Reactionary media in capitalism

Let's talk about reactionary media, Holla Forums.

Does anyone else find it really fucking weird how popular it is for media to depict feudalism in a positive light in western bourgeois democracies?

Doesn't the average person know that bloody wars were fought to achieve democracy and get rid of monarchy? Americans love to bang on about how "freedom isn't free" but the US can't stop making stories about feudal society. Stories depicting feudalism (especially for kids) seem to almost always depict it in a positive light. The most egregious example is probably Anastasia, which implies Tsarist Russia was good.

The really fucked up part of this is how "beloved" these stories become as a result of exposure during childhood. Generations grow up thinking there's nothing particularly wrong with a narrative that implies things like the divine right of kings. I think most here already agree that the interior of a capitalist enterprise functions like feudalism, so of course a story with a rightful leader overseeing subjects has its use as subtle propaganda for the current system. What I don't get is why is it subtle?

Why don't people more generally realize what's staring them in the face? These days there's a cottage industry of people who pick apart children's media. How come something as basic and omnipresent as nostalgia for feudalism not something that everyone is aware of?

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MARX WAS WRONG AND A JEWISH CUCK SPREAD THE WORD

Maybe feudalism was better?

Yeah, the idea of raising young girls to idolize and aspire to be princesses is fucking gross.

Tonight in "Holla Forums develops political theory": Are Disney princesses a tool of neoreactionaries used to further their agenda and restore feudalism?

My actual question is why are the people from democracies so enamored with feudalism and why they consume so much pro-feudalism media without batting an eye when the dominant cultural narrative is that feudalism is bad.

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watch out pol, you almost criticized porky for a second there

should't you be shitposting about how hillary murdered seth macfarlane or something

What's the difference between a princess and a prostitute?

the whole idea with fairytales is to ignore the socioeconomic context. consumers will take anything to escape the existential dread of capitalism, even if it blatantly doesn't make sense

Perhaps people have a tendency to latch on to the attractive surface aspects of the previous incarnation of society at large, because of positive, albeit twisted, memories of stories, legends, and those which were once thought of as virtues.

The royalty, especially princesses, shown in modern media are probably more inaccurate depictions of them than they would have been back in the day or century. There's a chance that late capitalism could slip into some new form of fascism given the right circumstances, but I really doubt inbred dynasties are going to make a come back. The popular depiction is essentially just myth, while there are, too, productions that represent monarchy as wicked, stupid and backwards more often than noble, such as Game of Thrones, or Dune.

It's funny because they slip up sometimes and put in the truth of the harsh reality. But fuck it, Alladin got out of poverty so maybe all the other poor beggar children will find a magic lamp and princess to marry.

i like how jasmine in this scene is directly faced with the injustices promoted in the system she perpetuates but then proceeds to do nothing about it as the ruler. just lol at liberal filmmakers trying to make monarchists sympathetic

Is this the thread where we talk about how Chairman Maoser Koopa was a based socialist revolutionary trying to overthrow the oppressive Mushroom Kingdom, and Stalindorf was only trying to help his people get out of the clutches of the muh privileged Hyrulean monarchy?

To be fair, the spinoff material they made implies that after Aladdin marries Jasmine and becomes the Sultan, he improves life substantially for the poor.

Princess Jasmine is ultra fucking sexy, so I may be biased in this assessment.

so they inadvertently turn the former sultan into some kind of antagonist even though he was clearly never meant to be one. that's funny

also bowser could be capitalist and i think in wind waker ganondorf blatantly states that he just wanted to kill people

Jasmine has no idea how anything even works in Agrabah because she's literally never left the palace before and has no frame of reference for anything.

I don't know what's "to be fair" about that. That's an incredibly fictitious ending, as such a marriage wouldn't take place bake in ye olde days, I doubt a street rat would be made Sultan, and tbh, they'd probably be hunted down and pecked to death by hungry birds for sullying the royal lineage. Total fantasy.

princess trainer is a very class con game too

The issue is that presidents and their families aren't as romantic or glamorous as monarchies
Also its impossible to divorce a politician from his politics making the story harder to sell.

Ganondorf said he wanted his people to live in a land less harsh than a punishing desert, presumably because there was food there. But when he gets the Triforce of Power and takes over Hyrule, the Gerudo don't seem to be any better off than before.

Any street rat in real history who would have thought about attempting to marry the princess didn't have a genie.

