this post was submitted on 18 Dec 2025
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For posting all the anonymous reactionary bullshit that you can't post anywhere else.
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Reactionaries seem to get really upset about the notion of morality being anything other than black and white. These comments remind me of drama that reactionaries on twitter stirred up a while back regarding Emily Wilson's translation of the Odyssey. There was obviously a lot of sexism surrounding that discourse, but one thing I noticed was that the marble statue pfp guys were really upset about the first line in Wilson's translation, which described Odysseus as "a complicated man". Countless posters who couldn't give less of a fuck about the classics were absolutely shitting themselves over the idea that Odysseus is not a perfect hero with zero flaws. Obviously that particular case has a lot to do with sexism and the idealization of a powerful white man, but more broadly I think fascists lean hard into the idea of black and white morality because it helps cultivate the "us vs them" mentality that fascism needs to survive. Seeing morality as black and white also inevitably leads to the conclusion that people are either inherently evil or inherently good, and that it's something which is absolute and unchanging, which of course fits really well with an ideology that likes killing people based on immutable characteristics like race or sexuality
Love this. "Yeah, I like stories where the morality is black and white, like Macbeth."
Important quote from the article ‘everyone needs to grow up’
Link to article
CW: Article has some bad takes, but its dunk of the right is spot on.
EDIT: Also heavily implies that people with ADHD are lying about their symptoms. Can't say I'm a fan of the article, lol
Jesus, sorry I didn’t warn about that. Added a CW.
damn good line
Hot take: Macbeth is black and white, in that royals and aristocrats are inherently evil and unacceptable regardless of their inner existence. "Oh Macbeth feels stuff or has motivations or whatever" who cares he's a royal straight to the
along with the rest of the characters and be done with it.
Same for Odysseus: he's a slaving war criminal landlord, and so is pure evil.
If you take a principled anti-monarchist stance, a whole lot of fantasy and historical fiction becomes a lot simpler in that the answer is they all suck and should lose.
spoiler
I'm obviously exaggerating this a bit for comedic effect. Although I do firmly hold that one should still view fiction through the lens of seeing monarchism and aristocracy and the like as intrinsically evil things that make characters bad people and their motivations and status fundamentally unjustified, for all that they can still be interesting despite this.I think Shakespeare does a pretty good job of painting royals as insufferable narcissists and having everyone lose at the end, IMO there's a lot of dry humor in his plays that can get missed in more "serious" analyses.
Very tangentially related, but I just remembered the gag from Mass Effect about the Elcor director doing a production of Hamlet that had a tagline about "enabling audiences to judge Hamlet for his actions, rather than his emotions and feelings", that went along with snippets of evenly paced, completely monotone deliveries of lines from it where the character's tone is just explicitly stated before the line.
Much as the series' overall writing was kind of shit, there were some pretty good gags slipped in as background dialogue or in-universe ads like that.
Jeez, Shrek never would have flied today.
An ogre just wants to be left alone? Constantly have to deal with angry mobs, explains how people don’t actually know his real depth and just judge him based on looks and whatever is “easier”, and it’s actually the charismatic monarch who’s the villain? Yeah, Twitter would blow a gasket.
Shrek needs to be our Pepe, Gritty was fun almost a decade ago but we need to bring back shrekposting to its former glory.
You're expecting too much ideological consistency.
Is the character in question our main focus? Are their actions broadly framed as good? If yes, then yankees will self-identify with them, regardless of what actual shape the narrative has.