Speaker 1: Meaning a live man like this, Man, you letting butterfly
Speaker 1: flapin and.
Speaker 2: Wing dig down in a forest. Man, it gonna cause
Speaker 2: a tree fall, letting five thousand miles away.
Speaker 1: Man, nobody seen nobody else. You don't mean no Man.
Speaker 1: I'd luck you call the little story and you got
Speaker 1: directed like that.
Speaker 2: Win Man over like a dang on the panel, man
Speaker 2: matter Man?
Speaker 3: All right, Arch, welcome to the Jay Burden Show.
Speaker 2: How you doing Man, I'm doing fun. Thank you, Thank
Speaker 2: you for having me.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I'm excited to have you on.
Speaker 4: Uh.
Speaker 3: As I was telling you before we went live, I
Speaker 3: had an episode on forty k more generally that just
Speaker 3: last week did quite well, and literally probably three days
Speaker 3: after Kevin and I had that discussion, uh, there was
Speaker 3: a major update to the sort of infiltration of you know,
Speaker 3: left wing politics into that hobby. So if you could, Arch,
Speaker 3: I guess I should be a good podcaster and ask
Speaker 3: you to describe what you do first. But then after that,
Speaker 3: if you want what happened, right, what's the big deal?
Speaker 3: What's everyone talking about?
Speaker 1: Well?
Speaker 2: I started doing YouTube content to solid ten years ago
Speaker 2: plus now because of the announcement of Total War Warhammer.
Speaker 2: It's always been a huge fan of Warhammer and Total War.
Speaker 2: Does that seem like the perfect opportunity to start talking
Speaker 2: about this stuff. But I very soon became aware of
Speaker 2: the political side of things, because this was, you know,
Speaker 2: the twenty fourteen fifteens, et cetera, when most of us
Speaker 2: began to become aware of the political shift that was
Speaker 2: starting with in entertainment at large. And I decided quite
Speaker 2: soon that this was something that wasn't going to stop.
Speaker 2: It wasn't going to limit its to one thing. It
Speaker 2: was going to try and infiltrate entertainment in general. So
Speaker 2: I started talking about that as well, at significant personal
Speaker 2: cost over the years. But well we're sitting here in
Speaker 2: twenty twenty six with female custodies and I feel pretty justified,
Speaker 2: honestly validated, even.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I think. I mean, I I was a teenager
Speaker 3: right during the whole gamer Gate thing, and so I
Speaker 3: have a very distinct memory of the sort of before
Speaker 3: and after. I've told this story before, Arch, but I
Speaker 3: figured you'd get a kick out of it. I went
Speaker 3: to university in seventeen and so, you know, right into
Speaker 3: you know, the Burning culture War, and you know, I
Speaker 3: was studying economics. I decided to take game theory, naively,
Speaker 3: assuming that would be game theory, right, And what I'd
Speaker 3: actually done is signed up for a course on the
Speaker 3: critical theory of video games. So I was hot gamer
Speaker 3: Gate at a collegiate level. A funny story, that's a
Speaker 3: large part of the reason I ended up here. You
Speaker 3: go through a course with an obese, actually purple haired
Speaker 3: woman yelling at you about gamer Gate, and you're like, okay, well,
Speaker 3: whoever you hate, I think those are my friends. And obviously,
Speaker 3: you know, that was sort of the canary in the
Speaker 3: coal mine. Many of these trends have been observed in
Speaker 3: other hobbies, you know, similar thing has happened obviously to
Speaker 3: anything that Wizards of the Coast owns. But forty k,
Speaker 3: as we discussed in a previous episode, is structurally resistant,
Speaker 3: you know, within the universe. It is illiberal, right, it
Speaker 3: doesn't conform to certain of our our modern sensibilities. And
Speaker 3: the specific issue is seemingly minor. Right, it's this desire
Speaker 3: to turn factions that are male, right, entirely male, desire
Speaker 3: to diversify them, right, desire to bring women into these
Speaker 3: male spaces, as they would say. And the battles lost
Speaker 3: a while ago, right, there was a. I can't remember
Speaker 3: which one of the horace heresy books I tapped out
Speaker 3: a long time ago, which featured one of these female custodies.
Speaker 3: For those who aren't aware, Giant Royal Protectors, right, Giant Armor,
Speaker 3: the best of the best, right, always been exclusively male,
Speaker 3: and they wrote in to one of these books a
Speaker 3: female character. Funny enough, arch As, I'm sure you're aware,
Speaker 3: she is featured in the book and does bawling her
Speaker 3: eyes out completely ineffectual, which is kind of funny. But
Speaker 3: the big update is now they have little plastic guys. Right,
Speaker 3: they have taken it down to that level, the thing
Speaker 3: that matters, so to speak. So Arch if you could,
Speaker 3: could you describe one why that matters? Right, Why this
Speaker 3: is a significant change for the franchise, And two what's
Speaker 3: the reaction been? Right? Who is celebrating? Who is upset?
Speaker 1: Well, there's quite a few layers to this.
Speaker 2: So this is very obviously so a political move into
Speaker 2: games Workshop because the company that owns Warm of forty thousand,
Speaker 2: that is Games Workshop, they have wanted to become a
Speaker 2: woke company for quite some time now, and they have
Speaker 2: met a great deal of resistance both from their fandom
Speaker 2: and the franchise itself, as you mentioned, one forty thousand
Speaker 2: is just not a very liberal friendly franchise. It is
Speaker 2: explicitly inherently left wing. It begins by simply stating that
Speaker 2: progress is dead. There is no progressivism in it, but
Speaker 2: Games Workshop wants it to be, and they've been waging
Speaker 2: an active war against their fans for quite a few
Speaker 2: years now. One of the central parts of that conflict
Speaker 2: was a man named Tom Mendelssohn, who was their community manager.
Speaker 2: He was revealed a few months ago to have celebrated
Speaker 2: the assassination of Charlie Kirk. I broke that story and
Speaker 2: nobody else talked about it in the Warhammer community. Of
Speaker 2: the commentators. Gainst Workshops suspended him and have still not
Speaker 2: elected to fire him because well, they sympathize with his
Speaker 2: point of view. And I stress that to make you
Speaker 2: understand just how progressive the company actually is. They put
Speaker 2: out a whole plan for female custodes, which, as you say,
Speaker 2: is an all female faction, which began with a small
Speaker 2: line in their codex, their rule book, which mentions a
Speaker 2: female custodes, and it's very vague. It's just the pronouns
Speaker 2: that give it away. This meant that a lot of
Speaker 2: people back then were basically coping like, oh, this probably
Speaker 2: isn't official rogue in turn, stuff like that. But this
Speaker 2: was a part of Against Workshop's long term campaign to
Speaker 2: introduce them boiling the frog on it. They later introduced
Speaker 2: the female custodies in an animated short, and now like
Speaker 2: a year or so later used models, which is essentially
Speaker 2: the standard of canonization. When something has a model, it
Speaker 2: is properly officially a part of the Warhammer forty K universe.
Speaker 2: So that's why that was a big deal, because now
Speaker 2: there's no more excuses nobody can trick themselves into thinking
Speaker 2: that this isn't happening anymore. It is the most blatant
Speaker 2: declaration of war in essence.
Speaker 3: Yeah, and I think that it's really what we're seeing
Speaker 3: is a small product for a very specific type of person,
Speaker 3: the kind of person who is both interested in painting
Speaker 3: up in large armies of fictional soldiers and also in
Speaker 3: a dark, illiberal future, right because there are you know,
Speaker 3: a great number of war games, forty K being the biggest,
Speaker 3: of course, But that was a product for a specific
Speaker 3: type of person, produced by a specific type of person.
