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“Look, Joseph, do you want 80% of your grandfather to survive, or do you want to keep none of him?” – asks Dio's head from atop a possessed body.
Or put another way: the classical lesson of zombie movies, and many other horrors, is «this is not your mom». Characters who fail to strike down the contagious reanimated corpse get bitten and turned as well. This is, of course, yet another piece of cultural commentary one struggles to speak aloud. Maybe a building block for a more healthy tradition as well. Maybe if your mythologized past had been taken from you, new fiction is the best replacement you can get – just gotta spin it right. And anything can be spun whichever way, provided you have time and your spin doctors are good enough: Krylov's «The Golden Key» depicts a whole post-apocalyptic posthuman civilization built on the basis of the only surviving data source, that is, a single corrupt Russian MP's laptop hard drive – with the intricate, humane religion of «Daughter-Mother», its «icons» meditated upon by chaste «Pedobear monks». Naturally, going downhill is much easier.
Tradition is a means to an end, a set of solutions for which we have forgotten the problems. You say «usable past», but – usable to whom? Considering the kind of involvement we see –to the side sensitivity readers represent, evidently; they and their employees aren't doing charity for the nostalgic Red tribe. Usable for what purpose, then? To carry on some nebulous ancestral legacy? Or to pacify the suspicious pagans with hollowed-out symbols and rituals, as you solidify the power of your true Church that shall give their lives and deaths a whole new meaning, one where these beloved holy days celebrate not their tribe's deities, lineage and land, but a certain Palestinian God whose grave they shall conquer?
Perhaps this past and this tradition are now useless to heirs of those who had built both, and their ancestors would have endorsed oblivion for their work rather than suffer it being defiled and repurposed; perhaps the risk of the sense of familiarity and reliability being used as a backdoor is much greater than the value of whatever original lesson remains. A prohibited book, at least, may become a touchstone for an underground cult (though I wouldn't recommend Ian Fleming in this capacity). But you won't get back to a sacred Celtic grove or whatever from a Christmas tree farm.
Now all of this is admittedly distant from the specific question of woke edits in brainless entertainment. Catholics with their Latin Mass, discussed here, have more of a case, but even then it's unclear what exactly of substance is being preserved or tarnished; we are already quite distant from any premodern tradition that serves its purpose and is understood as such, instead of simply being fetishized. In any event, the reaction of reactionaries follows from a very reasonable prior: do not let your enemies edit your source code. Not even comments.
I suspect this fictional Russian MP browsed some 4ch boards...that, or read John Ringo.
Oh, that's a classic. For my sins, I managed to make it all the way through Ghost, but regretted it. That was before reading OH JOHN RINGO NO; I would have skipped the book had I read the blog post first. I have heard that the rest of the series (...because of course there's a rest of the series...) is worth reading if you match the target audience, however.
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As per the book, he was a straightforward pedophile, and over generations, posthuman characters reasoned their way to a (barely) functional social arrangement approximating some Russian features (parodied by the book, on one of its levels) by erecting abstractions and esoteric readings on top of his laptop's contents.
But Krylov himself was intimately acquainted with 2ch/4chan culture, of course. There is a well-developed Equestria-equivalent domain, for one thing. Really it's a masterpiece. Very uneven, very rushed, deliberately trashy, smarter than virtually all of Western fiction.
Some notes from the thesaurus accompanying the trilogy (a ton of context is missed with such shabby translation, sorry about that):
God, part of me wants to read a proper translation of this. I need more brain-melting content in the vein of Ring: Legend of the Nibelungen.
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