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i mean, brooks doesn't think he's a villain. He thinks his badass warrior monk prophit promising the return of ww2 imperial japan is the good guy.
Lets Read: World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War
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Imrix
Periodically Malevolent QM
Mmm. I dunno, I think the insistence on the grifter angle kinda weakens the story some, here. I guess I have too many bad memories about centrists insisting on RWNJ rhetoric just being a grift as an excuse to partner with them, the 'it'll be fine, that's just an act they put on for the camera, they're normal people in private' line before the Actual Earnest Fascists go hog wild with political power and drive the coalition off a cliff. Sometimes the bastards really are just 100% honest about their bastardry, and smiling when people make their camouflage for them by dismissing them as grifters or ironic nazis or the 'it's just a joke, brah' crowd.
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My read here is that the grift is the claim that they have ways to make you strong, but that grift does in fact fund an actual fascist group. Of course, they could be totally earnest even about the stuff they sell, and the narrator here is just biased, because she pretty clearly is a lot of the time.
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- the Republic
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- He/They
The problem with fascism has never been that the majority of people in fascist-run countries are themselves diehard militarist nationalist zealots, but that the majority goes along with the people who are. I'm sure you encountered plenty of people who were personally appalled by Japan's imperial history, or at least who would claim to be so when speaking to an American, but Japan routinely produces mainstream media and elects mainstream politicians which are absolutely pro-imperial fascism. Conservative politicians in Japan (who have never been out of power) only differ in whether they want to politely, gradually undermine the national commitment to pacifism or just throw it out openly. The idea that post-apocalyptic imperial warrior cults could get mainstream traction is actually pretty plausible, given the combination of national trauma and unexamined history. This isn't unique to Japan, and neither is Japan uniquely immune to it.
I agree but I think in that case it more of the author IC bias coming through with them saying it a grift and such that it all a grift and they don't believe any of it and suxh
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- United Kingdom
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Oh, he is a fascist, running a fascist paramilitary. He's just also a grifting con artist.
But I freely admit this wasn't remotely my strongest work; I really just hated these interviews.
- Location
- Back in the 90s (In a very famous TV show)
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I honestly thought it was well-done and had a nice, evenhanded tone?
Mister Bad Guy
Mr Mercury to friends
- Location
- Bay Area
Honestly, I feel at a certain point you end up with "garbage in, garbage out" with some of these stories. Even when I was fourteen reading this for the first time, uncritically swallowing Yonkers and the SIR, I knew that shin-gunto were paperweights aspiring to one day be letter-openers. You can't really fix a part as key to the story as that without just declaring the entire thing is a great big lie.
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There was a movie I saw a couple years ago that really stuck with me when it said, ' "Ten percent of the population is cruel. Ten percent is merciful. And the other eighty percent can be swayed in either direction." And it gets scary to think about, because you don't know who's who, or how easily they can be swayed.'
And, for me, in the past ten years I've noticed a lot of people (maybe not eighty percent but far more than it ought to be, and it might well be 80% or more of people in positions of power) who, when faced with the choice between preventing harm and preventing change, pick preventing change every time.
- Location
- Mid-Atlantic
I can actually buy how Brooks maybe thought he was taking that into account with the "it took me three days of having to rest a lot and recover my strength," but yeah.
Agreed on all counts.
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- United Kingdom
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I think this section reads far too sincerely favourable to Imperial Japan - across two separate PoVs - to be dismissed as "oh it is about unreliable narration in a crisis" honestly.
globalwarmth
ruining the weather.
- Location
- Polar ice caps
The revolution will be blogged!
If I had a peso for every time a
Japanese left wing group violently splintered due to relationship drama I would have about 15 which is not much but extremely alarming
The less said about the poly anarchists, the better.
OOC:
Entrenching tools are real and somewhat useful if you've got nothing else. This gives them some cred that tacticool vendors have exploited to hell and back since charging 40 dollars for a stamped wedge with a polymer handle is super profitable.
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- Mid-Atlantic
Frankly yes.
I was specifically addressing the matter of the nineteen stories.
