Revolutionary heroes ranging from John Brown to Kim Il-Sung are isekai’d to a fantasy world that parodies shows like ‘the rising of the shield hero’ to break the chains of slavery in all forms once more and liberate the fantasy workers and the peasants from the yoke of feudal oppression while hunting down so-called “heroes” summoned by the feudal lords who intend to use them as tools to preserve their power and the economic base of their feudalistic slave economy.
Show me Stalin riding a chocobo or some shit leading a calvary charge against slaver caravans!
Show me Marx, Engels, and Lenin working together in the cities inspiring the proto-proletariate to take up arms against the feudal robber-barons and their land-leechs that bleed them dry
Show me Mao, Tito, and bonus character Jan Žižka, on a rural bro-venture with the three in a competitive rivalry to see who can organize the greatest peasant rebellion between the three!
Libs when their treats are made in sweatshops in countries run by right wing despots:
Libs when their treats are made in AES countries:
Tbh, I love when something I needed anyway comes all the way from an AES country. I’m happy to be supporting socialism in some very small way, that no one around me will notice.
NGL i scoured the internet to find a roaster that carries Yunnan coffee.
you would think these people would see that the dprk has an animation industry and think some of the lies they were told about it were wrong. but instead they just go “oh no, show i like has bits made by The Bad People!”
But of course they hate the government, not the people
I don’t want Aaaaaaaasian cooties in my treats!
The DPRK has been working on animation programs since the late 1980s, if I’m not mistaken. I’m pretty sure they’ve worked on an episode of Avatar, several episodes of Invincible, Iyanu (Some design documents were leaked, which made some Redditors and US diplomats angry, as they don’t want the North Koreans to get paid due to sanctions), several Italian Catholic and magical girl shows (The Original Winx and Angel Friends or Warriors, something like that), some Japanese anime and the Simpsons and Futurama movies.
Not to mention the fact that they make animation for the state television. Most of them seem to be fantasy shows related to Korean history, but the best-known show is probably Squirrel and Hedgehog and its 2005 remake (it seems they announced a new remake for it this year).
You think the embassy would mail DVDs od their shows if asked nicely?
I doubt they would be able to give the foreign stuff they worked on. But the domestically made shows and movies are usually sold by Mokran Video (the main dubbing/localization and media company in the DPRK). The embassy staff will probably just tell you buy the licenced international versions (usually some Italian, Chinese or French company owns the copyright to it and have some generic english dub with the usual VAs for anime and video games) or watch it online, since those can easily be found on youtube and some other video hosting site.
Most of these DVDs are sold on Mokran Video stores that exist in most of the country, I think there some videos on youtube with people buying these dvds.
Can’t hurt to try and it’d be a cool flex, if they do you should upload it for torrenting or put it on tankietube
Do you have sources for this? Very interesting! And specifically, wdym with catholic shows?
Do you have sources for this?
Due to US sanctions against the DPRK, most American/Japanese stuff that SEK Studios worked on was uncredited saved for some animators names. But you can easily find them on the credits of European shows. I think CNN recently reported on how Italian TV stations and studios didn’t care about the sanctions and paid fines so they could continue working with SEK Studios.
And specifically, wdym with catholic shows?
Marcelino Pan y Vino (or just Marcelino in Japan) is a catholic animated show made produced by Italy, France, Spain and Japan, though most of the animation was outsourced to Japan and the DPRK (due to sanctions they had to remove the SEK Studios credits from the english version, but you can find them on the Italian, French, Spanish and Portuguese versions). You can easily find most episodes on youtube, and most of them have SEK Studios credited with the animation, specially from season 2 on.
finally some cool italians. it’s been a while.
The graphic memoir Pyonyang: A Journey in North Korea by the Canadian Guy DeLisle details the author visiting a studio working on a French-produced cartoon. Fair warning: I read it as a liberal teenager and even then I clocked that it was racist and insane. Like just this white moron wandering around on guided tours, seemingly unaware of the history of the country he was visiting going “everyone here is a brainwashed automaton. everything is so oppressive. if only i could liberate these poor mindless drones from their shackles.”
Yeah, and tons of Western, especially European, animated series were outsourced there.
I’m assuming outsourcing to the DPRK became cheaper than outsourcing to occupied Korea which Western animated shows also did. AKOM was an animation studio that was infamous for its terrible work on shows like G1 Transformers and Batman: TAS.
If the DPRK could start flexing their soft-power muscles by drip-feeding their own anime into the poisoned-well that is the contemporary anime market, they may end up counter-balancing If not outright turning the whole generally reactionary medium on its head.
