-cop, but they tend to hate spider-man but he's just willing to work with them where it's logistically reasonable to do so - but that doesn't really act as a heavy feature of his stories in my experience. It is a heavy feature in the PS4 Spidey game (which is a good game but yeah this aspect is asscheeks).

Besides, a lot of the movie was about Miles fighting the Spider-society, I genuinely scratched my head for a while at seeing these takes..

There's a world of difference between ATSV & like Brooklyne Nine Nine, Hawaii Five-O or Law & Order or even just the average MCU film and its casual discussion of intelligence agencies and thelike.

Just another day on the internet where you get bludgeoned over the head for free.

P.S. I do not care to deliberate this, if you can't smile and enjoy a genuinely good movie then you're not the kind of person I want to talk to in the first place.

[thewickedbohemian]

You have half a point, only half because you shouldn't try to use Glee as a gotcha punchline as if it's cringe inherently or the show would turn into Glee if you put enough social issues in but you do have a point about Glee and the tokenism and the Very Special Episodes

Some better examples of why this shit should be avoided in fandoms are

the tendency to ascribe to a fictional police force in a fantasy world the negative traits of the worst parts of American police and then call the series copaganda for not addressing those negative traits yet daring to have law enforcement

the guy who said ATLA even being about the Avatar/Gaang and not a completely different story in the same setting about a populist revolution in the Earth Kingdom was teaching people to rely on a single savior instead of rising up

not just the Steven Universe fascism discourse but the first "bad social issue discourse" I remember since I started watching, the people trying to make it an either-or between the show having nonbinary representation or passing the Bechdel test because the non-Steven gems are technically nonbinary but female-presenting

(this is about a movie not a show but same deal) people complaining that Turning Red didn't address 9/11 just because it's set in the early 2000s even though even looking past its fantasy elements it's a coming-of-age tween comedy set in not just Canada but a part of Canada that isn't even near Gander, Newfoundland of Come From Away fame

just because a television show doesn’t actively address a specific issue doesn’t mean they’re actively avoiding it either. you know what happens when you try to stuff every possible social debate under the sun into one show?

you get glee.

that’s what happens.

[alarajrogers]

And copaganda, as bad as it may be, is not in itself fascism. Pretty much every democratic state in the world pretends that their cops are good guys.

Superman... because flag? Nationalism? Talking about truth, justice and the American Way, as if America isn't an evil empire? But... Superman, like Captain America, is about modeling what is best about America, trying to present an example to live up to.

There's an argument to be made that comic books, that superheroes in particular, are... not fascist, but inherently right-wing, because there are Good Guys and Bad Guys and the Good Guys win by beating up the Bad Guys. But, I mean, you have to look at the history and the Comics Code and shit to see why it's done that way, and a lot of modern writers have explored this problematic nature, and within universe... neither Superman nor Batman spend a lot of time fighting poor marginalized people. Superman's entire rogues gallery consists of billionaires and alien imperialists. Batman does beat up some mooks, but most of his foes are pretty well-heeled themselves. I mean, the Penguin's not a poor marginalized guy. I mean, it doesn't stand up to reality, but neither does a dude who can fly, so...

And yeah, originally, comic books and superheroes were almost entirely created by Jewish people as a fantasy of good people making the world a more just place. They weren't created out of a desire to beat up poor people. Early superheroes all fought Nazis (and Wonder Woman, who didn't exist early enough to fight Nazis while they were in power, had a lengthy arc in the 70's about her Earth-2 counterpart who did fight Nazis.) If anything, they're a fantasy of a world where evil is simple enough that you can punch it and defeat it that way.