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Reinhardt is a loser rear end baby who decided to throw a tantrum and break everyone's toys because "mah sister". Imagine if someone tried to convince Yang that letting two million people get nuked for propaganda purposes was the correct choice and what his response would be. Gold-haired pissbrain goes "aww geeze oh man should I let a planetful of people get atomized to make my job a little easier". gently caress him, rest in piss.
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Apr 19, 2020 18:03
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Fivemarks posted:I really want to like LOGH. I really, really want to like it. But the series' Pro-monarchy, anti-democratic message puts me off it way too much. Like, I love the music and the presentation of the original OVA, but man gently caress Monarchy, even when its 'enlightened'. Considering the foundation of the backstory is "Space Hitler literally happened", along with "he got in power via populism", really just says "populism bad" rather than "democracy bad" or "fascism good". All of the foils to that idea come in through merit, and most of the ones who do so die because of the monarchists or the populists and whatnot. And it's not pro-Reinhardt. It's more pro-Reinhardt's choice of people. Very few of Reinhardt's actions come from his mind, it's mostly his staff, which is why he wanted Yang so bad.
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Apr 19, 2020 19:00
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Reinhardt is never really in control of his empire. He's a brilliant strategist, and a genius at commanding loyalty, but the show never shows him govern much beyond removing obstructionist nobility. As soon as he does so industrial and business interests almost immediately fill the void. The people who accumulate power under Reinhardt aren't the admirals like Oskar von Reuenthal, they're administrators and managers like Bruno Silberberch. As far as anyone wins, it's Fezzan. Schwarzwald fucked around with this message at 21:57 on Apr 19, 2020 |
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Apr 19, 2020 19:11
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Pomp posted:I always kind of viewed Reinhardts arc as a tragedy rather than a pro-authoritarian screed. He's going to die someday, and some new autocrat will take over. The final scenes of logh are ominous because there's not long before a new period of upheaval caused by the nobility he had initially intended to destroy. Even if you get a benevolent autocrat, they're going to die someday and leave behind a power vacuum Yeah, I always imagined that the reason LOGH is framed as a documentary is because society collapses into a dark age afterward. There's no way Hilda and Mittermeyer managed to hold the regency together, especially when Hilda's big thing was that she could influence Reinhard when no one else could.
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Apr 19, 2020 19:13
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Fivemarks posted:I really want to like LOGH. I really, really want to like it. But the series' Pro-monarchy, anti-democratic message puts me off it way too much. Like, I love the music and the presentation of the original OVA, but man gently caress Monarchy, even when its 'enlightened'. It pretty clearly states multiple times that this is about the best result you could possibly expect from a monarchy and the ending of the series has Reinhardt agreeing to inject some democratic concepts into things because he too knows it'll very possibly all go to poo poo once he's gone. If anything I think it does a good job of showing that Reinhardt's society isnt strictly better than even a terribly run democracy.
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Apr 19, 2020 19:18
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Like, I get that it isn't MONARCHY GOOD EMPIRE BAD- the FPA is blatantly post-war japan's one party democracy with all the corruption it implies, with added bits of ultranationalism for good measure.
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Apr 19, 2020 19:19
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HerraS posted:Reinhardt is a loser rear end baby who decided to throw a tantrum and break everyone's toys because "mah sister". Imagine if someone tried to convince Yang that letting two million people get nuked for propaganda purposes was the correct choice and what his response would be. Gold-haired pissbrain goes "aww geeze oh man should I let a planetful of people get atomized to make my job a little easier". gently caress him, rest in piss. I mean Oberstein was in all likelihood correct that more than 2 million people were going to die if the war continued and there was no way the nobles were going to stop their poo poo
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Apr 19, 2020 19:25
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TheKingofSprings posted:I mean Oberstein was in all likelihood correct that more than 2 million people were going to die if the war continued and there was no way the nobles were going to stop their poo poo Oberstein did nothing wrong 
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Apr 19, 2020 19:25
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Angry Lobster posted:Oberstein did nothing wrong Oberstein did plenty wrong, he just was probably correct and a loving rear end in a top hat
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Apr 19, 2020 19:26
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The death tolls from regular battles are pretty staggering, don't some of the space battles literally result in millions of casualties?
