Chatter post

[trashmod]

For all your discussion needs.

Ground rules:
- Try to keep it loosely trash party related, or at least Cap fandom related.
- Disagreement is fine, nastiness is not.
- Being offended is not carte blanche for nastiness.
- Trashmeme ground rules apply. Read at your own risk, no romanticizing your noncon garbage, no wank about the moral acceptability of noncon kink.
- Body shots, sniper shots, and tetanus shots are all available at the open bar. Party like it's 2014, kids.

Comments

[(Anonymous)]

Is anyone else getting really intense déjà-vu from the wank about whether or not Hydra are Nazis? because as an antifa IRL, I'm so sick of having that discussion about every fascist group in existence, and I want to vomit on it.

[(Anonymous)]

It frustrates me, because it doesn't actually matter if they are. It would only matter if we wrote HTP fic because we were literally siding with Hydra. Or thought they were misunderstood woobies and/or didn't understand how bad the Nazis were.

Which we're not. HTP fic writes bad guys doing the things bad guys exist to do, which is to be foils for the hero. That requires the bad guys to hurt the hero or the hero's loved ones. It is okay for the villain to be a Nazi because being a Nazi is BAD. And it's okay to write villains because stories need them. Fandom needs to get over the idea that acknowledging a character exists and using them for their intended purpose means you condone their actions.

It's an equally valid point that not everyone who worked for Hydra was or is, a Nazi, because there are other ways to be a terrible person. It's not enough to not be a Nazi, Hydra's evil is more adaptable than that.

But when anti HTPers bring in the Nazi question, what they're really trying to do is drag an argument they can't win (the idea that there's an objective standard for how to recover from trauma, or which kinks are/are not okay to write) to a field they think they *can* win on. Which is racism and how you're a racist for being intrigued by well written villains with interesting motivations played by hot actors.

You're supposed to feel guilty and back down when they connect the debate to a politically and emotionally sensitive topic that they're accusing you of being on the wrong side of. If you get angry and start trying to defend yourself from the accusation of having a Nazi fetish, you're letting them reframe the argument.

[(Anonymous)]

I agree that the fictional politics of fictional characters doesn't impact the morality or immorality of HTP, but I was actually mostly thinking about how people make their arguments. Like, if someone says "Hydra aren't Nazis because X and Y and Z", then that has meaning that goes further than the fictional universe that Hydra exists in. Unfortunately Nazism didn't die in 1945, and the fact that people don't want to recognize the modern groups as the same movement is a problem when it comes to fighting them. Both Hydra and modern Nazis look and sound different from their ancestors, so the argument that Hydra aren't Nazis is a pretty worrying sign of how people think of the fascism of today, when those arguments can easily be made to whitewash real fascists.

I'm absolutely not saying that any of this is intentional, though, so please don't think that I'm calling anyone a Nazi apologist. I just think that a lot of people don't live in areas where run-ins with Nazis are a regular thing, which obviously gives someone a different perspective from mine.

In other news, "Nazis" no longer looks like a real word.

[(Anonymous)]

I agree with this comment.

A lot of the "Hydra aren't Nazis" arguments that I've seen boil down to their actual, formal, historical association with the Nazi party, and how that arrangement was dramatically terminated by the Red Skull in his own bid for power. But imo, all those metas are missing a few points:

1) On a textual level, Hydra are described as Nazis in-universe even after their split from Hitler. In AoS Skye has a famous line shutting Ward down when he protests he's not a Nazi; the SHIELD handbook calls them Nazis. So does Cap's Smithsonian exhibit, which names Hydra a "rogue Nazi science division." Hydra is associated with real-world Nazi-related events like Operation Paperclip. This isn't just an origin story a schism has decisively separated them from. This is their legend; this is why people know their name; this what new recruits sign up for when they shake hands with Hydra. The KKK may not do a lot of lynching anymore, but you don't join up if you're not cool with that, you know? And if all your recruits are the kind of people who are cool with signing up with a Nazi organization, that's what keeps your organization being a Nazi organization.

