i am darkly amused that even very cynical dystopias like V FOR VENDETTA and CHILDREN OF MEN imagine britain as the last island of stability in a world falling apart not like a shitty, unimportant island left behind by the world, stewing in its own sins
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Replying to @perdricof @arthur_affect
even in their cynicism they had a hard time imagining that england might simply not matter
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Replying to @perdricof
Cf. the fan theory (endorsed by Alan Moore) that everything we're told about global politics in 1984 may just be a lie and it's just Britain that's a fascist dystopia
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Replying to @arthur_affect
extremely sensible, but one wouldn't mind more hints of it like whispered-of ways to get out of britain, small boats that can take you across the north sea
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Replying to @perdricof @arthur_affect
even north korea isn't a perfectly sealed society, is what i'm saying
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Replying to @perdricof
There's a short story I read once, The Sepoy Rebellion, taking place in an alternate history where it was India (under the Mughal Empire) that colonized a version of Britain hit much harder by the Black Plague
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Replying to @arthur_affect @perdricof
Most alternate histories with the theme "What if the white people were oppressed" aren't good but this one hit really hard It really played up what a shitty, nasty backwater London is in this timeline and how the English sepoys are ugly, broken, lost human beings
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Replying to @arthur_affect @perdricof
And, like, instead of dwelling on the idea of role reversal just playing up everything nasty and self-destructive and dysfunctional in English culture The whole "They have a culture of excuse-making and failure" the Brits have launched at other people, turned inward
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Replying to @arthur_affect @perdricof
The narrator ends up sabotaging the rebellion because he comes to believe the rebel leader's mad dream of a British Empire is worse than even their shitty reality, it's a nightmare timeline that shouldn't exist, it'd empower everything that's worst about their people
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Replying to @arthur_affect @perdricof
It was a complicated piece, arguably still problematic, but devastating I liked the riff on exoticization where the English sex workers who hang out in the ruins of Westminster Abbey are a twisted version of exotified Indian bellydancers
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Dressed in tattered tarty versions of Elizabeth an ballgowns and quoting meaningless sing-song snatches from Shakespeare and the King James Bible
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