This thread's purpose is to discuss politics in works of fiction/media. Please do not use this thread to talk about politics or media in isolation from each other.
I was thinking of asking what people thought were the most interesting post-election Trump related media.
The Good Fight on CBS Access devoted their entire second season to dealing with the subject.
Edited by MacronNotes on Mar 13th 2023 at 3:23:38 PM
Team Rocket Boss.
I think any message can be executed well, even if it's something obvious like war bad.
There are tons of great anti-war movies, like Full Metal Jacket.
I'll teach you a lesson about just how cruel the world can be. That's my job, as an adult.
Idea Seeker
Yeah, hence my writing motto: Execution is the key.
Regardless of whether it's been done before or not.
You can't kill art.
Are there any original ideas left in the world of fiction? 
Seriously though, every plot or message that you see has already been presented thousands of times, if not more, and some of them before even written history started.
Wars? Love Triangles? Economic difficulties? Murder Mysteries? Revenge stories? Time Travel stories? Alien Invasion stories? Heist stories? People setting in a room, philosophizing about life stories? Search for immortality stories? Treasure Hund stories? Lost orphanes? Talking animals? Raised by animals? Fantasy stories when the protagonists fight the Dark Lord? Fantasy stories when the protagonist is the Dark Lord? Stories seen through the mind of a killer? Stories about a family struggling with poverty? Soap opera about a rich family?...etc.
None of the above is original, but still every years millions of novels, movies, series, theater plays, and games are produced about them, and some of them are even good.
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Civil War at least take points for not being:
1) A superhero movie
2) A remake/reboot/sequel/prequel of an existing franchise
3) not a No. 5767724 adaptation of a centuries-old work.
And it seems to be done well from the audience reaction, this is the best you can hope from Western movies.
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Another point in his favor, is that while it tries to present a message, it encourages discussion of an important and real phenomenon (at least for Americans).
I feel we are sometimes focused too much of our energies on discussing and getting angry over supernatural and unlikely scenarios (e.g was Thanos right? Should ghosts have equal rights to humans? Are Droids in Star Wars a slave race?) that we lose touch with more important and real issues that happen in the world right now.
So a work that addresses them is always a fresh welcome.
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In short, Fiction is like a chess game; you and your opponent play with the same 16 pieces in the same 64 cases as all the games in history, but every game is different, and some of them are superb feats of human genius and others are monuments of idiocy.
It is about the execution of the idea, not the idea itself, Tropes Are Tools and all that.
Edited by jawal on Apr 16th 2024 at 5:15:23 PM
Every Hero has his own way of eating yogurt
There's the idea that it's impossible to make a *truly* anti-war war movie, because it's visual, and well, if it's exciting, it shows 'War Exciting!!'
I see the merits of the argument, but it is a very not subjective argument for something so subjective and changing.
![[up]](https://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/smiles/arrow_up.png "[up]"){kind=icon}
Yes, and so discussing if it succeds as a movie on the strength of ideas and not execution is more or less meaningless. Foro example, Andor - its ideas are not diferrent from other Star Wars shows. It is just good.
Edited by Smeagol17 on Apr 16th 2024 at 8:40:46 PM
Industrious Incisors
I still can't get past that Civil War is trying to instruct on "what" to do without any "how" to do it. That seems like it could have... varying takeaways. But, I do not know the minds of filmgoers.
SoundCloud
I mean, this is hard, you don't want to pull a FATWS 'just do better, Senator,' cop-out, but saying 'this is bad, let's see how these characters live with and address this bad thing' is a perfectly fine movie plot and basically no fiction actually advances workable solutions more complicated than 'shoot x,' 'arrest y,' or 'adopt my preferred political platform.'
Lost in Space
"Do better!" and "Shame!" are some of my favorite meaningless protest words.
"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"
The secret is simply not to make the protagonist into "a badass", with cool or glamorous weapons and fighting scenes.
Or better yet, don't focus on the soldiers at all, but instead on civilian sufferings. I mean, few people watch Grave of the Fireflies and think "man it will be awsome if it was me on Seita's place".
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The problem is in works Gundam and Neon Genesis Evangelion when the anti-war / anti-child soldier message get lost into all those cool fight scenes between those glamorous Mechas, and the protagonist is portrayed as a young badass, with a life of adventure and maybe a harem following him around, so the audience doesn't understand why is he complaining about the conflict, and if he does it too much, he will be judged a perpetual complainer or a whiner (i.e Shinji Hikari)
Edited by jawal on Apr 16th 2024 at 6:04:09 PM
Every Hero has his own way of eating yogurt
To me, I avoid BOTH War is Hell and War Is Glorious in my novels. I only brought up the weapons and mecha used in my stories for Author Appeal. Nothing more, nothing less.
Now, as for the idea of War is Hell with Gundam, was that even the intention of Yoshiyuki Tomino when he first devised it? It's one thing to evoke how terrible war can be (since Tomino was born in 1941) but I doubt he intended on using Gundam when he first devised to say "War is Bad".
Edited by HallowHawk on Apr 16th 2024 at 10:08:49 AM
To my understanding, it tends to get exaggerated how anti-war Gundam is, but I'm not familiar enough to say for sure.
"Any campaign world where an orc samurai can leap off a landcruiser to fight a herd of Bulbasaurs will always have my vote of confidence"
A Low Cost Confection
I mean, it definitely is but not as much as “BUY OUR MODEL KITS OF THE COOL ROBOTS.”
