By David Futrelle
So over in the Men Going Their Way subreddit, the fellas are talking about what to do with “leftover” — i.e. unmarried — women after men finally step up and take the vote away from women, who are always voting for the wrong things anyway.
Apparently unable to understand that most women have jobs, the MGTOWs naturally conclude that in their version of utopia the single ladies — deprived not only of husbands and their resources but of Big Daddy government as well — won’t be able to support themselves. But the MGTOWs, kind ghouls souls all, don’t want to let them starve!
One brave MGTOW has a solution:
(Note: in the preceding quote “CC Rider” refers not to the famous song but to the infamous “cock carousel.”)
Naturally, other MGTOWs are enthusiastic about Mr. BCPrepper’s ingenious proposal.
BCPrepper goes on to praise himself for his “humanitarian” solution to the Leftover Woman Problem.
Such thoughtful fellows these MGTOWs are!
What the fuck did I just read?
Nopenopenopenope.
These people need to be exterminated ASAP.
That’s one possibility. I can also see them wanting to also enslave the “alpha” men they resent so much and using them as studs.
Well, to be fair, that’s not always a bad thing. Romanticising Fallout’s basically saved my ass these past six months, pushing me to keep resisting in real life like I resist in the game; if Imperator M can punch an entire airship of Nazis out of the damn sky, then Real-World M can at least manage to not fall all the way down the vodka hole.
But I know I’m in the minority there.
Not okay. Also, read the commenting policy.
Just jumping in to say that it’s not a 1:1 comparison to say that ‘fantasy is catnip for fascists’ is like ‘vidya cause violence’. Besides the fact that only the latter asserts causation, there’s still the matter of scope. The video game violence conjecture (VGV) has a way higher, for lack of a better term, burden of proof than the fascist and fantasy conjecture (FAF)
Violence is usually, in these discussions, limited to physical assaults. I think this limitation is harmful, but that’s a whole nother bucket. Anyway, VGV, as an argument, suffers from this. As Dan Olson of Folding Ideas put it:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DNspkOjZ0ac
^8:53, but it’s a really good episode all around 🙂
Vidya isn’t gonna make you go out and commit violent crimes, nor will it make violence less shocking to you. But can a medium almost ubiquitous in its lionization of violence as first resort of the righteous make violence, especially for a ’cause’, more palatable than it otherwise would be? Absolutely
In the same vain, is there something to be said for FAF? That elements in fantasy and role play have fascistic undertones (or just straight up tones) and that this might have a push and pull relationship with the broader culture. Again, I say absolutely. Especially for disaffected, white boys or any other person or group… not predisposed… vulnerable to that typa thinking. Not gonna make people get a rune tattoo and memorize the 14 words. But might it make later radicalization easier?
Jeez, this went longer than I expected. Point isn’t to say that fantasy makes people fascists. I’m not even really saying it has any measurable affect. Just that positing such an affect isn’t the same as subscribing to VGV
Yeah, there are better ways to rid the world of these monsters. According to them, all you need to do is get a haircut and/or tattoo, be fat, grow older than 25, and encourage more diverse characters in video games and movies. That’s their equivalent of genocide.
…But yeah, on a serious note, we have standards.
-BritterSweet
Yeh. Apparantly EVERYTHING they dislike is “white genocide”, so it should be easy 😛
Done, done, done, done, and done.
My point certainly isn’t that we shouldn’t point out, scrutinize, criticize, or otherwise try to better the realms of fantasy, or to say that video games and fantasy media don’t have massive issues. I absolutely believe that media plays a pretty significant role in how people form their opinions and view the world, and the darker sides of fantasy fiction can feed into that.
My point is that explicitly making the connection between “likes fantasy” and “is a fascist” is profoundly unhelpful. What does it actually tell us about the person in question? I don’t subscribe to the idea, as EducatedRedneck stated, that these people are actually “removed from reality”. Certainly they have very different ideas about how reality ought to work than most of us do, but they are not delusional, they are not living in some fantasy world, they don’t even believe that they are (even if they might, perhaps, wish so). They are perfectly in control of their mental faculties. They are not representative of everyone who likes video games. They are not even representative of everyone who idealizes fantasy worlds. I think pointing out how they have a tendency to gravitate towards video games and role-playing games would be great to start a discussion on fascism and fascist ideals in media, but that’s not what I was seeing.
EDIT: Not to mention that there are tons of fascists who think that video games, RPGs, and fantasy in general are for children.
Do we really want to have a “FantasyGate” start up (again)? That’s what Carl of Swindon, et al, would really love to happen.
I think it’s just funny in general that these dudes seem to think they’ll automagically have “resources” after the world goes to shit.
Like, do they really think money would be an acceptable form of currency after the fall of society? I mean, we’d be far more likely to go straight into a bartering system. And maybe that’d include trading currency if the trader so desired, but they’d have to agree to that trade, and they’d very likely only agree to that if they were taking trading up as a sort of profession.
