“Hegel remarks somewhere that all great world-historic facts and personages appear, so to speak, twice. He forgot to add: the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce.” - Karl Marx, “The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte”
Great quote. But sometimes I think “twice” was overly optimistic.
Wow. The whole console space is really going down the drain, isn’t it? Disappointing generations, hardware shortages, price increases, stupid live-service initiatives nobody wants, ever more subscriptions, and closing of studios that would usually turn out hits as long as you let them work in peace… Thank god for indie studios, retro consoles, PC gaming and a backlog that will last me three lifetimes.
I still remember reading the first issue of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles in German when I was 9 or 10 years old. In one of the panels where they first encounter the Shredder, I think Raphael says something like “Who is this guy? Darth Vader?”. I had never seen Star Wars before and didn’t even know how to pronounce the name. Still, a few days later I tried to be cool and dropped that reference at the playground. One of the older boys from the neighborhood was like “Who? ‘Dart Fadder’? What are you talking about?” Naturally, they corrected my pronunciation, found it hilarious that I didn’t know Star Wars and I was the idiot of the day. I never forgave Kevin Eastman for that and it took a few more years until I actually watched Star Wars and got the reference.
These days of course I know that having read the very first issue of TMNT at the age of 10 or so is actually several orders of magnitudes cooler than having seen Star Wars. ;)
It’s basically about how bad things can happen repeatedly in history, even if people knew those things were bad the first time around. It may simply look different enough so people don’t take it seriously the second time around, maybe seem not as threatening or even ridiculous, but it ends up causing the same kind of harm. But that second time is no longer a tragedy - because a tragedy is basically something that takes the world by surprise and has horrible effects. Marx calls the second time a “farce” - it’s something that is ridiculous and avoidable and stupid and by all accounts everyone should have prevented it from happening.