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In order to depict Nazi and/or fascist victories, you need to wank them beyond plausibility and take their propaganda at face value. That's a dangerous thing in a world where way too many people are already tempted by authoritarian solutions to their problems. Rather, alternate history writers, whatever they do with Nazism/fascism, should take pains to depict those regimes as they were historically, dysfunctional by design.[W]hat do their versions of 'High Castle' tell us? That Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan could have been triumphant over democracy and that the Reich would have built bullet trains and flown concords and colonised our solar system by early 1960s etcetera. The average viewer departs from these interpretations, even when discounting the more fantastical elements, under the impression that there is ‘efficiency’ in fascism, that the trains run on time.
@Gary Oswald I’m having a problem trying to read the article as on my phone it just keeps zooming in on the poster of Man In A High Castle that is causing my phone to cack out. Even reader mode has been corrupted by it.
Maybe my phone is just being dodgy, shame the parts I read were good.Huh, not sure why that is happening. I'm not seeing the same problem on my phone.
I agree with @Japhy; the counter examples represent a tiny minority of the genre. Is it getting better? Yes. But the outside perspective that it’s all Nazis and General Lee isn’t far off.
So, did you read the essay?If the problem is not what the stories are like but that stories exist at all where Nazis or Confederates won, then I don't think there's a problem. I'd have to lump Kevin Wilmott's CSA, a vicious satire on US history and race relations, with Lost Cause apologetica.
If the problem is not what the stories are like but that stories exist at all where Nazis or Confederates won, then I don't think there's a problem. I'd have to lump Kevin Wilmott's CSA, a vicious satire on US history and race relations, with Lost Cause apologetica.
I think that - with all due respect to those here who've worked on mods like this and/or enjoy them, because I don't think this is any one person's fault, really - that's sort of inherently a problem with AH video games like The New Order. Because they're set up so that players can choose between which country they'll play, and within each country which path to lead them down. Which is fine in and of itself, but I think the fact that it allows players to choose fascist countries and fascist paths for their countries as options that are equally technically valid sort of leads a lot of players to, on some level, think of those paths as equally valid choices, differing only in aesthetic content. And while I'm given to understand that TNO does make an effort to force players to confront the consequences of their decisions, in the end, it is just a video game and there's not much it can do to really confront the gravity of the Holocaust, even for players who would be receptive.The tone of the mod is a general luxuriating in atrocity that verges into holocaust pornography. Making the whole thing interactive- forcing the player to empathise with and imagine themselves as the perpetrators of genocide is even worse.
I don't think you need to assume that depiction is always glorification to hold that it is easy for depiction to shade into glorification without a deliberate effort not to make it so, and most popular published AH just doesn't make that effort.I agree - I think that the assumption that depiction is always glorification really weakens the argument here. Truffaut's Law is more of a guideline or reminder than an ironclad rule of storytelling. There are plenty of effective anti-war movies; Jarhead comes to mind (because it's built on deliberate anti-climax) as do any number of films that follow civilians surviving atrocities.
I've talked about it repeatedly on Twitter including the Discourse mentioned in the article but there's a real knee-jerk reaction to even the most basic critique here. The number of people who won't even consider there's a real problem at all and stick their heads in the sand is wild.
I think another part of the problem is that, well, there's a reason Nazi victories are so popular, isn't there? A lot of people want to read them. Part of that is that people want to read AH about stuff they already more or less know about, or think they do, part of it is that people seem to actively like dystopian fiction, part of it is that people don't really price the horrors of the Holocaust or slavery into the settings of those books - but there is a genuine demand for these things in a way that there just isn't, for now, for our more specialist stuff - I'm not trying to be a snob about this, but I do think most SLP content is very much for people who already like alternate history in a way that The Man In The High Castle or TL-191 isn't.I think Monroe is entirely right about the problem and that its serious. Like I said, I differ slightly on some stuff but it's well written and persuasive and addresses a genuine problem. But the weakness of the essay is essentially the 'call to action' at the end is 'keep doing what you're doing', which is not the most dynamic demand.
Like I can't write less Nazi victory pieces, because I started with 0. We at SLP could publish less Nazi victory books in that we've published 3 out of 136 but not by much. I think there's maybe 5 vignettes about Nazi victories that made it to the blog compared to 50 about other areas and maybe 3 essays that cover the same compared to 860 that aren't about that. We're not the ones putting a swastika on every book cover so we can't stop doing that.
And, tbf Monroe recognises that. They were very kind about both me and Tom in their essay and that is part of the reason, I suspect, they used this site as a bully pulpit.
But well, it's kind of easy to stick your head in the sand and view it as someone else's problem when the call to action 'is other people need to do what you're already doing'.