Don’t be proud to be an expert consumer of foreign propaganda

I started watching this video - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YkQvjEhGoVA - because he's an Irish editor with a career in matters booky.

2:40 is where he starts getting ridiculous. He says his expertise is as a "consumer". I think he is a professional editor, and I respect editors. But a consumer?

Then he starts using examples. At 4:50 his first example is Mistborn. At 7:10, Tolkein 🇬🇧. At 9:05, fucking Iron Man.

At 12:10 he mentions Sherlock Holmes, then Miss Marple, Poirot, Jack Reacher. I haven't heard of the last one but it sounds Yankee. I think the rest are English except Poirot is Belgian. (Side-note: we grew up reading Tintin and then Hercule Poirot.... why are Belgian detectives so influential in culture?)

14:00 Murder She Wrote 🌭

16:07 Luke Skywalker

At 18:00 he uses Shrek as an example and I turned it off coz I got the idea.

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What's the point of my sundaypost?

It's not just to list his examples and whine that they're not Irish.

It's not just to say that he grew up in a rich indigenous fantasy tradition, and a richer literary tradition, and ignores that.

It's to think about this man's goal, his ambition. He has studied to make himself an expert on imperial culture. He wants to study it so well that he becomes a professional reproducer of their culture. He charges people to advise them on how to make stories like Iron Man.

There's a cautionary tale here. Don't be proud to be an expert consumer of foreign propaganda. You can be proud if you're making art. You can be proud if you're keeping alive the traditions of your ancestors.