2) On a metatextual level, Hydra was explicitly designed as a Nazi stand-in. And yes, I mean in both films. In CATFA, Hydra is a matter of taste; you can't dress a superhero up in the American flag and throw him at actual Nazis in a comic-book movie and have that feel respectful. And so CATFA steers away from including a lot of real Nazis, but it still heavily plays on Nazi iconography. The colors of the logo. The armbands. The uniforms. The straight-armed salute. God, the famous "Hail Hydra," what does that sound like to you? Hydra is an obvious allegory for Nazis. They're metaphorical Nazis, so they still function in the text as Nazis. In CATWS, the Hydra = Nazis connection is important to the entire point of the film. The Hydra reveal works because we know they're evil as fuck; the idea being presented is that SHIELD is so bad that its organization, policies, and actions served the goals of the ACTUAL NAZIS hiding at its heart!

I realize this is all a lot of blather about fiction and that that's always open to interpretation. So here is what is, truly, most important to me:

3) In the real world, the majority of people read Hydra as Nazis. Before this round of discussions, I'd never seen a single person contest the understanding of Hydra as Nazis. (Though maybe Ward fandom did this? I never interacted much with them.) From movie reviews to fandom wank -- remember the 'Sam Wilson is Hydra' thing? how the rebuttal to that was 'what black man is a Nazi?' remember the criticisms of the choice of Sitwell to be the known character who's Hydra... because what Latino man would be a Nazi? -- it is just a common interpretation that Hydra are Nazis. In this case, when so many people believe a group to be a Nazi group, it is very, very fraught territory to argue otherwise. To a lot of people, it's crucial to call a Nazi a Nazi. And now we get to have arguments about whether a fictional terrorist group who function as Nazi stand-ins, have explicit Nazi origins, are called Nazis in-text, and have the Marvel version of "Heil Hitler" as their freaking catch phrase are actual Nazis. The htp gets to stand up as a group and claim that it's very very important not to call this organization Nazis. Think about that. Think about the real-world implications of that and the way you are making real people feel. Is that the side you want to stand on?

I know that people who hate on the htp try to use the Nazi thing as a way of shutting down the validity of what we do here, and I get what the ayrt is saying about wanting to But the htp has always justified its existence with the claim that we don't romanticize the evils we portray; abuse is abuse, the bad guys are bad guys, we acknowledge and examine this shit as unacceptable and that's the difference between depiction and complicity. We don't whitewash how bad this is. The tension between that creed and "no no, it's okay for me to find Hydra interesting because at least they aren't Nazis" is starting to make me really uncomfortable. I'm not exactly thrilled to be an attendee at a party whose public activities include passionately arguing that Nazis aren't Nazis. They are Nazis. Step up to the plate about it, just like you do when it's time to acknowledge that rape and abuse are wrong.

I just think that a lot of people don't live in areas where run-ins with Nazis are a regular thing, which obviously gives someone a different perspective from mine.

That's the thing. I'm in Germany, and it's really not fun to come online to find this rhetoric when Pegida (very popular with fucking Nazis) rallies in my city EVERY! WEEK!

I agree with the anon I replied to that I don't think any intentional Nazi apologism is going on here. I still have a lot of respect for everyone who argues that Hydra aren't Nazis; like I said, I get the urge, I understand the arguments, and you're all very likable, very filthy people. But I'm just so unhappy that this is part of the public face of the htp now. It makes me feel like a liar when I say we face the evil we write about it.

[(Anonymous)]

