From a listener re: ep 9: Disney's Robin Hood

So much of the robin hood story always feels so misunderstood to me when people try to put it in a modern lens. On the left the rich bad poor good of "steal from the rich and give to the poor" and on the right the "high taxes are bad".

It felt correct to me to hear how it's not authoritarian, but what it is in my mind is "noblesse oblige" even as dumb a concept in practice as that may be.

Just the idea that the king (or his brother by proxy) collected taxes as overseers of the land and had a duty to protect the peasants of the land. Thus by being a nobleman robin hood had a particular duty both to protect the peasants as well as oppose john usurping the throne... i mean this is 200 years prior to game of thrones.

The church being responsible for people here also makes a little more sense in the timeframe in that this is the roman catholic church closer to the height of it's power. In fact it was the church levying a highly unpopular 10% tax that eventually became a 25% tax used to pay a ransom on king richard. There's a weird whitewashing of the church's responsibility considering it was the church collecting the tithe and not the local sheriffs. But I mean making stories analogous enough, but not pissing off the rulers of an area in early versions of robin hood make some sense.

The cross-dressing [Roma] almost feels a little less like weird commentary on gender. I mean just watching it that's certainly there, but the context of them doing as [Romani] kinda removes all of that since [the Roma] were seen as trickers and monsters out to rip people off. Which is consequently what controveries of the movie today tend to focus on since it's less them cross-dressing and more them being even trickster monsters ripping people off. I dunno it's hard to somewhat separate out the general comedy from the cross-dressing focus from what it's actually saying about [the Roma].

My final thought on the gay coding of the advisers. Mostly because I've been slowly working my way through Secret City: The Hidden History of Gay Washington which is fantasic. But this would have been made in the final years of the lavendar scare. But around the 50s it's estimated that over 80% of the foreign service was gay just because being an unmarried man in high society was acceptable for someone living overseas moving around constantly. By the 1970s when this was made people actually could not quit the foreign service because quitting was assumed it was to avoid being outed as gay. Thus there were a lot of assumptions that advisers to leaders were gay - even as it wasn't entirely a wrong assumption. I can't say this is the reason the advisers were gay coded, but the timeline and assumptions all match up in my head.