300, Fascism, and the Angry Men of Twitter

I think that it's a pretty good exercise to read critiques of your favorite media, and instead of throwing out the critique or throwing out the media, sitting with the discomfort and working through the points being made. I tried this as an exercise with three of my favorite films (Alien, Annette and Leaving Las Vegas) and although it's hard to avoid some of that knee-jerk reaction, it's really useful and I think deepens my love for the work to acknowledge those critiques. Thank you for this video! Really excellent and inspired me

Britta Moline

This is the best video you've ever made.

Sylvia Black

In the end, heroism is an emotional fact. It calls to our values in an aesthetic sense, such that we can feel the goodness in a sublime fashion. That's most of what you have to ask yourself. Is the movie so sticky sweet that you get pulled out of the value stream, or does it keep you there, empathizing and inspired while the chemicals last. Also, as far as Nazis go - they also used representations and mythology which called from ancient Greece. They loved their architecture, aesthetics, or even some of their values. Just like you say at the end of your video - they often called upon our common archetypes coming from that common European history. Anyone who doesn't know this just doesn't know much about the first half of the 20th century.

👏🏼👏🏼👏🏼

Oliver Dubon

The politics of Civil War are deliberately extremely incoherent, like Tony's side appears to require that any 'hero' (?) be automatically suborned to the US military (??) or something, which also seems bad, though given that Tony himself is a vigilante who goes around committing acts of war makes a lot of sense for him specifically.

disk-kun, the mascot for the famicom disk system

I feel like a point missing here is that 300 and Synder generally cribs extensively from Leni Reifenstahl- the body worship in particular is very much something that looks like the opening shots of Olympia, long, slow, loving shots looking at perfect bodies in motion Which I guess could be an argument that this is satire but given that Synder movies just always kinda look like that wouldn't really hold up

disk-kun, the mascot for the famicom disk system

As a fan of superhero films, I'm constantly trying to deal with the cognitive dissonance of wanting to be the exceptional super man who ignores the system to save lives, and my personal disbelief in the fascistic Great Man theory of history. I'm Civil War, I want Captain America to win because I know he's incorruptible. In real life, I would definitely support the Sekovia Accords. To my recollection, The Batman is the only superhero film that acknowledges the questionable assumptions in the premise of these films.

Chad Wilson

never realized how hot n based Xerxes was until now. Crush these filthy heterosexuals

Solid video. With all you covered, I noticed you didn’t even get to the inherent racism in the portrayal of the two nations, as well. Very telling (and historically inaccurate) to make that choice- one of those people on one of those “expert rates how accurate movies are” YouTube videos talks about this too.

Daniel Worstell

this movie is my guilty pleasure. I've been aware for awhile that it is fashy but idk something about it is just fun to chill and watch every couple of years

Melody Williamson

Really great BJ! I thought "300 is fash" was a pretty normal take but apparently not... I will make one suggestion for the vid though, when you're talking about the 'Leonidas is gay' reading. Your video currently sounds like you're condemning anyone reading gay into the movie, but I think you might want to clarify that if people want to read a queer narrative in then that's cool, do what you want. Doesn't change your points at all, but the current section comes off a little unkind.

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