(New anon)
I think for the purposes of CATWS, hydra's nazi legacy is about 50/50 with shield's shadowy government agency schtick in how it gets its bad guy creds, and there is a shift in the role for narrative purposes from the heavily implicit storebrand nazis that they were. In Steve's era the general paranoia was the opposing side of the war. In the Cold War era it was the communists And Cold War era spy games. In the modern age, it's your own government and its corruption and the lack of privacy. (According to the commentary CATWS was 6 weeks into shooting before Snowden and the NSA thing blew up so it looked "fairly prescient") and I think the continuation of Hydra as the enemy is a shorthand for the immense evil and danger the heroes are trying to overcome, but while they have their markedly nazi legacy and fit in most definitions of the word neonazi, I think their ideology and the archetype of their villainy has changed enough that I would be interested in debate about if they're for real legit nazis.
That being said though, they do carry their nazi legacy no matter what kind of a role they've taken in the narrative, and I think people try to use the debate about their ideology to derail the moral issue of getting off on nazi torture porn. And I think it is important to acknowledge that due to all the things anon above mentioned, it is imperative to examine our response. "It's not really nazi porn" isn't really adequate in some cases because in CATFA they ARE nazis and in CATWS, they're technologically advanced governmental neonazis. The implications of nazisploitation in our porn is still there. It's insufficient a lot of the time to say hydra aren't really nazis because the conflict is generated often by the emotional response that comes ingrained with discussions of the Real Nazis, and it's that emotional response that the movies capitalise on to legitimise the villainy of Hydra.
Tldr, the argument about whether hydra are nazis doesn't really have much to do with the debate about the morality of nazi porn. I'm owning up to my trash being neonazi trash. Please reexamine your k eye jerk respons of Not Really Nazis because I think there is a discussion to be had about ethics and owning our trash that could do without being derailed by the nazi/not nazi debate. Hydra relies on Nazis to have emotional impact, therefore when writing about and masturbating over hydra it's important to keep in mind their origins and legacy as Very Nazi Indeed.

[(Anonymous)]

There was a great post I saw somewhere on Tumblr which pointed out that the SHIELD handbook in question was written while HYDRA was deeply ingrained in SHIELD - and that HYDRA had a very good reason to want people to think they were Nazis. Because if people thought that, then they would never suspect people like Sitwell or Bakshi of being HYDRA. Would fail to realize that people who had none of the NSDAP's nationalist or racist ideas could still support HYDRA's totalitarian fascist ideologies. And would therefore would be blind to the HYDRA agents within their own ranks.

This is literally how HYDRA got away with hiding within SHIELD. Everyone was on the lookout for Nazis, which is why they didn't recognize people like Alexander Pierce as HYDRA. Because Pierce had zero interest in the superiority of a particular state or race, and therefore could never have been a Nazi. His brand of totalitarianism was something very different.

This is what genuinely disturbs me about people's insistence on conflating HYDRA with the NSDAP. Because insisting that you can't be HYDRA without being a Nazi is blinding ourselves to the fact that even people who belong to groups that the Nazis would have ostracized, oppressed and murdered are capable of supporting CA:TWS's HYDRA's fascist, totalitarian ideology.

1) There are several instances in AoS of HYDRA-identified characters distancing themselves from or outright dismissing Nazism. I've no doubt that some people fetishize HYDRA as the new NSDAP, and sign up for that reason. But there's canon evidence that HYDRA has distanced itself from Nazism enough that people join under the genuine belief that it has nothing to do with Nazism any more. (In fact, Sitwell and Bakshi would never have been allowed to join the NSDAP, let alone hold positions of power within it.)

2) In the MCU, HYDRA stands in for the greatest contemporary threat to global freedom. In CA:TFA, that's the Third Reich, which is why there are so many explicit parallels with Nazi ideology and symbolism. In CA:TWS, it's US imperialism and the NSA, which is why there are so many explicit parallels with the ideology and behavior of the US intelligence apparatus.

3) The side I want to stand on is the one of critical analysis. I want to stand anywhere where we can actually have an evidence-based discussion about the ideologies of Nazism and HYDRA, and the reasons why a given person might support both, or might support one but not the other. But I personally see this as an entirely separate issue from the HTP community. I've seen plenty of non-HTP people arguing both sides of it.

The tension between that creed and "no no, it's okay for me to find Hydra interesting because at least they aren't Nazis" is starting to make me really uncomfortable.

I have no trouble announcing that I find HYDRA interesting for the same reason I have always found Nazism (and Stalinism, and serial killers) interesting: I have always felt driven to try to understand why people do evil things. I will 100% step up to the plate and acknowledge that HYDRA ideology is wrong. But it's a different kind of wrong, believed and followed for different reasons, than Nazism.

[(Anonymous)]

This comment is exactly what I wanted to say, thank you.