Fascists Suck

Due to various suggestions, I decided to see Pan's Labyrinth. What I liked most about the movie is that Spanish fascists were the villains.*

To villainize is inherently distortive. In fiction, translating an actual person or group into a villain can make them comical or cartoonish - certainly not keeping with understanding the true intricacies of the potential for evil inherent in all of us.

But, that said, some people are just asking for it.

Nazis have been done well, redone well and now they're just done (although awhile back a bunch of webcomics participated in a make fun of Hitler day, and that was kind of genius.)

Plenty of other fascists are out there! Pan's Labyrinth was decent (and I understand how it's relevant to the whole magic-that-can-happen discussion), but it by no means exploited Spanish fascist villainy to the fullest possible extent. The film's villain was a jerk who starts bad and stays bad - not the sort of character arc you get from the best villains. Consider Spanish fascists fair game.

Also, feel free to make fun of Stalin. Stalin is great to make fun of! I am generally too well-schooled on post-modern entertainment theory to go so far as to recommend a movie to anybody, much less everybody (and how many people can say that?) However, more people need to see Children of the Revolution because it's brilliant and I can't seem to have a discussion of either Stalin or the Red Scare without talking about it, and then I need to say that it's really funny and to explain the whole plot, and that is very difficult to do.

Plenty of dictators have proven to be great villain fodder in the past. There's still space for villainizing Idi Amin, pre-hanging Saddam Hussein, Kim Jong Il, Margaret Thatcher, the Taliban, any Roman dictator you can imagine, and many, many more.

Get on it, writers of the internet! Villains abound!


*What I liked least about Pan's Labyrinth was the translation of the title. The title's really "The Faun's Labyrinth" - Pan don't entaintait.