You guys know what Guy Fawkes was trying to make happen, right? RIGHT?!
Heroes aren’t always good people. Their reasons are lost to time to the average person, but the message is remembered. The actions supersede the reason.
Guy Fawkes is not remembered as a person, he’s remembered as a figure.
Not calling this a good thing.
He’s remembered as a figure who wanted to kill all of Parliament and return the nation to an absolute monarchy.
Tried to blow up UK parliament with the king inside centuries ago because the king was the wrong kind of Christian. Got caught and hung. In the UK we celebrate the capture every 5th November with a bonfire and fireworks, some places even burn an effigy of guy on the bonfire but that is becoming less common.
I mean immediately sure but in reality he was just an early al-qaeda prototype trying to spread his religion by blowing people up
Yeah… Of all the antigovernment people to latch onto it’s vaguely unfortunate that we landed on fawks. Like, I do get that it’s a pop culture reference more than an actual historical reference, but still.
There was legitimate persecution of Catholics in England at the time, so it doesn’t least have a veneer of fighting tyranny, but he didn’t even actually succeed.
Shoulda gone for Louis Lingg. A bit more modern, and had the awesome criminal defense that “it’s his right to fill his house with dynamite”.
every folk hero, just as, for instance, any of the national myths, are mostly entirely made up, and as more time passes, the less historical truth remains. This, simply speaking, is folklore, that has nothing to do with actual history, its more about communicating ideas and ideologies, that you imply with the story you’re making up, tying it up to real historical characters is just a way of cheap advertisement. I believe, we must not ever forget that, as we are destined to have lots of useless fights otherwise.
Between Anonymous, Occupy, and proud boys all using the same mask, the only shared symbolism for the Guy Fawkes mask is really “resistance” of some kind. Which is so broad, it’s hard to call it a symbol at all.
Did the Proud Boys not understand that the government V opposed was homophobic, Islamophobic, and hyper-christian? Did they not understand that the movie has multiple gay heroes? Did they not understand it was directed by trans women? The Proud Boys aren’t V! They’re the Party!