Things meant to be progressive just end up being incredibly offensive

[u/Character_Growth_397]

What If - In one of the comics Miles becomes Thor, and it's full of stereotypes about black people such as the Mjolnir having graffiti on it and the infamous "by Odin's fade"

Emilia Perez - Everything about the movie

[u/PlumbumDirigible]

I don't know, there have been plenty of movies with the Spartans as the protagonists. They were also very oppressive to the helots in the area around Sparta. The helots were somewhere between an enslaved class and serfs, and their subjugation was the main reason Spartan citizens were able to live in relative luxury and practice a form of eugenics. That said, there's been a lot more time in recorded history to whitewash them

[u/bgbarnard → u/PlumbumDirigible]

And anyone who knows about the actual history calls Sparta out as the horrifying slave state of pedophiles that it actually was.

[u/ThyHolyPaladdin → u/bgbarnard]

Sparta really asked “what if child abuse was oficial policy and dictated by law”

[u/bgbarnard → u/ThyHolyPaladdin]

There is a blog called "This Isn't Sparta" which argues that the agoge is much more equivalent to gang indoctrination than military training or public education, and that every single Spartan boy was both a victim and a perpetrator of sexual assault (you could only be a Spartan citizen if you were admitted into a mess group, which required a unanimous communal vote from everyone, including the "dorm parent". If that guy said he would endorse you in exchange for sexual favors, there was no way to refuse).

[u/eukomos → u/bgbarnard]

It's a valid interpretation, but it's worth bearing in mind that practically all sexual relationships in Ancient Greece were coercive to some degree or another. They expected and reproduced significant power differentials between partners. Girls were married off to the adult man of their father's choice shortly after menarche, and that was the fundamental model for all sexual relationships. The Spartans were actually an exception to this rule, because they noticed that babies born to fully grown mothers were healthier, and they needed their citizens to be maximally healthy in order to maintain the strength of their infantry which was key to their political power, so citizen women (members of the vanishingly small Spartan upper class) were married off several years later than was typical.

Basically, antiquity was built on suffering and they couldn't even imagine a different way of doing things. Everyone was a victim and if you were lucky you also got to be a perpetrator occasionally, but you probably weren't lucky.

[u/Equivalent-Battle973 → u/ThyHolyPaladdin]

Yep full on child abuse, I was gonna add the whole throwing infants off a cliff, but apparently that was made up by a roman biographer, Plutarch.

[u/bgbarnard → u/Equivalent-Battle973]

Leaving them to die of exposure is not much better. That is actually one thing the Disney Hercules got exactly right.

It would not be out of place at all for a Greek couple to find a baby all by himself out in the wilderness and adopt him thinking he was abandoned.

[u/Davido401 → u/bgbarnard]

I know a Paedo hunting group called Spartan Protection something here in Scotland and I wanna say to them their name is stupid but then I remember they probably watched 300 rather than actually read a fucking book

[u/bgbarnard → u/Davido401]

I remember when 300 came out, critics said it was this allegorical right-wing wet dream about the Iraq War (since a bunch of buff white guys shouting "FREEDOM!" are slaughtering a bunch of ugly Middle Easterners), but the hilarious thing is that the Persians (a massive multinational multiethnic empire hellbent on conquest) are more more analogous to the USA than the Spartans (a bunch of fanatics so committed to their beliefs they would rather suicidally charge to their doom than give up)

[u/juliankennedy23 → u/bgbarnard]

In fairness that describes a lot of ancient Greece honestly a lot of the ancient world.

[u/BizSilver5013 → u/juliankennedy23]

Athens was less insane with the physical abuse, but they had the same issues with screwing underage boys.

[u/thedrcubed → u/juliankennedy23]

Ancient?

[u/juliankennedy23 → u/thedrcubed]

I don't know enough about modern day Greece to comment but yeah Greece from 2 to 3,000 years ago sure.

[u/thedrcubed → u/juliankennedy23]

I was talking about the world in general lol.

[u/tospendlesstimehere → u/thedrcubed]

Giggling at the idea of some people 3000 years in our future referring to Americans as "ancient Epsteinians".

[u/Vaeon → u/bgbarnard]

And anyone who knows about the actual history calls Sparta out as the horrifying slave state of pedophiles that it actually was.

And yet... so many educational facilities choose to name their sports teams "Spartans".

[u/Ryousan82 → u/PlumbumDirigible]

Aside from 300 (and calling 300 "historical" is extremely generous) and perhaps some repretations of the Illiad (cuz Menelaus is king of Sparta) I haven't seen many common depictions of historical Sparta in Media. Hell, I don't recall historical dramas set in ancient greece since Alexander.

[u/bgbarnard → u/Ryousan82]

Menelaus is also long before the Sparta we know came into being. The Trojan War is ~1100 BCE and Classical Greece is roughly 500-300 BCE (Persian Wars to Alexander the Great).

[u/dramallamawithacomma → u/bgbarnard]

I looked into it a while back, and not only did Sparta not exist until centuries after the Iliad, I don’t even think there was a proto-Sparta city at that point. Athens, on the other hand, did exist, but still would have been uncrecognizable ofc

[u/juliankennedy23 → u/PlumbumDirigible]

I mean people tend to forget the slavery by the Anglo-Saxons the Romans and the Greeks all the time... it's the wrong kind of slavery or something like that.

[u/Egathentale → u/PlumbumDirigible]

It's a less-known thing, but there's something called "Laconophilia", which is a weird worship/admiration of Spartan culture, except it's not the "real" culture but this idealized view that gained a lot of traction as early as the 5th century BC. I liken it to those weird people nowadays who look at the USSR and talk about it like it was this paradise on earth, and any negative thing said about it is just capitalist propaganda, but on a millennia-long scale.

This is relevant, because a lot of the French philosophers who influenced the US founding fathers and their generation was unabashedly into laconophilia. Because of this, the idea seeped into US culture to the point where even after the rest of the world moved on, it's still subtly present in both their pop-culture and in general parlay, where people (especially the older generation) just casually considers them these virtuous, manly warrior poets or somesuch, because that's how they're treated by the local collective conscious.

[u/Cucumberneck → u/PlumbumDirigible]

The only such movie I know is 300 which completely leaves out helots. Tbh literally nothing about it is correct which is perfectly fine. The framework plot (?) is a Spartan who doesn't give a damn about helots or anything telling other Spartans how awesome their king and his men where.