Reviews Literature / Legend Of The Galactic Heroes

Well, why not tempt fate twice?

Migrating from the old review page; I suggest others there do the same before they\'re buried and lost.

For those unaware, here\'s useful bit of historical context regarding Japanese fascism: Nobusuke Kishi, the architect of Japan\'s absolutely monstrous colonial ambitions in Manchuria (as well as the country\'s complete economic subjugation to its military industrial complex during the war), was never even tried for the heinous war crimes he orchestrated. In fact, he went on to lead the post-war reconstruction at the direct behest of the United States.

His grandson Shinzo Abe later became the longest-serving PM in Japanese history and oversaw a political realignment towards militarized ultra-nationalism. He also vehemently denied and downplayed the atrocities committed by his own grandfather.

All of this is to say that the legacy of fascism lives on in modern Japan, and its proponents should not be so quickly dismissed or discounted.

I will be the first person to say Lo GH isn\'t perfect. As amazing as the writing is, it does have some questionable themes and I wouldn\'t blame anyone for coming to the same conclusions you did. It does support authoritarianism and the great man theory to a certain extent, and some of its many statements and speeches only serve to shoot itself in the foot.

But damn if everything else isn\'t stellar. The writing IS nuanced, the characters DO have depth, and the storytelling and dialogue IS superb. Some of the central themes can be problematic, but it gets props for having those themes at all. It makes you think about politics and the flow of history in ways that not many shows do, and better than some shows that do attempt it. Parts of it haven\'t aged well and it can be easy to look at it and go \'LOL FACISM\', but I can\'t help but love it.

And I feel that. When I wrote this review, it was in contrast to all the other reviews that offered much more positive critique, and I felt compelled to get into why I can\'t love it despite acknowledging it as an artistic achievement. And I did try to avoid just going \"LOL FASCISM\" in the body of the review itself.

I do feel bad that mine is the only review left... I\'ve heard there\'s a way to petition to have such things moved. I guess I could go do that now; I do have access to a keyboard for a change.

To me, reading Lo GH as an endorsement of fascism is a misreading of the series. The story makes it very clear that what strengths the Empire has lie within Reinhard\'s uniquely-gifted personage—as an administrator and military leader and abhorrer of corruption, with a unique eye for other promising talent to serve him, shaped by his rise from the lowest rank of the nobility. If anything, nobility and cults of personality are portrayed as a bad and irrational, but just like how the protagonist of Arslan—another one of Tanaka\'s works—doesn\'t seem to react to slavery as a youth, Reinhard doesn\'t abolish the nobility completely because of lingering cultural biases. I think this is realistic. I *do* think that a fair criticism is that—let\'s not mince words—Reinhard is a Mary Sue, and so someone could read the Empire that way because of that. And the show is a little glib about how he won the peace after the war.

I would actually argue that the story shows the (Goldenbaum) Empire and the Alliance to have many of the same flaws due to the war—especially militarism, a lack of respect for civil society, and out-of-touch leaders who didn\'t listen to field experts. As for a right-wing military dictatorship within the Alliance, that actually did happen fairly early on, and it certainly was not portrayed as a good thing.

My critique would actually be that the series has too much faith in the idea of meritocracy and personal talent, and laments a little too strongly that talented leaders often aren\'t the ones in charge. But this either came from Tanaka\'s personal or cultural biases, or from the limitations of basically re-telling the rise of and reforms of Frederick the Great. In any case, this series has flaws, but is quite far from an endorsement of fascism.

I can’t deny I see where you are coming from, even though I still personally disagree with much of that reading. At the very least, I see the theme of talent as tightly tied to the Japanese idea the talent is either something you’re born with or you aren’t in a way you don’t.

And yes, there is a reason I don’t use “fascism“ or “fascist“ within the body of the review itself. In many ways that title is an artifact, informed by the fact that the man who introduced me to the series has since become an enthusiastic and passionate fascist. But I do think that the core theses of the series are firmly anti-democratic. After all, many of the enlightenment thinkers men like Frederick the Great drew on weren’t democratic either. Reinhardt’s military despotism and its success is a realization of his society’s ideals, not a repudiation of them, and whether Reinhardt himself is a good or evil person his society’s ideals are definitely, in my eyes, irredeemably evil. And from that perspective, the message that good fruit can grow from poison seeds is a very dangerous one in the real world.

I do have to admit that the portrayal of Reinhard as an incorruptible battlefield genius in the OVA recalls the Rommel Myth a bit too much for my tastes. Where I think Reinhard differs from the Rommel of the myth, though, is that he was radicalized against the Goldenbaums\' system early on and his military career was purely a means to an end; democracy-skeptical cultural biases aside, he certainly was the opposite a true believer. I think you could call this unrealistic, but I fail to see how his rise validates the ideals of the Empire, especially because many of the people who assisted his rise were commoners and people who faced discrimination under the Inferior Genes Exclusion Act. I don\'t think their battlefield success under Reinhard\'s command proved the superiority of the Empire\'s political system any more than Russia\'s success against Napoleon in 1812 proved the superiority of the tsar, rather than just proving that the Alliance miscalculated due to hubris.