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Apr 19, 2020 19:47
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The alliance loses something like a million men at Astarte
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Apr 19, 2020 19:52
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The Lippstdat League had more than 25 million soldiers, just for scale.TheKingofSprings posted:Oberstein did plenty wrong, he just was probably correct and a loving rear end in a top hat Oberstein did not care about morality or individuals, he only cared about acomplishing his objective in the most eficient way. Of course he was an unempathic bastard, he had to be a cold ruthless mofo to do his job. Reinhardt knew this and that's why he kept him around, he needed someone who was not afraid to get his hands dirty.
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Apr 19, 2020 20:06
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I interpret the series as meditating on whether the best autocracy could be preferable to the worst democracy. It comes down pretty firmly on "no" because multiple characters conclude that even though Reinhard produces better outcomes than Job Trünicht, if the empire goes to pot again there's not even a theoretical way to fix it other than democracy.
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Apr 19, 2020 22:31
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I kind of interpreted it as saying that, even with all these incredibly unlikely events and circumstances leading up to it, the best possible absolute monarchy is still terrible for almost everyone else. And in the real world, we'd probably never get the same sequence of events leading up to it, so our monarchies are always even worse. Likewise, as bad as the FPA's democracy was, we theoretically have the power to keep it together and improve upon it, as long as we don't grow complacent and cynical and assume that all is already lost.
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Apr 20, 2020 13:39
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HerraS posted:Reinhardt is a loser rear end baby who decided to throw a tantrum and break everyone's toys because "mah sister". Imagine if someone tried to convince Yang that letting two million people get nuked for propaganda purposes was the correct choice and what his response would be. Gold-haired pissbrain goes "aww geeze oh man should I let a planetful of people get atomized to make my job a little easier". gently caress him, rest in piss. This is kind of reductionist. Reinhardt's initial impetus to hate the Empire-as-it-is-when-the-series-begins does indeed come from what happened to his sister, but coming to the conclusion of "hey maybe a system that allows decadent nobles to pretty much literally buy women as human chattel is kind of lovely" isn't really a tantrum, and smashing the corrupt Imperial nobility to smithereens is a noble goal. The problem is that he started tumbling down the "ends justify the means" staircase and began to wink and nod at shady business(let's hold a child hostage!) and literal atrocities to pursue his goals. This is specifically why Kircheis's death and Reinhardt's recovery from it is given such weight in the story - it represented the death of Reinhardt's conscience and Reinhardt's complete embrace of realpolitik.
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Apr 20, 2020 22:53
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Holding a child hostage doesn't even make me bat an eyelid when I read histories of feudal aristocrats. My take on how the old Galactic Federation evolved into the Galactic Empire under Goldenbaum was that automation was making large segments of the population unemployed particularly in the core worlds, and instead of holding that as a utopian ideal for self-actualization, there was a violent conservative reaction against it to put those lazy idle leeches to work. And the outcome of that was: the majority of the populace was stripped of franchise and welfare, and their economy deliberately de-industrialized to reduce their productivity and force demand for their labor. And huge numbers of the poor were genocided, particularly if they had a non-european phenotype. But the high productivity labor continued to be performed by machines, all for the benefit of the high nobles who were allowed to be completely decadent and idle. And this high nobility could maintain their power nigh indefinitely so long as they could continue to arm low nobles as security. It's certainly one nightmarish way to resolve the contradictions of capitalism. Phobophilia fucked around with this message at 13:45 on Apr 21, 2020 |
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Apr 21, 2020 01:04
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Phobophilia posted:Holding a child hostage doesn't even make me bat an eyelid when I read histories of feudal aristocrats. Of course, but Reinhardt's new regime was specifically supposed to be better and less lovely than the nobles he was deposing, so resorting to the exact kind of rear end in a top hat behavior he railed against in the name of political expediency is a bit of a defining moment.