Speaker 3: It came out of a very unique culture, right, the
Speaker 3: English culture of the seventies and eighties, and that unique
Speaker 3: flavor is what made it popular. But it's the exact
Speaker 3: same mechanism you see in anything else, which is on
Speaker 3: one hand, the tactical invocation of the wider audience. It's
Speaker 3: sort of up for debate if they actually believe this
Speaker 3: or not, because it has yet to materialize. But it's
Speaker 3: idea that if we know jam in representation, we will
Speaker 3: unlock this kind of secret, untapped audience for XYZ product.
Speaker 3: It will become this kind of global brand. And look,
Speaker 3: some of this is entirely that it's business sensibility. This
Speaker 3: has gone from being a small to a very large company. Understandable.
Speaker 3: But also you see these people who are sort of
Speaker 3: derisively referred to as tourists, right, those who are simply
Speaker 3: there because it is current thing, and when it is
Speaker 3: popular but not in accordance with current values, they want
Speaker 3: to pull it into line with everything else. And the
Speaker 3: combination of these two yields a gray, neutral product, a
Speaker 3: product of nowhere for everybody. And you can see this
Speaker 3: in any number of things. Right. I'm not a big
Speaker 3: like warhammer fantasy guy. It was never my bag for
Speaker 3: a number of reasons. But the way that that world,
Speaker 3: that sort of franchise, I guess you could say, was
Speaker 3: very casually disintegrated and replaced with Ages of Sigmar, which
Speaker 3: is vaguely the same thing, right, It's a medieval fantasy ish,
Speaker 3: but it's completely stripped of any cultural really weight to
Speaker 3: it at all. It again becomes another one of these
Speaker 3: mass market products, and I think that that is additionally,
Speaker 3: even a side from the politics, a big reason people
Speaker 3: are unhappy about this because something that was unique, that
Speaker 3: touched a very you know, specific subset, is being massified.
Speaker 3: It turned into kind of gray cultural good.
Speaker 2: Yes, it's also the fact that when Warhammer, both Fantasy
Speaker 2: and forty K were first introduced, this was, you know,
Speaker 2: thirty eight years ago for forty K and even more
Speaker 2: so for Warhammer Fantasy. Fantasy back then was actually quite formulaic.
Speaker 2: You had the Lord of the Rings in essence, it
Speaker 2: was hopeful fantasy. You had tales like Narnia and so on.
Speaker 2: So Warhammer being sent in a very grim universe was
Speaker 2: quite fresh. It's quite the deviation from things now. Most
Speaker 2: of those, all traditional universes have either fallen out of
Speaker 2: popularity or been broken into the attempt to, you know,
Speaker 2: bring in the wider audience. This meant that forty K
Speaker 2: and Warhammer had a great window there, particularly during the
Speaker 2: COVID season, where a lot of people discovered it, and
Speaker 2: a lot of people were kind of like, oh my god,
Speaker 2: it's a war game, grim dark, brutal, something for boys
Speaker 2: and men in an age where that was becoming vanishingly rare,
Speaker 2: like even Star Wars was entering the full swing of
Speaker 2: the Disney era back then, and so it appealed to
Speaker 2: a lot of people, and it grew very, very rapidly,
Speaker 2: to the point where it is now pushing on the
Speaker 2: gates of mainstreameddness and it's about to break through. Like
Speaker 2: I firmly believe that forty K will probably become the
Speaker 2: next Star Wars, the next cultural phenomenon in entertainment. But
Speaker 2: that has also drawn in the vultures. In this case,
Speaker 2: Amazon and also games workshops desire to appeal to the
Speaker 2: wider audience, partially for economic reasons. As you mentioned, though,
Speaker 2: the problem with it is we've seen this happen. We've
Speaker 2: seen Star Trek try it, Star Wars try it, countless
Speaker 2: other entities. The wider audience doesn't exist, that exists the
Speaker 2: casual audience. But the casual audience can never be appealed
Speaker 2: to for long. They will simply go towards whatever is
Speaker 2: currently popular, and they will stay with it for however
Speaker 2: long it is popular. And then once they have managed
Speaker 2: to reduce it to the gray, bored, turgid slop that
Speaker 2: appeals to everyone, they will move on because it appeals
Speaker 2: to no one. And this is one step in that process,
Speaker 2: by taking what was an exclusively male faction that was
Speaker 2: exclusively designed to appeal exclusively to males, and turning it
Speaker 2: into a diverse faction, and well, damn the law in
Speaker 2: the process.
Speaker 3: Well, and I think that the reaction has been very telling.
Speaker 3: All of the usual suspects are out, you know, crowing
Speaker 3: about the you know, the female custodes models. And what's
Speaker 3: interesting is that they're they're casting everything as a cultural victory. Right,
Speaker 3: we beat you, you can leave. Right. The idea is
Speaker 3: it's effectively an invasion. Right, we found your thing, we
Speaker 3: pulled it apart, we ruined it. Now you should leave.
Speaker 3: And yes, you know, the the idea that this is
Speaker 3: some sort of tolerant force, right, the idea that this
Speaker 3: is some sort of battle for inclusion. I mean, that's
Speaker 3: a tactical assumption. Right. They're stepping into that because it
Speaker 3: gives them, you know, some sort of advantage. It's not real.
Speaker 3: They don't actually think that. That's just a cope.
Speaker 2: Right, it's us and we've known it for a while.
Speaker 3: One hundred percent. So arch this is what we call
Speaker 3: in the interview industry a softball question. Why can't you
Speaker 3: just go somewhere else, to some other grim dark you know?
Speaker 3: I guess you could say intellectual property, like I don't know,
Speaker 3: a Trench Crusade, for example, right, another wargame with grim
Speaker 3: dark aesthetics that's set in Oh, I don't know. Maybe
Speaker 3: the an alternative history passed right? World War One inspired
Speaker 3: with strong Christian imagery. Surely that is a bastion of
Speaker 3: even if not right wing politics, at the very least
Speaker 3: a political wargaming. So what say you to the to
Speaker 3: the Trench Crusade question?
Speaker 1: I denounced this.
Speaker 2: Finally, Trench Crusades developers themselves have already come out and
Speaker 2: stated quite publicly that they do not consider themselves to
Speaker 2: be a Christian game. They believe the Christians to be
Speaker 2: just as bad as the demons, and that there is
Speaker 2: no objectively good side in a war between God and Hell,
Speaker 2: so I consider them to be legitimately actually insane people.
Speaker 3: And for those wondering, right, this is more inside baseball stuff.
Speaker 3: There was a brief exodus of people who saw forty
Speaker 3: k going in this direction and said, you know what,
Speaker 3: this might not be for me anymore. A trench crusade
Speaker 3: which was initially just art. I can't remember the guy's name,
Speaker 3: Mike something like very much talented Mike Francina, who is
Speaker 3: a very talented artist. I'm not going to take that
Speaker 3: away from it. And there was a game to go
Speaker 3: along with it, this sort of you know, if you
Speaker 3: can imagine a sort of like Eldritch World War One theme,
Speaker 3: that's sort of what it was. And so many people
Speaker 3: thought that this is my new place, my new replacement
Speaker 3: for this hobby. And what they found is that the
Speaker 3: invasion was done before they ever showed up, right, the
Speaker 3: same sort of you know, political activists had found their
Speaker 3: way there. And again, right, it's another way in which
Speaker 3: these kind of traditional nerd hobbies have been completely and
Speaker 3: totally subverted, right by these these sort of like political actors.
Speaker 3: So at the same time, obviously there's the direct politics.
Speaker 3: But there have been other people who aren't necessarily politics
Speaker 3: or politically minded per se, who are leaving forty K.
