i can’t believe this exists

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

    They are, not that that is going to stop the same usual nerds from getting big mad about it being fascist slop or whatever

    I want to read some Dungeons and Dragons shit where the characters make use of real world physics intersecting with in universe magic to Do Cool Shit. Goblin Slayer has that, and does a good fucking job of it. Connecting a teleportation scroll to the bottom of the ocean to use the water pressure like a laser? Cool. Using flour as a fuel air bomb? Hahaha cool. Sorry certain people are too fucking obsessed with their hatred of media and media tropes to appreciate it because they think the only Good Media would have the main characters idk building communism with the goblins

    I almost want to write some parody shit where I basically take one of the posts criticizing “the settler colonialism of [whatever isekai Nerds Mad About]” and transpose everything to being about, idk, Ghostbusters. Are the ghost busters not a proto fascist escapist stand in for the viewer? Are the faceless, ‘evil’ ghosts not merely stand ins for the colonized indigenous, encouraging the viewer to Do a Genocide? Idk i think it’s a good bit. You can’t enjoy Ghostbusters anymore, sorry sweaty

    • 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?

      • 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.

      • 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:

        • 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

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

          More importantly, you can have you creative violence without a highly racialized narrative of heroic genocide and sexualized rape. There is no need to be so defensive about the story because you think the mechanics of their gas chambers are creative.

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

              Is this really a difficult puzzle for you? Ask anyone if the infants on a plantation should be killed and they would probably say no. Goblin Slayer says yes.

              Making a race ontologically evil and also coded as “savages” in order to justify genocide is fucked up. You are still reasoning on the level of a character in the setting when the problem is on the level of the author making the rules of the world.

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

                the author making the rules of the world

                The author made this rule imo literally to head off nerds going “but wait what about all the little gobbos,” that’s the point of it. Y’all see the rape scene as some author fetish insert, I saw it as the author going “okay how do I establish that they are evil beyond reconciliation so that nerds don’t start to ask if the REAL way to slay goblins is FRIENDSHIP”

                Im sorry you wish the manga were called Goblin Befriender

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

                  Are you the person I talked about this last time with? God fucking damn it

                  It’s like the most standard thing in smutty reactionary writing to have the big, dark skinned savages molest the fair-skinned lady in a way that is both highly sexualized and functions as a causus belli for the protagonists. Have you seen any of SAO’s arcs besides the first one and the Asuna-led one? All the others use this trope at some point as foreplay to their revenge porn.

                  You are displaying a level of media literacy that would have you defending Birth of a Nation if not for social stigma. “Obviously the black people in this setting are ontologically savage to keep you nerds from worrying about the possibility that there are Good Ones! In this universe, the Klan is heroic, so there’s nothing wrong with cheering them on!”

                  There is no questioning of why this is the story the author wants to tell. Why is it along racial lines? Why is it a story of genocide instead of some revenge porn against a specific gang, like happens in Taken? Why do we have our hero be identified primarily as an exterminator of life-unworthy-of-life and not as a protector of the innocent, despite that being the nominal justification of the story? Why is the evil race coded as savage, with dark skin, primitive tools, and ragged clothes? What relationship does a work like this have with the real world? Having people be wronged by goblins and then monomaniacly fixated on ethnic cleansing because they are all bad sure reminds me of something I’ve heard of before.

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

                    Are you the person I talked about this last time with? God fucking damn it

                    If it bothers you you could not

                    my brother in christ it is a goblin it is a fantasy creature

                    Why is it along racial lines

                    Because it is a dnd setting and it’s easy to write it that way

                    Again i’m sorry it’s not goblin befriender. That’d be a good show too but ya know, this ain’t it

                • doesntmatter [none/use name]@hexbear.net
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                  1 year ago

                  the author’s being so lazy about what theyre doing with metaphors so it might look kinda racist but its REALLY NOT GUYS!!! and da cool fucken GENOCIDE is done with so much flair :3

            • laziestflagellant [they/them]@hexbear.net
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              1 year ago

              I think the eroticized scenes of rape that are just censored versions of established eroguro rape pornographic tropes are more about titillating the audience and at the same time tapping into fears of the racialized ‘other’ defiling and stealing away ‘our women’

              than they are for establishing a moral justification for murdering the shit out of goblins, seeing as rpg players do that all the time without ever seeing goblins so much as burn down a house.