Orwell was right about art
We need to stop lying.
There is a desperate need to not think about politics. Perhaps it has been the 24-hour news cycle, perhaps it is social media and the terrible influence it has over those foolish enough to use it (like me), or maybe it is the general stigma politics has in polite society. People have set limits to what can be discussed at the family dinner table, or in friend groups or just in general. It is better to be seen as apolitical, as safe, inoffensive so that no needless friction can occur.
Now, this desire is true both in social situations and the arts, what if I told you that this simple act of rejecting politics, to be wilfully apolitical is in of itself a political act?
If you already knew this then congrats! You understand more about complex human interactions than a seemingly high amount of people. While I was aware of this, having been exposed to the leftist discourse for a while now. I was aware of the motto “The personal is political.” The more I studied literature and the arts, the more I became aware of the politics of Shakespeare, Austin and Shelly, of Milton and Atwood. But it was during my studies in social linguistics, when I was assigned Orwell’s essay on Politics and the English Language and Why I Write when everything settled in.
Both are brilliant essays to read, but what really opened my eyes was how he eloquently but bluntly described the inescapable ways of which arts are interlinked with the politics of the culture that made them. Maybe it is because I have looked up to Eric Blair (George Orwell) as a literary figure and a political commentator, at least more than the average youtuber. It was then when everything clicked into place.
You cannot disengage from politics in your art as a apolitical action. to quote Orwell in Why I Write: “Once again, no book is genuinely free from political bias. The opinion that art should have nothing to do with politics is itself a political attitude.”[1]. So, when people decry the inclusion of politics in their games, their movies or their books, that is a political expression, it is the political attitude that certain mediums should refrain from certain topics, themes or persons.
This normally, and often most infamously devolves into the inclusion of queer themes, characters or just women not being suspiciously young, extremely well endowed, sounding like squeaky chew toys when mauled by an excited puppy.
The reason is that there is the implicit fact by the protestor that such elements should be either excluded (queers) or included (well-endowed women that look like squeaky sex dolls). The political action is that there is a right way to have media that fortunately doesn’t have these.
It is political to depict queers or women in certain ways in certain contexts. A homophobic depiction of a gay person or culture is political as it expresses a certain sect of beliefs around gay people. The same goes for women, depicting women as equals among men is just as political as depicting them as lesser to men. Both express a different set of beliefs, as disagreeable as they might be when beheld by the person who believes in the opposite set of beliefs.
Even the safe and escapist Isekai is often riddled with tacit political elements, take Rising of the Shield Hero’s ambivalence towards slavery, or its depictions of political intrigue within the first season. Where the protagonist, the shield hero is excluded and shunned due to the involvement of an evil princess. These are political, in the case of the indifference to the institution of slavery, an expression often found in anime and manga, is damning of Japan’s political indifference towards such an institution. Japan has the political ability to not engage with slavery in their stories, same goes for the court intrigue. Nothing in Rising of the Shield Hero’s political events exists within the theming. It is just an obstacle.
It has political elements but nothing to say, either for or against. Rising is apolitical, it chooses to be apolitical to avoid the uncomfortable realities of its setting
Yet, it isn’t the slavery in Shield Hero, nor is it the exploration of free will and hypocrisy in Bioshock, or just Star Wars’ exploration of tyranny that gets the people who wish to escape the politics of the media to run for the hills. But instead, rather the appearance of women being capable in recent releases, it is when anyone deemed non normative or against whatever vision of history, they decree to be true. Such as the existence of Moors within Europe, why is it considered not historically inaccurate when Shakespeare and Benn were all depicting Moors or Africans in their fiction. Surely, they would have been rare, but not impossible to have encountered.
To suggest that Africa and Europe were separated and never interacted with each other, is political. As it suggests an entirely different history from it is. It rejects the reality to supplement an alternative history.
The historical inclusion of non-whites in games or media is political as it is to deliberately not. This argument becomes trickier when people confirmed to have been white Europeans are suddenly depicted as having a darker skin tone, as it feels less like building a more accurate history as opposed to something well-meaning but poorly thought out or downright cynical.