Speaker 3: We're no longer interested. How would you describe those people?
Speaker 1: Right?
Speaker 3: What are the other objections that aren't necessarily directly political?
Speaker 3: People have towards game workshop or this hobby.
Speaker 2: So this is where the problem of politics and law
Speaker 2: comes in. So all law must in essence be viewed
Speaker 2: as a form of rhetorical argumentation. You are setting up
Speaker 2: a universe, and when you're setting up that universe, you
Speaker 2: can invent anything you want, anything whatsoever. You can have
Speaker 2: magical space toads, flying starships powered by the tears of
Speaker 2: children if you so desire. It doesn't have to make sense.
Speaker 2: But once you have created that universe, you must maintain
Speaker 2: internal consistency to the best of your ability. Otherwise is
Speaker 2: the argument loses its credibility. You're no longer making sense.
Speaker 2: You're making a shit up. And that's why people are
Speaker 2: leaving forty K. Even if they don't care about the politics.
Speaker 2: They now look at a universe that can apparently change overnight.
Speaker 2: Never before has there been any mention of female custodies
Speaker 2: at any point. There have never been any art of them.
Speaker 2: In fact, the faction has been specifically and explicitly described
Speaker 2: as all male on multiple occasions previously. And when they
Speaker 2: just change that, well, people now understand that the argument
Speaker 2: is no longer solid, it is no longer internally coherent,
Speaker 2: and that turns people off on a basic level. It's
Speaker 2: not even about whether or not there should be custodies
Speaker 2: from a political point of view. At that point, it
Speaker 2: is simply you've changed the thing. I like, why did
Speaker 2: you do that?
Speaker 1: Oh?
Speaker 2: Because politics? Okay, well I don't agree with you doing
Speaker 2: that for politics.
Speaker 3: Well. And then the other part we need to talk about,
Speaker 3: because this is relevant as well, is on one hand,
Speaker 3: the intellectual property right, the fact that this is a
Speaker 3: company which, for at this point, let's be honest, over
Speaker 3: two decades, has been extremely jealous of the things.
Speaker 4: That they own.
Speaker 3: In my mind, really, the warning bells were set off
Speaker 3: by I don't know what you'd refer this too, but
Speaker 3: the launch of the Primaries right for those who aren't aware,
Speaker 3: the poster boys of forty K are the space Breds, right,
Speaker 3: and basically they launched a refresh. We're getting rid of
Speaker 3: all the old stuff, bringing in the new stuff. Models
Speaker 3: are bigger, the design is cleaner, more modern, whatever. That's
Speaker 3: maybe a separate discussion. But what came along with it
Speaker 3: was this massive ret con right which featured several things. One, obviously,
Speaker 3: you need to buy more stuff. You need to buy
Speaker 3: it now, you can't use the old stuff anymore, and
Speaker 3: the economics of this certainly need to be addressed. But
Speaker 3: also of going back to your previous point, was a
Speaker 3: massive ret con right to how these super soldiers were made,
Speaker 3: you know what the plan was all along, But also
Speaker 3: there was this great secret plan right all along, right
Speaker 3: that these new you know, extra super space marines. Okay,
Speaker 3: fair enough, the Lord's stupid. But what with it was
Speaker 3: this idea that technological progress has resumed, right, we are
Speaker 3: no longer stuck in this kind of era of decay.
Speaker 3: And it's a very core premise to the setting. So
Speaker 3: you have and even like geez, it's been almost ten years, right,
Speaker 3: which is kind of crazy to think. There was a
Speaker 3: very conscious decision to discard the lore, to discard the rules,
Speaker 3: to discard the thing that people liked, and drew them
Speaker 3: to this setting or eight cash grab. And if you
Speaker 3: look at the you know, bringing in the politics as
Speaker 3: yet another cash grab. You certainly could. It's the same thing,
Speaker 3: the idea that we are sacrificing the product to make
Speaker 3: it more economically successful. What do you make of that transition?
Speaker 3: Right the launch of primaries, because in my mind as well,
Speaker 3: it also was a market move towards the kind of
Speaker 3: you know, chasing after the whales, right as well on
Speaker 3: the purchasing side. Do you see what I'm getting at
Speaker 3: their arch?
Speaker 2: Yeah, So the primariest marines, they were probably first and
Speaker 2: foremost an economic decision because they wanted to resell the
Speaker 2: space marine faction, which was by far their best sellers.
Speaker 2: The design also was an early indication that they didn't
Speaker 2: quite understand what their setting was anymore. The old space
Speaker 2: Marines could best be this described as crusading nights in space,
Speaker 2: very bulky, very symbolic looking armor covered in iconography. These
Speaker 2: new ones were very rounded, very tactical, very modern esque,
Speaker 2: and they lacked a lot of the charm of the
Speaker 2: old school of startes. But this was definitely first and
Speaker 2: foremost an economic decision to sell people space marines. Again,
Speaker 2: as they've continued to sell Space Marines constantly ever since.
Speaker 2: They are their best selling faction, so beyond economics an
Speaker 2: indication that they were losing contact with their own setting, definitely,
Speaker 2: But I think that was the primary motivation for the
Speaker 2: Space Marines relaunch rather than the political side of it.
Speaker 3: Oh yeah, one hundred percent. But point is right again.
Speaker 3: I think one of the I know, one of the
Speaker 3: reasons many people are leaving is that the cost of
Speaker 3: engaging in this has gone up dramatic, Right, you can't
Speaker 3: keep a model for nearly as long as you used to.
Speaker 3: You know, things are being refreshed, maybe a slight diversion there.
Speaker 1: Now.
Speaker 3: What's been really interesting, arch is the people who effectively
Speaker 3: have decided that they are going to build their own. Right,
Speaker 3: in the past five or six years, maybe a little longer,
Speaker 3: we've seen the explosion of consumer grade resin printers, right,
Speaker 3: something that I jumped on and have had a lot
Speaker 3: of fun doing, and also a sort of secondary market
Speaker 3: of people designing files. Right, some of them, let's be honest,
Speaker 3: you are ripping off other properties, right, You've got to
Speaker 3: squint your eyes and you know exactly what they're going for.
Speaker 3: But also you know, making their own, making their own systems,
Speaker 3: which are absent of these kind of you know, political overtons.
Speaker 3: So I'm curious, Arch, is there anything you see on
Speaker 3: that front that you see as sort of a sign
Speaker 3: for hope.
Speaker 2: Potentially there are many people trying to work on own
Speaker 2: their own alternatives. I do have a system in the
Speaker 2: works myself, as you do eventually have to just try
Speaker 2: to make your own if you're not happy with the
Speaker 2: current product anymore. I don't know how successful it will be,
Speaker 2: because at the end of the day, it's very difficult
Speaker 2: to make something like this really start taking off, and
Speaker 2: there's only so many people who have the resources to
Speaker 2: do so. And there have been many alternatives that have
Speaker 2: been around for quite some time that have never managed
Speaker 2: to really get going either. It's one of those problems
Speaker 2: where you don't want to give up on the thing
Speaker 2: you like. Anyone has been a fun of a style
Speaker 2: of Star Wars has known that feeling for quite some time,
Speaker 2: even as you see it on its deathbed, and like
Speaker 2: forty K two has the problems you mentioned with the
Speaker 2: economy of it that gw has just been increasing their
Speaker 2: prices add infinitum to the point where their specialty paint
Speaker 2: now costs ten times that of their competition and sell
Speaker 2: simply because of brand and market recognition. It's I suppose
Speaker 2: one of the problems with our current day internet based
Speaker 2: system as well, that once you have a thing become big,
Speaker 2: it usually becomes the dominant force in its own arena,
Speaker 2: rather than back in the day when we had far
Speaker 2: more competitors to all of this. Wow, it's difficult to
Speaker 2: say if we'll see anything rise up to replace it,
Speaker 2: but eventually, because we were kind of in the early
Speaker 2: stages of a replacement period right now, right where we're
Speaker 2: seeing many of the primary entertainment things like Star Wars
Speaker 2: are beginning to fall off. A lot of The Rings
Speaker 2: was lauded for the longest time due to the excellent trilogy,
Speaker 2: and then came to The Rings of Power, which is
Speaker 2: severely damaged its reputation. Game of throneses was lauded until
Speaker 2: his final season, and so on. So we're kind of
Speaker 2: seeing the end of many of these cultural giants right now,
Speaker 2: and we're not yet sure what will emerge now, like
Speaker 2: what comes next.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it's sort of an interesting thing writ large that
Speaker 3: as the Boomer generation is beginning to pass, so are
Speaker 3: many of the sort of the cultural phenomenon that they created.
