i often get asks that are like 'how do you enjoy anything' and similarly have a lot of detractors on web site who call me, like, 'joyless', and i feel like that's kind of revealing about the way these people conceptualise criticism (& especially political criticism). like esp. when i say something like 'DOOM 2016's central conceit of a heroic ubermensch righteously massacring an infinite horde of subhuman invaders is fundamentally a reactionary fantasy' i think that people assume that means i played the whole game through gritted teeth or threw it down in disgust but nah i played that whole thing and had a great time. i just also made some mental notes and thought them through afterwards. i just find it weird so many people find those things to be in abject contradiction
The thing that always gets me annoyed at tumblr user txttletale is that like, obviously, you should be able to reasonably predict, that when you say “This Videogame You Like is Fascist” or “minecraft is seeped in white-supremacist settler-colonialism” or something, like the obvious takeaway that anybody is going to get from that is that you think it’s morally reprehensible and a big problem and calls for boycotts and activism.
Because the vast majority of the time, when someone says something like that, they mean all that other stuff. It’s an incredibly reasonable trained response given prior experience that when you hear that you see it as an attack, because usually it is an attack - seeing it as an attack is usually correct!
I recall a similar kinda post where people were talking about movies - someone said something like ‘it isn’t problematic to like fight club because actually the clear moral message is that the thing it portrays is *bad*, portraying a bad thing is not the same as advocating it! I'm sick of us sending death threats and suicide baiting to people who don't deserve it because they said they liked media that we wrongly accused of being problematic when it wasn't.”
And I said something like “And even if it -is- problematic, you’re still allowed to like it! 300, for example, is a clearly fascist movie, and you’re still allowed like it as a movie."
And that got me, like, a shit load of very angry anons, which I think says something about how there’s a pretty strong belief that if you think a piece of media is fascist, you’re not supposed to admit to liking it! Like according to a sizable amount of people, a moral condemnation of a piece of media is kinda synonymous with a moral condemnation of its audience, and without the context of a post like this explaining it, you wouldn’t really have reason to believe that this particular poster is an exception.
300 is an instructive film to consider in light of the tumblr/breadtube style approach to media engagement, because it’s a film that highlights what that approach commonly gets wrong.
It begins by showing that Spartan society is undergirded by ritual child abuse. Where the pressure to conform and perform violence is enforced through a culture of obnoxious and lethal toxic masculinity. The violence is beautiful, operatic, and deeply, deeply uncomfortable.It ends with the Spartans dead nearly to a man, with the reveal that the entire preceding story was diegetic propaganda told by the lone survivor who stands to profit heavily from it.
300 depicts a fascist society, but it’s not a flattering depiction. It invites a reparative (antifascist) reading because of and through it’s problematic elements. The film plainly shows why such a society is terrible —
— but noticing that requires engagement on a deeper level than "depiction = endorsement” and “problematic = bad.”