Waiting for chuds to shit on woke Japan and South Korea for trad DPRK or something because they made big booba anime communist girl
“Okay, so some of the stuff from North Korea is really communist, but, like, aside from that the storylines are really good, and the animation’s the best I’ve ever seen! I suppose they really are Best Korea when it comes to making good media!”
The animation in this episode is pretty good too if I recall, certainly of the same quality as most other episodes
https://www.cbr.com/anime-north-korea-tv-series-outsource-sanctions/
Says here SEK also supposedly worked on Dahlia in Bloom, HBO’s Iyanu, Child of Wonder and Invincible Season 3.
And
Files have also been identified that may suggest a relationship with the Japanese animation studio Ekachi Epilka (Demon Lord, Retry!).
Invincible Season 3
the reason mark grayson refuses to let earth be taken over by the imperialist viltrumite empire is because of Juche ideology
That concept sounds so good. But then, I do absolutely love “modern socialist winds up in medieval fantasy world, quickly becomes so disgusted (s)he must apply dialectical materialism and drag this place kicking and screaming into a form of communism, 1917 style, after all, tsarist Russia wasn’t an industrialized nation either” as a subgenre - I don’t like isekai as it usually goes, I do like this variation of it - and I also like less explicitly isekai style dropping a modern communist into a decidedly apolitical or liberal hegemony universe in order to lead a revolution, especially when they didn’t set out to do so, and they and the local party’s attitude to it is “we want a revolution the way a desperate woman wants an abortion, or the way you want to gnaw your leg off when you’ve been caught in a bear trap” - the whole “no one wants to need a revolution” trope.
You might like the John Brown Isekai - it’s not explicitly communist, he’s very much written In Character and less as a revolutionary figure and very explicitly as a Christian acting out of religious conviction against slavery, and an early American who believes in the American style of democracy, but a student of historical communist tactics and governance practice might see some parallels in the military tactics and the very early council systems when they’ve got less than a hundred people. And, y’know, even a bourgeois revolution is a good thing in a feudal society if it ends slavery and brings some level of democracy. As much as I like stories that take that setting and skip straight to the proletarian revolution. Like the Bolsheviks actually did in our timeline.
modern socialist winds up in medieval fantasy world,
Mark Twain was so close with A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court
Tbf, it is hard to do the whole “someone from modern Anglosphere nation dropped into King Arthur’s court” thing and also have that person believably be a well educated communist party cadre. But I’d love to read such a thing.
might do better with a Bill Haywood type
True, that would work and I’d love to read it.
I think the best story that sounds like what you’re describing is the historical fiction book “Mediterranean Hegemon of Ancient Greece” by Chen Rui. Take a Chinese Civil servant - who’s probably a party cadre - who’s an ancient history nerd and throw him in the body of a random Greek mercenary that died during the campaign of the ten thousand under Cyrus the Younger, and see what kind of hijinks he gets up to.
Real slow burn, the writer doesn’t show too much Chinese chauvinism beyond asserting the Greek were too backwards to think of making sausages as a means of rational preservation. Beyond that the writer introduced minor technological or organizational improvements that wouldn’t look too out of place from the time period instead of using his modern knowledge to drop things like gunpowder, steel, or the steam engine to try and rapidly modernize the environment he found himself in. The book primarily focuses on matters of war and governorship with minor focuses on diplomacy and religion and overall when I read it I was quite enthralled by it.
Mmm. Sounds really good.
Glad someone here mentioned the John Brown Isekai.
Do you have any recs for that ‘modern socialist in a fantasy world’ subgenre? Closest I know of is probably Otherworldly Anarchist.
Yeah, it’s one of my favourites. Not really socialist, but it is a revolution story, and it’s a damn sight better than the genre usually is.
Unfortunately I don’t, most of the ones I’ve found are either unfinished and not super promising, very specific to its source material and requires previous knowledge of that existing universe, or… obviously written by someone who is not a socialist and is making fun of the Soviet Union. I’ll go through my history and bookmarks on my favourite sites when I have some time and see if there’s anything I’d actually recommend to my fellow tankies in there, though.
I love slop webnovels, gimme some even if it’s trash.
One that I’ve been reading is From Londoner To Lord, which bills itself as a modern engineer fixing an extremely low fantasy medieval world. It never actually mentions the big scary c word, but all the most impactful things he does are basically what immediately post revolutionary communist governments reforming agrarian societies do. Abolishing slavery, arming women, doing land reform, introducing universal child education and an adult literacy program, building public housing and starting public food distribution.
I’m reminded of “Blue Man” by Lazar Lagin, where a Soviet student from 1959 isekaied into 1894 and participates in budding revolutionary movement. I don’t know, if it was translated into English.
