kontextmaschine:

femmenietzsche:

The way Chinese netizens get government censors to crack down on the most anodyne things by giving them political connotations (e.g. Winnie the Pooh) is impressive, but what they really need to start doing is ironically praising the regime in a way that’s indistinguishable on a word by word level from actual praise, so that the censors’ll have to block that too.

you kind of just reinvented Classical Chinese literature

Oh! You know how in JRPGs there’s the trope of the evil/false chancellor, and that’s kind of derived from the fact that Japan’s sense of medieval Europe is filtered through their post-opening tutelage under Germany-sempai? Because that’s a “If the Czar only knew” way to reconcile the experience of poor rule with the legitimating myths of petty feudalism?

The “every 1,000 years an evil is released and a band of noble warriors must assemble to defeat it” trope is from China, it’s how they talked about “The Great Enterprise” – the fact that periodically dynasties decay to the point they have to be overthrown and replaced – without running too explicitly afoul of censors