Everything went down hill when Henry Vincent White invented White People in 1526.

his entire political success consists of figuring out how to run purely on the aesthetic signifiers of wealth and power without having to anchor those promises in anything that actually delivers either of those things. yes yes its all very baudrillard, invisible cities etc.

Star Wars is actually Hаmаs

His name is Merddyn and Geoffrey of Monmouth's estate will answer for its cultural crimes against the unceded Cymreig nation

[pivots the convo welsh nationalist-ly]

and in one of those we can talk about actors being White, while in the other we can talk about the racial politics of institutions their characters wear the names of

not sure the racial implications of these narratives are really analogous

Wait but that's the point - collectively they're all in that fallen age. There's no where among their side the same social power differentials as between the actual Navi and tank-grown bodies that look like them that White Americans use to walk among them.

you clock out, I'm clocking in

jesus how is this somehow worse than dances with wolves

Basically to sum up - people in general are uncomfy with this narrative but most other big names give them a justification for being critical yet not dismissive of the whole narrative. Avatar is less effective as a franchise at doing that, so more dismissals.

So while Star Wars isn't great on implications of saviors via pseudo-divine right, it's kind of immaterial (like... "crypto-buddhist vibes as interpreted by White guys are a basis of legitimacy?"). Whereas Dune/Avatar get more thorough look-throughs: "why are *these* the leaders?"

Worth saying as well, Dune and Avatar draw more explicit lines of comparison to modern conflicts while Star Wars is a bit more generic: like who exactly do the droids/separatists in Star Wars stand in for? 🤷‍♂️ The Fremen explicitly speak futuristic Arabic. The Navi are sociologically indigenous.

*more anti-capitalist than per se anti-colonial, but there's a way of interpreting at least the first chapter of The Hunger Games as that same trend, the difference being a much more thorough dissassembly of hero[ine] narratives, and that "things are bad, but I'll be okay" is dismissed in mere pages

IMO, narratively, it's an easier story to tell if the depravity of empire of empire is increasingly documented over the first act, and then really escalated as actual problem for the protagonist in act two - so most stories blunder towards the more precarious elite or more secure locals*

Dune at least suggests that dynamic is a mechanism of self mythologizing and social control, but also as effective, although why is kind of hard to unpack. Avatar, by contrast, seems to present that ambiguity up front: that it's unclear not just why it's effective but even how it's plausible.

The problem is the biggest one is dealing with a glut of data - AKA handling whatever mass surveillance collects. If the industry even delivers the most obvious application is dystopian.

That's the part I'd critiqued the whole time - that ownership of our labor is vitally more essential than a reduction of "the lump sum" in part because we spent most of the twentieth century automating more of it and at best breaking even on worker autonomy.