Still, I actually share your skepticism about the idea of the military as a means of changing society, especially a consolidated authoritarian one like the Goldenbaum Empire. But at the time I watched the OVA (2011), the show resonated with me because where I grew up, a lot of people had been told that the military was the only path to a bright future (I\'m writing from the United States). Many of my friends were doing or had done tours in Iraq and Afghanistan for—just like Yang—money for college. Not to mention, Trunicht gave me strong George Dubya vibes, despite the OVA being made long before his rise to power. Add in the fact that we\'re still talking about the \"poverty draft\" and debating whether military funding competes too successfully with human need, and this is how I came away more with the message that \"war erodes society\" and viewing those two as doing the best playing the only hands they were given.

These days, though, I would wonder \"where is the working class?\" if I were going to watch again. We didn\'t get to see very much of civilian life under the Alliance, or of the lives of commoners in the Empire. I would say the portrayal of the masses as unthinkingly swinging from passion to passion—that is, if they play a significant role at all—*is* a specific anti-democratic thread I have trouble with, if it\'s not a cautionary tale.

Also, as I wanted to point out but couldn\'t because the side never lets me edit comments, Arslan has the excellent excuse that he comes from a pre-modern, pre-industrial society where ideals about humanist egalitarianism and democratic republicanism simply did not exist, whereas every single person in this franchise exists at the culmination of human history with the whole sweep of industrial modernity to look back on.

I don\'t believe it\'s possible that anyone at the level these people are operating at, let alone a man as consistently depicted as well-educated and cultivated as Reinhardt, could possibly be ignorant as Arslan is ignorant. His rejection of democracy is an informed rejection.

And the fundamental ideals of the Empire Reinhardt embodies, reinforces, and ultimately represents the culmination of are its authoritarian militarism. When the Right Man is in charge, given absolute power to do whatever he wants, kill whoever he wants arbitrarily, mold the world according to his will, everything will work out the best for everyone, stability will be assured, and prosperity will flourish to benefit everyone, even the filthy rabble fit only to lick his boots.

If this system doesn\'t work, it doesn\'t work only because the Right Man was actually the Wrong Man, and clearly the only issue is that their aristocracy is insufficiently oligarchic, failing to move the Right Men into absolute power.

Furthermore, is it not made explicit that the reason Yang fails, and loses, and dies, and everything he fought to protect crushed because he, the Right Man, refuses to seize absolute power, put every one of those corrupt stuffed shirts up against the wall and riddle them with bullets to \"purify\" the nation from their influence, and so can never compete with Reinhardt\'s fully-realized autocracy because democracy is a shackle around his legs? That the only reason that right wing dictatorship fails is because it wasn\'t the Right Man running it?

I think we mostly agree that it\'s a deeply anti-democratic story. But I further argue that evil, corrupt ideals breed evil, corrupt results, and that there is no more ancient and insidious an evil, corrupt ideal in human history than the ideal that a perfect society is a benevolent dictatorship, that the only problem with absolute and unaccountable power is the wrong person getting ahold of it. Indeed, I feel there is no stronger lesson to take from the whole of human political history, and hence my strong negative reaction to people constantly trying to whitewash the Empire or suggest that Reinhardt in any way represents some form of progress away from the reactionary and brutal society that birthed him. Indeed, I would argue historically that reforming such an intrinsically-corrupt system only gives it the power and leverage to do more damage, by increasing its longevity and therefore, by its own logic, the number of Wrong Men to have absolute power wielded unaccountably. The story never tries to grapple with any of this, in my eyes, because there is no way to grapple with it without exposing Reinhardt for what he is: a product of a corrupt, intrinsically-abusive system without redeeming qualities that he has given dominion over the vast majority of civilization, before dying so that power can fall into the hands of someone who lacks his virtues.

Also, not to put too fine a point on it, it\'s always been a fantasy of reactionary authoritarian militarists that they could lick corrupt, rotten democracies in a fight, when if anything the accountability of democracy tends to reduce corruption while their own venal and cronyist systems instead encourage it. Look no further than Ukraine, at the time of this writing.

And... yeah, in the end, it\'s not like I can\'t say there\'s no nuance here? I said as much in the review itself. This is not a shallow or stupid story. I just feel that the bones of it lean towards dangerous ideas about the world that are dangerous because they\'re always going to be popular among incurious people who want quick and easy solutions to their problems and think a strong, decisive monarch is infinitely superior to the chattering ugly rabble of republicanism, to quote the front page of r/monarchism, a real subreddit that actually exists and you can go look up right now.

...I\'m sorry. I\'m doing this instead of my homework, and also I am a very wordy person. As you may know from my other reviews, where I have in the past gone more than double the word limit rambling about professional wrestling metaphors that make perfect sense to me but I worry are incoherent gibberish to everyone else!