I feel like a lot of arguments here are because it’s mostly discussing mass-appeal, usually action/adventure, media whose main purpose is to entertain and make money. Any social/political message is mostly a bonus and is only going to apply to the extent it doesn’t interfere with the main point of “watch these characters have cool fights.”
That said I’m going to nominate Attack on Titan (whatever its’ other faults) as a story that balances the cool action factor while also selling the horror and brutality of war very well.
Edited by CheapMarzipan on Apr 16th 2024 at 12:34:45 PM
Lost in Space
As cynical as I can be sometimes, there's nothing wrong with media that exists just to entertain. What annoys me is when said media pushes a wishy-washy "X is good"/"X is bad" message without diving more deeply into it.
I frequently talk about M3GAN in this respect because the first act is a starkly depicted and frighteningly relevant discussion of the role of technology in modern parenting, but it has to devolve into a silly horror movie by the third act to fill out its mandatory checklist.
I was way more unnerved by the relevant philosophical commentary on modern society than I was by the robot doll murdering people, but the film didn't have the guts to follow up on its premise. (Incidentally, the reluctant mother protagonist should be arrested on multiple counts of negligent homicide.)
Top Gun: Maverick is another key offender because it wants to showcase exciting aircraft battles, and to do that it needs a generic enemy for us to bomb without feeling weird about it. But that "enemy" is so obviously Iran (flying donated Russian aircraft) that it becomes silly and completely blows my suspension of disbelief.
The United States just committed an act of war on an unfriendly nation and everyone's cheering on the deck of the aircraft carrier. Sure.
Edited by Fighteer on Apr 16th 2024 at 1:51:02 PM
"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"
I was thinking more of Mobile Suit Gundam Wing and Mobile Suit Gundam SEED.
The former in particular has a lot of characters that stop and philosophize about war, how is a human nature, and how meaningless it is.
A particular arc is about Relena Peacecraft, an Actual Pacifist who preaches for dialogue and mutual understanding.
The last villain's plan, is to semi-stage a huge and devastating war, where billions will die, in order to make humanity appreciate peace more after they get the urge to war out of their system (Pain from Naruto and Lelauch from Code Geass had similar plans)
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As for Yoshikazu Yasuhiko intention behind the first series, the other wiki say:
The bottom line is, I wanted to have a more realistic robot series - unlike a super robot – where everything is more reality-based, based on a humanoid robot. Right from the beginning, the roots of the mobile suit came from the worker robots that were building the space colonies back then, and they would become more technologically advanced, to the point of becoming a weapon, and that was the whole lineage of the robots I had in mind since the beginning. So the whole idea, my idea, of trying to have a robot series in space without it becoming a stupid story was based on wanting to make a story and surrounding it with reality – more realistic possibilities was the underlying concept
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yoshiyuki_Tomino
His opinion on war is summarized in another interview:
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Make of those what you want
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I agree wholeheartedly.
What so unrealistic about that?
Edited by jawal on Apr 16th 2024 at 7:00:30 PM
Every Hero has his own way of eating yogurt
Lost in Space
Everyone I saw who looked at the film with an eye towards actual military protocol said that scene was absolute horseshit. They should be arming every plane they have for a potential retaliatory strike. A flash mob celebrating on the deck would be such an egregious breach of discipline that nobody involved would sail ever again.
I'm willing to overlook that part, at least, for the sake of entertainment. I can't overlook the act of war part, though.
Edited by Fighteer on Apr 16th 2024 at 2:04:11 PM
"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"
Well, it's easier to have a discussion about the MCU, Star Wars, and (Hollywood film in general) because people here are familiar with them. It's harder to have a discussion about works others haven't seen or read.
Edited by SilentColossus on Apr 16th 2024 at 3:04:42 PM
reconsidering
yea there's a ton of interesting works id love to discuss here that are like, obscure manga, or webcomics, or novels no one else really knows. Comic books and star wars can consistently get a discussion other than "huh. dont know it *shrug*"
Having Faun
That is annoying when that happens, though unfortunately par for the course when discussing more obscure works in media-wide forums. Maybe it would be easier to discuss the portrayal of politics in those obscure works in the forum threads of those works? Not that it isn't worth a try here, but if that doesn't work, then the forum threads of those works are the next place to go.
Edited by king15 on Apr 16th 2024 at 7:26:41 PM
Most people here are respectful when you mention a work that they haven't watched/read/etc, and that takes often much less space than discussion about a super popular franchise, so that is generally not an issue.
Edited by gropcbf on Apr 16th 2024 at 10:42:07 AM
Lost in Space
By contrast, mention a popular work and you can start multi-page mega-conversations that shut out anyone who's not interested (or takes a bathroom break).
Edited by Fighteer on Apr 16th 2024 at 5:08:53 AM
"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"
Movie and TV Goddess
It's probably much easier to discuss about obscure works than popular works since the conversations won't go out of control like they tend to do with popular works.
I love animation, TV, movies, YOU NAME IT!
Idea Seeker
Sure, like let's not forget that Light Yagami was right that the Jedi are evil zealots and superheroes are fascist enforcers of the status quo and thinks Zeon is a misunderstood benevolent force. 
reconsidering
congratulations youve summerized the entire thread lmao
we can shut this down now, lonecourier has covered everything there is to say
i do mention when an obscure work is relevant to the topic, but generally its tricky to get back and forth discussion. Just inevitable really, kind of the point of "popular media" by definition
Edited by Tremmor19 on Apr 16th 2024 at 5:20:07 AM
Lost in Space
You forgot "Thanos was right".
"War bad" is not a very riveting idea by itself, to be honest. Not that "killing bad people is good" is more original...