It's amazing how the liberation of the night in fallen London starts as a dumb joke about bomb throwing anarchists by a guy who thinks punching Nazis is the worst thing you could possibly do
and is now coherent enough of a political statement and important enough to me that I'd get a tattoo of it
love that shit
I should write an essay on politics and systems in fictional universes and what happens when they don't make sense, and use fallen London as an example because it's such a juicy one.
So many popular fictional universes, due to being often written by white, cishet, centrist-leaning-conservative men, simply ignore huge sections of how the actual world works when they build their world. They go "and the elves in my story work just like real world racism" but then ignore the centuries of colonial evil that racism is built on, creating a world where the results of colonialism are everywhere but yet it never happened. They'll give us the results of centuries of leftist struggle in how their worlds work, and then pretend that everything we clawed back from the capitalists is just How Things Are In That World.
when this happens it doesn't just make your worldbuilding more incoherent it also has the fascinating effect of opening up huge holes that anyone can step into! A fan can take any of these holes and fill them in with more fascinating world building then the story ever had, creating a far far more interesting world then the one we were given
fallen London is one of the few examples I know of where said fans are running the asylum lol