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Apr 21, 2020 02:51
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Kanos posted:Of course, but Reinhardt's new regime was specifically supposed to be better and less lovely than the nobles he was deposing, so resorting to the exact kind of rear end in a top hat behavior he railed against in the name of political expediency is a bit of a defining moment. I think that's more relevant with the nuking thing, rather than the child hostage. One's lovely towards the people, one's lovely towards the nobility.
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Apr 21, 2020 03:19
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HerpicleOmnicron5 posted:I think that's more relevant with the nuking thing, rather than the child hostage. One's lovely towards the people, one's lovely towards the nobility. I mean, yeah, one of them is an outright atrocity and the other one is an inhuman political maneuver. Both can be lovely indicators that Reinhardt isn't living up to his own original hype even if one of them is way worse than the other.
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Apr 21, 2020 03:55
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Kanos posted:I mean, yeah, one of them is an outright atrocity and the other one is an inhuman political maneuver. Both can be lovely indicators that Reinhardt isn't living up to his own original hype even if one of them is way worse than the other. His original hype is anti-Goldenbaum dynasty. It's inhuman, but it's very much in keeping with his agenda. Besides, if memory serves, he kept the kid as a political hostage rather than totally denying him any luxuries in life. It was the loyalists who did that when they kidnapped him. No matter what, kid was kinda cursed to be a political tool or die.
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Apr 21, 2020 05:05
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Let's be real though the Goldenbaum kid was the heir to a dynasty of space hitlers. Is killing baby space hitler wrong?
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Apr 21, 2020 13:32
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Bongo Bill posted:I interpret the series as meditating on whether the best autocracy could be preferable to the worst democracy. It comes down pretty firmly on "no" because multiple characters conclude that even though Reinhard produces better outcomes than Job Trünicht, if the empire goes to pot again there's not even a theoretical way to fix it other than democracy. Yeah Reuental's rebellion was pretty much the author's way of saying "This is the logical conclusion of Reinhardt's approach and it nearly destroyed his accomplishments and it's gonna keep happening"
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Apr 21, 2020 14:15
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iirc Reinhardt's succession plan was almost all but explicitly a mirror of Alexander the Greats, with all the implicit fragmentation that follows
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Apr 24, 2020 22:08
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the biggest issue with LoGH's political commentary is that it presents a binary of authoritarianism vs liberal democracy without acknowledging the spectre hovering in the background, the alternative of Marxist solutions Yang seems to get close - using historical analysis to determine the playing field and where to go next. I felt like the show was building up to cast him as this universe's Marx/Lenin, but he never seemed to commit to anything that went too hard against the liberal ideology he grew up with, and then he fuckin dies which makes the rest of the episodes less interesting imo it's a very small issue, really, and one that is common if you wanna make media that's commercially viable, but it stands out to me as a flaw in an otherwise well-considered show about space ideology
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Apr 24, 2020 23:51
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Peanut Butler posted:the biggest issue with LoGH's political commentary is that it presents a binary of authoritarianism vs liberal democracy without acknowledging the spectre hovering in the background, the alternative of Marxist solutions but you just said it does depict authoritarianism
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Apr 25, 2020 00:26
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Kanos posted:This is kind of reductionist. Reinhardt's initial impetus to hate the Empire-as-it-is-when-the-series-begins does indeed come from what happened to his sister, but coming to the conclusion of "hey maybe a system that allows decadent nobles to pretty much literally buy women as human chattel is kind of lovely" isn't really a tantrum, and smashing the corrupt Imperial nobility to smithereens is a noble goal. Oh drat yeah that's good
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Apr 25, 2020 02:45
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Peanut Butler posted:the biggest issue with LoGH's political commentary is that it presents a binary of authoritarianism vs liberal democracy without acknowledging the spectre hovering in the background, the alternative of Marxist solutions Isn't that a perfect metaphor for liberalism tho
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Apr 25, 2020 02:48
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Peanut Butler posted:the biggest issue with LoGH's political commentary is that it presents a binary of authoritarianism vs liberal democracy without acknowledging the spectre hovering in the background, the alternative of Marxist solutions Not gonna lie- if LOGH had taken that step, had had the reformist minded members of the military and the people team up to overthrow the corrupt government and institute a socialist state, I would've been way more into it.