I remember hearing that that part of The Lion King that people sometimes claim has the stars spelling out “SEX”, aCtUaLLy had the stars spelling out “SEK”, because that scene had supposedly been outsourced to SEK Studio — and the stars were SEK’s way of sneaking in some credits for themselves, since they wouldn’t get credited otherwise. Now the evidence of this story actually being true are basically nonexistent, just rumors, but it’s still a fun story if nothing else, right?
But honestly just give me more animation from every country in general, though. I used to say that I wanted to watch at least one animation from every country — really, I still kinda do, but it’s just not easy to actually do this, right? It’s easiest to get into animation from the Core Anglosphere and Japan, obviously; and it’s decently easy to get into animation from Europe, the FSU, China and Korea if you know where to look; and I’ve found it considerably more difficult to get into animation from everywhere else, but part of that might just be that I’m just not trying hard enough, right?
This desire to see animation in all countries flourish really also goes hand in hand with my own interests in fanime / (budget) independent animation, as well as my interests in fandubbing and fansubbing, and my fantasies about Norway sort of reevaluating its relationship to animation from Seppoland and Japan and going through a whole sort of renaissance of local animation that cuts into these countries’ soft power. Because basically nothing about anime that makes it so appealing for so many people is actually specific to Japan in any meaningful way, it’s really just historical happenstance.
Oh, and another side note about animation in the DPRK specifically: the anime tracker website Anilist used to have a section for DPRK animation, but they got rid of it for some reason! Honestly I am STILL a bit ticked off about that, because that was one of the best resources I knew of for learning about and exploring that country’s animation, and by Jove do they have animation in the DPRK, I can tell you that much!
I remember hearing that that part of The Lion King that people sometimes claim has the stars spelling out “SEX”, aCtUaLLy had the stars spelling out “SEK”, because that scene had supposedly been outsourced to SEK Studio — and the stars were SEK’s way of sneaking in some credits for themselves, since they wouldn’t get credited otherwise. Now the evidence of this story actually being true are basically nonexistent, just rumors, but it’s still a fun story if nothing else, right?
isn’t it SFX?
Probably, that interpretation was apparently confirmed by someone who worked on the film.
But maybe thaaaat’s a cooooover uuuuup oOoOoOh
we need a juche
I know they do a lot of stuff for internal audiences, but if the DPRK produced home-grown media that was appealing to Western audiences, it would open up countless minds to their struggle.
they don’t seem to care what random westerners think about them, which is probably the correct choice.
Honestly the problem extends to the global south too, where western propaganda is very strong in many countries (see: Brazil).
BRICS should hire them to do propaganda
they might, if the westerners lived in democracies and their opinions could affect foreign policy
animated feature film of A Connecticut Yankee In King Arthur’s Court
When they say animation studio, they typically means a Japanese studio does the design and key frames, then they send it to usually some SE Asian country to do the in-between frames. This is why you will often see Vietnamese names in the credits of nominally Japanese produced shows. I would imagine it’s something similar here.
DPRK has an official film promotion website. The website shows clips from the films, but I think it’s not the full films. Some of the films are on youtube if you search the title. Screenshot from the Animation page.
Umm…how much would it cost to hire this studio to make me an anime?
Stop being a freeloader and make your own anime in Gimp, Audacity and Openshot like the rest of us
For animation, you can use Blender or OpenToonz. Toonz is the same software that was used by Studio Ghibli, Futurama, and Spongebob.
Yeah, I have both Blender and OpenToonz installed on my own computer, and I can certainly attest that if you have the patience to learn them and are trying to make a serious animation of serious quality, then that’s what you would use. I was really just making a joke about “fanime” shows like SPARKLE ON RAVEN, My Jungle Book, Your Year!, Nyan~ Neko Sugar Girls, and Tokyo Crystal Mew — which have conventionally been made in MS Paint and Windows Movie Maker, or similar programs.
So apparently, after some investigation, the South Korean studio that was hired to do the animation outsourced the project to the North Korean studio under the nose of the American company that hired them.
That’s… kinda scummy, actually.
It’s actually pretty common. Outsourcing animation to occupied Korea is basically the standard now for US animated content network producers. US animators largely just produce storyboards and sometimes a couple keyframes of characters and define the drawing rules for certain characters. Occupied Korea then actually does the actual animations from these references and rules. Then, to increase profits, some of those occupied Korea companies outsource aspecta of the drawing to independent Korea.
That is wild! Wait, occupied Korea and independent Korea… which is which and why is what? Tried looking it up, and got a history lesson on the occupation of Korea by Japan, and a fuck ton of ads for like 5 pages.
