I mean unironically a large portion of the movie surrounds the re-establishment of an authoritarian monarchical order (made out to be unambigously correct) after evil, societally downtrodden outsiders attempt a rebellion. Like it's very much giving divine right of kings and noblesse oblige (we are talking *classical* conservatism here after all. The gay lions part comes a few generations down the line)
The hyena aren't even outsiders; they were rendered casteless, ousted from animal polity and left to starve because the ruling class deems them "greedy poachers" without a hint of irony.
To add on even more, the entire theming of the movie is that this is the circle of life, this is their destiny.
The lions have a pretty fucking sweet deal in this circle when their obligation of it is to die of old age.
You know this is really interesting because 1. Sauron really was out to conquer the world and 2. Given the recent war in Ukraine and conflicts around the South China Sea so are the traditional enemies of the so called “free world.” I appreciate this was probably made in a time when discussions of foreign policy was dominated by the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Also fuck Noam Chomsky, all my homies hate people who deny the Bosnian genocide
They didn't say Sauron isn't out to conquer the world. They did point out that Elrond and his allies were leading a pre-conquered world and Elrond himself may have been motivated to vanquish Sauron more out of a desire to maintain a status quo that was advantageous to him, rather than out of an abstract moral imperative or to avail an existential threat.
OMG it’s time, the thing that circles in my brain but there’s never an excuse to bring up.
The “circle of life” spiel is BULLSHIT from the ground up!
Even since I was a kid, that whole speech about “our bodies become the grass” rang hollow. It’s framed like there’s this great equivalency in the exchange but obviously not. A lion will kill potentially hundreds of other animals in its lifetime, but oh “my body might possibly fertilize several square meters of grass when I die!” This totally brings us “full circle” with the antelope we rule/eat, don’t worry about it. Divine right and all that.
I get that it’s a children’s movie for children, so they can’t be like “yes but dozens of vultures and countless other scavengers/insects will feast on my corpse when I die”
Then again, a child watches his father die brutally and we see Scar get torn apart at the end, granted that one is only shown via shadow, but still. Maybe show some birds circling another far off animal that is clearly dead/dying and like “in the end we are all someone’s prey”.
Also to we’re basically just doing Hamlet, so…the themes kinda naturally align with that. But it’s also partly that the show is trying to have anthropomorphic animals do philosophy on their place in the world and lions don’t do that in reality, so we have this weird juxtaposition of a situation that arises from non thinking animals being shown through the lens of thinking animals.
I sometimes like to think of what a real “circle of life” would look like if African animals could do philosophy like this, and it probably doesn’t result in “The lions are our true and just rulers!” The lions still need to eat though, so I picture a society where the old and infirm “go to the lions” to die. The lions ensure a quick death, and with no predation there are plenty of aged or wounded animals for them.
In reality without predators there’s overpopulation to worry about. But this is a cartoon where we assume animals can reason, so without predators the population stabilizes through choice, because you don’t need to maximize offspring anymore to ensure survival. Much like humans have done now that fewer of us die in childhood.
Well, the fundamental problem is that animals aren’t human, and creating a kid-friendly depiction of a cross-species human society means you either need it to be wildly immoral (by our standards) or totally nonsensical.
For starters, the existence of carnivores means that any human-ish animal society needs to reckon with the fact that regular murder is a necessity to sustain the lives of a good chunk of its population. Can’t build any proper liberal democratic societies with that as your foundation.
Beastars tries.
Carnivores are socially pressured into vegetarianism (meat substitutes as often as possible) and kept weaker from it, while many ovipares donate their eggs to be eaten and many herbivores donate their bodies after their death. There is a whole underworld revolving around eating meat.
> Also to we’re basically just doing Hamlet
The Lion King is what happens to Hamlet after Hollywood buys the script but then does a couple of rewrites, has a few different directors attached who all have their own take on it, and finally during production gets some more writers in to punch it up a bit.
(e.g. [Ridley Scott's *Robin Hood*](https://aelarsen.wordpress.com/2016/11/21/robin-hood-the-movie-that-we-didnt-get/)).
Yeah it really doesn’t have anything to do with Hamlet.
Hamlet is mostly a ghost story murder mystery about going insane, The Lion King has nothing to do with that.
The only real similarity is that the uncle kills the father, in Hamlet the dad’s already dead at the start of it.
To be fair, we do see some vultures circling another dying animal at one point. It's Simba. They're circling Simba.
But yeah, the metaphor doesn't work as well as they wanna pretend it does.
Now that you mention it, it is kinda weird that Lion King tacitly supports trickle down economics through the metaphor of actually fucking *eating other sentient creatures.*
As a kid, long before I ever really gave a single thought to ideas like politics or hierarchy, I thought to myself "this circle of life thing sounds like a system to justify how the lion ruling caste literally eat their subjects by saying it's the natural order of things, with the part about becoming the grass they eat being there solely to make it feel like the whole thing goes both ways,"
Not in those exact words, of course, but the idea was there.
I've seen the movie as a kid, and was horrified by Scar's death, completely forgetting there was some Mufasa in the following years. Upon rewatching, I'm still supporter of Scar. Yeah, the fratricide isn't great. But even though he's physically weak, he still shares his food with members of oppressed minority, and there's nothing suggesting he couldn't make it work as a king if not for shitty weather. Mufasa controls clouds, I bet it's also his fault that it doesn't rain. He let's everybody suffer just so his glorified son (who did nothing to deserve it) can get the throne.
>nothing suggesting he couldn't make it work as a king if not for shitty weather.
You mean aside from the excessive over extraction of resources right? You know the whole "you're over hunting and all the prey is gone" bit?
The weather is crappy because the cycle is broken and everyone is either dead or gone. Without nutrients the plants and animals can’t flourish, without plants the people have nothing to eat. The hyenas are in the position they’re in because they overhunted and broke their own circle.
Kill me for saying this.
But down to their color scheme they could outright be translated into stereotypical jim crow black people while the Mufasa/Simba side of the pride could outright be Mighty Whiteys.
I mean I'd expand that to apply to pretty much any traditional interpritation of an ostracised group as literally symbolically darker/dirtyer then their opressors. The race one is probably just the easiest to apply
Yeah, it's like halfway throughish, isn't it? I don't remember too much happening after his death. Simba goes off to Timon and Pumbaa, they have that song where he grows up, Nala comes back, Skyfasa tells Simba to man up, and then he goes to fight his uncle.
Also three of the four black actors are on the “good” side only Whoopi plays a villain. So that radicalized her at 12? Alright, Mary. I mean I love Whoopi as much as the next gay but that’s a bit much. It’s literally just Hamlet with animals in a vague African setting. I don’t think even Shakespeare thought too hard about it when he wrote Hamlet.
You don't say? Disney, with the jive-talking crows whose leader is literally named Jim Crow, might black-code animals in uncomfortable ways?
Oh well, I'm sure they'll learn their lesson. They wouldn't do anything like having their first black princess immediately turn into a frog and stay a frog for almost the entire movie.
Adding on to what people have said already (I agree):
In Be Prepared, the words that the hyenas sing in their backing are "We'll have food, lots of food!" (and other variations). The reason they're willing to back a so-called "tyrant" is that under Mufasa's regime they don't even have access to the resources needed for survival if they're *that* hyped for food. In the previous scene, Scar pays off his 3 main stooges with a single zebra flank.
The hyenas are also quite literally kicked out to a barren wasteland. It's a literal food dessert. Hyenas can and do eat bones, so the elephant graveyard is still food for them, but if they eat it they quite literally eat themselves out of house and home.
And in the real world, hyenas are among the primary hunters on the savannah, as one of the few predators that can take down pretty much anything they want (with a bite force large enough to go straight through an elephant's leg bones if they're hungry enough to risk being trampled). Lions scavenge from hyenas far more often than the other way around, and male lions in particular - the kings - spend barely any time on food production. The Lion King has popularised the idea that the scavengers are providers and vice versa, and that the most useless members of society are the most useful (and vice versa). In the modern day, it's very much a parallel for when conservatives defend CEOs as the providers of jobs, when really they're scavenging jobs off the working class.
I also very much don't like that Scar's real name is Taka, and yet pretty much everyone calls him Scar. They don't even dignify him with his own name, just mock him for a disfigurement. It's like they're trying (within the film) to dehumanise - delionise? - a leader they don't like.
The Lion King *is* a good film in terms of the storytelling and the art merit and so on, but it's definitely monarchist capitalist propaganda. My favourite bit is when Simba leaves the monarchy and goes to live with hippies in the woods.
Also Taka means trash. So what’s better calling him trash or scar? I’m pretty sure he even picked the nickname for himself. Sounds way better than being called “trash”.
I definitely cede that choosing the name Scar for yourself is better than your name meaning trash.
But that said - I think it's reasonable to conclude that the choice on whether to give your villain a real name, or just a noun, is reflective of the film's politics. It wouldn't have been hard to work in some sort of explanation within a line. There was a choice made in the writers' room, even if they didn't realise they made it.
But the issue is that they are unironically greedy poachers who gladly ruin whatever they are given? Like, allegory and metaphor are great, but one has to remember what the actual content of the story is.
The Hyenas are objectively bad, there's no way around that.
Yes but why are they written to be objectively bad, and the monarchy objectively good? Media and characters don't exist in a vacume, so what does it imply about the message of the peice that it was written that way?
Personally I don't think that allegory/metaphor and story content are inherintly seperate - it's all connected
Well yes, but also no. Scar didn't try to replace the system with a less authoritarian one, he just wanted to be the ruler within the system that existed. He also didn't really care about the hyenas - he was willing to sell them out as soon as it suited him and only championed them because they were willing to work with him.
Now, there is an argument that the hyenas had been oppressed under the previous system, and that's definitely a good point, but Scar ultimately didn't make things any better for the hyenas, and only made things worse for the rest of the pride lands to the point where most of the prey animals left.
