That maintains its plausible deniability. In context, the massacre hits harder because 1.5 seasons have already shown the everyday reality of living within empire in a way that can’t be mistaken as vaguely anti-authoritarian. The realities of imperial maintenance are hard not to correlate with specific empires in history (it evokes alternately the British, Nazi-German, and American empires) and the logic of the anti-imperial struggle is hard not to correlate with real-world counterparts like the Bolsheviks, the Haitian revolution, the Chinese communists, and others.
It doesn’t matter if viewers are ignorant of the specific historical references, as long as they understand and agree with the logic of anti-imperialism.
That maintains its plausible deniability. In context, the massacre hits harder because 1.5 seasons have already shown the everyday reality of living within empire in a way that can’t be mistaken as vaguely anti-authoritarian. The realities of imperial maintenance are hard not to correlate with specific empires in history (it evokes alternately the British, Nazi-German, and American empires) and the logic of the anti-imperial struggle is hard not to correlate with real-world counterparts like the Bolsheviks, the Haitian revolution, the Chinese communists, and others.
It doesn’t matter if viewers are ignorant of the specific historical references, as long as they understand and agree with the logic of anti-imperialism.