the_dunk_tank

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.