I’m referring to South Korea as occupied Korea and North Korea as independent Korea.
Korea was divided due to US invasion and occupation that never ended. The war never ended and cannot end without the United States signing off, which it refuses to do. Massive US bases remain in South Korea and it is not really a sovereign country, it is controlled by Chaebols and similar monopolies entrenched with US-dominated capitalism.
North Korea, in contrast, remains independent. It outperformed the South until the fall of the USSR, after which the US-led capitalist faction of nations proceeded to isolate it, cutting off fuel and other kinds of trade on which it depended. Combined with natural disasters, this led to the near famine conditions of the 90s that are what the false memes about North Korean poverty often refer to. The philosophy of Juche strengthened as a result of this experience and North Korea is now much more secure and independent, though it has close economic ties to China.
Incidentally, the US invasion was essentially on the pro-Japanese side. The (more popular) socialists rejected the Japanese imperialists as well as their collaborators while the US embraced both, basically just stepping into Japan’s shoes because they could use the existing apparatus to mass slaughter pro-independence people in the South.
Whoa! Well damn, I guess I have some stuff to study and follow up on. Thank you so much for informing me!
Of course, friend. If you like podcasts, Blowback recently did a very good and detailed series on this.
yo dawg i heard you like outsourcing
so we outsourced your outsourcing so we can save on labor costs while you save on labor cost
That’s classic capitalist pursuit of the profit motive right there.
boo hoo hoo a for-profit corporation got scammed by another one boo hoo fucking hoo give me a break
This reads like a line out of an old sitcom.
Revolutionary heroes ranging from John Brown to Kim Il-Sung are isekai’d to a fantasy world that parodies shows like ‘the rising of the shield hero’ to break the chains of slavery in all forms once more and liberate the fantasy workers and the peasants from the yoke of feudal oppression while hunting down so-called “heroes” summoned by the feudal lords who intend to use them as tools to preserve their power and the economic base of their feudalistic slave economy.
I’ve wanted to make a comic like this (though without any specific historical figure, I think an everyman protagonist would work better for reaching libs) but I’ve never quite managed to write a version that felt right.
I’d like to write a fictional book like that too but I’ve been in a hell of a quagmire for a writers block for a bit over a year now.
I know what you mean! It’s so hard to find the time to write my own stuff, I’m always writing things for work and then just don’t have the drive to really work on my stuff after that.
Yep that plus having writing reports or articles for my party, really not a cool time for having a writing block at this time. Like the most I’ll write nowadays is when something tilts me in that special way that gets under your skin like fiberglass in the interdigital space between your fingers.
Like the most I’ll write nowadays is when something tilts me in that special way that gets under your skin like fiberglass in the interdigital space between your fingers.
That’s how I use AI in my writing. If I’m struggling with a scene, I get the AI to write it, and then it is so awful that it makes me want to write better out of sheer spite, so I end up getting my work done. I can’t really do that for my own personal projects though.
Oof I can’t imagine asking the tickle-me-elmo to write my story for me, even if it’s to get something down on paper I can stare at and turn red mad and nude over to redo the whole thing. At least for me it’s a whole self-reliance thing (juche gang) combined with being a bit super self-controling when it comes to using possible proverbial crutches/training wheels. Honestly I should just schedule some time in the week to just sit there and stare at a piece of paper with pencil at hand with the intent of just cranking out one-shot stories until the block is bulldozed.
It helps that I’m mostly motivated by spite, and often have confidence issues with my writing, so when I see something awful and generic as the “alternative” to what I am going to write, it really helps inspire me to keep going. I used to just look up bad writing in general, but AI has streamlined the process of finding terrible writing to compare my own too quite a bit. It helps stop me from getting into the cycle of nonstop revision as well, because I’m comparing my work to something worse, not some hypothetical perfect version in my head. It mainly works for me because I have deadlines to meet and do need to get stuff done even when I’m just not feeling it at all.
Honestly I should just schedule some time in the week to just sit there and stare at a piece of paper with pencil at hand with the intent of just cranking out one-shot stories until the block is bulldozed.
Sometimes just putting aside time for a quick idea can work really well for people! It is a little hit or miss for me, but it has helped me with writer’s block in the past. Just writing something you want to, with no rules, no audience in mind, just trying to create something to get back into the habit can be really effective. Creativity is a skill like any other, and like any other skill, it needs practice and discipline for you to keep going with it.
Well heres to us and anyone else dealing with the block to get over the hump one way or another!
also I can’t believe we don’t have a toasting emoji.I kinda want to share some of my writing ideas in the literature comm sometime just for the hell of jt
