• @rwhitisissle
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    2221 days ago

    I’m really not sure I understand what point he’s trying to make.

    The point is that there exists a fundamental dissonance between events as they transpire in fiction and for which the audience is emotionally invested and those same kinds of events as they happen in real life and the audience’s perception of them as they happen in real life.

    Star Wars was originally inspired by Lucas’s perspective on the Vietnam War. The Storm Troopers are, in that sense, comparable to American forces killing unarmed Vietnamese farmers. Most Americans who saw Star Wars never made that connection because this is in conflict with the audience’s internalized notion of “America good” and “America’s enemies bad.” As such, in watching and enjoying the story of Star Wars, you are ironically investing yourself into a narrative that inverts your normative ideological position. You can extrapolate this onto the current conflict in Ghaza without much effort.

    First of all he’s equating fiction to reality which is ridiculous at the very least.

    They are not being “equated” - they are being compared. He’s making an implied comparison between fictional events and real world current events in order to highlight similarities between the two. Specifically, he’s doing a form of comparison called “juxtaposition.” Being able to do this is a very basic element of media literacy.

    he took revenge on the people who actually killed his family

    Well, no, the specific individuals who killed his family were probably the stormtroopers stationed on Tatooine, whom he never actually interacted with. The specific people onboard the Death Star that were not part of the Empire’s military high command had virtually nothing at all to do with his family’s death.

    As opposed to taking revenge on people that just happened to be in the approximate vicinity of people who killed his family. The Death Star was a military base.

    The individual in the image literally says that he “immediately joined the armed resistance and literally blew up the enemy base.” Not sure what your point is here, unless you’re implying that you believe that the Palestinians who are fighting against Israel are only attacking indiscriminate civilian targets and not military ones.

    • Echo Dot
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      fedilink
      921 days ago

      Israel is attacking civilians indiscriminately what are you on about

      • @rwhitisissle
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        721 days ago

        Do you think Israel in this scenario is the Rebel Alliance or the Empire? Because you seem confused.

        • @[email protected]
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          fedilink
          220 days ago

          It works both ways depending on the timescale you apply. You could compare the murder of lukes parents to october 7th. It fits the “bad thing where people die happens, response kills far more” that applies to palestine too. And the public perception, especially of people supporting israel, seems to think the conflict started there.

          I saw it that way, but still as a post critical of israel saying “it’s easy to see an atrocity and want revenge at all costs, but that doesn’t make it right”. The “yea” at the end implies to me that what we thought with the fiction was maybe mistaken.

          Of course, the death star was a weapon of mass destruction seconds from destroying a planet, so there really isn’t much moral ambiguity there, but not mentioning that is likely deliberate in order to make the comparison work.

    • @Socsa
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      -121 days ago

      The big difference here is that Vietnam never attacked America.

      • @rwhitisissle
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        21 days ago

        You’re right. Israel was always there and then the Palestinians just showed up randomly one day and attacked them out of nowhere. There is no decades long history of apartheid and outright oppression of the Palestinian people by the state of Israel and this conflict has no roots in colonialism or ethnostate politics. /s