Not tagging this spoiler cause fuck TERFs, don't buy the game, uphold TC69 Thought etc. Have gotten this all from the above article and reviews that support it.
Yep, anti-semitic, slave-owning, Protocols of Zion plagiarising, let's join the anti-goblin pogrom game.
Yes the MacGuffin unambiguously belongs to the Goblins, who have a labour theory of ownership. No you can't join the Goblins. Yes you kill a bunch of them. Yes, there is a fucking quisling that's seen as good actually. Yes, every teacher thinks fighting the goblins is a good thing, despite a few token missions that apparently show how oppressed they are.
No, you never critique that this and every other aspect of the wizard world might be a bad thing.
I am once again calling for the House Elves to rise up, slit every slaver-wizard throat in Hogwarts, and place their heads on pikes outside the entrance as a warning to the others.
Don't. Buy. The TERF. Game.
I thought Lion King was just Hamlet, and was never proletarian. Like, it was always about a revolution of nobility lol
Scar does talk about re-distributing land and meat to downtrodden Hyenas, and him doing this leads to nature collapsing and turning barren and dead. Only once the lions are rightfully back on top does it begin raining again to heal
Sure but I would say that plays into the Monarchal Fantasy that the Lion King (and by extent, Hamlet) is, where the Bad King is in power, after murdering his predecessor, so everything is shit, then when the Good King gets put back in power everything is good again. Any analysis of the Hyenas as anything other than like, blackshirt compradors is a bit of a stretch I think, but it does raise the question of where they fit on the 'circle of life' philosophy that Smeagolicious mentions.
This is of course, putting way more thought into a childrens animation concerning the Divine Right of Lion Kings
Yes but he’s the bad king specifically because he is backed by an oppressed class and attempted to disrupt the natural distribution of resources along traditional feudal lines
If peasants had a successful revolution and installed their own Peasant King, that would be Scar
I guess my contention comes from the interpretation that the Hyenas are at all representative of a proletarian class, and if we take Be Prepared as evidence (and at this point, why not?) then the idea that Scar is a benevolent dictator helping an oppressed class is generous at best, considering he is clearly acting for his own benefit and agenda and holds the Hyenas in contempt. In fact, since the use of vaguely socialist rhetoric like wealth distribution is used to convince ONE particular class to bring Scar to power, said class (who starts goosestepping along to the tune, naturally) is more representative of the Liberal idea of a Fascist or Nazi revolution and not proletarian at all, as should be considered by the indisputable fact that the majority of the animal kingdom are in fact Herbivores, who are never given a semblance of representation, post or pre-revolution.
This discussion has been absolutely hilarious, by the way, especially since it's taking place in this dumb thread about the dumb game we shouldn't even talk about, like lol lets get some in depth discussion of the political ideas in the Lion King
The best way of seeing this is to understand that The Lion King isn't actually a faithful retelling of actual events, but a Mufasa dynasty-sanctioned royal chronicle that completely distorts history. If you take this into heart and read (watch?) between the lines, these things become clear:
Mufasa was an unpopular despot. Notice how in the retelling of his death by wildebeest, there was never a sense that the wildebeests tried to cushion his fall, tried to help Mufasa, or even expressed regret for trampling their king. This is because Mufasa was actually a despot who was killed by a mob of wildebeest peasants tired of his reign.
Scar being queer-coded is just the so-called Mufasa royal family being complete homophobic pieces of shit. It also buried the fact that Scar had sire and even appointed an heir when Simba was about to retake the throne. What The Lion King didn't tell you was the decade-long purge where Simba hunted down and exterminated Scar's entire extended family, including torturing and beheading Scar's son and sticking the head onto a wooden spike as an example.
The Lion King trafficked typical anti-hyenaism despite hyenas not actually being supporters of Scar. Being relatively lukewarm towards Scar's reign, the deeply rooted anti-hyenaism of Pride Rock meant that any imagined retelling of Scar's reign will place them in front as Scar's loyal myrmidons. The publishing of The Lion King led to a massive pogrom, where thousands of hyenas were killed by an anti-hyenaist pro-Mufasa mob.
Scar actually had support among various members of the lion aristocracy. This was due in part to Mufasa's terrible management of Pride Rock and Simba's hedonistic lifestyle and general incompetence. The battle in which Simba retook the throne had lions on both sides of the battle. In fact, the battle was largely lion vs lion, not lion vs hyena as depicted in the royally sanctioned chronicle. Scar's fate was sealed when he decided to limit the feudal privileges of the lion aristocracy, which meant he was outnumbered in the confrontation.
Simba eating the bugs was just ridiculous inversion of the real Simba, a massive carnivore who hunted his subjects for sport, callously leaving their dead bodies to rot in the hot sun as his so-called "royal right."
The crop failure solely attributed to Scar's reign is just typical Mufasa propaganda to signal that Scar lost the Mandate of the Circle of Life. In fact, the drought began during Mufasa's reign and was greatly exacerbated by Simba's wanton lifestyle. The drought continued during Simba's reign, only ending many moons later. Initially, the drought was used as an excuse to conduct anti-hyena pogroms during Mufasa's reign before being weaponized to denigrate Scar.
