#i was not lost in the subsequent movies at all 😊

[compacflt]

hi! im learning so much from your blog and its endlessly fascinating to me, im not american so i knew next to nothing about the us military before getting into tg (still dont know that much but. more than before), i never cared about or defined myself by us political terms but now i really want to know and understand the tg characters and its fascinating to me how much politics is a part of that, so thank you for sharing your views on that on here, id be lost without them!

(i havent read your fic yet because idk if im emotianally ready for it yet but when i do. im sure its gonna be great)

haha I do sort of worry that I’ve made top gun too political. I think I’ve always just been trying to come to terms with the fact that… top gun wasn’t really made for me.

I saw Top Gun: Maverick for the first time in a movie theatre in rural southern Oregon…. Which, if you’re not American/didn’t know, is a part of the country characterized by Jesus-loving gun-toting “patriots.” The theatre was a full house. Everyone loved TGM. It’s NOT an apolitical movie. It pushes a WWII-era narrative about the “American underdog” military that appeals to a certain subset of the population: the military deserves more resources because our heroes are disadvantaged on the battlefield (F-18 vs SU-57), though of course in real life no more than a dozen SU-57s have actually been produced, and American fighters… don’t engage in dogfights anymore. Cain was right, no matter how much TGM wants to sensationalize the adventurism of real life pilots: drone warfare is making extinct manned fighter jets. TGM is geopolitically out of date. —And whether we like it or not, it is straight-up recruiting propaganda. The main emotional thrust of the movie is that we (audience) are supposed to sympathize with Bradley, who wants nothing more than to Join The Navy. We are supposed to be mad at Maverick (and later, conveniently, our scapegoat Carole) for preventing Bradley from Joining The Navy. The story of TGM does not make sense if the Navy isn’t the most desirable place to be. Top Gun: Maverick isn’t just recruitment MATERIAL; fundamentally it is a recruitment STORY. I feel like that’s an important metatextual aspect to engage with & acknowledge.

I’ve said elsewhere on my blog, the target audience for TGM is Republican dads of teenage boys: men who were teenagers when the first Top Gun came out, and have that nostalgia for a more dangerous/more exciting military, and are in the position to influence their sons to join up. The Navy would not have let Tom Cruise et al rent their $20,000-an-hour-operating-cost airplanes if that weren’t the case. Top Gun wasn’t really made for people like me.

Obviously how people in fandom engage with the source text is their decision. But engaging with Top Gun & Top Gun: Maverick is to engage with the Reagan-era reactionary, hawkish Cold War foreign policy that inspired Top Gun (the 1981 Gulf of Sidra incident really springs to mind—it would’ve been in the minds of many people watching Top Gun in 1986), and then the subsequent NOSTALGIA for that time period that inspired Top Gun: Maverick. They’re not apolitical movies at all; they have an agenda. It’s good to take their agendas seriously.

I hope if you read my fics you enjoy them 😊

#this is my last answered ask for a while #I do a lot of handwringing #there’s a reason i don’t tell irls i write top gun fanfic #it’s a conservative-coded IP! #I’m not telling people ‘you should write political fic’ #but i AM telling people it is good critical practice to understand/take seriously the politics of a source text before you transform it #in fandom. #fun military movies are still fundamentally military movies. #top gun #top gun maverick