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Ganondorf was an opportunist.

The Sultan in the movie was just supposed to be a useful idiot that Jafar could manipulate.

Bowser is explicitly a king originally but since they've dropped that he does appear to be closer to a titan of industry. WW Ganondorf is actually the only version to have a sympathetic portrayal at all. He says he wanted to help his people who were poor and lived in the shitty desert. If the official timeline is true though, all the Ganondorfs are the same man and he never does anything to that effect. The Gerudo are absent from Wind Waker, possibly dead.

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A prostitute is incharge of their own labor.

Pocohantas fought against imperialism

I don't see it.

ah yeah, it's been a while since i beat wind waker. i could've just interpreted it wrong

Good things happening in depictions feudalism is the whole point. Instead of portraying feudalism as backwards and shitty they portray it as if it was nice.

So, let's make a rated-G version of game of thrones then.

You wouldn't even need to go that far, Disney went with the revised version of Robin Hood where he supported King Richard when earlier version of the folklore had him simply as a brigand fighting the nobility to liberate the Yeoman class from the oppression of the feudal nobility. Basically Robin Hood lore started as the leader of a petit-bourgeois revolutionary army against feudalism yet Disney decided to go with the stories of him defending feudalism.

Speaking of reactionary. Disney also has ancestor worship as a recuring theme. Lion king, Mulan and that new hawaian movie all have ancestoral spirits guiding the protagonist.

IDK if that counts as ancestor worship, especially since Lion King was kid friendly Hamlet, which, in it's time, ancestor worship would have been illegal. That's just spooky ghosts popping up because magic praxeology.

the ancestors in mulan completely fail to do anything effective. mulan herself has to take up the mantle of the stone dragon

Eh most of those wars failed completely and then half the time monarchy went away for completely unrelated reasons, showing that the failed wars were completely pointless anyway

Good worker

I think it's probably more about instilling hierarchy than about creating a soft spot for feudalism.
Actually I'd go so far as to say that because feudalism is safely locked in the past, it's possible to look back on it as harmless. Capitalism isn't afraid of feudalism, so it's a safe "alternative" space which can be escaped into without harming TINA in the here-and-now. (If god wanted us to have a king, he'd anoint a king…)

Even if we got lolbertarian neofeudalism, postmodernity would impose that self-awareness that god isn't real and that he's just a guy with a lot of power. Sure, it'd be ironically referenced by memespouting inbetween the public floggings, but it'd be known.

Actually a weird sort of thought on that, for some reason the idea of a benevolent Latin American president (dictator?) falls into the same area as "the good king" for me. I can't even think of why, I just know he's wearing a white suit with a sash and rosette. I don't even think that was in a movie/game.

Fuedalism was better for farmers whose land was taken from them during the transition to capitalism. It was equally bad for mercenaries or for-hires.
During the transition (at least in north western europe) the traditionally farmed fields were taken from the farmers and converted to large meadows for wool production. The commons, which had been a germanic tradition and institution were also stolen and made into private property. This threw millions of farmers into proletarianism, having to sell their labour to survive. This was further accelerated due to the enlightenment which dismantled church institutions, who managed the commons. Thousands of villages turned into ruins for the benefits of the now-capitalist landlords.

Feudalism was a load of shit, but the feudal lords relied on the inhabitants of their land for their power. The more farmers you had on your land, the more power you had. This meant that they couldn't choose monetary gain over their subjects (at least not to the extend it happens today). In capitalist society, the landlessness of the people benefits the capitalist, resulting in billions of landless people, forced to go to the market for all their sustenance, being dependent on the whims of their employer and the market.
While there is certainly a lot wrong with feudalism, most of the capitalist world is not any better, I would dare to say even worse. There is still war, there is still no democracy (unless you are delusional enough to think your vote counts), but most of the world only have a shack to live in, a shack without even a little bit of arable land.

Autism

Oh yea, read Capital chapter 26-30 for more information. (Part 8, primitive accumulation).
marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/

or maybe those fairy tales just come from long enough ago that a) they're not protected by copyright and b) they're not relevant enough to modern politics to be edgy.
I mean really, does every story have to jam in political dialogue for you? It's a fucking fairytale, it's not going to make an aside to say "oh hey guy by the way remember feudalism was bad" when that has nothing to do with the story. Do you want every story now to be like the socialist version of CSI Cyber? Jamming political messages into every nook and cranny because you can?