Speaker 3: And obviously, you know, Tolkien was not a baby boomer
Speaker 3: not my point at all, but the kind of great
Speaker 3: cultural properties of the twentieth century, Marvel, Star Wars, any
Speaker 3: one of these sort of got taken through this, you know,
Speaker 3: slow build up, meteoric rise, and then very quickly burnt
Speaker 3: out at the point which there's very little left. And
Speaker 3: I think it's interesting to see, and I know that
Speaker 3: you've done a few videos on this, the sort of
Speaker 3: later attempted editions. So I'm sort of fascinated by Avatar
Speaker 3: for a number of reasons, James Cameron, not the Cartoon
Speaker 3: Network show. And perhaps the reason I'm the most interested
Speaker 3: in it is that it is the message of that
Speaker 3: movie is the most insane boomer slot possible, but it
Speaker 3: is sort of out of date, right, So the central
Speaker 3: conceit of Avatar is very much the sort of male
Speaker 3: baby boomer fantasy, right of finding people who were connected
Speaker 3: to the earth, who are you know, from a different culture,
Speaker 3: you know, being placed in charge of them, made a warlord,
Speaker 3: and getting you know, a really hot alien babe. This
Speaker 3: is the plot of you know, obviously Dances with Wolves,
Speaker 3: any number of you know, similar Western movies. I mean, honestly,
Speaker 3: the Last Samurai is very similar as well. Right, there's
Speaker 3: this whole genre of film, but Avatar is that same story,
Speaker 3: just remade much past its cell by day. And obviously
Speaker 3: the politics of Avatar are completely and totally insane on
Speaker 3: multiple different levels. But it is sort of this interesting
Speaker 3: instance of both being the property that never was right,
Speaker 3: the movie that sold a billion tickets but no one
Speaker 3: actually talks about or remembers particularly. But you see that
Speaker 3: same trend, you see that same narrative, that same thing
Speaker 3: once the sort of roots that underpinned have begun to rot,
Speaker 3: you know, And I think that you're entirely right to
Speaker 3: talk about this era of replacement because so many of
Speaker 3: these large legacy properties that have taken up so much
Speaker 3: of everyone's time and kind of psychic energy are running
Speaker 3: out or petering out and sort of converging into kind
Speaker 3: of gray ubisoft slop. It's an interesting thing.
Speaker 1: That it is, because you say it too.
Speaker 2: The story of Avatar is basically the story of John Carter,
Speaker 2: Warlord from of Mars, which was published in nineteen thirteen. Like,
Speaker 2: this is an over one hundred years old story, and
Speaker 2: we can go back further beyond that. You've got to
Speaker 2: bear in mind that things like Troy were basically their
Speaker 2: versions of Issachais going to strange and distant lands or Hercules,
Speaker 2: right and finding strange alien babes in these areas too,
Speaker 2: Like this is a tales all this time, and Avatar
Speaker 2: is fascinating again because.
Speaker 3: Or you Norwegians just made a culture out of that, right,
Speaker 3: going to strange lands and finding strange women.
Speaker 2: But sorry, it's a romantic pursuit that is vaguely recognizable,
Speaker 2: but Avatar, Avatar doesn't manage to deliver it because the
Speaker 2: problem is that the Navy aren't the good guys. The
Speaker 2: Navies are obviously the slaves of this parasitic fungus entity
Speaker 2: that is obviously evil. So I firmly believe that is
Speaker 2: the reason why it has failed to have the cultural impact,
Speaker 2: because when people go to watch the movie, even if
Speaker 2: they are not entirely aware of it, not quite cognizant,
Speaker 2: they understand that the bad guys are winning, and that
Speaker 2: makes them disconnect from it.
Speaker 3: Well, and there's a fascinating element of racial politics to
Speaker 3: these where of course, right, this is a movie that's
Speaker 3: sort of hamfictedly about colonialization. Right, you have the the
Speaker 3: evil you know, uh, technologically advanced imperial faction, uh, you know,
Speaker 3: harassing these noble savages, right, a unified you know, a
Speaker 3: race of people who have never died in war only
Speaker 3: due to old age, at which point they are, you know,
Speaker 3: their body is subsumed, right in this sort of beautiful
Speaker 3: circle of life. But and I'll be one hundred percent honest,
Speaker 3: I haven't seen the first one since it came out, right,
Speaker 3: So I'm not gonna pretend to be a scholar. Actually,
Speaker 3: now that I think about it, I've seen all of
Speaker 3: these movies when they came out and never you know
Speaker 3: again since. But point is, there's this really interesting dynamic
Speaker 3: that comes up in the third one where there's sort
Speaker 3: of this debate raging about purity, right, the genetic purity
Speaker 3: of the nov because of course you have you know,
Speaker 3: Jake I always want to say it, Jake Soley, because
Speaker 3: that's how they say it in the films. But Jake Sully,
Speaker 3: you know who has been He has a man's soul
Speaker 3: transported into a you know, a nave body, right he is,
Speaker 3: you know, which is again the idea of having a
Speaker 3: soul and a body disconnected to sort of an interesting
Speaker 3: one orright, you know, a spirit in in kind of
Speaker 3: current politics, right if we look at gender or something else.
Speaker 3: But nonetheless you have this debate between him and his wife,
Speaker 3: and you know, they're constantly arguing back and forth about,
Speaker 3: you know, the need to keep their planet pure. And
Speaker 3: a large part of the conflict of the second movie
Speaker 3: is that there is a you know, a kid who
Speaker 3: through bs earth magic, it's not particularly important, has gained
Speaker 3: the ability to breathe the toxic air. And of course
Speaker 3: everyone's all worried because oh no, now the invaders can
Speaker 3: live here, right if they discover his secret. And so
Speaker 3: it's quite funny because again this is a deeply progressive
Speaker 3: movie intentionally, but the unintentional message, of course is we
Speaker 3: can't allow the invaders here because once they get a foothold,
Speaker 3: they'll take over. And so that's this bizarre kind of
Speaker 3: you know, mixed up you know, racial politics if you will,
Speaker 3: where it could very easily be recast as you know,
Speaker 3: something that you know, a certain mid century German would
Speaker 3: have made. But if you see what I'm going to
Speaker 3: get there, they almost can't keep their own you know
Speaker 3: logic straight.
