Let’s start with the bad guys. Battalions of stormtroopers dressed in all black, check. Secret police, check. Determination to brutally kill everyone who doesn’t look like them, check. Leader with a tiny villain mustache and a tendency to go into apopleptic rage when he doesn’t get his way, check. All this from a country that was ordinary, believable, and dare I say it sometimes even sympathetic in previous seasons.
I wouldn’t even mind the lack of originality if they weren’t so heavy-handed about it. Apparently we’re supposed to believe that in the middle of the war the Germans attacked their allies the Russians, starting an unwinnable conflict on two fronts, just to show how sneaky and untrustworthy they could be? And that they diverted all their resources to use in making ever bigger and scarier death camps, even in the middle of a huge war? Real people just aren’t that evil. And that’s not even counting the part where as soon as the plot requires it, they instantly forget about all the racism nonsense and become best buddies with the definitely non-Aryan Japanese.
Several of those became staples of fiction because of their association with World War II, so this is sort of like complaining that Shakespeare is full of cliches. If the Nazis had eaten Jews instead of putting them in death camps, the past 70 years of fiction would have been full of cannibal stormtroopers.
Stranger than World War II?
HT: Volokh
Several of those became staples of fiction because of their association with World War II, so this is sort of like complaining that Shakespeare is full of cliches. If the Nazis had eaten Jews instead of putting them in death camps, the past 70 years of fiction would have been full of cannibal stormtroopers.
Note that Yvain is the author.