King Krávoka
An infection of Your universe.
/r/HFY's recently concluded The Nature of Predators was a Turner Diaries for Overton Window beliefs, as in, it is a hilarious evisceration of the demonic ideology that it was written to promote. It is ostensibly yet another stab at the skeletal horse of fascism, but the only racial-supremacist government was actually being propped up by an extraterrestrial equivalent to the United Nations. The main characters, by the way, work for or alongside the Earth equivalent of the Federation.
So it remains an allegory for the existential threat posed by a particular political system, but not the failed experiments of last century's Europe, the very one that it celebrates and supports with open hands.
I get how the author did this without having any really thoughtful or odd opinions, He needed a twist villain, so He had to invent a familiar system and work out all the ways that it can turn against Life Itself and the Human Spirit, and before He knew it He wrote bad guys that did literally nothing but what his protagonist faction does IRL. I don't think that You or I could make a better anti-modernist tract, He was even able to turn reddit users into frothing antimaskers.
To make matters worst, the main characters still fill out Article 1 (Humanity takes disproportionate favor in discussions because they're the only spacefaring species that wasn't thoroughly lobotomized by Federation dogma), 7 (the protagonists adopt a 3 year alien child from a warzone with no indication that she's kept in touch with her native culture <it's also revealed later on that her species suffers from an fatal allergy that is ridiculously easy to trigger on Earth, her adoptive father contracts it in a warzone, and it's treated like a massive tragedy that it's keeping him away from his family>, and another is put on amphetamines for office-incompatible-behavior after from she's rescued from similarly motivated abuse in a side story), and probably 5 in the form of the Humanity First organization that does nothing but make implausible successful attacks on the UN Secretary-General (really this is just the author having glowops as his only frame of reference for political extremists). It's a really refreshing and unique twist from "We need xenophobic despotism (human) to stop the threat of xenophobic despotism (alien)".
So in the end, the lesson of the story that has been hidden even from the author, that three letter agencies will burn the world to keep their jobs, bodes nothing good for the winners of the story. It's like, even when HFY authors try to celebrate the good of Humanity, they still write the most dehumanizing slop.
So it remains an allegory for the existential threat posed by a particular political system, but not the failed experiments of last century's Europe, the very one that it celebrates and supports with open hands.
- Though purported to assist the global/galactic community, its actions only follow the interests of the founding superpower(s), by design.
- Any sense of a permanent, naturally occurring culture is demolished, replaced with a generic one that has been minimalized for ease of implementation, until the original can be sanitized for mass production and consumption.
- A secular religion has been created by holding a monopoly on sciences of health, whether physical, planetary, or mental, then taking certain notions as unquestionable fact and blacklisting anyone that disagrees from the scientific consensus, furthermore using the idea of One That Disagrees as the definition of intolerable political evil. All self-admitted faiths are only tolerated once they have been reformed to comply with the moral prescriptions of the actual state religion.
- Despite this manipulation of consensus, ethical restrictions are given frequent exceptions to assist nations with following their interdependant economic roles.
- Most loosened is the extremist underdog faction that is treated like an enemy in its surface level interactions, but is actually a direct and intentional creation of the leading power like all other nations. They are not fought, they are farmed with physical violence through a careful mix of intentional failure, direct aid, and evasion of the core problem.
- And when the secular state religion encounters any other crisis, the 'solution' is to seek more control over the populace after doubling down on the events that caused it, because these events are also intentional products of the religion's implementation.
- There are recognized differences between peoples, yes, but those are quirks. All people are otherwise of an identical nature, one that is coincidentally identical to an unattainable state of perfect compliance with the system and its demands. The problem is never outside of You, but we will take it out by loving application of drugs and surgery.
To make matters worst, the main characters still fill out Article 1 (Humanity takes disproportionate favor in discussions because they're the only spacefaring species that wasn't thoroughly lobotomized by Federation dogma), 7 (the protagonists adopt a 3 year alien child from a warzone with no indication that she's kept in touch with her native culture <it's also revealed later on that her species suffers from an fatal allergy that is ridiculously easy to trigger on Earth, her adoptive father contracts it in a warzone, and it's treated like a massive tragedy that it's keeping him away from his family>, and another is put on amphetamines for office-incompatible-behavior after from she's rescued from similarly motivated abuse in a side story), and probably 5 in the form of the Humanity First organization that does nothing but make implausible successful attacks on the UN Secretary-General (really this is just the author having glowops as his only frame of reference for political extremists). It's a really refreshing and unique twist from "We need xenophobic despotism (human) to stop the threat of xenophobic despotism (alien)".
So in the end, the lesson of the story that has been hidden even from the author, that three letter agencies will burn the world to keep their jobs, bodes nothing good for the winners of the story. It's like, even when HFY authors try to celebrate the good of Humanity, they still write the most dehumanizing slop.
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