Speaker 2: Well, there's very much so a James Cameron problem, because
Speaker 2: James Cameron, he has a feeling of what he wants
Speaker 2: to get across, but he doesn't quite understand the implications
Speaker 2: of what he's trying trying to create. Like even the
Speaker 2: third movie was basically him realizing that, oh God, I
Speaker 2: have made the humans look way too good. I'm going
Speaker 2: to need to just up the bad on every level
Speaker 2: to try and make you not sympathize with them. And
Speaker 2: again he keeps overseeing these obvious things, like the entire
Speaker 2: idea of Awa the goddess. We have now had it
Speaker 2: basically confirmed in the third movie that yeah, no, she
Speaker 2: is a fungus. She lives within people. She uses their
Speaker 2: memories as a way to prey upon their psyche. Oh
Speaker 2: you want to see your loved once again, Well you're
Speaker 2: going to have to worship me then, because I.
Speaker 1: Can do that.
Speaker 2: And even that, it's I've seen progressives as well described
Speaker 2: this as an after life, and no, this is an
Speaker 2: alien entity showing you a snapshot of the person the
Speaker 2: last time they connected to a war as a form
Speaker 2: of emotional black mail in essence, I mean, by any
Speaker 2: other in any other franchise, this would be a monstrous,
Speaker 2: nightmarish entity. Yet because it's presented as as realistic in
Speaker 2: a way you have progressives flocking to it. It's kind
Speaker 2: of become this form of how did I put in
Speaker 2: like a secular god to them where they worship realism
Speaker 2: almost it's.
Speaker 1: A strange thing.
Speaker 2: I think that's the only part where I've seen it
Speaker 2: actually have any cultural impact is amongst the progressive class,
Speaker 2: and it is usually by using very religious language combined
Speaker 2: with this worship of the rational.
Speaker 3: And there's a so, look, this is not a good film.
Speaker 3: You should not watch it, listener. It's a large to
Speaker 3: total waste of time. If you've seen the second movie,
Speaker 3: watch it again. That's the third one. But there's sort
Speaker 3: of this fascinating, fascinating instance at the very end where
Speaker 3: the arch villain whose name I cannot remember, another you know,
Speaker 3: human soul transported into a blue body, which, by the way,
Speaker 3: arch as one of the only other people to see
Speaker 3: this movie as far as I remember. Their explanation as
Speaker 3: to why he is back is a single line which
Speaker 3: basically just says he was resurrected. Am I am I
Speaker 3: misremembering that? Or is there some greater explanation for why
Speaker 3: this dead character is back now?
Speaker 1: Oh quotach?
Speaker 2: He was basically brought back by James Cameron straight up. Yes,
Speaker 2: he became one of the most popular characters in the
Speaker 2: first movie. And this also because the actor is excellent, Like,
Speaker 2: he's a fantastic act.
Speaker 3: He's the only compelling character in the entire film.
Speaker 2: Yes, and that's why James Cameron brought him back, because
Speaker 2: there was okay, well, I can't not. And that's also
Speaker 2: kind of, you know, one of the things that have
Speaker 2: damaged the overall story because Avatar really only had one
Speaker 2: movie in it, and every movie since the first one
Speaker 2: has basically just been a retelling of the first movie
Speaker 2: in slightly different circumstances, to the point where now it's
Speaker 2: almost as much of a tale between Qurridge and Jake
Speaker 2: Sully as anything else, because again James Cameron doesn't quite
Speaker 2: know what he's doing with this. But no, he was
Speaker 2: just brought back and it's like, oh, yeah, we decided
Speaker 2: to back up your mind in a navvy body because
Speaker 2: you know, fuck it, why not?
Speaker 3: And that's basically the reasoning for most things.
Speaker 1: Oh, that is the entire reasoning.
Speaker 2: Like he even Quorish himself just kind of shrugs like, okay,
Speaker 2: well fine, I guess.
Speaker 3: One of the other relevant parts about this and I
Speaker 3: maybe too much personal detail, arch, but going to see
Speaker 3: the Avatar films as part of a noble tradition known
Speaker 3: as mall beers. There is a theater in the mall.
Speaker 3: There's a bar in the mall, and so you know,
Speaker 3: you combine the two and you get smashed and go
Speaker 3: see a movie.
Speaker 1: Right.
Speaker 3: It's not high art all, grant you, but it's something
Speaker 3: to do. And you know, so I'm going to see
Speaker 3: this with the kind of guys who are interested in that, right,
Speaker 3: most of them aren't necessarily interested in cultural analysis per se.
Speaker 3: They're normal guys, right. And you know, halfway through this movie,
Speaker 3: I'm sitting next to a guy and he leans over
Speaker 3: to me and he just whispers in my ear, James
Speaker 3: Cameron really hates people. Which it's entirely true, right, this
Speaker 3: this is a profoundly anti human movie. And Korich again,
Speaker 3: who is this villain? He declares that his loyalty is
Speaker 3: to the human race. I'm sure you're familiar with the
Speaker 3: heat map meme arge, right, which is comparing you know,
Speaker 3: left wing and right wing people on their assigned amount
Speaker 3: of loyalty. Right, You're given ten points, will say to
Speaker 3: assign to different groups. Generally speaking, conservatives assign that to
Speaker 3: their family first, in ever decreasing amounts going outwards, whereas
Speaker 3: people who self identify as progressives are the exact opposite.
Speaker 3: They feel the most loyalty to the universe at large,
Speaker 3: the least to the people around them. Right. And so,
Speaker 3: what's again kind of interesting about the mixed up politics
Speaker 3: of this movie is Korich is the villain, right, He
Speaker 3: certainly played sympathetically, but he is a bad guy. Right,
Speaker 3: We're supposed to be rooting against him. But right before
Speaker 3: he dies for the third time in the third movie,
Speaker 3: he basically says like, no, I did this all for humanity.
Speaker 3: Everything I did was in service of the survival of
Speaker 3: the species. And it's profoundly amusing to me that this
Speaker 3: is basically a liberal movie about the the need to
Speaker 3: prioritize your tribe quite literally over the human race. I
Speaker 3: just think that that's a very funny message for a
Speaker 3: progressive to put forth.
Speaker 2: Yeah, well, because again it's because of their own worship. Like,
Speaker 2: the progressives are as deeply religious as any other group,
Speaker 2: it's just that their God is named something else. That
Speaker 2: God is the rational god and for them therefore are
Speaker 2: awa an Avatar is rational good. The planet of Pandora
Speaker 2: is beautiful, it's clean, and everybody is happy there. Nobby
Speaker 2: has a nine to five job, and their god is
Speaker 2: a real god, and therefore they're good. Now again, if
Speaker 2: we start to actually analyze what's going on there, you
Speaker 2: can very clearly see that the now we are not.
Speaker 1: Good, and that a war is not good either.
Speaker 2: But it's I really need to like look into this
Speaker 2: war when it comes to like the rear reaction to
Speaker 2: it from a progressive point of view, because I do
Speaker 2: think there's definitely just a natural outgroup preference there which
Speaker 2: allows them to overlook the other logical inconsistencies. Right, we
Speaker 2: don't like humans, therefore we automatically root for the opposition.
Speaker 2: But there is a lot of contradictions because it does
Speaker 2: absolutely boil down to well, you know, I am on
Speaker 2: this side of the fence now, so I will do
Speaker 2: anything I can to protect this side of the fence
Speaker 2: over yours at any cost. And the way they'll probably
Speaker 2: square this is by simply just bioterror bombing Earth with
Speaker 2: AOA spores, and then we'll all become monkeys living the
Speaker 2: Stone Age.
Speaker 1: Instead.
