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Notes -
I hardly think that follows - one can be interested in monstrously evil societies because they're monstrously evil. A man who seeks out an in-depth exposé about the Spanish Inquisition or the Gulags or the Nazis probably is here for the lurid details and the frequent histrionics about how twisted and awful they were. By no means is this the only possible audience for a documentary series about Sparta, but there's no reason to assume that audience doesn't exist.
(Indeed, I myself as a boy, during the brief period where Sparta occupied a large part of my thoughts, pictured it as very much the City Populated Entirely By Nasty Drill Sergeants - it tickled my imagination as a city of insane-sounding joyless motherfuckers which I could scarcely believe had ever existed outside of a cartoon. Not something to be condemned with serious mournful expressions like the Nazis, but a nation made up entirely of heels. That's fun.)
I think that's also how it's portrayed in Asterix The Gaul, and if there's one IP I trust to use stereotypes in a way that's 100% accurate to real life...
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This is true, but acoup guy channels his hate to make spartans look lame in addition to evil. "Acktually as an initiation ritual, spartans had to sneak around naked with a dagger and stab a random unsuspecting peasant to death. Then they get to partyyyyy."
Which by all accounts is not how things worked. To the extent that mass murder actually happened in sparta it wasn't a bunch of guys wandering around with a knives just tryna get a kill squid game style.
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