User:RD/9k/Trotsky breaking narratives (Q618)
Main entry
- Trotsky breaking narrative conventions -> so... ironblood series. the project has been stagnant for a matter of years so I think I can just spill things like this now. in ironblood the stories and characters are largely fictional but they take place inside real historical scenarios (or imagined offshoots of real scenarios) and there are a handful of real historical figures that exist — mostly because when I first thought of it I thought it was really funny. Harry Potter had accidentally implied the Nazi party existed and after that I thought it was the funniest thing to imagine a bunch of less-bad historical figures or groups simply existing in an urban fantasy story including Stalin, Mao, and the CNT-FAI.
I had found this rather specific form of storytelling where the 'real people' would appear only in imaginary Marxist theory articles carefully written in their style and theoretical approach, while the 'fictional people' would appear directly as in a normal work of fiction, and only mention the historical figures sometimes; there would be tiny exceptions to the divide between theorists and regular characters only when it made sense. but I knew that if I was going to bring up Trotsky in a work of historical fiction and actually do his character justice I would have to properly represent the way that just, every account of him you hear anywhere is weirdly hilarious because he did not follow anyone's rules, he always acted like he was more significant than anyone, at every moment he was larger than life and dropped in the middle of reality he hardly felt like he could possibly be real. on one hand you couldn't make up a more interesting character but on the other hand you almost want to ask 'is he even real or is this all made up'.
so what I had come up with was this conceit that most of the time there was a particular storytelling formula, but like, Trotsky would totally break it, and he would just be there on the ground in the 'regular people' sections where he wasn't supposed to be. I don't want to say a lot more because we're getting into very half-baked ideas. but basically parts of Trotskyism would interact directly with the main characters, in Victor's case the main characters are really tired of them because they're citizens of the Soviet Union and they're anxious about the independent existence of their country whatsoever as opposed to being absorbed into United States capitalism specifically and colonial class rule belonging to specific countries and ethnicities that crush all other cultures in the task of reproducing theirs. there's a strong theme of anxiety that Trotskyism contains secret treachery and whatever they look like on the surface their disregard for what makes sense will eventually lead them to turn their backs on the Third World as they pursue their own interests. - now, after... you know... I have come to look at this trope from a bit of a different angle. I think there's nothing wrong with it, because it didn't really stop being true that every single historical incident involving Trotsky has been incredibly bizarre. I like the weird synergy between transgender people and sometimes lesbians repeatedly retelling The Matrix, and the notion of Trotskyists stepping all the way out of at least a particular stylistic frame around the narrative because they are discovering, through somewhat confused stumblings, that the common narrative advanced by Marxism in a lot of countries isn't working. it's one of the only intuitive ways to portray the concept that 'the televised will not be revolution', that you never actually see some of the most important processes happening in media up to and including Marxist articles until maybe they get noticed and you get a summary of them after they have happened. it potentially gets across this really important process of how difficult it is to find the cutting edge of science and have to forge across it not really knowing what way you're going until you get there.
there is a lot of synergy between the trope here of Trotsky breaking out of the 'narrative' of Stalinist articles and the trope in Deltarune of breaking out of the game world and finding the secret monochrome world that may or may not contain the mysterious scientist of videogame-world Materialism W.D. Gaster, or might contain Dess doing the same thing instead.
I will not apologize for making an AU where the people in the monochrome world are Communist theorists, I think it's just perfectly accurate to what the game is accidentally saying. my only apology for Auldernet will be: ok, I missed the ways in which the subtly anti-capitalist moments in the game were equally against the shape of socialism-in-one-country and I should have noticed sooner that Deltarune is more of an inherently Trotskyist narrative just in terms of what it says about the relationship between reality and ideology.
Related
Ideologies or fields
- / early Trotskyism
- / metatransitional literature
- / Ironblood setting
- / Ironblood: Soviet Union, 193X