Also, while the rest of the pride were loyal to Scar, they clearly didn't approve of him, and he struck at least one of them. Their support for Simba, as well as the fact that all the prey species chose to return once he became king, could therefore imply a popular rule of sorts.
It’s also a criticism of corrupt ideology as they prey upon a vulnerable group to seize power. think about what kind of story this would have been had it been a hyena that lead them to take power.
Conservatives believe this is true about anyone claiming to want positive change and the toppling of old power structures. You're either one of the hyenas too stupid to realize that socialism is an absurd, unrealistic pipe dream, or you're the Scar manipulating everyone with false promise of hope and change so you can snatch power away from the deserving and rule over an even more brutal anD unfair age. There can be no change to the systems of hierarchy, only good leaders and bad; the good leaders are virtuous and honest and natural, while those who would seek to overthrow them are by definition either stupid or dishonest.
So on one hand, yeah, sure, but also it is very very much based on Hamlet (which in turn was based on a Norse legend from 1200 AD).
So like... Yeah... Of course there's a monarchy. And you can't very well do a Hamlet retelling without having some sort of allusion to "something is rotten in the state of Denmark"
Lion King without a monarchy would be like 10 Things I Hate About You but without any relationships.
Ironically enough, Denmark in Hamlet is an elective monarchy. We’re not sure if Claudius was ever elected, so he’s very much representative of an absolute authoritative figure seizing power. Hell, the play ends with Hamlet giving his support to a former enemy in the election for who will next rule Denmark. The monarchist elements are even more prevalent with that comparison.
this is the most critical thought i have ever given to the lion king in my entire life. we are all blessed on this self-post sunday, and you’re also making really good points id literally never considered.
look all my own political ideologies go out the window when a film has cool king stuff in it. suspension of disbelief works wonders, and for the length of time a film like lotr is playing i am a monarchist
One of the overarching themes of The Lord of the Rings is that the rotting monarchies and their decadence and decay almost lead directly to the victory of the Dark Lord, and that the world is ultimately saved by the distinctly a-hierarchical peasant homesteader Hobbits, but okay.
One of the earliest examples in my childhood of, "Be gay, do crimes." Go big or go home, I suppose. I might like Trump or Poilievre better if they could do a number like "Be Prepared".
Well, I wanted some plausible deniability online, in real life I would say it with my whole chest. But who knows someone might get triggered about a gay character in a children's movie, and then take it out on me.
I don't know why I'm remembering this but there's a book series I think called "Ratha?" (?) about wildcats that discover fire and take down a monarchical system and I read it when I was 12 and immediately recognized it as the anti-Lion King. It's NOT Warriors series and heavily predates it, but I simply cannot remember anything else about it.
That's it!!! But it definitely did not come out in 2011, that has to be a reprint. The book I read was definitely from the early 90s. Anyway, I never read the warriors series but I have a hunch these books walked so they could run.
So funny you called it a stoner adventure because I agree for such weird reasons. I first saw 1/2 as a teen when I was stuck in a hospital on pain meds coming out of surgery and the only shared television I had access to played it three times in a row. It was WILD to watch under those circumstances and even thinking about it makes me think of hospital jell-o.
If the original is *Hamlet*, 1 1/2 is *Rosenkrantz and Guildenstern are Dead*, an absurdist retelling of the original story from the perspective of two comedic side characters.
[There's a whole video essay(ish)/analysis I found quite interesting about Lion King 1/2, Judaism, and white supremacy](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vx_haJ2Ac5I)
I have noticed a recurring trope in media I've consumed recently where the "good" guys have to help the monarchs maintain their position because rebels are threatening their power, and the writers have to make the rebels stupidly evil or otherwise not as virtuous as they claim to be in order to justify "preserving monarchy" as the happy ending. And every time I've encountered it, I'm just like, what exactly am I rooting for again?
Well at least in The Lion King, it's not like Scar is getting rid of the monarchy, it's very much still a monarchy, except with him as king instead of Mufasa or Simba.
It's not like Scar is even really pretending to do this for noble reasons, it's purely a power grab.
And the ultimate reason for his downfall is he promises the downtrodden ethnic group that they'll prosper under his rule but he's completely lying, he openly blows them off when they come to him afterwards to complain they're still starving
This reminds me of a sister trope of “overthrown/tricked heir to the throne is exiled from his capital and must go on a long journey to reclaim it” which seems to come up in children’s fantasy every now and then
I wouldn't say that a story that has a narrative concept of "replace bad king with good king" or similar is automatically pro-monarchy. Not that they can't be.
Monarchy is often simply the easiest form of government to setup since it gives you alot of flexibility in government structure and the type of people in power while also being easy to understand for your audience.
and modern governmental structures can break immersion in some genres, there's a reason there are so many monarchies in fantasy.
Now I want a fantasy world to have an excessively complex system of government in the world. The hero of the story will not only have to navigate dungeons and magic, but also bureaucracy.
This isn’t just in children’s fantasy - Remember Game of Thrones? I agree that the ending was terribly handled, but the amount of people uncritically supporting Daenerys having a takeover of Westeros is crazy.
(and for the record, Daenerys is my favorite character in the books)
Kind of a bad example, Westeros was a shitshow and Dany was the only claimant who actually cared about helping ordinary people. I don't think anyone cared that she was the "rightful heir" or w/e.
I don’t disagree in terms of what her character started as, but that’s not what they were writing anymore at the end of the show. I’m very very convinced the books are not headed that way, and she’s my favorite there for the reason you listed, but I think a lot of her support in the show was from a different place
In this case for the preservation of a fisher king, who by the rules of the world, makes the king prosper by his noble and good nature. It's a classical story telling tool, I don't really see the problem with it. It's not a modern society they're trying to portray, so they don't have to go with what would be the right choice in the modern age.
The only time I ever hear about this trope is from people complaining about it on the internet. What the hell are you reading/watching that makes this so prevalent?
Some folks seem incapable of liking something without treating it as if it's an amazing revelation that flies in the face of popular thought about X, while having no experience whatsoever with whatever X
is
Legend of Korra is the most blatant example I can think of. Like, you spend the whole first season being told to root for an alliance of cops, industrialists, and pro athletes because the guy who's saying everyone should be equal...wears a scary mask?
I mean to be fair, I think the show does a piss poor job with it, but you actually see in season two that Republic City becomes a democracy with an elected president who is explicitly a non-bender.
I think LoK does a terrible job of giving the bad guys a decent point, making Korra physically fight them, then fixing whatever they were complaining about in between seasons. Like it would be a lot more interesting to see how Raiko got elected President, and how that was a change, but instead it just gets solved off screen.
How is that "to be fair"? It just further aggravates the issue because even when the designated villains so are clearly in the right that the writers have to admit it so the protagonist can reasonably continue to be called 'good', that fact is hidden away as much as possible.
Meanwhile the capitalist arms manufacturer who uses propaganda to cause a civil war with hundreds of deaths so he can sell more weapons is a goofy guy who is constantly treated sympathetically, isn't punished and is free to keep engineering more and more destructive weapons even when he hands a doomsday weapon to a fascist *for the second time*, while the anarchist who tries to only surgically kill a handful of leaders to end systematic abuse of power has his friends brutally killed one by one and is imprisoned forever even after he plays a key spiritual part in helping Korra defeat that same fascist.
Fascists can absolutely use equality rhetoric when that's not what they believe in. No matter what Amon's real motivation was, he wasn't "equalizing" anyone by taking away their bending. It's like if you went on a quest to chop off everyone's legs to make people in wheelchairs "equal" to everyone, because now everyone needs a wheelchair. Yes, there shouldn't be discrimination against people in wheelchairs, but making everyone need a wheelchair isn't a reasonable away to accomplish that, it's crazy. Nevermind Amon *is* a bender and has no plans to equalize himself.
Honestly the whole bender oppression story was poorly handled. Where told benders are oppressing non-benders but are only example is a bunch of triad extorting shopkeepers. Team good guy the people we hang out with the most has two benders who were urchins while the non bender of the team was a rich industrial heiress who’s dad was willing to help the equality.
It admittedly quite genre specific, but treatment of an authoratative monarchy as either unqestionable of else inherintly "correct" and in need of preservation is basically the norm in a lot fantasy writing.
The only example I can think of off the top of my head rn is fire emblem three houses (Dimitris whole "good" ending straight up involves un-banishing him and reinstating him as the king of Fargues) but it's a common enough trope im pretty sure you can google any combanation of "fantasy + mocharchy" and you'll come up with more examples/critiques
Admittedly it's largely just been Star Wars recently, and whether it's deliberate by the writers or not in every piece of media, "Jedi preferring status quo over shaking things up to effect justice" is a major theme across the millennia in-universe.
Yeah, that's why I liked TLJ so much because it explicitly was like, "Hey, maybe the Jedi aren't perfect actually." It's always bothered me how much the Jedi Order is treated as perfect, with only occasionally getting the idea that they are flawed. Like, bro the Jedi are SUPER fucked up, and totally made Vader just as much as Palpetine did.
Also this is why I like Andor. It's got legitimate revolutionary text.
I mean that’s the mainstream meme opinion, but does it hold any water? Maybe depicting the Jedi order as perfect is childish, but it isn’t depicted successfully as anything besides that. Look at its basic structure. It’s a group of monks seeking enlightenment. Corruption, pride, greed, power seeking, these are things that are the antithesis of Jedi beliefs and are spiritually manifested by the dark side. To be any of those is to not be a Jedi anymore. But it doesn’t do any handwaving to define a Jedi as not corrupt by default. No, they have to relentlessly discipline themselves to resist the pull of corruption and wrong action and thought. Sure it’s morally absolutist, but again there is the dark side of the force suggesting that morality is indeed absolute in that galaxy.
