When you realise Hollywood is from the same country that held the microphone to the world for the last 80 years, repeating the same stories, over and over.
People outside the Anglosphere still have a different experience. I mean, the whole “UK refuses to give up, fights for what’s right” bit is… not how that is played out elsewhere.
If you’re from a big chunk of occupied Europe the narrative is more Star Wars-y. The Empire has won, it’s about the plucky resistance. Only a lot more bleak. If you’re from Northern Africa… probably no good guys in this one. If you’re in Spain it’s more of a Game of Thrones. It starts in 1936 and it ends in 1975 after a very long timeskip before which a bunch of resistance fighters wait to take back their country holed up in the mountains and are betrayed by the US and UK because they worry about their ties to the soviets. If you’re from China, the narrative doesn’t have many people from Europe at all, but it sure has a whole lot of Japanese bad guys and an entire holocaust spin-off that somehow you never hear about.
They all get the Hollywood version of it, most people are at least told one alternative take at some point in their lives. I sometimes forget that’s not the case with many things in the Anglosphere.
Many major Star Wars main trilogy and prequel plotlines have real-world analogues.
- Main trilogy plot line: French Resistance
- Prequel plot line: Hitler’s rise to power
- Palpatine gaining emergency powers from the Senate: Reichstag Fire Decree
- Dissolving the Old Republic and forming an empire: First French Empire, Augustus’s rise to power as Roman emperor
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Then in the sequel, the audience can no longer tell who is good and who is bad and slowly realize that the main cast who are neither good or bad and have all done horrible things are at the heart of the conflict while every one around them die needless deaths in order to continually drive the story into the next sequel.
That’s more or less the default throughout history. The Nazis had to be a deeply horrifying kind of evil to make WWII have a clear good side that contained most of the world’s biggest colonial empires
Then the sequel to that was basically Star Wars Episode III: Revenge Of The Sith … where we find out that the enemy we’ve been fighting is not a nation, or a military but a religious/ideological movement based on faith, wealth and historic power.
In our actual history, it’s called fascism, a belief that power and wealth is entitled to only those who take it by force and more often that not, the movement is directly tied to certain groups, races or religions.
Art (if you can call the Star Wars movie franchise art) certainly does reflect life.
Anon wants to deny the Holocaust
“It just sounds too good true to be true”
- Anon, probably