Pixar's corporate themes obviously don't take place during feudalism. Also, for characters to defy society, the obvious and necessary implication is that society's norms are bad. Mulan defying Chinese gender roles is meaningless if gender roles aren't bad and if Chinese society doesn't enforce them.
I really just think you're grasping at straws to tie your dislike for disney movies to your political ideology somehow.

This, the splendor of Monarchies is just inherently attractive to many people. Gotta sell those plastic tiaras. Besides, like said, Feudalism is just not perceived as a threat anymore.

Dude libertarians actually think that Robin Hood was one of them. It can actually be seen from an anti-tax perspective.

I think the glorification of monarchies goes a bit deeper than just capitalism. It also fulfills a power fantasy, which is why it will always be attractive. Monarchs are literally the center of the mundane world, and that makes people feel special putting themselves in the place of the monarchs in entertainment. It holds a deep seated appeal.

Disney Princess movies are why so many women are capitalist brainwashed even when they claim to be Leftist
Fuck that shit

whether or not political messages are included intentionally or not, they often crop up.

there is nothing more political than being "ideologically neutral"

This

But I think the discussion is why feudalism is so often used as a back drop.

I think it's more to do with upholding authoritarianism but that doesn't explain why say the Roman Empire isn't used as often, especially considering it had better atheistics.

The middle ages are like the shittest time in Europe from what I can tell, so it's weird that it's so fetishsized.

I think part of the reason is that plate mail is cooler than lorica segmentata.

Not sure about Mulan (this guy gets it), but on the topic of Moana (Hawaiian Polynesian movie) and also Hercules the male lead is a literal demigod.

Lion King is less ancestor worship because it's ambiguously just in Simba's mind. But being based on Hamlet doesn't really have anything to do with the detail of the Lion King. Adaptations frequently completely change the values and themes of the original.

A lot of the tradition of these stories was established in a time where the west was much more religious than it is now. The Roman Empire had Christianity for a while, but it was medieval Europe where Christianity came into its full power. Maybe it's just the cultural-religious memes. It took them until Aladdin (1992) to have an obviously non-Christian setting and protagonist.

I watched a video on YouTube by saberspark about inappropriate cartoons on YouTube for children.

Wow, I think we're hitting levels of alienation that shouldn't even be possible.

These cartoon had themes of suicide, rape, mutilation and violence and were being marketed directly and very young children like 4 or 5.

This reminds me of "Sex Puppets" from my favorite cyberpunk comic "Tranmetropolitan"

"Sex Puppets" was a cross between Sesame Street and a hardcore porno and marketed to kindergartners.

I realized it was just a satire of how the media was sexualizing kids at a younger and younger age.

I never thought I'd really see something along the lines of "Sex Puppets" until I saw these YouTube cartoons.

These cartoons are getting BILLIONS of views. Will capitalism cause something like a real life "Sex Puppets" to be produced and forced to be accepted by porky?

I think so, and you can't deny marketing hardcore porn to childern and toddlers wouldn't be highly additive and profitable.

Most of the folklore and fairytales of europe come from medieval times or take place in medieval times. The roman and greek tales are forgotten from common memory.
Also europes current culture is rooted in christianity, and the roman and greek stories often have a weird (from european perspective) sense of morality.

Never played wind waker but wasn't the story of LoZ supposed to represent the eternal struggle between good and evil? As in link and ganon are the two incarnations of the absolute which continually repeat themselves through history in an actual material struggle representative of the struggle of the universe

Are you reffering to happy tree friends

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The Man in the High Castle depicts a veritable Nazi utopia where we finally exterminate all the jews and niggers, and the world is able to advance technologically, so we have stuff like mass produced jet planes faster than the concorde in the 60s.

The main antagonists are the Obergruppenführer John Smith who is in charge of destroying the resistance composed of psychopatic marxists and semites, and Inspector Kido, a jap whose first onscreen action is to literally gas the kikes. It also portrays Hitler as a human and reasonable authority figure.

include my scare quotes and it works perfectly for

Im not the first poster but no. They're basically tons (like thousands upon thousands) of absolutely atrocious & mindless animations of horrid quality starring famous characters aimed at children - and they're getting constant views in the millions. Its something that kinda slipped past at least me as it's being marketed for kids.