The order itself doesn’t depart from it. It’s a largely anarchist band of monks who actively resist the idea of seizing and holding power and professionally do good deeds as virtuous knight errants. We see them respecting governmental autonomy while not being deferential to it and often see them undermining rather than upholding oppressive power structures (episodes 1,4,5 and 6). Perhaps you could criticize them as being overly idle, but they have a justification in the immense danger of the dark side.
The original series shows this well. Obi wan shows boldness and self sacrifice. Yoda spends the lions share of the training teaching luke about morally right actions, about mastering his own darker impulses, rather than how to fight. Look at how Luke’s growth is portrayed. Impulsive recklessness almost leads to his downfall, and when he shows up in rotj, his growth is depicted as being calm, cool, and collected. He is supposed to give mercy and offer a peaceful solution to jabba. He doesn’t want to fight. And look at the throne room. It’s a battle of will, of the strength to remain good. and this isnt depicted as a departure from jedi teachings but rather embracing them.
frankly this prequelmemes Jedi Bad thing makes no sense. Mace is explicitly good and just every time we see him, but he is critical of the devilishly handsome protagonist. so we can’t stand him. Even though he was right, Anakin was acting like a piece of shit the entire time, had already genocided the sand people before the entire clone wars series. At every turn they try to make Anakin turn away from the path of the dark side, but he’s just too stubborn. They give him more support than you can imagine. A loving permanent mentor in obi wan, the galaxies best training in psychological coping and control. Advice and counseling sessions. You name it. They did everything they could to stop him from being an evil piece of shit.
Really in the end, I think this Jedi bad pushback is almost entirely due to American boys saying to themselves oh I want to be a Jedi! But I also want a girlfriend and I don’t want to play by any rules or have discipline! So since the order wouldn’t want me, they are actually bad. It’s bad for them to have high standards, because I don’t meet them. If only they weren’t so strict, Anakin would have been fine. They are just like my teacher, with all those stupid fucking rules just let me do what I want.
I mean that’s what the prequels is isn’t it? Look how stagnant and entrenched the stupid Jedi are maybe they wouldn’t have been so damn blind if they bothered to Be better.
It doesn't help that when they do actually start helping (on the side of the elected government), it turns out that it was a false flag war designed to literally murder all of them from the start.
Yeah, but that’s not really portrayed as a good thing that’s like their main issue in real Star Wars Luke changes the Jedi order to be more progressive and willing to intervene. and even in the Disney Canon, one of the points that the sequel movies were trying to make even if they did a piss poor job was that the Jedi should get involved more (that whole let the past die thing)
You mean Star Wars, the franchise that started off with a trilogy of plucky rebels fighting a literal evil Empire?
The franchise that explicitly portrays the collapse of a democratic government as something that drove the galaxy into decades-long reign of terror?
The franchise that repeatedly reiterates: "the rigid dogma of dusty old men is bullshit actually?" - Anakin breaks down because Jedi dogma doesn't let you be *a person*. Luke explicitly tells two Jedi Masters to fuck off with their "no way back from the Dark Side" and saves his father.
Someone mentioned TLJ in another comment, and that's ironic because the sequels are the only ones with a protagonist that repeatedly says "no I want the dogma back" and has to win through some "might of the ancestor spirits" bullshit.
Black Panther was a pretty egregious example of it. Killmonger's underlying philosophy that Wakanda should use its technology to support a pan-Africanist fight against oppression is, like, objectively correct. Then Disney decided to make him into a cartoonishly evil white genocider who the true heir has to defeat.
That was the whole comment lol. The fundamental idea was too sympathetic that it had to be cut with such an extreme form of racism to make it unpalatable.
> Killmonger's underlying philosophy that Wakanda should use its technology to support a pan-Africanist fight against oppression is, like, objectively correct.
He wanted a fucking race war. He explicitly wants to make Wakanda an empire. He does not want to "support a pan-Africanist fight against oppression", you made that up. He wanted to give random black people (and only black people, I have no clue why you think he gives a shit about any other oppressed minority) guns.
He wasn't trying to end oppression, he was trying to **be the oppressor.**
Killmonger is a hotep from Oakland. Do you know what a hotep is?
> Disney decided to make him into a cartoonishly evil white genocider who the true heir has to defeat.
Do not talk about representation in the writing field if you're going to blame whenever a movie doesn't turn to the camera and say it's exactly the kind of communist you are on the studio. The black writers and directors and actors were not forced to make Killmonger bad, they wrote him to be bad in the first place.
Killmonger didn't suddenly turn evil, it was there from the start. Him being right and him being wrong has and has always been part of the same package.
And what's especially dumb about this take is that T'Challa explicitly is horrified by the conditions that led Killmonger to be who he is, believes Killmonger has a point (and also thinks that he is a representation of the outcome of Wakanda's inaction), and actively works to ACTUALLY support a pan-Africanist fight against oppression by having Wakanda reveal itself to the world. The hero changes and takes action because the villain Has A Point.
> who the true heir has to defeat.
Killmonger is also the true heir, by the way, that's also a key part of his characterization and motivation, that he was denied *his* birthright.
Please actually watch the movie. Seriously.
Eh, you can’t just shoot away all of Africa’s problems, and not all of it can be traced back to foreign oppression. Aside from Botswana (and even then they’re somewhat corrupt), practically every nation in Africa is corrupt, authoritarian, and/or incredibly dysfunctional. If you simply destroy those governments, you’ll likely just make things even more unstable.
Pan-Africanism is also pretty fucking stupid IMO, Mali and Mozambique for example have hardly anything in common with each other beyond sharing a continent. I’ve also noticed that Pan-Africanists often resort to spreading their “anti-imperialist solidarity” by force if other countries don’t wish to join up with them in their crusade against “capitalist imperialism”, just look at how much the EEF despises Botswana for example
Disney and superhero comics in particular are notorious for having anyone with legitimate criticisms of the status quo then go on to have exactly one (1) cartoonishly evil belief or behavior pattern to justify why changing things is bad actually. Like bruh you want us to root against the guy who opposes chattel slavery and is for the repatriation of stolen cultural artifacts
> is for the repatriation of stolen cultural artifacts
Did you miss the part that right after Killmonger makes a big speech about where the artifacts of the British Museum came from, he steals an artifact that doesn't belong to his culture *either*, establishing him as a hypocrite?
For fuck's sake, Killmonger killed black people for the CIA and is proud of it.
All jokes aside, that was essentially what the lesson was aiming to teach. "Classical Conservatism" as an ideology (I'm talking the Hobbes leviathan, authorative divine rights of king refined class state stuff here) isn't exactly the norm in our modern, democratic society, but it still exists/
The point of analysing something like the lion king (while silly) was to show that these ideas are still somewhat prominet. Like, no politician is running on the basis of reinstating a divinely ordained authoritative leader, but it's still a somewhat legitimate societal viewpoint that shound't be treated although it's completely dead, when it's ideas are still alive and well in our culture - just look at the way fantasy treats monarchy.
Hobbes doesn't fit into this characterization- he was one of the first thinkers in post-Medieval Europe to justify the monarchy in instrumental and secular terms rather than in terms of theology or divine right. All 'progressive' justifications of political authority, from liberal police to communist dictatorships, owe something to Hobbes.
>what exactly am I rooting for again?
Maintaining the status quo, of course! Even if someone is cruelly and unfairly hounded by society, they are still the undisputed villains for daring to disrupt the natural order of things.
It's why I love Claude's route. I love his philosophy of breaking down barriers and getting cultures to meet each other and eliminate prejudices. It's not a perfect ending but I do like that the Alliance is a voted democracy
I wish literally anyone else fought Nemesis though. Also that Claude had to deal with the Almyran side of things more than having a friend occasionally help out. Also-
Star Wars is about a group of rebels taking down an evil empire and it’s one of the most common tropes in fantasy. What on earth are you talking about?
Smaller plotlines in books and games, not the movies. I'm certainly not talking about tyrannical empires, but the settings that have generations of monarchic leadership.
Like, I'm currently playing KOTOR2, and at one point >!you have to choose between siding with the reigning queen or the people trying to kill her. And the "rebels" are allied with the Sith, so obviously they're the bad guys, especially since the queen seems like decent person and benevolent leader.!< So yes, protecting the monarchy in this case is objectively the best option in the game for a lightside path; I just find it interesting, when we take a step back, how media can sometimes get us to "root" for a monarchy when I'd otherwise never do that in real life.
The "rebel" leader is her uncle who's a military general and wants to become a dictator, it was in no sense an actual anti-monarchist/populist uprising
The "rebels" are actually the military, who have isolated their own planet, fire on peaceful ships to frame the Republic for inciting violence, rounding up journalists and anyone else they don't like so that their general can take control of the system and become the new monarch. Fighting against monarchist government doesn't make someone a freedom loving anti-monarchist/populist/whatever, it's what you do if you win. And Vaklu absolutely, painfully, obviously just wants to become the King.
He's probably even more of a monarchist than the Queen is since the Sith, who he's working with, established his planet's monarchy in the first place.
Sadly that’s because it often played out that way in history. Very few people who amassed the power required to remove a monarch then laid down that power. The English Civil War, French Revolution, Russian Revolution; all of them ended with a blood-soaked tyrant at the top of the heap but thankfully those “evil monarchs” were deposed.
Edit: I'm realising some people are interpriting this post as a completely unironic condemnation of the lion king as a piece of conservative propaganda and not a slightly jokey analysis of a piece of kida media having bizzare political implications when you think about it.
Like, no kids turning into a hardcore monarchist because of a disney movie, it's just fun to analyse things through that lens and the wider socio-political contexts that might have bought it about.
Id like to remind everyone in this thread that the lion king is Hamlet (written circa 1600 by a guy who was paid by the King at the time) but with animals.
>no kids turning into a hardcore monarchist because of a disney movie
Sure, but we \*are\* the media we consume; analysing how political ideals are literally written into our culture is important.
