Kontextmaschine

13th December 2022

Post reblogged from Born Of Two Worlds, Belonging To None with 11,303 notes

Last night I dreamed there was a huge fandom on tumblr around a children’s animated series called “The Wall.” The series was based on a Bertholt Brecht play where characters in an imaginary country spend their days building a massive, pointless wall in the middle of nowhere. It was brutal, unsafe, labor for little pay. Workers either lived in makeshift housing nearby, or slept on the wall itself.
Most of the play was the characters talking to each other about their reasons for working on the wall. Only one of them was poor and desperate enough to do it for the money, most of them were there for ideological, philosophical or personal reasons. The wall alternately became a metaphor for capitalism, patriotism, religion, personal trauma, etc, depending on who was talking.
It was adapted into an animated series that replaced all the characters with modern-day kids who were forced to work on the wall by a mysterious, supernatural force. The plot was more episodic, i.e., stories where the kids had to deal with roadblocks to construction, or a monster that was picking off builders, etc.
The cartoon wasn’t especially violent, but it was shockingly intense and even cruel in its depiction of how much physical and psychological torture the kids building the wall were going through, and how sad and troubled their backstories were.
The fandom was intensely divided between people who were like “Aaaaaah, I just want these poor kids to get a break!! To be able to rest and relax and be happy!!” and ones who were like “I want them to keep working on this awful wall forever.”