this post was submitted on 23 Aug 2024
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the_dunk_tank
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Genre fiction writer here, 99% of genre fiction is fascist.
I learned that the hard way with my beta readers with my own work.
"Why is this so political? Can't it just be about a war with piloted robots?"
"The main character needs to have her naked body described in detail during a mandatory shower scene." (the character was a malnourished minor)
"This is a butchering of the Ramayana. I am insulted by this sloppy portrayal of it." (the Ramayana was mentioned, yes, but it's a total fascist wet dream of a story and I deliberately dunked on its ideals in favor of the much more nuanced, thoughtful, and worthwhile Mahabharata)
Even the Mahabharata is like a thorough endorsement of Patriarchal power structures but it's what makes mythology and its fuzzy ironic (ambivalent?) relationship with its historical context so interesting
Yes, yes it is. Even after considering how ancient and grounded in patriarchal caste systems it always was, I'm nonetheless deeply impressed by how it plays out in the very long story. There's even a fairly-recent treatment written by a late 1800s writer that gives Draupadi a lot more agency and it was so good that some later theater treatments worked that addition in.
How is Ramayana a fascist story?
I don't mean the modern concept of corporatism merged with a perpetual war economy. I use the term loosely for the mythological roots of typical fascist ideology: the idea of purity, especially purity in a patriarchal sense where a woman held captive by "impure" enemy forces must painstakingly, exhaustively, and perhaps even dangerously prove her "purity" to the patriarchal power. The sheer disposability of the armies at Rama's disposal, Rama's own ubermensch-like portrayal, the seemingly unchallenged militaristic pagaentry and absolutism strokes of the story are also what I meant by that.
The current right wing political powers in India invoke the Ramayana fairly regularly, and even if they don't have the exact uniforms that were around in WW2, yeah I call that a fascist movement.
https://theconversation.com/how-narendra-modis-cult-of-personality-was-formed-by-a-powerful-hindu-nationalist-group-with-a-dark-history-225280
Maybe not so different from Iphigenia / Isaac.
Okay cmon no way did anybody say this to you, right?
...please let it be fake...
One of the beta readers that agreed to read a very early draft of the first novel of my trilogy requested exactly that.
He was in his 60s. He had an adult daughter nearly my own age at the time that had children of her own. He called the naked body description "an inevitability in the genre." He left a punitive middling review, unasked for (I didn't ask him to review the final work), probably because I stood firm and didn't describe a malnourished teenage refugee girl's naked body.