Welcome to “Are You My Comrade?” where I will evaluate fictional revolutionaries on the basis of whether or not I would personally like to hang out and/or revolt with them. This will be an ongoing, multipart series, and is theoretically infinite, since I don’t see us running out of fictional revolutionaries any time soon. Suggestions for future entries are welcome; leave us a comment with a fictional revolutionary you’d like to see judged in a highly subjective way!

Les Amis de l’ABC, Les Miserables

Oh you guys. You’re so passionate, and sincere and sincerely passionate. I think my favorite moment in any musical ever is when Marius comes into the revolutionary plotting meeting singing the “I just saw a girl for like three seconds and now everything has changed oh my god you guys” song and gets told “dude shut up, we’re trying to plan an insurrection over here. You can chime in with whatever you want when we sing Red and Black if you must but tbh no one cares about your feelings right now and don’t you dare try to bring your heterosexuality into Do You Hear the People Sing.” It’s pretty satisfying.

Continue reading Are You My Comrade? part 1 →

Detective Jack Robinson

Miss Fisher’s Murder Mysteries

So, so guilty. Maximum guilt. This guy is just a standard stereotype of what people who say “most cops are good, it’s the bad ones who ruin things” believe a “good cop” to be, and I am an absolute ass for accepting and loving this character just because he wears sharp 1920s suits and because I want him to make out with Phryne Fisher. You do not get a pass on being part of an oppressive colonialist law enforcement agency just because I think it’s cute when you get flustered by a flapper’s free-spiritedness. So much agonizing guilt here.

Should you suffer from the same guilt, I highly recommend constructing a parallel narrative to the show in your head, where Bert and Cess never gave up on being communists and are quietly plotting a 1920s Australian revolution in the background of literally every scene in which they are not actively helping Phryne stop murders. If you like, you can also pretend that Jack knows about this, and is turning a blind eye or even helping them, but I honestly don’t know if my imagination can stretch his character that far; he is a cop, and I feel bad for liking him. I feel bad for liking Phryne too, if it comes down to that, but Free-Spirited Flappers Who Are Also Imperialist Aristocrats I Guiltily Love is a much shorter list so it doesn’t get its own article, I just thought I’d mention it.

Guilt levels: so high.
Continue reading Fictional Cops I Love, Ranked By How Guilty I, As An Anarchist, Feel For Loving Them →

update: This post was written before further it came to light that the “purge” ostensibly called for by high school students in Baltimore was likely a police fabrication. Those kids were, it appears, set up. The buses home from school were shut down, the mall was closed down, and they were surrounded by riot police before anything happened. Of course, this makes the whole even more creepily comparable to the film series.

Only two hours left before the purge. We’d better get inside. At the cafe, ominous music was playing, and as twilight set in outside, the crowd diminished and a nervous energy grew in those of us left. Or maybe that was just me.

According to the police and media (and they may have been right, I don’t know), this whole atmosphere of rebellion and resistance kicked off when a group of school-age kids put out a call for a “purge” at 3:30 at at a neighborhood mall. It was a reference to the film series The Purge (reviewed here with surprising favor on AnarchoGeek Review)… the Purge is the one night every year during which all crime is legal.

There’s so much to unpack in that. First, and perhaps foremost, what matters is that these kids decided, for themselves, that they were going to get away with crime. In this case, the crimes were almost exclusively mass assault on riot police and mass vandalism of police vehicles.

Continue reading The Purge: Baltimore →

If I can’t have the toy, then I will destroy the toy

Here at Anarcho-Geek Review, we care about two things: anarchism, that glorious ideal of liberty and diversity; and geekery, the loving embrace of imaginary worlds and lives. Oh, and reviews.

With our professed love of liberty, diversity, and the imagination, we were obviously ecstatic to hear that a group of freedom-leaning rebels were fighting against “the stranglehold of old cliques by encouraging a more politically diverse group of fans to take part in the annual Hugo Awards.”

In fact, these “Sad Puppies,” as they call themselves, are trying to “draw attention to an atmosphere of political intolerance, driven by so-called ‘social justice warriors,’ that is holding the medium back.”

Oh, wait, what the fuck?
Continue reading Hugo Scandal 2015 →