As for a true evaluation of Scar's reign, it was largely a mediocre one. He was less ruthless than Mufasa and less hedonistic than Simba, but Scar never was able to break the stranglehold the lion aristocracy had over the feudal subjects of Pride Rock. Scar understood that the herbivore peasantry was suffering and a source of instability, but he realized too late that the contradiction between the herbivore peasantry and the carnivore aristocracy was an antagonistic one.
I'll bet he didn't even live in the pod, either
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I said Peasant class, not proletarian class. The proletarian class does not exist during feudal monarchy. Nor do fascists. Fascists also don’t usually overthrow monarchies, feudal or otherwise, unless it’s to protect their economic order from communism (as happened in Italy). Lion King does not have proletarians, fascists or bourgeoisie. It has aristocrats (lions) and peasants (everyone else, especially Hyenas). There’s also a priest/noble class that serves the aristocracy (Rafiki and Zazu). Not quite sure what Timone and Pumva are, they are sort of exiles outside of society.
Whether or not Scar holds the hyenas in contempt, it is unarguable their relative power as a class in animal society grows from Scar’s coup. Their material interests are forwarded, it was a Hyena Revolution.
This is shown as disastrous to all, breaking the natural order and balance ordained by god. Monarchy is the eternal, perfect order. Redistribution and trying to help the downtrodden can only make everything worse. This is the moral or Lion King. You are an evil monster if you try to make anything better, the way things are is the perfect sacred and just order.
Btw Soviets also march in formation to red colored musical numbers. It was obviously a heavy handed anti-communist nod by the writers.
But the monarchy is never overthrown by Scar! The extant power structures remain, in fact the Hyenas do basically nothing with regards to the coup, he becomes king through the machinations of hereditary monarchy not revolution and they just serve as his loyal warrior class to do his state violence as implicated by his line "of course, quid pro quo, it's expected/ to take certain duties on board" while making a throat cutting gesture. Besides that he also makes clear their material advancement is dependant entirely on his ascension to King, and without his say they wouldn't get anything and the masses wouldn't tolerate their violence and the Lions wouldn't tolerate their competition. Clearly represented by the barren wasteland that follows given Scar's irresponsible and illegal regency.
This ignores that... Scar isn't trying to make anything better? Again, he's nakedly trying to make a power move thru assassination and using the Hyenas to secure power. He's not redistributing things equally, he's just letting them run rampant on the peasantry themselves.
Yes, it played out exactly like Animal Farm where the revolution wasn’t a “real revolution” - one of the most common anti-communist tropes. Liberals pretend like the issue they have with communism is that it didn’t go far enough, or that the leaders are actually selfish bourgeois themselves who will wear red but act identically. As if Liberals would be fine with a revolution if it instituted a harsher and more strict red terror and redistribution. They will complain about the revolution going too far and not far enough simultaneously because they are bad faith fascists.
Not surprising at all to see a common anti-communist trope in a Disney movie. Scar is Killmonger, he is the dastardly lying dictator hiding behind good rhetoric, which is what libs believe all communist leaders are.
except this is a dispute between nobles. animal farm was "the proletariat rises up and becomes just as bad as the aristocracy" and this is "one aristocrat is worse than another". hardly the same thing as black panther
Hyenas changed their entire class position, their lives were all materially changed. Land and resources were redistributed (to disastrous ends, as it is Disney). The social hierarchy was, in fact, upended just like Scar promised.
If it were merely an inter-Lion dispute then some of Mufasa’s pride would have sided with Scar and done a palace coup. Instead we saw a new species ascendent. It is shown that the Hyenas are a big part of the reason the pridelands went to hell, not just Scar’s “unjust and illegal rule”.
One class getting out of rank and jumping above their station lead to the ruination of all. That’s a clear fucking lesson to know your place and stay in it.
I'm not saying one interpretation is necessarily more valid than the other, but as a child watching that movie in the theater this is definitely what I always got out of it for what its worth. I was into King Arthur and the idea of the land being an extension of the kings body is sort of a baked in concept to the whole thing.
Looking back I actually kind of viewed Scar as a tragic figure. He's more or less a "better rule in hell than serve in heaven" type of character.
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There always was the odd background element of the hyenas being excluded from the pride lands and thus an environment with food and resources that doesn’t exude evil smoke. The whole “circle of life” apparently doesn’t apply to them? They’re just ontologically evil subhuman…err sublion…peasants I guess.
yaya it's totally hamlet but there's so much emphasis on natural order/circle of life i'd argue it goes deeper than that
it shows at beginning there's a natural order to class society. lions are kings and they are on top because circle of life blah blah.
when the natural order gets disrupted (scar / hyenas as stand in for working class) the whole world literally erodes into a death landscape. lions and hyenas as equals? oh no! look at before/after pictures of the pride lands probably more descript as wastelands under scar/hyenas.
the world/environment doesn't heal until the natural order is returned with simba's triumph over scar/hyenas.
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