As i like to put it: you can write a story about how the prince rides in on the white horse and rescues the princess from the tower, and that's just normal, but if you have the princess save the princess, now we're getting political.

To paraphrases something I can't remember the origins of: we are most deeply embedded in ideology when we don't recognize it as ideology / post-ideology is the ultimate ideology.

Or, to quote David Foster Wallace:

>There are these two young fish swimming along, and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says, "Morning, boys, how's the water?" And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes, "What the hell is water?"

And, might as well add Zizek:

>That is why we are also unable to shake so-called ideological prejudices by taking into account the pre-ideological level of everyday experience. The basis of this argument is that the ideological construction always finds its limits in the field of everyday experience - that it is unable to reduce, to contain, to absorb and annihilate this level. [...] Does not this everyday experience offer an irreducible resistance to the ideological construction?

>The answer is, of course, no. If everyday experience offers such a resistance, then the anti-Semitic ideology has not yet really grasped us. An ideology is really ‘holding us’ only when we do not feel any opposition between it and reality - that is, when the ideology succeeds in determining the mode of our everyday experience of reality itself.

>---THE SUBLIME OBJECT OF IDEOLOGY

---

>even when the old star trek stuff, which is also quite diverse, is well regarded

Roddenberry would be denounced as the king of social justice warriors if he were writing today. (So would Rod Serling.) Star Trek, Stars War, Dr Who, etc are always okay in the past sense (no matter how bad the individual episode / movie) exactly because they are part of the past, and they cannot and never will change, which, to me, points to the real desire, the real anxiety, of those at present as being one a perpetual potential for alteration, much like a hypochondriac: there's no state of not being sick, only the state of not being sick yet, so the true desire is to be sick, because that is definitive.

And I keep imagining (comics / manga are what I've been seeing the most of this in lately) that if you imagined an alternative history where Alan Moore came along now, there would be no end of youtube videos and blog vitriol about him ruining Swamp Thing with agenda stuff and killing the superhero genre with Watchmen. But, since that's in the past, it can be safely embraced. Much like Martin Luther King, Jr: reviled up until death, after death, the establishment can lionize him. The dead don't talk back when someone puts words in their mouth.

On the one hand a certain vocal contingent of the audience does not want change, but instead wants the same story repeated ad infinitum, even though they say the opposite. The problem is it's not like heroine, where you simply have to increase the dosage until death, instead in must be continually new/different and yet the same, which quickly becomes untenable.

>1984, Farenheit 451, Ayn Rand's works

Interesting how is likely to be called art tends to be dystopian, isn't it? I have this paper somewhere [but that I cannot find for the life of me to link] that puts froward the idea that the dystopian subset of science fiction was allowed to become respectable in the mid twentieth century because it reflected the bourgeoisie's own anxieties about themselves and externalized an internalized death wish.