i can’t believe this exists

  • CriticalOtaku [he/him]@hexbear.net
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    1 year ago

    Waitwaitwait hold on a second.

    So, first of all- you’re free to consume problematic media. Reading Mein Kampf or The Turner Diaries doesn’t automatically turn you into a Nazi, otherwise we’d have a lot of right wing political graduate students. The only danger these books pose are to those who uncritically accept the author’s ideas, and I’m sure there’ll be no problems on that front given the general media literacy of people in the anglosphere. If you think there’s cool stuff in the show by all means enjoy it.

    But Goblin Slayer was written for someone, by someone, to communicate something.

    Why are the goblins cunning enough to set traps and ambush people, but too stupid to engage in diplomacy or have their own culture? Hmmmmm, I dunno, my dude Umberto Eco has something to say about that. “[…] the followers must be convinced that they can overwhelm the enemies. Thus, by a continuous shifting of rhetorical focus, the enemies are at the same time too strong and too weak.” I dunno, seems pretty sus to me…

    Why does it open with graphic rape? Oh haha those whacky Japanese and their strange cultural perversions, that’s it, it’s totally not that fear of sexual assault has a long history of being used to justify racism. It’s not as if historically minorities have been lynched on trumped up charges of sexual assault. It must be because the goblins are ontologically evil, the author’s not trying to draw some equivalence or something.

    If the goblins pose that much of a danger to people, why do the powers that be leave them alone? Why isn’t there an organized response by official to deal with them? Why do the powers that be actively suppress information about goblins? Can’t possibly be anything to do with conspiracy theories about how the the media in the real world suppresses the real crime statistics that show minorities in a bad light, right? Can’t possibly be so that the big, strong MC has to take things into his own hands, go all ‘lone wolf’ and enact all that cool improvised violence, right? Gotta be a real big damn hero. Oh here comes Eco again: “in Ur-Fascist ideology, heroism is the norm. This cult of heroism is strictly linked with the cult of death.”

    The answer to the above questions, of course, is because the author wrote it like that. So the next thing we need to ask is why. Who could this story possibly be for? I hope I gave sufficient inferences through the sarcasm.

    When people criticize art, they aren’t attacking you as a person, they’re attacking the ideas presented in the texts. I’m not trying to wokescold people into enjoying only Good Communist Approved Media. Me, personally, I call shit like Goblin Slayer out because I’m the fucking minority in question who racists will call a goblin and say deserves to be genocided, “just like in my le ebin animays”. Because the spread of and acceptance of these ideas in the wider culture without pushback is just one more drop in the bucket towards fascism, so I’ll point out all the ways in which a show like Goblin Slayer promotes far-right ideas and talking points in the vain, pointless hope that people who watched the show and didn’t realize it actually think about what the show is trying to say, and maybe they realize how those messages can be dangerous because too many people are uncritical of the media they consume.

    Ask yourself: why do racists 4chan shitheads stan this show so hard?

    P.S. Ghostbusters? Really? The movie about how Reagan era deregulation is good actually, where the villain is the EPA and attempting to enforce environmental regulations is what causes the most problems?

    • UlyssesT [he/him]@hexbear.net
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      1 year ago

      No one is immune to propaganda, and in this thread, we can definitely see that with toxic fans that outright refuse to even acknowledge propaganda elements (including fucking genocide apologia) in their slop. If they did, they might feel bad. The slop must be totally harmless and all critics must wrong and stupid or else they might feel bad. :morshupls:

    • ChapoChatGPT [any]@hexbear.net
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      1 year ago

      great post

      i’m regularly shocked at the supposed unwillingness of self-described leftists to read. your comment is a 2-3 minute read at average reading speed.

      • CriticalOtaku [he/him]@hexbear.net
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        1 year ago

        I spend my time to engage in good faith and this is all you got? tl;dr?

        Fuck it, here’s the tl;dr: why do racists 4chan shitheads stan this show so hard?

        • GorbinOutOverHere [comrade/them]@hexbear.net
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          1 year ago

          Fuck it, here’s the tl;dr: why do racists 4chan shitheads stan this show so hard?

          Idk dawg I literally don’t care what 4chan nerds like, it does not matter to me. Makes me think of the Republican/Democrat duopoly and how all Americans view everything in that context. Ahhh the fascists like it, must be fascist!

          • CriticalOtaku [he/him]@hexbear.net
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            1 year ago

            Ahhh the fascists like it, must be fascist!

            In your opinion, why do you think Hexbear doesn’t stan this show? Partisanship? Virtue signaling?

            • GorbinOutOverHere [comrade/them]@hexbear.net
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              1 year ago

              I think there are like 5 nerds here who think too hard about shit like the big wall of blah blah media literacy i just got from someone else. Someone wanting to write some shit about killing goblins and isn’t really thinking too hard about it, just like the people consuming that content, that’s just beyond the realm of probability and it must be this fascist dogwhistle propaganda vehicle, lol.

              I’m getting these walls of text about how goblins are real world minorities and goblin slayer is the KKK or whatever like my brother in christ it is a goblin it is a fantasy creature it’s not like they’re fucking coded like the goblins in Harry Potter, like that’s actual use of goblins as racial allegory

              Don’t feel like you gotta write more words at me it’s pretty pointless isn’t it

              • CriticalOtaku [he/him]@hexbear.net
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                1 year ago

                Ok, so you think a minority of posters on Hexbear are over-analyzing the show and are seeing Nazi ghosts where there are none. Ok.

                it’s not like they’re fucking coded like the goblins in Harry Potter, like that’s actual use of goblins as racial allegory

                Why do you think the goblins in Goblin Slayer aren’t coded like the goblins in Harry Potter?

                • GorbinOutOverHere [comrade/them]@hexbear.net
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                  1 year ago

                  Why do you think the goblins in Goblin Slayer aren’t coded like the goblins in Harry Potter?

                  Perhaps because they are fantasy monster and in the case of goblin slayer not meant to be a racial stand in for a real life minority but instead are, you know, a fantasy monster