What are your left wing manga/anime recommendations? I only got Ninpu Kamui Gaiden, because it is communist and ninjaic? You may shrug you shoulders, but a communist created all the ninja cliches, like a dude named Sasuke and the “Izuna Drop”! Unfortunately, the manga is from 1969, when the United States still had not erased all left-wing presence in Japan.
Whatt
Okay so let me explain a BIT because some of it is a bit funky
spoilers, but not all of them!
The revolution is spearheaded by what reads explicitly to me as a vanguard party, led by a disgruntled former member of the aristocracy who asks for no compassion and wants to give no compassion. They exist only as a secret society at first, receiving foreign support from the Nur Empire which seeks to destabilize a geopolitical rival, the Bauer Kingdom. Reads a biiit like and to me.
What puzzles me a bit ideologically speaking, and something that I still haven’t really gone back to make heads or tails of, is that the revolution that happens ends up with basically the very chaotic series of events (that was about to end in the guillotining of the reactionary provisional government that had been formed)! instead ends with the monarchy being saved and a constitution being implemented to allow free elections. The constitutional monarchy still sees the royal family as being fairly influential, with all three of the prospective heirs retaining governmental posts both as figureheads and statesmen. Some of the nobles do still recover posts in the government as private citizens though, tapped for their experience in government and diplomacy. Still, their estates are dissolved. We still of course do NOT jump straight from feudalism to communism, this is clearly a feudalism to capitalism kind of situation.
The thing is though, the radicalization of the main love interest :claire-grin: is played incredibly straight, with her conversations with the high-ranking nun Lily regularly spreading clearly marxist polemics about the nature of feudal society. I fucking love how the author Inori was able to make marxist polemics interesting as a ‘yuri scene,’ in the same process with how Miyazawa talked about making science fiction palatable. Maybe I should make a blog post about that!