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Ah, but dear Authoress, don't you know that for the simple price of all your money and total devotion to the shield society you too could develop such superhuman skills. Don't forget to buy the special herbal pills as well.
I can't believe they'd give the Shield Society this kind of advertisement without someone getting paid off. I guess if you're in the Junta propaganda military or running this kind of project you've got to get your money where you can.
Edit: I'm surprised they aren't saying the poor old bugger sowed his eyelids shut so not to have to see the horror that consumerism had given Japan.
Hey don't diss the red brigades. They're mostly pretty cool. I know you hear a lot of horror stories but most of that is just them applying the excesses of the 1960s era Japanese student movement to the wartime communist units. Obviously some of them are pretty extreme. They've been defending those hills through the worst of the war and that can harden a person but I've met some and they were pretty polite and accepting of me even knowing I was trans. That's not something I've had from every European leftist I've met.
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Mister Bad Guy
Mr Mercury to friends
- Location
- Bay Area
Incidentally, this chapter also may have been something of an inspiration for the manga Zom 100: Bucket List of the Dead, which also opens with the protagonist breaking out of a haze, finding that his entire home city is being consumed by the undead, climbing his way to the city below, and seeing the corpse (well, the zombified corpse, anyway) of a woman he already had a crush on, and which features a copy of it and the Zombie Survival Guide sitting on a shelf. The key differences are that Bucket List is a) complete gore-and-titties schlock with no pretensions to the contrary, b) has surprisingly more thought put into its weird zombie-fighting world (the protagonist finding a sharkskin suit is treated as making him essentially invincible), and c) has its most important message be "Japanese work culture sucks ass" and its most contentious message be "small towns are just nicer than big cities", as opposed to "we have become soft from our high-tech militaries and democratic free-press societies" and "apartheid-era policies will save us all by culling the weak."
Also, there is a character who runs around fighting zombies with samurai weapons, including a naginata and full battle armor. She is, in fact, a German weeb.
Also, there is a character who runs around fighting zombies with samurai weapons, including a naginata and full battle armor. She is, in fact, a German weeb.
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One thing that frankly deeply confuses me about the book is what exactly Brooks' point is with some of this. Like Brooks isn't like actively fascist, but the book seems so bizarrely uncritical about the fact that so many of the countries in the text seem to be backsliding into fascism as a result of the crisis. Like he consistently seems to pick groups with fashy or outright fascist temperaments as an inspiration for how these countries are currently structured. Which could be because these are the groups he knows, but he claims to have done research prior to writing the book, and this just keeps happening. It feels like it could be interesting commentary, but he does not seem to really interrogate it or question it at all, it is just kind of The Way Things Are.
The book outside this generally gives off centrist liberal sort of vibes, and I feel like there's a detailed broader point here to make about the relationship between people of Brooks mentality and fascism but I am not in the headspace to try and do that sort of dive at the moment
The book outside this generally gives off centrist liberal sort of vibes, and I feel like there's a detailed broader point here to make about the relationship between people of Brooks mentality and fascism but I am not in the headspace to try and do that sort of dive at the moment
Mazeka
You must be joking
- Location
- United States
Maybe he fell for the myth that having a militaristic (or even semi-militaristic) national culture will enable one to survive major crises like zombies more effectively. But don't quote me on that.
- Location
- Within the Light of Hope
I can see it but the next book he wrote is just weirder and confusing. what does bigfoot and hummingbirds murdering each other have to do with a story? honestly I just see the japan part of the book as the story of too outcasts living together and being awesome. once you assign political factions that's when it starts to crumble.
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- United Kingdom
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They are explicitly the leaders of a paramilitary cult named after a previous paramilitary cult which tried and failed to restore imperial Japan.
I'm not assigning political factions to shit, they're fascists by any read you care to try to make.
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The shield society was literally the society of a Japanese ultrarightist who killed himself in front of an SDF barracks in order to try to restart Japanese militarism.
SemiSaneAuthor
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- Location
- Sol-3, Memetic Quarantined World - For English
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Brooks' "Research" is up there with Rowling's "Research," Namely it has more holes in it than a sieve.