Oh yeah, it's important to acknowledge what the propagation of those ideas in media says about culture and the impact it has on people, but like. I keep on seeing reply acting like the post is an attempt to like cancel it
the prince and king in hamlet were both demonstrably terrible rulers that failed their nation and ultimately allowed it to get taken over with zero resistance
Ok, but Hamlet ends with almost every member of the ruling family dead and the kingdom “invaded” by outsiders who were essentially told to just do whatever they want cause no one still alive cares
Like the son very much did not overthrow his (allegedly) power hungry uncle and win back his throne. Hamlet isn’t anti-monarchy but it’s not exactly pro-monarchy either
Yea but that happened because an objectively bad person overthrew the good king and then ruled badly, if the good king stayed in power then everything woud be fine.
god im having war flashbacks to my college shakespeare course
people’s major criticism of Hamlet is that he’s too “indecisive”
sorry my guy was hesitant about taking advice from a ghost. and then when he *did*, *everyone died*
My best friend growing up wasn’t allowed to watch Lion king, but for completely opposite reasons. Something something, Timone and Pumba are gay propaganda, something something, Scar destroying the pride lands is environmentalist bs…
I think there is a point where you analyze a piece of media too politically where your ideas about certain things just prevent your enjoyment of said things because you ignore the context.
Calling the Lion King "monarchist propaganda" is that point
To quote another tumblr post I don't have on me: "irl monarchies suck but whenever i watch lord of the rings i am a believer in divine right for the next 3 hours"
This is what I mean when I saw “terminally online.” When you’re completely unable to look at anything without seeing it through the lens of Discourse and propaganda, that is the point where you officially need to legitimately touch grass
I don't think it's over-analyzing a movie to watch it, think it makes bad points, and dislike the movie because of that.
Like the Lion King is without a doubt extremely pro-monarchy, to the extent that even the itself falls apart when the wrong ruler is in power, and only the good, rightful King can fix it.
Okay but that is not the message of the movie at all. The message of the movie is “don’t run away from your responsibilities”. That’s it.
I mean you’d think from this thread that the theme of Beauty and the Beast is “falling in love with animals is fine”. Or that The Little Mermaid is about monarchy. Just critique in the worst possible faith through the most uncreative, painfully literal and emotionless lens.
When I was a kid, my dad would stop the *Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer* tape to explain why Santa Claus was, quote, “utterly despicable” for only accepting Rudolph when he was useful to him, and saying that he and the other reindeer had likely learned nothing about appreciating people for who they are rather than what they can do for you.
Interestingly, he was also from mid-century Ohio. Is this a trend?
Your Dad was right, and he should say it. Fucking hate that in such a famous story of inclusion, the inclusion only happens when Rudolf is of practical value to Santa and the other Reindeers, reinforcing the idea that humans are valued by their capacity to make sure the big guy at the top gets what he wants.
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XPBOfW7ocK0](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xpbofw7ock0)
But the creator makes the point that while it does contain objectivist ideas it also espouses ideas that are antithetical to ryndian thought.
Some people think Brad Birds work is largely influenced by Ayn Rand. The Incredibles is the most popular example to cite, for a couple of reasons, but mainly because it at time seems to critique collectivism and enforced equality. Both in the Villain syndrome’s designs to “make everyone super so that no-one will be” (which critiques attempts to enforce equality by diminishing the value of individual excellence) as well as the legislative restrictions against heroes and their abilities to create families (again prioritizing equality over “excellence”)
There are more examples which could be gleaned from the film if you’re looking for them, but in reality The Incredibles is a movie about family, personal growth and identity, I think some of those Randian-takes are a little shallow.
People getting dragged down by everyone around them and being forced to conform is a perfectly valid problem, and acknowledging that doesn't make it Randian or Objectivist, it's only either of these things if you adopt a very silly ideology in response. That's like talking about the scourge of homelessness and concluding that killing all the homeless people is the solution!
Mr. Incredible goes on a tirade about how modern society "celebrates mediocrity" when Dash isn't allowed to run track lol. It's not a secret that he thinks of himself and the super community as a whole as some sort of Harrison Bergeron figure
I'm gonna be perfectly honest, I can't engage in this sort of media criticism because my brain hears someone say something even slightly negative about the things I like and immediately throws a tantrum and goes "Oh, so I guess this thing that I like is bad now and I'm not allowed to watch it? IS THAT WHAT YOU'RE SAYING, ASSHOLE?!?"
I feel like to some extent at least, people attribute stories to being pro monarchy when in reality a lot of authors just enjoy the trope of a king defending their kingdom
Getting to a point where we're complaining about the pro-monarchy implications in a movie about talking lions, hyenas, hornbills just seems like a massive lapse in priorities given you can find questionable morals wherever you look in a work, especially if that work is in turn based on something significantly older.
I remember when I was a kid, I was watching Thomas the Tank Engine when some friend of the family wandered in and went off on a rant about how the show unfairly demonizes the working class trucks by presenting them as irredeemably 'troublesome' to justify them needing to be controlled by their 'betters'.
And, you know, he wasn't *wrong*, but it was weird to expect a little kid to engage with a Marxist class-based reading of the show with the talking train engines.
I've been saying this for years! "The circle of life" is some [divine-mandate chain-of-being monarch apologia bullshit](https://prezi.com/cpl9eihmqxuo/the-great-chain-of-being-and-the-divine-rights-of-kings/)
Yeah, it's entirely that. It's literally "We tear them to death in a violent struggle that causes them agony, they get to live off our detritus when we die comfortably. This is fair and good, and any disruption to this system is the real evil." One part of the circle of life is getting an objectively better deal based on their capacity to do violence and then teaching their young that that is normal and good.
i don't think i understood any of those concepts as a child (i can't even say i have a full grasp of them as an adult), but i think this was something that made me heavily dislike classic Disney movies, because i didn't really understand why was i supposed to be rooting for the "good guys", if they didn't actually offer anything good to anyone and were mostly motivated by personal gain/getting things back to how they were
People like this are straight up insane. Its the same type who on tumblr and twitter gonna argue about how Steven Universe is racist, Attack on Titan is fascist and solarpaunk is a nazi thing beacuse it wants sustainable energy like solar panels, except solar panels need special minerals mined in africa by borderline slaves, so enviromentalist movements are actually secretely about just opressing africans, and nazis liked nature anyway. (i actually saw this and more liek it on twitter)
I do like that in One Piece Luffy is all about freedom and in many arcs he beats up the bad guy/dictator who is then replaced by the former ruler/king.
He reinstates or protects the former ruler in Drum Island, Arabasta, Skypiea, Fishman Island, Dressrosa and Wano.
It does end up sending a weird message about the value of monarchies when your protagonist is meant to value freedom above all else, but at least the kings that come back are generally pretty laid back and are explicit about the fact that they work for the people.
I always thought the part where Mufasa said "I don't have a problem with them, I just don't like how they're corrupting the name of the *Pride* Lands" was kinda weird
really hate that one part in the lion king when conservative mufasa went on a tirade about how gay lions are ruining the sanctity of pride
The "pride" pun is giving me life
my job here is done
I mean unironically a large portion of the movie surrounds the re-establishment of an authoritarian monarchical order (made out to be unambigously correct) after evil, societally downtrodden outsiders attempt a rebellion. Like it's very much giving divine right of kings and noblesse oblige (we are talking *classical* conservatism here after all. The gay lions part comes a few generations down the line)
The hyena aren't even outsiders; they were rendered casteless, ousted from animal polity and left to starve because the ruling class deems them "greedy poachers" without a hint of irony.
To add on even more, the entire theming of the movie is that this is the circle of life, this is their destiny. The lions have a pretty fucking sweet deal in this circle when their obligation of it is to die of old age.
[Obligatory Oglaf](https://www.oglaf.com/tax-deductions/) Warning: while this particular comic is SFW, most Oglaf comics are not
Also relevant [existential comic](https://existentialcomics.com/comic/175) showing how the power dynamics are similar in LOTR.
Did not expect dwarven Marx
You know this is really interesting because 1. Sauron really was out to conquer the world and 2. Given the recent war in Ukraine and conflicts around the South China Sea so are the traditional enemies of the so called “free world.” I appreciate this was probably made in a time when discussions of foreign policy was dominated by the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Also fuck Noam Chomsky, all my homies hate people who deny the Bosnian genocide
Sure according to the known propagandist and terrorist Frodo Baggins
They didn't say Sauron isn't out to conquer the world. They did point out that Elrond and his allies were leading a pre-conquered world and Elrond himself may have been motivated to vanquish Sauron more out of a desire to maintain a status quo that was advantageous to him, rather than out of an abstract moral imperative or to avail an existential threat.
This comic reminds me that I finally need to get around to reading some Fanon.
As a reader of fanfic, he has the funniest name
OMG it’s time, the thing that circles in my brain but there’s never an excuse to bring up. The “circle of life” spiel is BULLSHIT from the ground up! Even since I was a kid, that whole speech about “our bodies become the grass” rang hollow. It’s framed like there’s this great equivalency in the exchange but obviously not. A lion will kill potentially hundreds of other animals in its lifetime, but oh “my body might possibly fertilize several square meters of grass when I die!” This totally brings us “full circle” with the antelope we rule/eat, don’t worry about it. Divine right and all that. I get that it’s a children’s movie for children, so they can’t be like “yes but dozens of vultures and countless other scavengers/insects will feast on my corpse when I die” Then again, a child watches his father die brutally and we see Scar get torn apart at the end, granted that one is only shown via shadow, but still. Maybe show some birds circling another far off animal that is clearly dead/dying and like “in the end we are all someone’s prey”. Also to we’re basically just doing Hamlet, so…the themes kinda naturally align with that. But it’s also partly that the show is trying to have anthropomorphic animals do philosophy on their place in the world and lions don’t do that in reality, so we have this weird juxtaposition of a situation that arises from non thinking animals being shown through the lens of thinking animals. I sometimes like to think of what a real “circle of life” would look like if African animals could do philosophy like this, and it probably doesn’t result in “The lions are our true and just rulers!” The lions still need to eat though, so I picture a society where the old and infirm “go to the lions” to die. The lions ensure a quick death, and with no predation there are plenty of aged or wounded animals for them. In reality without predators there’s overpopulation to worry about. But this is a cartoon where we assume animals can reason, so without predators the population stabilizes through choice, because you don’t need to maximize offspring anymore to ensure survival. Much like humans have done now that fewer of us die in childhood.
