no, you misunderstand. i don't "dislike" disney. i'm not "not a fan." i genuinely believe that disney, its subsidiaries, and all their products are a catastrophic empire-focused parasitic evil exceeded only by the us military & the cia in its detrimental effect on human culture.
if i seem unhinged when i call disney "the great satan of our time" it's only because i literally believe that disney is the great satan of our time
"come on it's not that bad" there are explicitly homophobic films from the 20th century that are better representation than *anything* disney has produced in the last twenty years
which like, fuck representation as a concept, i don't want to be represented by a corporation anyway? my point is that they have so much fucking money they can just invent a reality where people *have* to be impressed by a gay doing hiroshima or whatever
this faceless corporation has deprived us of an entire CENTURY's worth of public domain works to draw from and so made themselves the sole proprietors of virtually all american culture. disney is, first and foremost, a rentseeking landlord of uncountable quantities of ideas.
our entire conception of art as "IP," as properties you must get permission to trespass on, as a plot of land in ideaspace that can be bought and sold and legally enforced- i'm not saying disney is the only one to blame, but boy howdy do they sure bear a lot of it
i know a lot of folks agree that disney's ratfucking of copyright law is bad, but it still feels like the prevailing attitude is, well, you know, it sucks, but it's not the end of the world, other people besides disney can still make stuff, and obviously *i* don't have ideology
the thing is that i DO think it's the end of the world, in the sense that disney's collective cultural affect forms a tremendous part of the ideological framework that is propelling us headlong into irreparable climate apocalypse on a global scale
this framework, this relationship we have to the ownership of ideas in combination with the simple reality of how much of our culture is owned property, it doesn't just affect how we think about art, it shapes our entire conception of reality in a million different ways
i don't know how else to explain the absence of violent widespread outrage over our government's abject refusal to enact a TRIPS waiver other than to say that we've been conditioned from birth to accept that such things are normal and make sense EVEN AS WE FIND THEM BAD
it's always been conspicuous to me that across the disney canon there is *such* a devotion to maintaining the worth of hereditary monarchies and the villainy of lower class upstarts. the lion king and black panther are the first to jump to mind, but it's *everywhere* in disney
and even when you get something like thor ragnarok, which IS critical of hereditary monarchies, it still has to end with some middling "i've learned my lesson about the evils of empire, now i'll be a ~good~ king, i promise!" once you see this unspoken theme, you'll never unsee it
it's conspicuous because if you confront a disney fan with the evils of disney they'll still probably say "yeah that's bad, but, you know, i like disney movies." like yeah, you know, the king does bad stuff sometimes, but who doesn't? at least he keeps up the bread and circuses!
i don't care if this is intentional. i don't care how much anyone is to blame or whether it's fair to say x or y about the one good movie they make every ten years. these little discourse games are a distraction from the inarguable cumulative evil that this corporation represents
the thing about capitalists is they don't have to be mustache twirling villains to commit unspeakably evil crimes, they just need the profit motive
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