I wrote this paper a few weeks ago and posted it on the anime channel of the discord. Thought y’all might also be interested in it
I have only read a little bit, but I fucking love this.
I will read it all, slowly in between other things. I’ve advocated for a long time that almost all of Trigger’s works featuring revolution is not a coincidence and that they are filled with comrades. Kill la Kill is especially obvious.
kinda unrelated but doesn’t Nazis win WWII in the kill la kill universe?
spoiler
Not that I know of. The only time they’re mentioned to my knowledge is the first few seconds of episode 1, and there all that’s said is: “In 1933, the National Socialist German Workers’ Party came to power. This was the birth of chancellor Hitler. In the end, it was Germany’s post-war democracy that gave rise to fascism.” I’m a bit too tired to copy down and translate all the Japanese, so I’ll do a few of the words I think are important.
「政権を獲得」is what they’re translating as ‘came to power.’ The first two characters mean political/administrative power, and the last two mean ‘aquisition/possession.’ Normally you’d need to add 「する」(to do) to the end to make aquisition a verb, but it’s fairly common to leave that out in notes, etc. The one in the middle ‘を’ marks the object of the sentence. So a more accurate translation would be ‘In 1933, the National Socialist German Workers’ Party aquired political power, which sounds a bit stilted in English.
「誕生」is what they’re translating as birth, it literally means birth.
「ファシズム政権を生んだことになる」is what they’re translating as ‘gave rise to fascism.’ 「ファシズム」means fascism. 「政権」 I explained above. 「を」is object marker.「生んだ」means to give birth. 「ことになる」basically means that something happened without the speaker having control over it. So a more literal translation would be ‘give birth to fascism,’ but gave rise sounds better and doesn’t significantly change the meaning.
So overall, we can probably take this scene to be a critique of liberal democracy. None of the words imply Hitler won WWII.