Most people would prioritize stuff they actually have a use for (food, supplies, tools, weapons) over just pure currency, and I don’t think the miggytoes would have much that most people would consider to be useful. Not to mention they’d clearly be shit at trading, since they think they’re owed the world and clearly lack understanding of the concepts of consent or compromise. It’d very likely go how Trump’s “deal” with Mexico to pay for his vanity wall is going. One party insisting that the other will pay, and the other party loudly shouting “FUCK YOU, NO WE’RE NOT.”, except in the post-apocalypse they’d most likely be run off, if not “dealt with”.
And don’t get me started on the notion that a bank account would still be functional post-apocalypse.
I think it could be said that there is a correlation between fascists and identifying with/idealizing fictional dystopian dictatorships (the imperium of man, galactic empire and principality of zeon immediately come to mind),
but its rather recursive since many of the fictional dictatorships neo-nazis idolize are based at least in part on nazi germany.
So it may be more neonazis like fictional factions inspired by nazi Germany.
To add on to the currency discussion, you can’t eat gold, but you CAN eat potatoes.
@dslucia
All I’m saying. The link between vidya and active, behavioral violence is so often ignorantly cited and so often frustratedly refuted that I think subtler effects are often lost in the shouting matches (not that this has been shouty, just in general, ya know?). ‘Vidya doesn’t cause violence, duh’ or anything like it tends to set off my alarms these days, due to… the usual suspects. Totally same page 🙂
Perfectly fair
@ vicky p
I’ve seen a few recipes that do involve gold leaf or gold flakes. Can’t imagine they’re very nutritious though. Given the choice, I’d definitely go with the potatoes.
The Imperium of Man is the first thing that comes to mind! Fans have defended it to me as either an over-the-top parody, a cautionary morality tale, or TOTALLY NOT NAZIS WHAT ARE YOU TALKING ABOUT THERE IS NO RESEMBLANCE. It’s safe to say it can’t be all three.
@Katz
It was a parody back in first edition but that depiction went the way of the Squats in later editions,
now the setting just twists itself into pretzels bending over backwards to justify all the horrible things the imperium does in the name being dark and edgy.
SUCH DARK. MUCH EDGY.
Again, doesn’t mean you can’t play Warhammer or that playing Warhammer makes you a Bad Person (I play Tyranids and chaos daemons), but if a game contains that kind of imagery, it’s good to observe that it’s there and think about what message it’s sending.
In reference to the whole “That’s not me, that’s just the character I play on Youtube!” well…I think Kurt Vonnegut had something to say about that sort of thing:
“We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be.”
I also remember seeing a bit of the awful comic series “Crossed” on scans-daily that did have a bit of the whole MRA fantasy: Man has a safe place from the zombie-esque hordes, uses it to get women and rape them in exchange for safety. As soon as they manage to crack his code for his security system so they could use it, he gets fed to the monsters.
re: Warhammer 40K
I haven’t played it yet (and my older cousins who do have advised me not to, due to the price alone!), but I’ve read the TV Tropes article. As far as I can tell, every faction sucks, just in different ways. But while the Imperium of Man certainly aren’t the Tyranids, they’re still…not good. At all. Exterminatus, yo.
(Though this reminds me of reading about a parody–Toyhammer or something?–where every faction was sugared up except for the Tau, ironically flipping them from the lightest shade of very, very dark grey to the darkest shade of grey by FAR.)
ETA:
If I were to play, I think I’d go for Dark Eldar.
I agree that W40K fetishize authoritarism way too much. Not just with the imperium : half the factions are actual fascists dictatorship, the other half is arguably concealed fascists dictators. They even have gone out of their way to make sure people know that Tau aren’t democratics.
The last edition is a mess on that regard. The new leader of the imperium historically dislike the authoritarian / fanatic approach to the Emperor, but he did exactly squat to make the situation improve on that regard, instead concentrating on mutilating new space marine so that they can be dreadnought.
That being said, I don’t think fantasy world are any more prone to incite fascism than science-fiction. I think the relation is reversed, with would-be fascist searching the more fascists books, and twisting them when necessary.
It *is* pretty annoying however, when you start a campaign of the ultimate good vs the ultimate evil (Wrath of the Righteous in Golarion, pathfinder), and you have to explain to some players several time that “they are half demon mongrel !” isn’t actually a valid reason to execute prisonners and make all kind of war crimes.
@Katz
I used to play Tau myself.
Its the guys who act like want to live in the imperium and worship the emperor that deserve all the side eyes,
they always seem to think they will be commissars or chapter masters rather then the poor guardsmen the commissar shots unprovoked to “motivate” the rest.
In recent lore, Tau can be the more chilling faction, since they are basically 1984.
If I had to choose a faction to play on their non-shitiness, I would likely take the Necron. They are the one race who revolted against their half-deity, fascists despots to reclaim control on their destiny after all. And they don’t try to hide anything under the carpet. Being honest is at least refreshing in the setting.
Of course, they have done their shares of atrocities, and at best they can be said to have good reasons to be xenophobic. But it’s warhammer 40k, the game where purging a planet from all his inhabitant is roughly as forbidden as exceeding speed limits.
I went for the two most evil factions because playing the crypto-fascists feels a little too close to reality, whereas playing literal daemons is more like joining the Church of Satan.
@ Alan
Only gold I care to eat is Yukon Gold. Them’s good taters.