Speaker 3: You're you're you're entirely right. I'm sort of fascinated arch
Speaker 3: by these poorly produced pieces of political progressive propaganda. That
Speaker 3: alliteration is not intentional, but we'll go with it. Another
Speaker 3: one is the second Dune film, which got panned by
Speaker 3: a lot of our guys, and I understand why, But
Speaker 3: in a way, I actually thought that having you know,
Speaker 3: Chini be this kind of you know, scowling character, you know,
Speaker 3: doubting you know, poll's ability to sort of you know,
Speaker 3: unite the stars in this kind of global giha or
Speaker 3: this you know, galactic chihat, I thought that it was
Speaker 3: actually an oddly poignant thing, right where effectively, you know,
Speaker 3: this image of you know that this woman looking over
Speaker 3: her shoulder scowling because he didn't pick me. He wanted
Speaker 3: to go, you know, change the entire you know, destiny
Speaker 3: of the human rights. I thought that was an oddly
Speaker 3: poignant message. And the movie, of course, is trying to
Speaker 3: tell you that you know, she's right, that he really
Speaker 3: should stay at home, that you know, this destiny isn't real,
Speaker 3: that he's you know, he's given into toxic masculinity. But
Speaker 3: they're almost unable to present that message in a compelling
Speaker 3: way and end up sort of communicating the exact opposite.
Speaker 3: So these, you know, not particularly good progressive science fiction
Speaker 3: movies are kind of a fascination of mine, if you
Speaker 3: see what I'm getting at.
Speaker 2: Yes, And a lot of this has to do is
Speaker 2: the inability to understand it as well. That there's a
Speaker 2: fascinating picture from from one of the Dune premieers. I
Speaker 2: think that shows the entire cast. I'll put in a
Speaker 2: little private chat here so you can see it, And
Speaker 2: it's the most metrosexual bunch of people you've ever seen.
Speaker 2: And when you understand that, when you understand this is
Speaker 2: a cast made by very metrosexual people, by very metrosexual producers, developers,
Speaker 2: written in a very modern fashion, they obviously can't understand
Speaker 2: the destiny of Paul the Tradees. They can't understand this
Speaker 2: is a man who will conquer the galaxy through force,
Speaker 2: who will eventually be haunted by the force he was
Speaker 2: forced to unleash in largely the defense of himself and
Speaker 2: his family as well. They can't understand that very idea
Speaker 2: of being willing to do these things, even knowing they
Speaker 2: are going to result in horrible consequences, in order to
Speaker 2: defend yourself and your own as as you say it,
Speaker 2: Shanni is very much so the counterpoint of well, shouldn't
Speaker 2: you just roll over and die, shouldn't you just let
Speaker 2: the evil empire win and your family be eradicated if
Speaker 2: you're so horrified by your own actions? And no, because
Speaker 2: there there is actually a morality in looking out for
Speaker 2: your own people. That is not moral. In fact, it
Speaker 2: is a very definition of morality. These are mine, I
Speaker 2: will defend them to the best of my abilities.
Speaker 3: Well, and additionally, right, there's the level of her saying no,
Speaker 3: stay with me, right, you know, be a prince here,
Speaker 3: don't fulfill your destiny. And it sort of it honestly
Speaker 3: adds a sort of beautiful, beautiful element to the story.
Speaker 3: Right because of course, during the duel with fate Rautha,
Speaker 3: you know, paul Is is wounded, but because he is
Speaker 3: human and he can master his emotions, he can master
Speaker 3: his pain, he's able to push through it, win the duel,
Speaker 3: and you know him marry into the imperial household. But
Speaker 3: what's interesting about that is obviously there is the death right,
Speaker 3: the death of Paul you know, the birth of Madep
Speaker 3: the man who is a god. But also in that right,
Speaker 3: he is saying, you know, I am giving up the
Speaker 3: happiness of being a normal man right be married to
Speaker 3: the woman I love. I am taking this sort of
Speaker 3: loveless imperial marriage. And that's another level as well. That's
Speaker 3: sort of interesting because he is, you know, killing the
Speaker 3: man to sort of become a legend, right to become
Speaker 3: a demigod almost, and with that, you know, there is
Speaker 3: glory with it. Right, he will be the most powerful
Speaker 3: man in the history of the human species. But also
Speaker 3: right he is, he is giving something up there. There's
Speaker 3: a sacrifice there, and I think that that's a very
Speaker 3: interesting element to the film that again they are unable
Speaker 3: to recognize because in the progressive vision, power and a
Speaker 3: press are one and the same thing. Of course stated
Speaker 3: not revealed. They're more than happy to be in power,
Speaker 3: they just can't recognize it. But I think that that's
Speaker 3: another interesting element as well, where they simp they cannot
Speaker 3: understand the fact that there is a sort of tragedy
Speaker 3: to that right, that you must sacrifice your personal happiness
Speaker 3: for something greater. It's kind of great destiny. And it's
Speaker 3: again it's a concept that would be very basic to
Speaker 3: pre moderns, right to anyone really before the nineteen forties
Speaker 3: John Carter, you know any number of these even you know,
Speaker 3: kind of pop cultural or you know, we could say,
Speaker 3: you know, a pulp right would recognize this and show
Speaker 3: similar themes. But the modern progressive is simply unable to
Speaker 3: recognize that. And again, right, this is something that you
Speaker 3: see in forty k as well. It's funny if if
Speaker 3: you go on you know, Reddit or something like that,
Speaker 3: which I don't recommend, it's it's poisonous to your brain,
Speaker 3: but you can find very funny interactions. So owl caat
Speaker 3: right did a CRPG in the Warhammer universe that you know,
Speaker 3: I quite enjoyed, but the coverage of it was quite interesting,
Speaker 3: right because you see, you know, people saying, oh, is
Speaker 3: this a fascist game?
Speaker 1: Like?
Speaker 3: Why is their consequences for freeing heretics? Why are there
Speaker 3: consequences for not you know, blowing up entire planets because
Speaker 3: of corruption? Is this game fascist? And again there's no
Speaker 3: way to recognize that. You know, in the Warhammer universe
Speaker 3: or and Doing or anything else, there are these hard
Speaker 3: limitations placed, right, There are tough choices that require sacrifice
Speaker 3: sometimes you know, not willing sacrifice even and I think
Speaker 3: that's sort of an interesting element to watch them, you know,
Speaker 3: grapple with something they can't understand and sort of mess
Speaker 3: it up in the process.
Speaker 2: Yes, and this of course holds the thing comes also
Speaker 2: back to the end goal of progressivism is to reduce
Speaker 2: Western society, is to get rid of the fundamental pillars
Speaker 2: that uphold it, and one of those is absolutely the
Speaker 2: idea of self sac that there are going to be
Speaker 2: things that are greater than yourself, and you should, to
Speaker 2: be a moral being take actions to preserve those things,
Speaker 2: even at a personal cost. And the progressives kind of
Speaker 2: have never accepted the idea of the personal cost. They
Speaker 2: are fundamentally a very selfish political movement that pretends to
Speaker 2: not be. It's one of the interesting things that whenever
Speaker 2: you see any progressivist group argue for something, it is
Speaker 2: always going to be in their own favor in some way.
Speaker 2: The Great War between the proper progressives and the radical
Speaker 2: feminists was very interesting in this regard because the radical feminists,
Speaker 2: of course, simply wanted things that benefited them. They wanted
Speaker 2: greater power for themselves, greater privileges for themselves, and that
Speaker 2: of course ran into a big conflict with the progressives,
Speaker 2: who didn't want more powers for feminists, for women. They
Speaker 2: wanted to define what a woman was. They wanted a
Speaker 2: man to be able to be a woman because that
Speaker 2: would grant them more power, and the radical feminists didn't
Speaker 2: have any good arguments against it other than to continue
Speaker 2: to be radical feminists. And that didn't work because the
Speaker 2: only reason why that worked was because they were arguing
Speaker 2: against men who have also been through Western society well
Speaker 2: programmed into being like, no, no, no, you've got to take
Speaker 2: care of the women. They're a little bit brain damaged,
Speaker 2: we all know, but you gotta agree with them even
Speaker 2: when they say crazy shit, And that, of course didn't
Speaker 2: work on the progressives. So they have an interesting thing
Speaker 2: where they don't seem to understand negative consequences, Like they
Speaker 2: live in this weird kind of world of duality where
Speaker 2: at the one time they are always the victim. It's
Speaker 2: always terrible, they're always undergoing great hardships, but they seem
Speaker 2: to never actually be able to expect those hardships to occur, oh.