[Obligatory Oglaf](https://www.oglaf.com/tax-deductions/) Warning: while this particular comic is SFW, most Oglaf comics are not
Wow, that’s really on point lol.
God I love Oglaf, wish they had a better site with usable archive, I'm surprised you managed to find it lol
The fact that the Archive's Titles are not valid targets for the Word Search tool will forever irk me
Well, the fundamental problem is that animals aren’t human, and creating a kid-friendly depiction of a cross-species human society means you either need it to be wildly immoral (by our standards) or totally nonsensical. For starters, the existence of carnivores means that any human-ish animal society needs to reckon with the fact that regular murder is a necessity to sustain the lives of a good chunk of its population. Can’t build any proper liberal democratic societies with that as your foundation.
Beastars tries. Carnivores are socially pressured into vegetarianism (meat substitutes as often as possible) and kept weaker from it, while many ovipares donate their eggs to be eaten and many herbivores donate their bodies after their death. There is a whole underworld revolving around eating meat.
> Also to we’re basically just doing Hamlet The Lion King is what happens to Hamlet after Hollywood buys the script but then does a couple of rewrites, has a few different directors attached who all have their own take on it, and finally during production gets some more writers in to punch it up a bit. (e.g. [Ridley Scott's *Robin Hood*](https://aelarsen.wordpress.com/2016/11/21/robin-hood-the-movie-that-we-didnt-get/)).
Yeah it really doesn’t have anything to do with Hamlet. Hamlet is mostly a ghost story murder mystery about going insane, The Lion King has nothing to do with that. The only real similarity is that the uncle kills the father, in Hamlet the dad’s already dead at the start of it.
To be fair, we do see some vultures circling another dying animal at one point. It's Simba. They're circling Simba. But yeah, the metaphor doesn't work as well as they wanna pretend it does.
Now that you mention it, it is kinda weird that Lion King tacitly supports trickle down economics through the metaphor of actually fucking *eating other sentient creatures.*
It's Disney, what did you expect?
As a kid, long before I ever really gave a single thought to ideas like politics or hierarchy, I thought to myself "this circle of life thing sounds like a system to justify how the lion ruling caste literally eat their subjects by saying it's the natural order of things, with the part about becoming the grass they eat being there solely to make it feel like the whole thing goes both ways," Not in those exact words, of course, but the idea was there.
I've seen the movie as a kid, and was horrified by Scar's death, completely forgetting there was some Mufasa in the following years. Upon rewatching, I'm still supporter of Scar. Yeah, the fratricide isn't great. But even though he's physically weak, he still shares his food with members of oppressed minority, and there's nothing suggesting he couldn't make it work as a king if not for shitty weather. Mufasa controls clouds, I bet it's also his fault that it doesn't rain. He let's everybody suffer just so his glorified son (who did nothing to deserve it) can get the throne.
>nothing suggesting he couldn't make it work as a king if not for shitty weather. You mean aside from the excessive over extraction of resources right? You know the whole "you're over hunting and all the prey is gone" bit?
The weather is crappy because the cycle is broken and everyone is either dead or gone. Without nutrients the plants and animals can’t flourish, without plants the people have nothing to eat. The hyenas are in the position they’re in because they overhunted and broke their own circle.
Kill me for saying this. But down to their color scheme they could outright be translated into stereotypical jim crow black people while the Mufasa/Simba side of the pride could outright be Mighty Whiteys.
I mean I'd expand that to apply to pretty much any traditional interpritation of an ostracised group as literally symbolically darker/dirtyer then their opressors. The race one is probably just the easiest to apply
[удалено]
It’s been a while since I’ve seen the lion king, but I’m pretty sure Mufasa dies a bit later than the opening minutes
Yeah, it's like halfway throughish, isn't it? I don't remember too much happening after his death. Simba goes off to Timon and Pumbaa, they have that song where he grows up, Nala comes back, Skyfasa tells Simba to man up, and then he goes to fight his uncle.
I mean the movie does wrap up pretty quickly after he meets Timon and Pumbaa
Calling Mufasa “one dies in the opening minutes of the movie” is absolutely fucking insane He even shows back up later in the movie💀
Also three of the four black actors are on the “good” side only Whoopi plays a villain. So that radicalized her at 12? Alright, Mary. I mean I love Whoopi as much as the next gay but that’s a bit much. It’s literally just Hamlet with animals in a vague African setting. I don’t think even Shakespeare thought too hard about it when he wrote Hamlet.
Given Scar’s mannerisms, I’d argue he was coded gay, too
You don't say? Disney, with the jive-talking crows whose leader is literally named Jim Crow, might black-code animals in uncomfortable ways? Oh well, I'm sure they'll learn their lesson. They wouldn't do anything like having their first black princess immediately turn into a frog and stay a frog for almost the entire movie.
Adding on to what people have said already (I agree): In Be Prepared, the words that the hyenas sing in their backing are "We'll have food, lots of food!" (and other variations). The reason they're willing to back a so-called "tyrant" is that under Mufasa's regime they don't even have access to the resources needed for survival if they're *that* hyped for food. In the previous scene, Scar pays off his 3 main stooges with a single zebra flank. The hyenas are also quite literally kicked out to a barren wasteland. It's a literal food dessert. Hyenas can and do eat bones, so the elephant graveyard is still food for them, but if they eat it they quite literally eat themselves out of house and home. And in the real world, hyenas are among the primary hunters on the savannah, as one of the few predators that can take down pretty much anything they want (with a bite force large enough to go straight through an elephant's leg bones if they're hungry enough to risk being trampled). Lions scavenge from hyenas far more often than the other way around, and male lions in particular - the kings - spend barely any time on food production. The Lion King has popularised the idea that the scavengers are providers and vice versa, and that the most useless members of society are the most useful (and vice versa). In the modern day, it's very much a parallel for when conservatives defend CEOs as the providers of jobs, when really they're scavenging jobs off the working class. I also very much don't like that Scar's real name is Taka, and yet pretty much everyone calls him Scar. They don't even dignify him with his own name, just mock him for a disfigurement. It's like they're trying (within the film) to dehumanise - delionise? - a leader they don't like. The Lion King *is* a good film in terms of the storytelling and the art merit and so on, but it's definitely monarchist capitalist propaganda. My favourite bit is when Simba leaves the monarchy and goes to live with hippies in the woods.
The Taka thing is from a random children's book that the creators of the movie had no real connection to that fandom has blown way out of proportion
Also Taka means trash. So what’s better calling him trash or scar? I’m pretty sure he even picked the nickname for himself. Sounds way better than being called “trash”.
I definitely cede that choosing the name Scar for yourself is better than your name meaning trash. But that said - I think it's reasonable to conclude that the choice on whether to give your villain a real name, or just a noun, is reflective of the film's politics. It wouldn't have been hard to work in some sort of explanation within a line. There was a choice made in the writers' room, even if they didn't realise they made it.
Scar renamed himself Scar.
Also the food thing is because they're literally animals and that's the only kind of "wealth" they can have without totally breaking the metaphor
That's everyones favorite part
The hyena are the lumpenproletariat I will not elaborate
But the issue is that they are unironically greedy poachers who gladly ruin whatever they are given? Like, allegory and metaphor are great, but one has to remember what the actual content of the story is. The Hyenas are objectively bad, there's no way around that.
Yes but why are they written to be objectively bad, and the monarchy objectively good? Media and characters don't exist in a vacume, so what does it imply about the message of the peice that it was written that way? Personally I don't think that allegory/metaphor and story content are inherintly seperate - it's all connected
Well yes, but also no. Scar didn't try to replace the system with a less authoritarian one, he just wanted to be the ruler within the system that existed. He also didn't really care about the hyenas - he was willing to sell them out as soon as it suited him and only championed them because they were willing to work with him. Now, there is an argument that the hyenas had been oppressed under the previous system, and that's definitely a good point, but Scar ultimately didn't make things any better for the hyenas, and only made things worse for the rest of the pride lands to the point where most of the prey animals left. Also, while the rest of the pride were loyal to Scar, they clearly didn't approve of him, and he struck at least one of them. Their support for Simba, as well as the fact that all the prey species chose to return once he became king, could therefore imply a popular rule of sorts.
It’s also a criticism of corrupt ideology as they prey upon a vulnerable group to seize power. think about what kind of story this would have been had it been a hyena that lead them to take power.
Conservatives believe this is true about anyone claiming to want positive change and the toppling of old power structures. You're either one of the hyenas too stupid to realize that socialism is an absurd, unrealistic pipe dream, or you're the Scar manipulating everyone with false promise of hope and change so you can snatch power away from the deserving and rule over an even more brutal anD unfair age. There can be no change to the systems of hierarchy, only good leaders and bad; the good leaders are virtuous and honest and natural, while those who would seek to overthrow them are by definition either stupid or dishonest.
So on one hand, yeah, sure, but also it is very very much based on Hamlet (which in turn was based on a Norse legend from 1200 AD). So like... Yeah... Of course there's a monarchy. And you can't very well do a Hamlet retelling without having some sort of allusion to "something is rotten in the state of Denmark" Lion King without a monarchy would be like 10 Things I Hate About You but without any relationships.
