Honestly, I would welcome anyone trying to help start the trend.

Like, seriously, I don’t know what story series or franchise to pick, but goddammit, how is “communist fanfiction” not a genre?

I mean, it’s much easier than writing or publishing a “real novel” (that’s also communist) so, like, why not?

It’s more achievable, at least.

  • Shrike502@lemmygrad.ml
    15·
    2 years ago

    The issue, I think, is with the underlying philosophy. Communism takes root in dialectic materialism, while the majority of the pre-existing fiction is undialectic at best, deeply idealistic at worst. It’s what allows it to have narratives that are impossible in real life, but drive the existence inside the fictional world. Approaching them from a communist POV would then require changing so much that you might as well write your own tale

      • Shrike502@lemmygrad.ml
        14·
        2 years ago

        Consider something popular, say DC comics. In them, USSR was a monstrous totalitarian hellscape akin to the most fevered dreams of white house propagandists, USA had fought the Nazis in the name of freedom and goodwill, hereditary oligarchs are somehow good people and anarchists actually achieve something.

        Now try framing all this junk from a communist perspective. You’ll end up with a bigger deconstruction than the Permian extinction

  • Adhriva@lemmygrad.ml
    14·
    2 years ago

    Not a bad idea. This route works too. Much of early lgbtq+ fiction has/had its roots in fanfiction because it wasn’t allowed to exist in the traditional mainstream and it ended up flourishing in this environment.

    • Makan@lemmygrad.mlOP
      7·
      2 years ago

      Actually, that’s true. A lot of the authors were previously fanfiction authors too.

  • HiddenLayer5@lemmy.ml
    13·
    2 years ago

    Actually doing a literary roleplay in the Pokemon Mystery Dungeon world where we’re trying to decolonize the Mystery Dungeons. No, I’m serious.

    • Makan@lemmygrad.mlOP
      5·
      2 years ago

      Damn!

      Oh, so not a tabletop RPG, but one of those “forum RPs,” right?

      I like those.

      • HiddenLayer5@lemmy.ml
        4·
        2 years ago

        Mostly on Discord. Like, multiple paragraphs per message back and fourth with out of character discussion and planning. It’s serious business lol, if you find the right roleplay partner you can write a novel length story fairly easily. Have plans to eventually polish some of the better ones into published web series on Wattpad or elsewhere.

        Always happy to roleplay with more people by the way! (hint hint for anyone reading this) Doesn’t have to be on Discord, Matrix works fine too as does most other messaging apps. I’ve even RP’d fairly serious stories in Reddit’s DMs!

        • Makan@lemmygrad.mlOP
          1·
          2 years ago

          I’ll keep tabs on you and invite you to my writing Discord one of these days (probably today, if anything lol).

  • Munrock ☭@lemmygrad.ml
    12·
    2 years ago

    After a communist revolution in Great Britain, the new government petitions China for help in reforming and modernizing the British education system.

    China sends cadres of education professionals to serve in advisory and supervisory roles in British schools, assisting them in reforming their political education syllabuses and keeping watch over the ideological tendencies of staff.

    One of them, Fang Hui, finds herself at Hogwarts. She has five years to clear out the bigots, wizard supremacists and fascists if she wants to save the school from being demolished. She’s inclined to write it off as unsalvagable at first, but one evening she finds a portrait Friedrich Engels in the room of requirement and he tells her that he studied at Hogwarts.

    She spends long evenings in the room trading stories. Fred tells her the story of the things he witnessed at Hogwarts that played a role in inciting his radicalism, of how the sorting hat sorted Marx into Slytherin just because he was Jewish, of how Marx was expelled in the second year for talking other students into freeing their house elves, and how Engels was expelled in the fifth year for refusing to stop prying into a terrible secret about Griffindor house. Fang Hui tells him about what’s been happening in the muggle world, about SWCC and all the things that are happening in AES countries that he doesn’t hear about only having his one portrait in the wizarding world.

    With Engels’ encouragement, Fang Hui renews her efforts in purging Hogwarts, and promises to help him finally uncover the harrowing secret behind events in Griffindor house and why the LGBTQ population of the wizarding world dramatically dropped almost overnight in the mid 1800s.

    • mauveOkra@lemmygrad.ml
      5·
      2 years ago

      why the LGBTQ population of the wizarding world dramatically dropped almost overnight in the mid 1800s.

      Wait is that last bit a reference to an actual historical thing?