Speaker 3: One hundred percent. It's very much this kind of performative
Speaker 3: theater where you know, the rebels are always the good guys,
Speaker 3: but ultimately, you know, the Nazis have to do their
Speaker 3: part and lose. Like honestly, it's sort of why Star
Speaker 3: Wars is sort of fascinating because it's the archetypal version
Speaker 3: of this story. I mean, honestly, if we're talking about
Speaker 3: the great, you know, the great kind of you know,
Speaker 3: turnover in culture, I think a large part of it is,
Speaker 3: honestly the mythology of World War Two, not that it
Speaker 3: didn't occur, right, but that as the defining moment for
Speaker 3: our culture, you know, that as the story which must
Speaker 3: be eternally retold. Obviously Star Wars dude, it's just it's
Speaker 3: World War two in space, right. You don't have to
Speaker 3: be a genius to figure this out. But that kind
Speaker 3: of core story, the idea of you know, the plucky
Speaker 3: resistance if you will, built into that is ultimately a lie. Sorry,
Speaker 3: but America wasn't the underdog and world or too, you know,
Speaker 3: like you were a continent size superpower and you bolt
Speaker 3: us to the Soviet Union and you know it, It's
Speaker 3: not exactly like that was the you know, the plucky
Speaker 3: underdog against you know, the empire from Star Wars. So
Speaker 3: I think that's that's definitely part of it. Not looking
Speaker 3: to get into a historical digression there. But I think
Speaker 3: another part of that right is an inability to have
Speaker 3: true evil, right to have an objective you know, good
Speaker 3: and ill, because you know you have shades of it,
Speaker 3: right obviously, you know the Nazis. That's a reason that
Speaker 3: slur is used. But I think that you know, really
Speaker 3: there is this kind of baked in idea that you know,
Speaker 3: the outsider, the downcast, that's never evil, right, it is
Speaker 3: simply misunderstood. It is simply something that can be normalized
Speaker 3: and brought into the fold, and that's ultimately good. And
Speaker 3: I think that when we're talking about that kind of
Speaker 3: you know, particularism of sacrifice, right, it's a sacrifice for who.
Speaker 3: You know, when when Beowulf, you know, tears Grendel's arm off, right,
Speaker 3: he is doing that to protect definite people and he
Speaker 3: is ultimately killed in battle with the dragon, it is
Speaker 3: he is a king protecting his people. And I think
Speaker 3: that that's an element as well, right, that the lines
Speaker 3: become very blurred and there's an unwillingness to accept, you know,
Speaker 3: a world, whether ours are a fictional one, where there
Speaker 3: is an absolute, irredeemable evil that cannot be normalized, that
Speaker 3: cannot be brought into the fold that is not misunderstood.
Speaker 3: It is simply you know, wrong and evil. And so
Speaker 3: even in like the modern Wolfenstein games, right, which are
Speaker 3: perhaps the most egregious versions of that, you know, twentieth
Speaker 3: century myth. You know, every one of these German soldiers is, oh, well,
Speaker 3: you know, he's a he's a sexual degenerate, or oh
Speaker 3: there's some other reason he's doing that, and he is,
Speaker 3: you know, fundamentally, he cannot even simply be evil. He
Speaker 3: must be this sort of twisted, misunderstood thing. And I
Speaker 3: wonder if that's an element as well.
Speaker 2: Arge perhaps like we've changed our ideas of evil too,
Speaker 2: in this kind of interesting way, where we had a
Speaker 2: fairly simplistic evil and from the Lord of the Rings perspective,
Speaker 2: like sour on darkness, all of this stuff. This, of course,
Speaker 2: also was one of the earliest versions of the Second
Speaker 2: World War as our modern day mythology. But the Nazis
Speaker 2: have taken up the position of the irredeemable evil side,
Speaker 2: and it lacks a certain how do I put it,
Speaker 2: not finesse necessarily, but depth of understanding. I guess because
Speaker 2: on the one hand, I kind of sympathize with the
Speaker 2: idea of the misunderstood villain, because there's a lot of
Speaker 2: interesting things you can do with that. Magneto used to
Speaker 2: be one of my favorite villains from the old, you know,
Speaker 2: comic book days, because he was a victim of the
Speaker 2: Nazi purchase who then became a mutant and started basically
Speaker 2: becoming the Nazis. And his journey of discovering this is
Speaker 2: quite fascinating, and the way that he rationalizes his own
Speaker 2: crimes without understanding the parallels between them and the Nazis.
Speaker 2: But there's also this kind of intersects with the idea
Speaker 2: that the enemy must be both infinitely powerful and malicious
Speaker 2: and infinitely retarded at the same way. In old law
Speaker 2: of propaganda, which is where you arrived in kind of
Speaker 2: around that the Avatar thing, where the humans are evil,
Speaker 2: they do random evil shit for absolutely no gardamn reason,
Speaker 2: and at the same time they're also incompetent. You have
Speaker 2: humans here fighting an underwater alien species with our underwater
Speaker 2: alien mounts that refuse to use a simple sona to
Speaker 2: wipe them out in a single goddamn ping, but simultaneously
Speaker 2: they're going to kill their ancestors. These whale creatures practically
Speaker 2: just for shits and giggles to take like a single
Speaker 2: vial of magical, obscure liquid nonsense out of them and
Speaker 2: dump their carcasses back into the water.
Speaker 1: I feel like we.
Speaker 2: Have almost managed to lose track of how to conceptualize
Speaker 2: of an antagonist in many ways, like beyond just the
Speaker 2: purely evil or or the progressive version of evil. That's
Speaker 2: something I need to think about more.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it's sort of an interesting it's sort of an
Speaker 3: interesting question. Right. There's a great article and I can't
Speaker 3: remember exactly what it's called, by Dave Green, the Distributist,
Speaker 3: about Harry Potter. Right, it's basically asking the question of, like, well,
Speaker 3: you know what happens to House Slytherin afterwards? Right, what
Speaker 3: do you do when this evil faction has been bested?
Speaker 3: And you know, he's talking about kind of a like
Speaker 3: what does the progressive do with a vanquished evil? Right now,
Speaker 3: we can look to you know the history of the
Speaker 3: American South or you know, continental Europe and say, well,
Speaker 3: they will simply socially engineer them out of existence, right,
Speaker 3: they will attempt to sort of reform them in a
Speaker 3: very kind of Quaker way. But that's sort of an
Speaker 3: interesting question. Again because part of that, you know, that
Speaker 3: kind of founding myth, right in the same way that
Speaker 3: like Romulus and Remus or the Trojan War would have
Speaker 3: been for previous empires, for US is is you know,
Speaker 3: World War Two, and so you know, in the kind
Speaker 3: of retellings of this, it's like, well, you you blow
Speaker 3: up the Death Star and then it just goes away, right,
Speaker 3: It's just done. It's crumbled, and you know, even in
Speaker 3: the sequels you can see that they're not entirely sure
Speaker 3: what that looks like. Where it's you know, fifty years
Speaker 3: on and well, the rebellions now the resistance, and I
Speaker 3: guess they're kind of in charge. But also you know,
Speaker 3: the is that the first Order I can't remember what
Speaker 3: they rebranded it. To the point is they're still stormtroopers, right,
Speaker 3: There's no way to conceptualize what winning looks like. And
Speaker 3: I think a big part of that is that idea
Speaker 3: around power, which is the idea that you know, power
Speaker 3: is fundamentally illegitimate, that if you were in charge, there's
Speaker 3: something wrong with you and you ought to be resisted.