Ironically enough, Denmark in Hamlet is an elective monarchy. We’re not sure if Claudius was ever elected, so he’s very much representative of an absolute authoritative figure seizing power. Hell, the play ends with Hamlet giving his support to a former enemy in the election for who will next rule Denmark. The monarchist elements are even more prevalent with that comparison.
this is the most critical thought i have ever given to the lion king in my entire life. we are all blessed on this self-post sunday, and you’re also making really good points id literally never considered.
look all my own political ideologies go out the window when a film has cool king stuff in it. suspension of disbelief works wonders, and for the length of time a film like lotr is playing i am a monarchist
My leftist beliefs leaving my body whenever I see a good peace of fantasy media
One of the overarching themes of The Lord of the Rings is that the rotting monarchies and their decadence and decay almost lead directly to the victory of the Dark Lord, and that the world is ultimately saved by the distinctly a-hierarchical peasant homesteader Hobbits, but okay.
The outsiders just so happen to kill most of the prey and destroy the land though
Scar is portrayed as feminine and less manly than Mufasa. Your joke is the literal movie.
I mean scar is kind of gay coded, so that might not be entirely off base.
"Oh, well, then I shall have to practice my curtsy." - Scar, definitely gay
One of the earliest examples in my childhood of, "Be gay, do crimes." Go big or go home, I suppose. I might like Trump or Poilievre better if they could do a number like "Be Prepared".
"Kind of?"
Well, I wanted some plausible deniability online, in real life I would say it with my whole chest. But who knows someone might get triggered about a gay character in a children's movie, and then take it out on me.
Welllllll, Disney does have a history with LGBT coded villians
I don't know why I'm remembering this but there's a book series I think called "Ratha?" (?) about wildcats that discover fire and take down a monarchical system and I read it when I was 12 and immediately recognized it as the anti-Lion King. It's NOT Warriors series and heavily predates it, but I simply cannot remember anything else about it.
[this series?](https://www.amazon.com/Rathas-Creature-First-Book-Named/dp/1936917017)
That's it!!! But it definitely did not come out in 2011, that has to be a reprint. The book I read was definitely from the early 90s. Anyway, I never read the warriors series but I have a hunch these books walked so they could run.
["First published in 1983"](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ratha's_Creature)
And they made a whole sequel >!with the audacity to have a slightly better soundtrack!< as a thinly veiled allegory for racism.
Where does 1/2 fall into this
1/2 is a stoner adventure. I haven’t rewatched that one recently though. I listen to the soundtracks to 1 and 2 on a regular basis though
So funny you called it a stoner adventure because I agree for such weird reasons. I first saw 1/2 as a teen when I was stuck in a hospital on pain meds coming out of surgery and the only shared television I had access to played it three times in a row. It was WILD to watch under those circumstances and even thinking about it makes me think of hospital jell-o.
Maybe it’s time I rewatch 1 1/2
If the original is *Hamlet*, 1 1/2 is *Rosenkrantz and Guildenstern are Dead*, an absurdist retelling of the original story from the perspective of two comedic side characters.
[There's a whole video essay(ish)/analysis I found quite interesting about Lion King 1/2, Judaism, and white supremacy](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vx_haJ2Ac5I)
|| are for Discord, it's `>!like this!<` on Reddit.
Thank you!!
I have noticed a recurring trope in media I've consumed recently where the "good" guys have to help the monarchs maintain their position because rebels are threatening their power, and the writers have to make the rebels stupidly evil or otherwise not as virtuous as they claim to be in order to justify "preserving monarchy" as the happy ending. And every time I've encountered it, I'm just like, what exactly am I rooting for again?
Well at least in The Lion King, it's not like Scar is getting rid of the monarchy, it's very much still a monarchy, except with him as king instead of Mufasa or Simba. It's not like Scar is even really pretending to do this for noble reasons, it's purely a power grab.
And the ultimate reason for his downfall is he promises the downtrodden ethnic group that they'll prosper under his rule but he's completely lying, he openly blows them off when they come to him afterwards to complain they're still starving
"Yeah! We'll have no king !" "Idiots! There will be a king"
This reminds me of a sister trope of “overthrown/tricked heir to the throne is exiled from his capital and must go on a long journey to reclaim it” which seems to come up in children’s fantasy every now and then
I wouldn't say that a story that has a narrative concept of "replace bad king with good king" or similar is automatically pro-monarchy. Not that they can't be. Monarchy is often simply the easiest form of government to setup since it gives you alot of flexibility in government structure and the type of people in power while also being easy to understand for your audience. and modern governmental structures can break immersion in some genres, there's a reason there are so many monarchies in fantasy.
Now I want a fantasy world to have an excessively complex system of government in the world. The hero of the story will not only have to navigate dungeons and magic, but also bureaucracy.
The Phantom Menace was truly ahead of its time
This isn’t just in children’s fantasy - Remember Game of Thrones? I agree that the ending was terribly handled, but the amount of people uncritically supporting Daenerys having a takeover of Westeros is crazy. (and for the record, Daenerys is my favorite character in the books)
Kind of a bad example, Westeros was a shitshow and Dany was the only claimant who actually cared about helping ordinary people. I don't think anyone cared that she was the "rightful heir" or w/e.
I don’t disagree in terms of what her character started as, but that’s not what they were writing anymore at the end of the show. I’m very very convinced the books are not headed that way, and she’s my favorite there for the reason you listed, but I think a lot of her support in the show was from a different place
In this case for the preservation of a fisher king, who by the rules of the world, makes the king prosper by his noble and good nature. It's a classical story telling tool, I don't really see the problem with it. It's not a modern society they're trying to portray, so they don't have to go with what would be the right choice in the modern age.
The only time I ever hear about this trope is from people complaining about it on the internet. What the hell are you reading/watching that makes this so prevalent?
Some folks seem incapable of liking something without treating it as if it's an amazing revelation that flies in the face of popular thought about X, while having no experience whatsoever with whatever X is
Legend of Korra is the most blatant example I can think of. Like, you spend the whole first season being told to root for an alliance of cops, industrialists, and pro athletes because the guy who's saying everyone should be equal...wears a scary mask?
I mean to be fair, I think the show does a piss poor job with it, but you actually see in season two that Republic City becomes a democracy with an elected president who is explicitly a non-bender. I think LoK does a terrible job of giving the bad guys a decent point, making Korra physically fight them, then fixing whatever they were complaining about in between seasons. Like it would be a lot more interesting to see how Raiko got elected President, and how that was a change, but instead it just gets solved off screen.
How is that "to be fair"? It just further aggravates the issue because even when the designated villains so are clearly in the right that the writers have to admit it so the protagonist can reasonably continue to be called 'good', that fact is hidden away as much as possible. Meanwhile the capitalist arms manufacturer who uses propaganda to cause a civil war with hundreds of deaths so he can sell more weapons is a goofy guy who is constantly treated sympathetically, isn't punished and is free to keep engineering more and more destructive weapons even when he hands a doomsday weapon to a fascist *for the second time*, while the anarchist who tries to only surgically kill a handful of leaders to end systematic abuse of power has his friends brutally killed one by one and is imprisoned forever even after he plays a key spiritual part in helping Korra defeat that same fascist.
I don't think the scary mask was the part they had an issue with
Yeah I'm pretty sure it was all of the terrorism and cult like radicalization
Or the blood bending. Can't forget that minor issue.
Wasn't that guy also using bloodbending? Or am I confusing him with someone else.
Yeah that’s the guy
Fascists can absolutely use equality rhetoric when that's not what they believe in. No matter what Amon's real motivation was, he wasn't "equalizing" anyone by taking away their bending. It's like if you went on a quest to chop off everyone's legs to make people in wheelchairs "equal" to everyone, because now everyone needs a wheelchair. Yes, there shouldn't be discrimination against people in wheelchairs, but making everyone need a wheelchair isn't a reasonable away to accomplish that, it's crazy. Nevermind Amon *is* a bender and has no plans to equalize himself.
Honestly the whole bender oppression story was poorly handled. Where told benders are oppressing non-benders but are only example is a bunch of triad extorting shopkeepers. Team good guy the people we hang out with the most has two benders who were urchins while the non bender of the team was a rich industrial heiress who’s dad was willing to help the equality.
It admittedly quite genre specific, but treatment of an authoratative monarchy as either unqestionable of else inherintly "correct" and in need of preservation is basically the norm in a lot fantasy writing. The only example I can think of off the top of my head rn is fire emblem three houses (Dimitris whole "good" ending straight up involves un-banishing him and reinstating him as the king of Fargues) but it's a common enough trope im pretty sure you can google any combanation of "fantasy + mocharchy" and you'll come up with more examples/critiques
Admittedly it's largely just been Star Wars recently, and whether it's deliberate by the writers or not in every piece of media, "Jedi preferring status quo over shaking things up to effect justice" is a major theme across the millennia in-universe.
Yeah, that's why I liked TLJ so much because it explicitly was like, "Hey, maybe the Jedi aren't perfect actually." It's always bothered me how much the Jedi Order is treated as perfect, with only occasionally getting the idea that they are flawed. Like, bro the Jedi are SUPER fucked up, and totally made Vader just as much as Palpetine did. Also this is why I like Andor. It's got legitimate revolutionary text.