      • Munrock ☭@lemmygrad.ml
        9·
        2 years ago

        Not intentionally. Just backfilling why the entire LGBTQ community in Hogwarts is just Dumbledore and Sirona.

        But homophobia did have a huge surge in Victorian Britain. That was the era when things like male friends holding hands or kissing went out of fashion because of the fear of just being suspected.

  • ivy@lemmygrad.ml
    10·
    2 years ago

    I can see it as taking a popular piece of media to base it on and plant a thought here and there. What’s your plan?

    • Makan@lemmygrad.mlOP
      8·
      2 years ago

      I… currently have none.

      But honestly, I wouldn’t underestimate the power of culture or even pop culture.

      I just want, like, a group of writers or people that would be interested in doing this and sharing ideas.

      But idk. They’re stories, yeah, but it would help with outreach and, besides, Marxist-Leninists have a problem of sometimes over-prioritizing the same places for recruitment or education. A foray into fanfiction would be another audience to reach so, like, why not? It’s not like it has to eat at anyone’s time a lot (depending on the person), it’ll be fun, and, hell, it may even spur some people to make communist fiction that gets published or is “official” later on.

      • ivy@lemmygrad.ml
        9·
        2 years ago

        But honestly, I wouldn’t underestimate the power of culture or even pop culture.

        Yeah, capitalists are using pop culture all the time for their interests. They preach individualism, demonize people who question the status quo or just straight up paint communism as evil.

  • DoghouseCharlie@lemmygrad.ml
    7·
    2 years ago

    I’m posting my cringe, but whenever I write fanfics of cartoons I add very unsubtle pro socialist ideas. One time I just had a character recite the Yuri Gagarin copypasta.

  • Socialisminmind@lemmygrad.ml
    6·
    2 years ago

    That sounds fun, with all the talk of harry potter being liberal theory I may actually read the series just to deconstruct it and turn it into communist propaganda ha, if you make a discord server or a shared google docs or something I will join

    • relay@lemmygrad.ml
      4·
      2 years ago

      Just rewrite the basic parts of harry potter and change his name. make this “harry” become a class traitor because of his friendship with his middle class “ron” and how “Hormione” convinces them to liberate the “house elves” from slavery. They study the muggle works of Marx and Lennin and study the primary and secondary contradictions of the wizarding world and the muggle world and how their dialectial relationship shapes each other. Write “Azkaban” as the horrible place that it is in the terf’s novel but instead use the testemony of “Serius Black” as a way to inform how terrible azkaban is and how Angela Davis’s works on prison abolition as an alternative to the punitive punishments of sending people to “Azkaban”. Really “Azkaban” manages to be worse than most Muggle prizons so learning from the muggles would be helpful in reforming or grounds for revolutionary. Also, make avadakadavera not a spell, so that killing people with magic can happen in surreal creepy and horrifying ways, like “wingardium leviosa”. Make it cannon that “voldemort” was actually released from “azkaban” by the “Ministry of magic” in order to stop “Harry” and his friends from their revolutionary activities. the “ministry” “accidentally” keeps on releasing wizard fascists from prizon that all have an agenda of making “Harry’s” life miserable. Also have “Neville Longbottom” be a trans girl (to spite rowling) that got really good at making potions because she really wanted to keep her body as a female as long as possible, but she’s terrible with spells, so transfiguration is not the route that she took to keep a female form. Also put in the effort in worldbuilding that Rowling wanted to leave out.

  • QueerCommie@lemmygrad.ml
    6·
    2 years ago

    Someone should write a posadist Star Wars where there’s a rival power to the empire that uses democratic centralism and supports uprisings against the empire.

  • MelianPretext@lemmygrad.ml
    5·
    2 years ago

    @Makan@lemmygrad.ml @Munrock@lemmygrad.ml @Socialisminmind@lemmygrad.ml @relay@lemmygrad.ml @QueerCommie@lemmygrad.ml

    Lemmy give a shoutout to this one I’ve found on AO3: Harry Potter and the Expatriate Pioneeer by ComradeTortoise:

    It is the fifth year at Hogwarts, and a new student has arrived. A 17 year old Muggleborn Communist from Wizarding East Germany who has to repeat two years of his education due to a combination of turmoil in his native country and unhelpful bureaucracy. Lord Voldemort has returned, and the Specter of Fascism is haunting Konrad’s new home. https://archiveofourown.org/works/27851798/chapters/68190754