Well, Nazis were, in regards to Manifest Destiny and segregation.

Fascists, as in ideological fascists, actually really fucking hated New Deal America and (small r) republican governments in general. Mussolini actually had a pretty big bug up his ass about it, especially because the American Republic was patterned on Rome and as someone trying to bring back the Roman Empire that was kind of annoying.

There’s quite a lot of writing where he bitches and moans about how American democracy makes it weak.

Make me, you can’t, I’m too snoozy

No, you fool, we’re taking more pictures than ever… And they’re deleting them with their space haxs

The cop that arrested him was fat.

A tattoo that looks like infected flesh

I’ll never forget some journo’s book review where he basically says “I didn’t understand what I was reading so it must be genius” and, as someone who did understand, I knew it was because both Peterson and I owned a thesaurus.

i don’t think that’s really fair, for example, in the slowest one I grew to hate Faile more than any other character in literary history, and that’s technically a result of character exploration.

One might say that’s a subtext to the meme

Well, do you recall how fulfilling the wishes demands a sacrifice of Bastian’s memories and self?

One might alternatively phrase that as wish fulfillment, if one was tricky writer sort.

One might also note that the Story demands Bastian pass it on to another child if he wants his own memories back. Once he realizes he is not willing to give up his last memories of his father.

Passing to a new host once it has drained Bastian of what it wants and his defenses prevent it from gaining more, as it were.

A successful parasite is not one that kills its host, after all, it’s one that spreads and grows.

And then it evolves and spreads to a new, American movie going population where that message isn’t profitable so it just becomes a standard chosen one story.

That’s not what you’ve been told, by your boss, what democracy means.

That it can mean something else in a different circumstance, you know, like how most words work, never enters your tiny little thoughts by their design.

Get a vasectomy

Because humans are stupid conformist apes with delusions of grandeur.

Here’s some more trauma:

The novel it’s based on makes it clear that The Neverending Story is a psychic parasite that traps young readers in an escapist fantasy, never growing up, never facing your real fears, just endless running down an egocentric treadmill of main character syndrome.

You don’t even know who you’re talking to

Sometimes people deserve to be insulted, like when they’re pedants who can’t even be bothered to be correct

He was 42

She is survived by her 47,890 children

That’s the story anyways… That they repeated consistently throughout many, many interviews

Wrong.

Some of Tolkien’s specific inspirations were the Germanic Sagas, including the Nibelungenlied and Volsunga Saga.

A theme of both is that heros are often descendants of the Aesir, specifically Odin, and Gandalf is patterned after Odin to an undeniable degree, a wise and enigmatic warrior-mage often depicted as grey cloaked, proficient in rune lore, carrying a staff or spear.

Not only that, Gandalf means elf with a stick, and a common theory for his origin among the men that knew he lived longer than mortals is that he was literally just an elf.

Tolkien may or may not have specifically intended it, but he’d certainly agree that you could read it that way with the influences he drew from, and it is also a special point of his Middle Earth (aka Midgard btw) that the history they tell isn’t necessarily the history that happened. The hobbits having forgotten that it was Gandalf banging GranGran Took or mistaking him as an elf isn’t just a likely theory, it’s a probable one. Further, we also know that Maia WILL marry and have children from some of his other histories.

Or not, and it was just an elf who died or returned to Valinor, with Gandalf just keeping an eye on the line! He’s tricky like that.