Bowser says "free palestine" and "death to the monarchy"

based

Lmao, that was the first thing I thought of when I saw this.

Given how fanatical they are about PR, they probably don't want to deal with the inevitable accusations of antisemitism such litigation would cause.

I would be very conflicted if JK Rowling were the one who stepped up and sued Israel over this shit.

They're partners in the

Jigsaw has imprisoned and tortured people for absolutely trivial things.

I'd go so far ad to say he's pretty bad guy

They are probably aiming at children. Someone who is 10 now will be 20 in 10 years and already primed propagandised to support the next massacre. Can't think of any other reason for something so ridiculous.

I mean it's not like they can claim Hamas are worse than irl villains - could you imagine the reaction if they had Hitler looking at the news in horror?

And the only one that doesn't has some weird puppy-skinning fetish

Is it proletarian? Or is it one faction of bourgeoisie overthrowing another with the populist support of the hyenas?

Does Scar replace it with more monarchy or is it really proletarian?

I disagree Scar is very much of the ruling class and uses and exploits an underclasses anger at the status quo to gain personal power.

Like how Cortez turned a rebellion against the aztecs into a conquest

The question is, where are the sanctions and warfare made against Scar's rule?

I recognized it as that old ass trope of a prince killing his evil uncle who killed his father for the throne (Jason and the Argonauts, Bhagavata Purana, Hamlet, Bahubali, etc.)

The trope is about divine rule or enlightened kingship, that I agree with. But overthrowing feudalism is a bourgeois revolution fueled by similar idealist humanism about how society should be set up. Not a communist, proletariat revolution which stems from a materialist philosophy.

I think an anti-feudal bourgeois revolution can be portrayed as symbolic of communist proletarian revolution, but only as a loose metaphor, so very hard to pull off. Tbh I don't think this trope does it though. There are better ways, like Robin Hood like figures or historical peasant revolts in which the peasants struggled against feudal lords or kings that work well IMO

I have conflicted feelings on this reading of the Lion King. While I understand where you're coming from, I think listening to some of the writers on Lion King kinda shake this up. Lion King had a lot of black South Africans writing it. Here's a video that goes into Lion King's accidental implications extremely well. I'm not saying your interpretation is wrong by any means btw. Normally I kind of ignore author's intent, but I feel that if author's intent adds enough to the conversation to actually be interesting, it's worth discussing at least. They don't know what they subconsciously wrote, so interpretations that ignore author's intent are completely valid. Different story interpretations is what separates good from great stories imo.

BUT with that being said, let's go into what the authors have said. Simba is supposed to represent Nelson Mandela, while Scar and the Hyenas are supposed to represent the colonizers. The writers weren't trying the convey that it was "natural order" that kept the world in check (although I will agree that certain parts of the movie certainly do), they were trying to convey how South Africa was flawed before the Europeans took over, but it still generally worked. Even with oppression that was present in pre-colonial South Africa, every single person in their ecosystem has a place, every person has a stake in their world where they do care about what happens. The lions may literally kill their subjects because hungry, but the lions also want the other groups of animals to actually succeed because they don't want to just move to find another food source. Regardless of how problematic the lions in the movie are, they still care about their society and culture.

The Hyenas and Scar are supposed to represent fascist colonizers (hence the imagery being uncomfortably Nazi). The Hyenas do really want to eat, but they also want to be as powerful as Scar is, and their avoidance of wider society is in hopes of getting as powerful as Scar. The Hyenas do not want to find their place in the rest of society, they want to drain said society until there's nothing left because they like laying around all day and consuming the value of the prey without thinking about it. The Hyenas are the imperial core, perfectly content with eating nations like Iraq, but even hungrier than before after their bloody feast.

They may stand where Mufasa used to stand, but do not care about keeping the society running, they just want to do the eating (aka the aesthetics of power) I think the grey skies were a bit dramatic and uncommunicative, but also think it would be too harsh for a Disney movie to have the Hyenas begin a genocide against the native population. I feel like Lion King is critical of the "natural order" at times, with Simba depending on Timone (canonically, extremely Jewish) and Pumba although the natural order says he should eat them. Idk, with author's intent, I see Lion King as the allegory of Nelson Mandela being exiled, imprisoned, and using that time spent with "the lesser" to come back strong enough to see true revolution for his people. Mandela was transformed from being a dedicated but young and questionable revolutionary to one of the most effective revolutionaries through his time in prison, just like Simba's time in exhile.

The reasons I consider author's intent so heavily in this case are two-fold. A. It's just an interesting conversation. You can read everything I just wrote and disagree with every word, but I'm sure you're at least thinking about it. B. This isn't just a story of a revolution, this is an extremely personal story to many of these writers. This movie released in 1994. Mandela had just been released from 30 years of prison in 1990, after being sentenced to life in the 60's. Mandela was taken away from his people for decades, but still came back as one of the most important leaders in modern history. To the South African writers of the film, this was extremely recent history, and extremely important history. Mandela/Simba weren't necessarily supposed to be brought back into leading because of the divine right of kings, rather because their homes have been ruined by foreign invaders and someone with enough influence had to come back and try to restore their homeland. Cult of personality, as bad as it can be, has proven to be absolutely essential in revolution.

Maybe these South African writers do have absolutely batshit conclusions in politics, but it just makes their point stand even more. Regardless of how flawed Mandela may have been, he actually had a stake in the nation and wouldn't have just let the nation fail. Maybe he would have commited a few atrocities or abuses of power, maybe (not really, think hypothetical since Lion King was built for Western audiences absorbed in anti-mandela propaganda of the time) Mandela actually commited some serious human rights abuses during his rule. The Europeans would have let every person in the country die for a few million dollars because the survival/death of south Africa simply didn't matter enough to be built into an actual colony. I think that's the ultimate point of the film. It doesn't really matter how fucked up we see the circle of life professed to the animals of the area, foreign powers with no understanding of the land will kill the land because their plans don't require the land to survive, they want as much profit as possible as fast as possible. Africa (yes, switching to all of Africa right now because the history of imperialism is borderline universal) doesn't have enough important resources to actually be developed by capitalists, but they do have enough important resources to be consistently subjugated by capitalists. The only way to protect Africa is by letting its citizens run its own nations.

I gotchu

I said this in another comment, but Jigsaw is a character that I would argue is 100 percent on the side of Hamas. Jigsaw actually has ideology, even if he executes it in gross and evil ways. But dude literally started kidnapping medical insurance executives because their austerity was murdering people. Insurance man had to kill people in similar ways to how his patients died, but still got BRUTALIZED in the end by Roderick because he fucking deserved it.

Like yeah, Jigsaw is an evil piece of shit who will create dumbass punishments for people. But he's clearly trying to punish people punching down on defenseless people. Jigsaw would be far more likely to support Hamas than Israel.