Another thing I respect about the show is that it circumvents a lazy and dishonest rhetorical trap I’ve come to loathe: the idea that fascist states look like black-and-white, constantly dreary prison planets where the sun doesn’t shine and nobody smiles. The show goes to great lengths to show you that it is miserable and existentially horrifying for many people to live in the Nazi American Reich / Japanese Pacific States, but does so in full color juxtaposed with white nuclear families playing games and watching Nazi propaganda with a smile on their faces eating pretzels in front of the TV, and Japanese settlers enjoying the power they hold over their subjects while they live relatively well-off lives reminiscent of the “American dream”.

It’s important not to overly mythologize the Nazi / fascist state as it robs it of its human element and treats it as something alien and impossible, rather than the living reality of millions of people in the nations many of us live in, pertinently colonized native and black people in the U.S. as well as enslaved prison laborers. Although the natives are being systematically annihilated, although black people are wantonly being murdered by the state and incarcerated exponentially more than whites, although prisoners are the backbone of the entire U.S. economy, John Pettybougman, his loving wife, and their two and a half kids continue to play catch and enjoy life on their green lawns with a dazzling sun overhead, just as Aryan desirables did as the ashes from the crematoriums were falling as snow in the Reich.