i’m getting more and more put off by this inescapable mode of fandom analysis centered around judgement. it has its uses - i think a lot of people use it to build their politics and ethics in a communal space. i identify x political message in the text, either explicit or implicit, i condemn it, i build my own sense of my values by doing so. but i just feel like well, i’ve already done this. i’m an adult and actually really confident about many of my moral viewpoints. so i am anti-monarchy, anti-hierarchy, anti-war, as deeply held personal principles. i don’t need to categorize and condemn the faulty and suspect values of the characters in order to affirm my own via contrast. but this is much of what is going on. the characters believe in the divine right of kings, which is risible and deluded. they believe in their special bloodlines that give them a birthright to their various privileges, which is of course very mockable. they believe in the exercise of force to achieve political aims, and also have corresponding socioreligious beliefs that valorize warfare, which is Bad. the task of fandom analysis is mostly to notate all this with fine precision, or at least to make jokes about how absurd everyone is. the viewer is politically and ethically superior to the characters, and sits in the place of judgement weighing their sins. we come from a self-evidently better civilization than this pseudo-medieval one, and also, in the many ways it can be connected to our contemporary world (source text written by a 21st century US american, adapted for television by same, inflected inescapably with the POV of the present) we are better than any possible analogues. again, i don’t think this is a wrong way to engage, it is just one i find really annoying and unrewarding and at odds with anything i am interested in doing at this juncture. it is very unfashionable to say that one comes to fiction for the transformative exercise of empathy - i think in resistance to the idea that said exercise has some inherent positive political effect, which i also agree is very critiquable. but it does have a more complex moral and political meaning for me to do this, to suspend judgement, to try to put that aside and ask questions about what it is to live another life from inside, what beliefs - no matter how objectionable - someone might hold to be able to do so, to get into the skin so deeply i merely have to let myself feel their force.
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