Seven episode season, watched over 3-4 days.

I was really excited for this as a big Coup/StBY fan, but I have to say this was a pretty deflating watch by the end.

Politically you are not ever going to find a more openly left-wing scripted show, period, at least not produced in America. That's cool and all, but by the midway point we literally have the Boots surrogate character explaining capitalist exploitation, the need for a movement of workers etc via actual presentations that stop the thing dead in its tracks. My guess is Boots felt like he had one shot at this massive platform and felt the need to be as explicit and didactic as possible.

I won't drill into it all here but so many plot elements and little beats feel like prescriptive messages aimed at the predominantly young male audience that will end up watching...at times it drifts into outright edutainment

And some of you will say that's a good thing, and I the fairly online leftist is not the target audience....but hoo lord I have to imagine that anyone who is not already onboard with Boots' vision of a world where (spoiler alert)

spoiler

superpowered fascists can be defeated with a single Marxist slideshow

is gonna turn this off fast.

The jolts of humanity (mostly via the performances which are great across the board) and occasional amazing bits of surreal humor got me to the end (I will say there is one sequence in the last episode that justifies my viewing time) but yeah, real letdown for me personally. I really thought StBY nailed the mix of elements whereas here I just felt pandered and preached to... Hope it works better for yalls, big love to boots if you're reading :/

  • duderium [he/him]
    ·
    1 year ago

    The Marxist fantasy trilogy I’m working on is pretty didactic. In the last communist trilogy I cranked out, I tried to keep the communism on the DL as much as possible. Lib and chud reviewers didn’t care and still trashed its reviews exclusively because of its politics. So this time I’m just like, fuck it, we’ll do it live, basically. I have chapters of political discussions (which people can skip) but which make it abundantly clear that Marxism is good—also because it’s annoying when liberals appreciate communist art while pretending to miss the point. Urgh. Still, there’s just no way to win here. Lots of the trilogy deals with organizing a workers’ uprising, so that’s why a lot of the politics is there. But you also get superpowers from being in solidarity with workers and using dialectical materialism. There are also spirit vampires and lib wreckers based on people I’ve met during my own forays into politics.

    I watched the first episode and a half of this show a few days ago and liked it, find myself thinking of it a lot in a positive way, etc. I support Boots using that massive platform to basically grab people’s heads and scream in their faces.