I write books, though to little success, and was recently inspired by Dune to start working on some kind of highly complex political intrigue high fantasy. As I got to thinking, I realized that much of what I'd come up with was essentially a thinly veiled allegory for the state of global affairs right now lol. I thought it might be fun to ask around and see if any of y'all have ever rolled similar ideas around in your head and what these ideas consisted of.
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I always thought you could retool the emperors new clothes. A more original idea would be the never ending oppression hierarchy resulting in the last person on earth
Ooh, that could work well as a short story. The endless cycle of oppressor vs oppressed ultimately resulting in nothing. Good stuff.
I wouldn't. That's not entertaining.
Fucking beat me to it LOL
Basically what was evil pre-2014. A faction that wants to control and monitor every part of your life, that uses fear and manipulation to take rights away from citizens, that hates culture and wants to destroy it.
I really can't imagine modern politics in a high fantasy setting if I'm being honest, things seem too far apart with the realities of technology in a modern setting to be comparable, along with how different the political systems are.
Unless you basically make magic end up functioning like technology does in the modern world and somehow make a modern political system for the setting.
Anyways though, if I were to try such a thing, I'd probably include a secret religious death cult at the top of the political food chain in such a world, an evil ""deity"" (basically fantasy Satan) who is a veiled, yet ever-present reality in said people's lives and demands ever-increasing sacrifices. I'd include an eroding culture as societies degrade to accommodate fantasy-Satan's demands carried out by the cult's edicts and laws (that the people have no idea about). I'd include things like wars and exhaustion of the common people so they are practically too drained to fight back or question the authority.
I'd include a proud history that the common people can relate to, incorporating heroes from the old days and a "true" deity that was revered and once worshipped commonly, but now is more only sought out by the really poor and those who are basically abandoned by even the degrading society. Perhaps I'd include a secret order of knights or something who preserve the old ways as well, but remain in hiding in the current military regime, finding ways to aid the common people.
I'd probably use/make a main character like Cecil from Final Fantasy IV if you've ever played that, I feel he's an excellent character foundation for something like this, though things like a "unlikely heroic savior with a dark past related to the country's evils" would probably appear closer when things are really collapsing in the world as Not!Satan's machinations come closer and closer to reality as things get worse and worse (but by extension, less attention might be paid to some parts of countries than others, leaving vulnerabilities as things start centralizing).
And so on. I might make a "transitional" part in history for the main country, where prominent figures were shown to slowly lose their morality and start accepting things they wouldn't have in the past (aka going along to get along), which makes the moral decline easier to accept.
Basically I'd make it a story of redemption, rediscovering a "righteous way" out of the hell and wrong actions taken, and once there, refusing to compromise, even in the face of hardships, pain and tragedy, and resulting in someone who has amassed followers, resources, and fast friends strong enough to overcome all the machinations of the enemy.
Allegory is a mode of storytelling that is so infrequently used well (and so frequently used very poorly, particularly bt ideological hacks) that I would discourage anyone from using it as a core part of their work.
The story of modern day far left ideology was written already. Go read Harrison Bergeron, and consider the 1961 publish date of that short story depiction of the penultimate end state of our current culture arc.
Actually saw a good anti left narrative story on an anime. It has pro tranny themes so not naming publicly, askmover DM if you want to know.
It's a post apocalypse fantasy. The characters are looking for a doctor from one their pasts. They search for a clinic they heard about but when they find it they are warned away by a group that tells the clinic story is a ruse to attract victims for human experimentation.
One of the opposition group members shows her jury-rigged prosthetic leg. She says she went in with a minor injury and they cut off her leg against her will. She also said she saw gruesome experiments where a girl was tortured by being cut apart piece by piece and being kept alive by machines to prolong her suffering. The heros join the opposition group and agree to help them infiltrate and bypass the security to destroy the clinic.
When they get inside they see the patients are happy and grateful because this clinic is the only place they could get prosthetics. It turns out the girl that the opposition group saw had a disease that would turn her into a man-eating monster when she died. The girl wanted to be kept alive as long as possible to prevent that but the disease progression required regular amputations. The doctor even removed one of his own eyes to give to the girl so she could still see when hers had to be removed.