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Apr 25, 2020 03:18
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Fivemarks posted:Not gonna lie- if LOGH had taken that step, had had the reformist minded members of the military and the people team up to overthrow the corrupt government and institute a socialist state, I would've been way more into it. You know for a fact that would be the alternate reality if Yang had chosen to take power. I also like to think that's one of the post-ending power blocs that end up forming when the Empire inevitably collapses.
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Apr 25, 2020 03:46
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Was there anything about the FPA not being socialist democracy or even full socialism? I don't think politicians being corrupt and the people being too lazy to do anything about it has much to do with capitalism versus socialism. I don't remember it being a major factor in the situation at all.
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Apr 25, 2020 05:27
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The Alliance seems to fit into a social democratic structure, as far as I can remember, but I’m pretty sure there is definitely a class and financial caste system to some extent. Doesn’t Yang end up going to the military academy because his dad ran into huge debts, all the objects he collected in life were worthless forgeries, and that was literally the only way Yang could afford to study History?
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Apr 25, 2020 05:50
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The Unnamed One posted:The Alliance seems to fit into a social democratic structure, as far as I can remember, but I’m pretty sure there is definitely a class and financial caste system to some extent. Yeah, the FPA is pretty clearly just America.
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Apr 25, 2020 05:51
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HerpicleOmnicron5 posted:Yeah, the FPA is pretty clearly just America. Postwar Japan not America. It’s a one party state
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Apr 25, 2020 12:12
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skasion posted:Postwar Japan not America. It’s a one party state I’m thinking more in terms of military industrial complex worming its way through all of the aspects of society. Serve in the military for your higher education, honour the veterans who die and heck, worship them at every possible opportunity because they fight for FREEDOM. a two party state is still just a one party state if they’re both just as totally unrepresentative anyway and out of touch
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Apr 25, 2020 13:08
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The FPA is in a situation that would actually justify having an America-esque focus on their military, since they are in a fight for survival against an authoritarian state that can actually beat them if given the chance. There are still a lot of parallels to America, but I think that distinction (being in an actual war) is what sets the FPA apart, and sort of what makes the state of their economic system moot. Socialists wouldn't have anymore leeway ending the war than a fully capitalist state would.
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Apr 25, 2020 19:54
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Captain Cappy posted:The FPA is in a situation that would actually justify having an America-esque focus on their military, since they are in a fight for survival against an authoritarian state that can actually beat them if given the chance. There are still a lot of parallels to America, but I think that distinction (being in an actual war) is what sets the FPA apart, and sort of what makes the state of their economic system moot. Socialists wouldn't have anymore leeway ending the war than a fully capitalist state would. The FPA absolutely had a chance to end the war after Yang captured Iserlohn though.
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Apr 26, 2020 00:55
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Fivemarks posted:The FPA absolutely had a chance to end the war after Yang captured Iserlohn though. They definitely had a chance to keep a favorable stalemate (if they stayed vigilant with Phezzan's neutrality) but I don't remember any talk of peace.
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Apr 26, 2020 05:29
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The Empire never really made excursions into FPA territory other than small border conflicts. Really, the FPA were the aggressors most of the time.
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Apr 26, 2020 05:38
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It's called a revolutionary war against reactionary feudal forces, smdh.
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Apr 26, 2020 05:52
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Both sides kept the war at a level of intensity that their economies could sustain, as that status quo benefited their respective establishments and true total war was too risky and costly to even consider.
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Apr 26, 2020 09:27
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