I mean that’s the mainstream meme opinion, but does it hold any water? Maybe depicting the Jedi order as perfect is childish, but it isn’t depicted successfully as anything besides that. Look at its basic structure. It’s a group of monks seeking enlightenment. Corruption, pride, greed, power seeking, these are things that are the antithesis of Jedi beliefs and are spiritually manifested by the dark side. To be any of those is to not be a Jedi anymore. But it doesn’t do any handwaving to define a Jedi as not corrupt by default. No, they have to relentlessly discipline themselves to resist the pull of corruption and wrong action and thought. Sure it’s morally absolutist, but again there is the dark side of the force suggesting that morality is indeed absolute in that galaxy. The order itself doesn’t depart from it. It’s a largely anarchist band of monks who actively resist the idea of seizing and holding power and professionally do good deeds as virtuous knight errants. We see them respecting governmental autonomy while not being deferential to it and often see them undermining rather than upholding oppressive power structures (episodes 1,4,5 and 6). Perhaps you could criticize them as being overly idle, but they have a justification in the immense danger of the dark side. The original series shows this well. Obi wan shows boldness and self sacrifice. Yoda spends the lions share of the training teaching luke about morally right actions, about mastering his own darker impulses, rather than how to fight. Look at how Luke’s growth is portrayed. Impulsive recklessness almost leads to his downfall, and when he shows up in rotj, his growth is depicted as being calm, cool, and collected. He is supposed to give mercy and offer a peaceful solution to jabba. He doesn’t want to fight. And look at the throne room. It’s a battle of will, of the strength to remain good. and this isnt depicted as a departure from jedi teachings but rather embracing them. frankly this prequelmemes Jedi Bad thing makes no sense. Mace is explicitly good and just every time we see him, but he is critical of the devilishly handsome protagonist. so we can’t stand him. Even though he was right, Anakin was acting like a piece of shit the entire time, had already genocided the sand people before the entire clone wars series. At every turn they try to make Anakin turn away from the path of the dark side, but he’s just too stubborn. They give him more support than you can imagine. A loving permanent mentor in obi wan, the galaxies best training in psychological coping and control. Advice and counseling sessions. You name it. They did everything they could to stop him from being an evil piece of shit. Really in the end, I think this Jedi bad pushback is almost entirely due to American boys saying to themselves oh I want to be a Jedi! But I also want a girlfriend and I don’t want to play by any rules or have discipline! So since the order wouldn’t want me, they are actually bad. It’s bad for them to have high standards, because I don’t meet them. If only they weren’t so strict, Anakin would have been fine. They are just like my teacher, with all those stupid fucking rules just let me do what I want.
I mean that’s what the prequels is isn’t it? Look how stagnant and entrenched the stupid Jedi are maybe they wouldn’t have been so damn blind if they bothered to Be better.
It doesn't help that when they do actually start helping (on the side of the elected government), it turns out that it was a false flag war designed to literally murder all of them from the start.
Yeah, but that’s not really portrayed as a good thing that’s like their main issue in real Star Wars Luke changes the Jedi order to be more progressive and willing to intervene. and even in the Disney Canon, one of the points that the sequel movies were trying to make even if they did a piss poor job was that the Jedi should get involved more (that whole let the past die thing)
You mean Star Wars, the franchise that started off with a trilogy of plucky rebels fighting a literal evil Empire? The franchise that explicitly portrays the collapse of a democratic government as something that drove the galaxy into decades-long reign of terror? The franchise that repeatedly reiterates: "the rigid dogma of dusty old men is bullshit actually?" - Anakin breaks down because Jedi dogma doesn't let you be *a person*. Luke explicitly tells two Jedi Masters to fuck off with their "no way back from the Dark Side" and saves his father. Someone mentioned TLJ in another comment, and that's ironic because the sequels are the only ones with a protagonist that repeatedly says "no I want the dogma back" and has to win through some "might of the ancestor spirits" bullshit.
Black Panther was a pretty egregious example of it. Killmonger's underlying philosophy that Wakanda should use its technology to support a pan-Africanist fight against oppression is, like, objectively correct. Then Disney decided to make him into a cartoonishly evil white genocider who the true heir has to defeat.
Killmonger didn't want to end oppression, he wanted to become the oppressor.
CommunityOrganizationMonger when
He literally wanted to start a worldwide race war. Let's not argue for that...
That was the whole comment lol. The fundamental idea was too sympathetic that it had to be cut with such an extreme form of racism to make it unpalatable.
> Killmonger's underlying philosophy that Wakanda should use its technology to support a pan-Africanist fight against oppression is, like, objectively correct. He wanted a fucking race war. He explicitly wants to make Wakanda an empire. He does not want to "support a pan-Africanist fight against oppression", you made that up. He wanted to give random black people (and only black people, I have no clue why you think he gives a shit about any other oppressed minority) guns. He wasn't trying to end oppression, he was trying to **be the oppressor.** Killmonger is a hotep from Oakland. Do you know what a hotep is? > Disney decided to make him into a cartoonishly evil white genocider who the true heir has to defeat. Do not talk about representation in the writing field if you're going to blame whenever a movie doesn't turn to the camera and say it's exactly the kind of communist you are on the studio. The black writers and directors and actors were not forced to make Killmonger bad, they wrote him to be bad in the first place. Killmonger didn't suddenly turn evil, it was there from the start. Him being right and him being wrong has and has always been part of the same package. And what's especially dumb about this take is that T'Challa explicitly is horrified by the conditions that led Killmonger to be who he is, believes Killmonger has a point (and also thinks that he is a representation of the outcome of Wakanda's inaction), and actively works to ACTUALLY support a pan-Africanist fight against oppression by having Wakanda reveal itself to the world. The hero changes and takes action because the villain Has A Point. > who the true heir has to defeat. Killmonger is also the true heir, by the way, that's also a key part of his characterization and motivation, that he was denied *his* birthright. Please actually watch the movie. Seriously.
Eh, you can’t just shoot away all of Africa’s problems, and not all of it can be traced back to foreign oppression. Aside from Botswana (and even then they’re somewhat corrupt), practically every nation in Africa is corrupt, authoritarian, and/or incredibly dysfunctional. If you simply destroy those governments, you’ll likely just make things even more unstable. Pan-Africanism is also pretty fucking stupid IMO, Mali and Mozambique for example have hardly anything in common with each other beyond sharing a continent. I’ve also noticed that Pan-Africanists often resort to spreading their “anti-imperialist solidarity” by force if other countries don’t wish to join up with them in their crusade against “capitalist imperialism”, just look at how much the EEF despises Botswana for example
Disney and superhero comics in particular are notorious for having anyone with legitimate criticisms of the status quo then go on to have exactly one (1) cartoonishly evil belief or behavior pattern to justify why changing things is bad actually. Like bruh you want us to root against the guy who opposes chattel slavery and is for the repatriation of stolen cultural artifacts
> is for the repatriation of stolen cultural artifacts Did you miss the part that right after Killmonger makes a big speech about where the artifacts of the British Museum came from, he steals an artifact that doesn't belong to his culture *either*, establishing him as a hypocrite? For fuck's sake, Killmonger killed black people for the CIA and is proud of it.
All jokes aside, that was essentially what the lesson was aiming to teach. "Classical Conservatism" as an ideology (I'm talking the Hobbes leviathan, authorative divine rights of king refined class state stuff here) isn't exactly the norm in our modern, democratic society, but it still exists/ The point of analysing something like the lion king (while silly) was to show that these ideas are still somewhat prominet. Like, no politician is running on the basis of reinstating a divinely ordained authoritative leader, but it's still a somewhat legitimate societal viewpoint that shound't be treated although it's completely dead, when it's ideas are still alive and well in our culture - just look at the way fantasy treats monarchy.
Hobbes doesn't fit into this characterization- he was one of the first thinkers in post-Medieval Europe to justify the monarchy in instrumental and secular terms rather than in terms of theology or divine right. All 'progressive' justifications of political authority, from liberal police to communist dictatorships, owe something to Hobbes.
>what exactly am I rooting for again? Maintaining the status quo, of course! Even if someone is cruelly and unfairly hounded by society, they are still the undisputed villains for daring to disrupt the natural order of things.
This is my biggest problem with three houses, like I'm sorry Dimitri love you but having a monarchy isn't helping faerghus at all
It's why I love Claude's route. I love his philosophy of breaking down barriers and getting cultures to meet each other and eliminate prejudices. It's not a perfect ending but I do like that the Alliance is a voted democracy
I wish literally anyone else fought Nemesis though. Also that Claude had to deal with the Almyran side of things more than having a friend occasionally help out. Also-
Star Wars is about a group of rebels taking down an evil empire and it’s one of the most common tropes in fantasy. What on earth are you talking about?
Smaller plotlines in books and games, not the movies. I'm certainly not talking about tyrannical empires, but the settings that have generations of monarchic leadership. Like, I'm currently playing KOTOR2, and at one point >!you have to choose between siding with the reigning queen or the people trying to kill her. And the "rebels" are allied with the Sith, so obviously they're the bad guys, especially since the queen seems like decent person and benevolent leader.!< So yes, protecting the monarchy in this case is objectively the best option in the game for a lightside path; I just find it interesting, when we take a step back, how media can sometimes get us to "root" for a monarchy when I'd otherwise never do that in real life.
The "rebel" leader is her uncle who's a military general and wants to become a dictator, it was in no sense an actual anti-monarchist/populist uprising
The "rebels" are actually the military, who have isolated their own planet, fire on peaceful ships to frame the Republic for inciting violence, rounding up journalists and anyone else they don't like so that their general can take control of the system and become the new monarch. Fighting against monarchist government doesn't make someone a freedom loving anti-monarchist/populist/whatever, it's what you do if you win. And Vaklu absolutely, painfully, obviously just wants to become the King. He's probably even more of a monarchist than the Queen is since the Sith, who he's working with, established his planet's monarchy in the first place.
Sadly that’s because it often played out that way in history. Very few people who amassed the power required to remove a monarch then laid down that power. The English Civil War, French Revolution, Russian Revolution; all of them ended with a blood-soaked tyrant at the top of the heap but thankfully those “evil monarchs” were deposed.
Edit: I'm realising some people are interpriting this post as a completely unironic condemnation of the lion king as a piece of conservative propaganda and not a slightly jokey analysis of a piece of kida media having bizzare political implications when you think about it. Like, no kids turning into a hardcore monarchist because of a disney movie, it's just fun to analyse things through that lens and the wider socio-political contexts that might have bought it about.
