This will be another reason for the traitors to piss and moan.
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I first noticed this a few years back when I started to see “The Empire Did Nothing Wrong” on bumper stickers. Sure it seemed like a joke at the time but I was confused that so many people thought this was a statement worth putting on their vehicle. I mean, pretty early on in the OT, Darth Vader uses the Death Star to murder an entire planet so surely no one was serious, right?
Whoooo boy have I learned a lot about my neighbors’ values since then.
When I found out about the 501st Legion, I was absolutely baffled. George Lucas dressed the bad guys to look like Nazis, and now fans were dressing up as the bad guys because they love the movies so much? What the fuck is wrong with these people?
Then Captain America came out and people started dressing as Hydra agents, and I was like, "Oh, they're just straight-up okay with Nazis. Got it."
I had the impression the 501st was a different beast from "The Empire Did Nothing Wrong" types. I thought the point of them being stormtroopers was so everyone else had someone to heroically oppose? Their charity events seem to focus on things like kids shooting them with dart guns.
I'm not saying they haven't been co-opted since I learned about them several years ago; but last I knew, they were happy playing bad guys to let other people be good guys.
Let us remember that the entire "The Donald" meme subreddit was entirely satirical when it was made back in the early days of his first campaign. It was people posting memes of Trump as the Emperor from the fascist human empire in Warhammer 40k. (Which is also an entire related topic on its own)
What happened pretty fast is people who didn't get it was satire started coming in absolutely LOVING the worship of the golden clown and started posting unironic memes of Trump riding tanks and carrying eagles and shit. They eventually drove out the people who were there for laughs and it became one of the largest subreddits and a huge chunk of his online support came from that subreddit before it was eventually banned for all the reasons you would expect.
I think we have vastly overestimated people's capability to discern media, we have vastly overestimated our population's capability to rationalize and reason things out. We have a massive segment of the population that has cognitive dissonance baked-in to their very being.
Seriously, I had a whole ass mental breakdown when I started realizing just how bad it is. Most people are on autopilot and just react to stimuli. No brain use. They're fucking CLAMS.