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 gui-better 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.

[–] LeninsBeard@hexbear.net 11 points 3 weeks ago (1 children)

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.

[–] KobaCumTribute@hexbear.net 7 points 3 weeks ago

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.