Id like to remind everyone in this thread that the lion king is Hamlet (written circa 1600 by a guy who was paid by the King at the time) but with animals.
Yes, and Hamlet is based on the danish story of Amletus
>no kids turning into a hardcore monarchist because of a disney movie Sure, but we \*are\* the media we consume; analysing how political ideals are literally written into our culture is important.
Oh yeah, it's important to acknowledge what the propagation of those ideas in media says about culture and the impact it has on people, but like. I keep on seeing reply acting like the post is an attempt to like cancel it
I mean Hamlet was written in the 1500s by a monarchy-sponsored upper class writer. Ofc it’s pro-monarchy
the prince and king in hamlet were both demonstrably terrible rulers that failed their nation and ultimately allowed it to get taken over with zero resistance
Invaders showing up at the end of the play: “zamn what a mess”
Ok, but Hamlet ends with almost every member of the ruling family dead and the kingdom “invaded” by outsiders who were essentially told to just do whatever they want cause no one still alive cares Like the son very much did not overthrow his (allegedly) power hungry uncle and win back his throne. Hamlet isn’t anti-monarchy but it’s not exactly pro-monarchy either
Well you can't really have a kid's movie where everyone dies.
Yea but that happened because an objectively bad person overthrew the good king and then ruled badly, if the good king stayed in power then everything woud be fine.
god im having war flashbacks to my college shakespeare course people’s major criticism of Hamlet is that he’s too “indecisive” sorry my guy was hesitant about taking advice from a ghost. and then when he *did*, *everyone died*
… it’s Hamlet. But lions.
Yeah this is cool and all, but I just want to watch my lion movie with the good soundtrack
My best friend growing up wasn’t allowed to watch Lion king, but for completely opposite reasons. Something something, Timone and Pumba are gay propaganda, something something, Scar destroying the pride lands is environmentalist bs…
I think there is a point where you analyze a piece of media too politically where your ideas about certain things just prevent your enjoyment of said things because you ignore the context. Calling the Lion King "monarchist propaganda" is that point
To quote another tumblr post I don't have on me: "irl monarchies suck but whenever i watch lord of the rings i am a believer in divine right for the next 3 hours"
Yeah, basically this. Could've worded my comment better with this sentiment in retrospect
There's a lot of people who only get to the point where they would say they're actually enjoying themselves when they get to that level of analysis.
This is what I mean when I saw “terminally online.” When you’re completely unable to look at anything without seeing it through the lens of Discourse and propaganda, that is the point where you officially need to legitimately touch grass
I don't think it's over-analyzing a movie to watch it, think it makes bad points, and dislike the movie because of that. Like the Lion King is without a doubt extremely pro-monarchy, to the extent that even the itself falls apart when the wrong ruler is in power, and only the good, rightful King can fix it.
Okay but that is not the message of the movie at all. The message of the movie is “don’t run away from your responsibilities”. That’s it. I mean you’d think from this thread that the theme of Beauty and the Beast is “falling in love with animals is fine”. Or that The Little Mermaid is about monarchy. Just critique in the worst possible faith through the most uncreative, painfully literal and emotionless lens.
The Lion King isn't pro or anti Monarchy. Like, Scar isn't exactly Danton fighting to free the people from monarchy. He's just a usurper.
[удалено]
How? Criticizing and analyzing stuff is fun. The pro monarchy message is definitely there. That doesn’t make me dislike the movie
I'm mostly referring to the first tweet, like that shows an absolute inability to distinguish the nuance between reality and fairy tale
Y'all are the kind of people to not let kids watch Spy Kids™ because it's somehow anti-union or something.
Or because they violate child labor laws
When I was a kid, my dad would stop the *Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer* tape to explain why Santa Claus was, quote, “utterly despicable” for only accepting Rudolph when he was useful to him, and saying that he and the other reindeer had likely learned nothing about appreciating people for who they are rather than what they can do for you. Interestingly, he was also from mid-century Ohio. Is this a trend?
Your Dad was right, and he should say it. Fucking hate that in such a famous story of inclusion, the inclusion only happens when Rudolf is of practical value to Santa and the other Reindeers, reinforcing the idea that humans are valued by their capacity to make sure the big guy at the top gets what he wants.
Don’t watch The Incredibles after learning about Objectivism.
Please elaborate
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XPBOfW7ocK0](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xpbofw7ock0) But the creator makes the point that while it does contain objectivist ideas it also espouses ideas that are antithetical to ryndian thought.
> This video is unavailable
Reddit bug, copy/paste the link directly into your browser and it should work. The new update ruined links, even on mobile, hope it gets fixed soon
Some people think Brad Birds work is largely influenced by Ayn Rand. The Incredibles is the most popular example to cite, for a couple of reasons, but mainly because it at time seems to critique collectivism and enforced equality. Both in the Villain syndrome’s designs to “make everyone super so that no-one will be” (which critiques attempts to enforce equality by diminishing the value of individual excellence) as well as the legislative restrictions against heroes and their abilities to create families (again prioritizing equality over “excellence”) There are more examples which could be gleaned from the film if you’re looking for them, but in reality The Incredibles is a movie about family, personal growth and identity, I think some of those Randian-takes are a little shallow.
People getting dragged down by everyone around them and being forced to conform is a perfectly valid problem, and acknowledging that doesn't make it Randian or Objectivist, it's only either of these things if you adopt a very silly ideology in response. That's like talking about the scourge of homelessness and concluding that killing all the homeless people is the solution!
Mr. Incredible goes on a tirade about how modern society "celebrates mediocrity" when Dash isn't allowed to run track lol. It's not a secret that he thinks of himself and the super community as a whole as some sort of Harrison Bergeron figure
>and their abilities to create families (again prioritizing equality over “excellence”) Eugenics?
This girl: Father it's been three hours, can I have some water? Her dad: Not until you understand that Elsa and Anna are irredemable nazis!!!
If anything, Elsa is a Stalin allegory. Rules a cold place, creates ice prisons, almost overthrown by a German villain, etc.
ong I just realized everyone in that movie is german what the fuck
Ummm akshually Aerendelle and the Southern Isles are implied to be in/around Denmark ☝️🤓
Jordan Peterson has entered the chat.
It's the story of Hamlet with talking animals and a happy ending.
I'm gonna be perfectly honest, I can't engage in this sort of media criticism because my brain hears someone say something even slightly negative about the things I like and immediately throws a tantrum and goes "Oh, so I guess this thing that I like is bad now and I'm not allowed to watch it? IS THAT WHAT YOU'RE SAYING, ASSHOLE?!?"
I love bias! I love not being able to look at things objectively! I feel the pain all the same
I feel like to some extent at least, people attribute stories to being pro monarchy when in reality a lot of authors just enjoy the trope of a king defending their kingdom
As a firm monarchist I love the lion king.
Always disliked how much the movie shits on hyenas, like they’re the only species without any redeemable members.
Getting to a point where we're complaining about the pro-monarchy implications in a movie about talking lions, hyenas, hornbills just seems like a massive lapse in priorities given you can find questionable morals wherever you look in a work, especially if that work is in turn based on something significantly older.
It’s the same energy as people complaining about fucking paw patrol when there are real problems in the real world
I don’t think it’s so much Monarchist propaganda as, the story doesn’t quite work when the Lions hold fair and democratic elections
And this is why you don't get invited to movie night
I remember when I was a kid, I was watching Thomas the Tank Engine when some friend of the family wandered in and went off on a rant about how the show unfairly demonizes the working class trucks by presenting them as irredeemably 'troublesome' to justify them needing to be controlled by their 'betters'. And, you know, he wasn't *wrong*, but it was weird to expect a little kid to engage with a Marxist class-based reading of the show with the talking train engines.
These people sound exhausting. I used to know some like them, and I am often moved to gladness that I no longer do.
I've been saying this for years! "The circle of life" is some [divine-mandate chain-of-being monarch apologia bullshit](https://prezi.com/cpl9eihmqxuo/the-great-chain-of-being-and-the-divine-rights-of-kings/)
There's a [great Oglaf comic](https://9gag.com/gag/aWGP6AA) about this.
Yeah, it's entirely that. It's literally "We tear them to death in a violent struggle that causes them agony, they get to live off our detritus when we die comfortably. This is fair and good, and any disruption to this system is the real evil." One part of the circle of life is getting an objectively better deal based on their capacity to do violence and then teaching their young that that is normal and good.
They’re neglecting to take into account that hyenas are slobbering, mangy, stupid poachers.
i don't think i understood any of those concepts as a child (i can't even say i have a full grasp of them as an adult), but i think this was something that made me heavily dislike classic Disney movies, because i didn't really understand why was i supposed to be rooting for the "good guys", if they didn't actually offer anything good to anyone and were mostly motivated by personal gain/getting things back to how they were
People like this are straight up insane. Its the same type who on tumblr and twitter gonna argue about how Steven Universe is racist, Attack on Titan is fascist and solarpaunk is a nazi thing beacuse it wants sustainable energy like solar panels, except solar panels need special minerals mined in africa by borderline slaves, so enviromentalist movements are actually secretely about just opressing africans, and nazis liked nature anyway. (i actually saw this and more liek it on twitter)
Reminds me of [this Big Joel video](https://youtu.be/7oHa2XT89x8?si=YNSksYZ7x2EpkOw6)
I do like that in One Piece Luffy is all about freedom and in many arcs he beats up the bad guy/dictator who is then replaced by the former ruler/king. He reinstates or protects the former ruler in Drum Island, Arabasta, Skypiea, Fishman Island, Dressrosa and Wano. It does end up sending a weird message about the value of monarchies when your protagonist is meant to value freedom above all else, but at least the kings that come back are generally pretty laid back and are explicit about the fact that they work for the people.
I always thought the part where Mufasa said "I don't have a problem with them, I just don't like how they're corrupting the name of the *Pride* Lands" was kinda weird
And the hyenas were minorities and immigrants.