Tuesday, February 16, 2010

Fantasy = Fascism.. Whats the deal?

I've been noticing an awful lot of these sorts of posts lately.. that the Fantasy Genre is some how a Fascist construct.. At least unless its Micheal Moorecock or China Meivelle writing it..

Typically my eyes glaze over any time words like " Fascism " and " Marxist theory " start getting tossed around in concert with words like " escapist fiction " and " Metaphors " I begin to immediately consider who ever is using them to be a tad to over educated for their own good.

Apparently if your protagonist supports a deposed monarch, is male, is anything other than a base level prole who's fighting to remove oppression from other proles... then you support the status quo.. and that means you are a fascist..

Tolkien is of course constantly trotted out as being the worst offender.. I imagine Howard dosen't rank much higher.. after all Conan did become King...

bit rambly maybe but this whole thing just astounds me....

2 comments:

Andy said...

The overuse of the term fascist is a pet peeve of mine. I remember critics sneering at action movies in the 70s and 80s and trotting out the fascist label to dismiss most of them. The funny thing is that many of those movies were pretty fun to watch, so I'm almost at the point that I regard a "fascist" work as something that's more likely to be entertaining than a more "socially responsible" work :)

Brian Murphy said...

The folks whom you've mentioned above view everything through a political prism (it literally poisons their vision), and they're so hardcore in their extreme beliefs that anything that smells remotely conservative gets labelled as fascist. That's pretty much how I see it.