Those who tend to decry wokeness, tend to inscribe maliciousness/cynicism to such blunders, even if there is no textual evidence to such a claim.
Speaking of which, remember when Woke used to mean an awareness of political injustice? Rather than a nebulous thing that is bad and always conveniently left wing. I know I have engaged in this sort of discourse before, and while I do still agree with some of my thoughts there, I am not as charitable towards right wing culture warriors as I used to be.
I deeply underestimated the effect the culture war had on the public as well as the culture of the discourse surrounding the media. If anything, I have come to realise just how terribly it infests the ability to talk and engage with the media we interact with.
It isn’t that the thing is poorly thought out or executed, it’s trying to uncover the evil agenda, every inclusion, every sign must be examined for any apparent impurities. Think when the Critical Drinker brings up the dreaded message image. Any sort of liberal or left leaning expression, real or imagined, is framed as a bad thing.
But Drinker, indeed all the culture warriors, don’t consider their own views or ideologies as ideologies. They are the party of common sense and family values etc, totally not ideological even though they are, it’s just the ideology they agree with. This is where Orwell’s other observation on political language comes in: “Political language – and with variations this is true of all political parties, from Conservatives to Anarchists – is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.” [2]
A bit brutal perhaps, but political language like wokeness or the message, the way of which art is framed in the mind of the culture warrior is a prolonged exercise in making the lie that anything that depicts anything that the party decrees to be improper, it is to make the lies sound truthful in relation to the depiction of people that the party that doesn’t like sound rational, respectful even. To give the appearance of greater solidarity against media that is corrupting the culture.
Orwell’s observations hold about language and the political response to art. The innate political expression of women in power causes the political reaction.
But people doing the reacting, wish to silence the political expression inherent in art, at least the elements that are considered by their ideologies. They do not wish to appear political, they are lying, they cloak their language in the guise of rationality to hide the fact that their political rhetoric creates the environment where there are fewer artists and allows for fewer diverse viewpoints. Where the soft power of the party softens expression through the incessant whining, they are priming their audience to treat any existing minorities or different people as inherently suspicious.
Political dialogue is inherently dishonest. The art is unavoidably political as it is always the goal to advance one’s political ideas, regardless of what they are. One would argue that race swapping characters that were established to be of one race is political dialogue and thus dishonest. And that is correct, but so is the deliberate, continuous framing of anything that supposedly deviates from what they decree to be reality.
I do find that Orwell’s argument for the inherent dishonesty in political talk struggles to always hold true when it comes to the arts. Art is inherently political, and the wilful apolitical choice is political dishonesty. But when something is knowingly honestly political that seeks to authentically express the ideas of the creator, be it with Orwell’s 1984 or even Brokeback Mountain, it can speak to the state of things. That doesn’t make it dishonest in comparison to the supposedly apolitical Isekai that depicts slavery with the shrug of indifference.
Orwell was right about the inherently political nature of narrative; he is correct with the dishonest framing of political talk to excuse cruelty and justify atrocities. But that doesn’t mean that political talk within the media is inherently dishonest but should be approached with caution, rather than as a given, which the inherently dishonest commentators try to frame as such.
I understand the desire to not think about politics in your media, but if we are to have a more honest society, then we need to not ignore the reality of what is happening around ourselves, and we need to not let language deceive us into hallucinating or believing language at surface level.
Bibliography
George Orwell, 'Why I Write',The Orwell Foundation, 4 November 1946,<https://www.orwellfoundation.com/the-orwell-foundation/orwell/essays-and-other-works/why-i-write/> [accessed 2026/02/14], para 9 of 24
George Orwell, 'Politics and the English Language', The Orwell Foundation, April 1946,<https://www.orwellfoundation.com/the-orwell-foundation/orwell/essays-and-other-works/politics-and-the-english-language/> [accessed 2026/02/14], para 31 of 31
[1] Orwell George, Why I Write 1946
[2] Orwell, Politics and the English Language 1946