today i will bother you with an autistic rant about all the half-baked midwit "common sense" takes that everyone in every community dedicated to the discussion of art indulges in all the time.
most of this post will use pop culture examples because that's what the vast majority of online discourse revolves around. but i've seen all of these applied to other kinds of art.
>cool roboti despise this fucking meme.
yes, gundam is an anti-war series. it puts a spotlight on the meaningless horrors
and tragedies of war. however, it is
also a series about a cool robot. the cool
robot is there, all the time, looking cool as it strikes heroic poses and slaughters
enemies. one cannot simply say that one prominent aspect of the series is arbitrarily
important and definitive while another is just for fun and should be ignored.
but here's the bigger thing: can anyone stop for five seconds and at least consider
that the tension between its anti-war perspective and its inevitable aestheticization
of warfare actually makes gundam a slightly
richer series to experience and think about? is that so gundamn hard for some people? does everything have to be so damn singular, linear, literal?
similar examples: <insert crime story> here can't be aestheticizing crime because it shows that the criminal is immoral or he dies at the end etc. berserk isn't a power fantasy because guts goes through a lot of shit.
guess what: the misery and tragedy makes these characters cooler.
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