Not sure if this is a proper post to this community, but I’ve been trying to be more active so figured I’d give it a shot. Mostly just want to get this off my chest really.

I’ve had a similar feeling with The Boys, also on Amazon Prime, where for the most part you’re just watching something that’s fun, dark, and light hearted, but seems to be intentionally peppered with anti-capitalist rhetoric, but like, in a safe way. The platform being owned by the richest most capitalist dickhead on Earth probably has something to do with it, but really that’s just how capital works: it co-opts the social and cultural anxieties of the era into a form that can be packaged and sold, and so on and on it goes.

But there’s one line in the show that I can’t help but feel does have something sinister behind it, and it’s Moldaver’s line: “I’m not a communist, Mr. Howard. That’s just a dirty word they use to describe people who aren’t insane.”

Without going into her character too much, she seems to be a scientist that’s more focused on finishing her research on cold fusion than aligning herself with any sort of political ideology, so she’s using the communists as a means to an end. But the fact that she’s aligning herself with the communists, giving speeches to communists, understands that capitalism is undermining her research and is leading to a worse world, then why wouldn’t she just be explicitly communist, unless the showrunners are trying to imply something very specific about communism, or at least, a sentiment towards communism?

Now I may be reading way, way too much into this, but there’s something nagging at the back of my head about this kind of wording, that these kinds of sentiments represented in liberal media are used in a way to actually reinforce negative stereotypes about communism by acknowledging that while right wingers do misuse that word to mean essentially ‘anything they don’t like’, that you still shouldn’t be asking too many questions about communism itself because that’s irrelevant. In essence, you don’t have to be an “extremist” to poke fun at conservatives, implying in a weird round-a-bout way that communism itself is too extreme for most people, and isn’t exactly a position a true intellectual should take.

I remember feeling something similar during The Last of Us when Joel brother denies he’s a communist but his wife says something to the effect, “No, we literally are, this is a commune, we’re communists.” It’s played for laughs and it’s harmless enough, but it still seems to be one of those weird lines that seemingly puts a positive spin on communism, but ultimately reinforces the idea that it’s an outlandish concept that doesn’t really deserve further scrutiny, or at the very least, seems to be content on keeping the term vague enough so that you can reasonably argue that the showrunners could fall on either side of some argument of whether or not ‘communism is acceptable’.

I understand that communism is a bit complicated of a subject to thoroughly explore in a show meant for mass appeal, but I can’t help but feel that these shows are intentionally messing with the cultural anxiety of aligning yourself with communism, and maybe intentionally, maybe not, reinforcing the idea that people shouldn’t align themselves with communism through some sort of meta-narrative hidden wink.

That’s all. thx.