this post was submitted on 26 Oct 2023
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I recognized it as that old ass trope of a prince killing his evil uncle who killed his father for the throne (Jason and the Argonauts, Bhagavata Purana, Hamlet, Bahubali, etc.)
The trope is about divine rule or enlightened kingship, that I agree with. But overthrowing feudalism is a bourgeois revolution fueled by similar idealist humanism about how society should be set up. Not a communist, proletariat revolution which stems from a materialist philosophy.
I think an anti-feudal bourgeois revolution can be portrayed as symbolic of communist proletarian revolution, but only as a loose metaphor, so very hard to pull off. Tbh I don't think this trope does it though. There are better ways, like Robin Hood like figures or historical peasant revolts in which the peasants struggled against feudal lords or kings that work well IMO
also it's far more throwing off the old king in favour of a new king. It's a feudal revolution against an unfavourable feudal order
Yeah, and it's kind of hard to map the factions involved to any sort of real-world analogue. Maybe if there was discussion of the Lions having rights that Scar was stamping on, you could argue that he's supposed to be some sort of centralizing autocrat and therefore a force for historical progress ala Stannis, but the only difference between the regular lions and Scar and the Hyenas is that the regular lions believe in the circle of life.
Maybe you could identify that with more liberal rights for the peasantry (IE, Britain vs France/Russia) but that's kind of a stretch.
I go into this in another comment in this thread.
But the plot does depict an ideological struggle it's just an extremely feudal one and the circle of life is almost exactly the ideological doctrine of feudalism and divine right of kings. Everyone has their assigned place and that place carries social rights and responsibilities. Circle of life is just divine right of kings. Especially considering that in feudal concepts the will of God for feudal roles was considered an aspect of nature. Scar as feudal usurper who upsets the natural order who is replaced by the true king restoring the order and thus putting nature back in balance is a very obvious theme
Personally I thought Stannis was meant to be a depiction of Cromwell that had the flaws of not understanding or caring to understand anything about Cromwell's background, motivations, or why people liked him and thus didn't really work. Some aspects of his personality are very clear allusions to Cromwell such as his exact legalism, obsession with order and the manner of his justice for example his insistence on both punishing and rewarding Davos for the onion stunt. But he just doesn't have the ideology which makes him incoherent.
Well, don't mean to sound rude, but real life analogues from the Lion King can be easy to draw based off author's intent. Obviously not all of the authors are, but many were South Africans that left Africa after Nelson Mandela's arrest in 1960. I have other comments in this thread going into more detail, but the Hyenas are explicitly meant to represent European colonizers, Mufasa is traditional African rule, while Simba is supposed to represent Nelson Mandela returning to South Africa and freeing the nation from its colonizers
Mufasa and Simba are supposed to be flawed. Domestic rule before Nelson Mandela WAS very morally questionable. Nelson Mandela came back and freed the nation from imperialists, but was also an extremely flawed leader that had plenty moments that were morally ambiguous. However this isn't necessarily a negative. I love Mao, but he (along with China as a whole) 100 percent have had morally ambiguous moments throughout history, and that's totally fine. Revolutionaries don't need to be "heroes", they need to unite a people against the oppressor. Those people can fix those issues on their own once someone isn't fucking with them, foreign entities only ever harm these moral quests. Even with all of Simba's flaws, he should still be the ruler of the pride lands. Because as flawed as the circle of life is from a representative view, the circle of life is also the flawed logic that keeps the pride lands functional. Keeping the gazelles eating and functioning. Even if Simba/Mufasa are awful leaders, they're still better than Scar because they have genuine interest in keeping the pride land's ecosystem functioning.
The best way to explain this logic is under Simba, the gazelles could hold some sort of "strike". The gazelles could just decide to run off the lands and let the lions lose their food. If it happened, the lions would try to fix the issue that makes the gazelles leave the pride lands because the gazelles being successful and having their own culture within the pride lands is essential to the lions eating. Even though it isn't as much as the lions, the gazelles still have some power in a society under Simba. But when the goal of the Hyenas is just to eat everything in the area and move on to a new area (like the West), the gazelles running away only have the power to choose where they're hunted. In the analogue, this is the option for Black South Africans to choose total assimilation, or to lose their homes just to be "hunted" in whatever nations they leave for. People who either submit to the death of their people and culture, or people that fight to maintain their way of life even though if they fail, they will definitely die.
I said this in another comment as well, but I widely welcome alternate interpretations of Lion King, so you could respond to me and totally dunk on this comment and it'd be cool. People's different interpretations is what makes the difference between a good piece of media, and a truly great piece of media. By this metric, Lion King has so much unintentional subtext that it's one of the greatest pieces of media of all time. Even if a piece of media is flawed, the ability to discuss serious ideas over a cartoon is GREAT. I can't think of any other piece of media close to as popular as Lion King that's so morally ambiguous.