What Happens Next: A Gallimaufry

melancholic romantic comic cynic. bi & genderqueer. fantasy writer. sysrae on ao3.

Anonymous asked: RE: the ask about 'cutefying' Nazis - I agree that the Star Wars movies portray the Empire/Order as monstrous, but that falls apart completely when you get to the merchandising. I work as a cashier at a U.S. big box store, and there is SO MUCH Empire-glorifying crap for sale. And a LOT of it is targeted at kids, specifically. I can't help feeling that, by profiteering on Nazi-esque imagery, Disney/Lucasfilm are diluting the horror of it.

Yeah, that’s definitely a problem, though as you say, it’s not so much based on what the story actually says as how that story is subsequently marketed in other arenas. I seem to recall that when TFA came out, Disney was shocked that there was a demand for Rey merchandise - they’d banked on the idea that little boys would identify with Kylo Ren, even though that makes no fucking sense whatsoever, and produced a fucktonne of stuff promotiong him as a character. A similar thing happened with The Hunger Games, too: the entire story is about inequality and the excesses of the Capital, but a heap of the merchandising for it focused on getting the “Capital look”, especially with makeup, which is literally the opposite point to the one the film was making.

The message I take from this is that late-stage capitalism is a fucking nightmare that will happily merchandise fascism if they think it’ll make them a buck.

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