I'm sure I've made this point before, but there's a pervasive brand of internet lefty that can't seem to perceive art as anything other than propaganda, and if it doesn't register to them as propaganda that supports their politics, then it has to be propaganda against their politics.
Like when people argue whether warhammer 40k is fascist propaganda that says that fascism is good, or if it's actually a satire of fascist propaganda saying that fascism is bad. When it isn't really either of those things. That's not what it's going for and that's not what it's doing.
It's got satirical elements floating around in there in varying degrees depending on era and author, but the point of them isn't to instruct the audience whether fascism is bad - it's for drama, and mood, and weird interestingness, and humour, and all the other reasons why things are in art other than political and moral instruction. It portrays a bunch of fucked up stuff connected by in-setting circumstance and lets you make your own mind about it, or just let yourself think "damn that's fucked up" and leave it at that.
It's not even, like, complex, by almost any literary standard. It's the same thing with them being unable to understand marvel movies, literally the most accessible movies ever made, when they crack out the most basic #101 nuance for teenagers where a villain has a sympathetic motive or a hero makes a mistake, and they can't really understand it, thinking that because the villain has a sympathetic quality then the movie is trying to demonise that sympathetic quality, because they assume that the film is operating at the level of basic propaganda, when it's, like, even slightly above that.
And they talk so much about being Media Literate and the importance of Media Literacy, in a way that makes them vastly, vastly less capable of understanding media, crunching down all the myriad ways you can interpret things into the simplest and stupidest form of idea, which is so galling when you compare it to the *actual* form of Media Literacy, the beautiful gemstone with its thousand-and-one beautiful shimmering facets!
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