A Dumb Culture War Argument I Will Probably Regret Wading Into - Blog Posts

I used to have a friend who was pretty big into both WW2 militaria and animé, and she used to argue that people in both these groups have a bad habit of adopting imagery from Wilhelmite Germany in substitution for Nazi imagery as a way to glamorizing German militarism without being immediately accused of pro-Nazi sympathies. Now she was very hard-left politically, and some of this may have been hyperbolic. Still, this something that has given me pause, and I feel that Tanya the Evil does straddle the line, particularly in the later installments when WW2-era technology starts appearing. Still, while I don’t want to die on the “let people dress like Nazis!” hill, I would not ban Tanya cosplay on the grounds that it depicts a “fictitious Nazi organization,” because it bloody well doesn’t and a personal interpretation of subtext is not the same thing as out-and-out pro-Nazi propaganda, and if it is then we might as well cut out the middleman and just start arresting people because we don’t like them.

Well… that’s dumb.