You know I think I’ve finally figured out why I hate the term “media literacy” so damn much. Media literacy is the process of taking a story and bending and breaking it to fit YOUR narrative, media analysis is about dissecting a story to understanding ITS deeper meanings and themes. Notice the difference there, you have no idea how many fucking video essays I’ve seen where it some dumb shit like “the queer Marxism of Barbie” or “the gay representation of Thomas the tank engine” these video that basically take a story or series and purposely ignore context, break characters and just fabricate bullshit in order to push their narrative about a piece of media. Let’s look at the prime example of this: starship troopers the movie fails as a satire, I am only referring to the first movie for this post none of the others exist. A very common theory is that “the asteroid strike that hit earth was a false flag”, it’s a very compelling theory but the problem is the film itself never once prints up this idea, and later in the film we see that the bugs have the ability to make ground base cannons that can destroy spaceships, so they can and do have the ability to do something like this. Also many of these video essays praising the film as some great satire often ignore the fact that at the beginning of film the very first scene we see a group of of Mormon separatists who were advised NOT to settle on the bug planet be murdered by the bugs, remember these were sepertits who had no authorization from the federation to colonize this planet in other words this wasnt the fault of the federation but the fault of the separatists who caused the war. Those same people will be like “look see the main cast is white and the officers were ss uniforms clearly they are the bad guy Nazis” this once again runs in the problem of surface level observation becuase once again of you look at the film the bugs NEVER make an opportunity for negotiation. The satire of this films fails even more once you read the book, becuase oh boy the federation in the book as literally nothing to do with fascism hell the bugs are more fascist than the federation, oh that’s another change in the book the bugs are actually more than just mindless killing machines they are still a hive mind but they operate more like the covenant from halo. In other words the director and writers of this movie took a book that had nothing to do with being a critique or satire on fascism and then forced it to be that but at the expense of chnaging basically every aspect of the book to the film.