By then the opposition group broke in and started smashing the medical equipment and chasing off the patients. It turns out the opposition leader wanted the generators and other resources of the clinic to start his own wasteland kingdom.
I mean, there's Demolition man
I have one in my DnD campaign actually. Cultists who agitate against the gods after an event analogous to the destruction of Gommorah.
They claim to be proponents of a set of new moral principles that exclude uncaring gods. They claim to be humanists who focus on the good of mortals.
But in reality they actually serve an ancient evil from the distant past, and spend an enormous amount of time and effort gaslighting mortals that they don't exist at all while fomenting strife between as many factions as possible.
Pretty much the left.
I think re-telling biblical stories in a novel context while shaving off the serial numbers is a good way to go.
I used this technique as a part of a campaign world I was writing: https://skyblessed.obsidianportal.com/wikis/mythology
The Emperor New Clothes
Whatever you write, it will be used to project onto the right.
I started writing a story like this a couple of years ago. It took place in the future, when the mRNA vaccine caused children conceived in 2021 to start turning into giant bugs (it tied back to the Brood X cicadas in the Washington DC area). It was meant to be all about how the media controls the public’s view and reaction to these insect people (thinly veiled commentary on contempt for the unvaccinated). I never got past the first chapter, though.
A small family living out in the middle of nowhere -- start your story here with their simple way of life. Using farming as a means to get by, and give readers the impression this takes place in older times. They live in a rural area with some other scattered families. Everything seems quaint; father, mother and two sons.
Have the parents highly paranoid about their sons venturing out and away from their seemingly rural paradise.
Youngest son gets restless as he gets older (mid-to-late teens); eventually flees to find more excitement in life.
Oldest brother decides to go searching for him, and his parents prep him by giving him everything he needs to survive on his own.
Big twist is that this is not taking place in old times, but in the far future.
Metropolitan and urban sprawls are corporatocracies operated by degenerate kakistocrats.
Oldest son attempts to track his younger brother to the nearest, largest city, which is a massive, crime-ridden, degenerate-ridden dystopia.
After waylays, near-catastrophes and finding a few people to help him along the way, the oldest son finally discovers the fate of his younger brother about a year or so later...
Forced gender reassignment to maintain population "equity". His younger brother -- to meet the mandated quota -- is forcibly drugged up and mutilated after being processed" by the city board when he attempts to relocate there.
Since the youngest son has no money, and has no skills to acclimate to his new urban environment, he's shuffled into working for the drudges of society in seedy and unpleasant activities, losing his mind to the horrible gender reassignment process, his new degenerate lifestyle, and all of the drugs he's hocked up on to force-feed the process.
The only solution is for the eldest son to put his younger brother out of his misery, and escape the dystopian hell-hole. The message is basically, both sons realise why life on the farm was better and why their parents kept them away from the big cities. Only, the youngest son fell victim to a fate far worse than death and paid the price for seeking the modern amenities of the world. The eldest son manages to make his way back home, but scarred from what he encountered in the big city and the unforgivable fate of his younger brother.
Easy way to sell a sci-fi fantasy dystopia of Leftism gone unchecked.
If I were to write allegory, then I would use a religion of
equalityequity. Cult behavior, Lyshenkoist persecution of a Kulak analog, eventual famine & plague blamed by the cultists on the inequity of the system. Total well-intentioned death cultists.However, I wouldn't know how to market such a work. I am an author, and I write escapism. I write to free those who are jailed by modern circumstances, not as polemic.
Do you let the prisoner dream of freedom, or 'reimagine' their chains?
Frankly, I wouldn't. They don't deserve that level of recognition, even if I'm trying to be subtle, and I don't want to taint my story with even the slightest whiff of their existence or letting them have any influence on it what-so-ever.
The author tract is a trope best avoided at this point.
The Defiler Wyrm concept kind of sums it up for me.