Speaker 3: And so that question of what does a victory look like,
Speaker 3: what does beating the big bad It's sort of a
Speaker 3: gray area, right one where there's there's nothing to find.
Speaker 2: Yes, there's also just the reductivest part of it, because
Speaker 2: one of the keys of progressivism is that it doesn't
Speaker 2: want to be happy. It wants problems. Problem brings power
Speaker 2: to it. It doesn't want to find a solution because
Speaker 2: if it finds a solution, you can no longer use
Speaker 2: graevance politics against everybody else. It's fundamentally anti Western society,
Speaker 2: and this can manifest itself in many ways. Like a
Speaker 2: favorite favorite quote of mine is the idea of George R. R.
Speaker 2: Martin quote, But Tolkien doesn't ask the question what was
Speaker 2: Adragon's tax policy? And the reason why that is so
Speaker 2: amusing to me is because, on the one hand, I
Speaker 2: actually like the idea of a fantasy setting where you
Speaker 2: delve into that, Okay, what does Gondor look like after
Speaker 2: defeating Mordor? What happens to the Orc? And the answer
Speaker 2: is probably just simple genocide. But it's also one of
Speaker 2: those ultimately reductivist tastes where I actually don't give a
Speaker 2: shit about what Adragon's tax policy is. I give a
Speaker 2: shit that he is the king that was chosen, He
Speaker 2: is the king that was promised, He returned, and he
Speaker 2: beat the Big bad and the story is over. That's
Speaker 2: where Star Wars should have ended. Now the Imperium was destroyed.
Speaker 2: There you go, You're done, You're finished. To then have
Speaker 2: them transition into the Resists whilst being the masters of
Speaker 2: the Galaxy to the point where you have to have
Speaker 2: the best scrawling introtext in the history of cinema going
Speaker 2: somehow Palpaty in returned. You don't have a plot anymore
Speaker 2: at that point. And I don't know if it's a
Speaker 2: lack of imagination to not understand where you could possibly
Speaker 2: go with this, or simply an inability to understand that
Speaker 2: sometimes you have to have a goal in mind, and
Speaker 2: I don't think the progressives do. I don't think the
Speaker 2: progressives have an idea of the ideal society, and I
Speaker 2: don't think they're working towards it. They just have these
Speaker 2: loose promises, these thoughts in their minds, which, amusingly they
Speaker 2: were a part of tearing down I mean, you can
Speaker 2: look at the acceptance rate of things like gay marriage
Speaker 2: or transgender people today and they've all nose dived after
Speaker 2: progressivism became more popular. Estually, the progressive victory would have
Speaker 2: been to shut up in the nineties and just let
Speaker 2: everything proceed as it was.
Speaker 3: Well, Arch, I'll have you know that for many of
Speaker 3: our progressives, your society with roughly the demographics of Mogadishu,
Speaker 3: I believe that is the ideal society. Obviously, I'm not
Speaker 3: going to ask you to, you know, to weigh in
Speaker 3: on if that is some sort of heaven on earth.
Speaker 3: But yeah, you're entirely right. I mean, I think another
Speaker 3: part of this, to be brutally honest, is that, you know,
Speaker 3: for many of these cultural figures, you have this huge
Speaker 3: talent gap where you have you know, these baby boomers
Speaker 3: right who have held onto their positions of powers. Actor directors,
Speaker 3: you know, James Cameron is a great example, and the
Speaker 3: people underneath them did not come up under the same circumstances.
Speaker 3: They were not forced to compete in any sort of
Speaker 3: meritocracy whatsoever, and they were pushed well ahead of their
Speaker 3: skills sets. And so if you look at you know,
Speaker 3: Millennial and you know gen X directors, writers and all
Speaker 3: their diversity hires, so even you know, the kind of
Speaker 3: like core skill set of how to write something compelling, right,
Speaker 3: even if the politics in it are horrible, and there's
Speaker 3: a great number of examples of films that have bad politics,
Speaker 3: but are you know, great to watch. I think that's
Speaker 3: another element as well, that they have sort of undercut
Speaker 3: their own talent based to the point where I don't
Speaker 3: think they have anyone who even understands what they're doing anymore.
Speaker 3: Maybe a discussion for another day that but arch we're
Speaker 3: oh sorry, I'll let you respond.
Speaker 2: Oh you know, I'll just finish by saying that that's true.
Speaker 2: There was an article a few weeks ago that basically
Speaker 2: was from it Insider that was trying to become a writer.
Speaker 2: He was a young person trying to become a right
Speaker 2: in the page, and he was.
Speaker 3: The Lost Generation is by something Savage in Compact.
Speaker 2: Yeah, where he simply lined out that no, they weren't
Speaker 2: looking for good writers. That was ir relevant. That was
Speaker 2: a Urchieady concern.
Speaker 1: At best.
Speaker 2: They were looking for diverse writers, and when they needed
Speaker 2: one or two good writers, they had an entire stable
Speaker 2: of fifty sixty year old people with proven track records
Speaker 2: that they would rely on instead. And so we lost
Speaker 2: an entire generation, multiple generations of storytellers who never got
Speaker 2: a chance because they were born wrong.
Speaker 3: Again, they're doing it to themselves. And honestly, Warhammer was,
Speaker 3: and I've successfully emotionally divorced from Warhammer. I don't really
Speaker 3: care anymore because I can't do anything about it, right,
Speaker 3: and they have a little bit of control over you
Speaker 3: if you do care, right, if you're still buying this stuff.
Speaker 3: But with all of these other ones, you know, it's
Speaker 3: just very clear there's there's not much left, you know,
Speaker 3: they have been sort of hoard out. And again, as
Speaker 3: you said, the best bet we've got is sort of
Speaker 3: either going back right to a previous version or you know,
Speaker 3: to the source material, or making your own because clearly,
Speaker 3: you know, the people in charge of these different franchises
Speaker 3: you know, pick your poison right, are complete and total idiots,
Speaker 3: to be blunt about it. Absolutely well, Arch, we are
Speaker 3: fast approaching time. This was a fun discussion. We talked
Speaker 3: about Warhammer much less than I thought. Where can people
Speaker 3: find you? Where can they find your work?
Speaker 2: Well, these days it's either the law channel, which is
Speaker 2: simply called ARCH for interesting for the k law, or
Speaker 2: if you're interested in the regular cultural commentary and the politics,
Speaker 2: then that is the arch cast.
Speaker 3: Well again, check both of those out as far as
Speaker 3: my stuff, The Jay Burdens Show, Apple, Spotify, YouTube, anywhere
Speaker 3: you want to listen to podcasts. This is what I do.
Speaker 3: It's my job, and if you want to support me
Speaker 3: you can do so just a couple bucks a month
Speaker 3: on Patreon, Substack or gum road. You get the episodes
Speaker 3: early in ad free. I know the ads are your rotating,
Speaker 3: but you know what, I got a mortgage to pay. Guys,
Speaker 3: I'm sorry, and if you pay for it, it's like
Speaker 3: twenty cents an episode, not a bad deal, So you
Speaker 3: can support me. There again, Archie was a ton of fun.
Speaker 1: Man, I'm solely happy to be Yeah.
Speaker 3: Never went home. Keep your head up. Well, I can't
Speaker 3: last forever.
Speaker 4: Good night.
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