I’m one of the people who agree that it doesn’t have to do with the real Guy Fawkes but rather what it symbolized in V for Vendetta (particularly at the end of the film). I do own one of the masks, because I am a fan of the movie and it’s message.
Tell that to Fathers Edmund Campion, Ralph Sherwin, and Alexander Briant who were hanged, drawn, and quartered in 1581 for nothing more than preaching Catholicism and denying the Queen was absolute in religious matters, or in fact, any of the so called “forty martyrs of England and Wales”, who were put to death for their Catholicism, or the “eighty-five martyrs of England and Wales”, also put to death for their Catholicism, or any Catholic in Ireland affected by the Penal Laws, which said Catholics couldn’t hold office, go to universities, serve in the armed forces, vote, buy land, own horses, adopt children, teach school, or be a priest.
There was a good deal of intolerance and persecution on both sides.
I’m curious, what’s its message?
Many wear it or cloths over their faces because of the police using facial recognition software. They don’t want the police to start a file on them.
The movie’s message is that a tiny minority can rule over the majority using fear and propaganda…but only if the majority let them.
The primary message is that Natalie Portman is still really hot, even when she’s bald. But the secondary message I think he’s getting at is that social change isn’t brought about by one mutant with super-strength and knives. It’s brought about by the mass and unity of a movement. At the end of the film, there are many thousands, or perhaps millions of people wearing their Fawkes masks in the streets, and the government structure in the film is terrified of the wide-spread uprising.
Of course this assumes the government isn’t willing to start bombing its own civilians.
Worth noting that Catholics get part of their bad rap for those times from the fact that the Protestants eventually “won”, at least when it comes to Britain. They got to write the history.
So I’m confused. Clericalist is bad. Wanted to assassinate the monarch is good. Do you like this guy or not - you are sending mixed messages.
My local town when I was a nipper had a huge torchlit procession for GF day. There were always two effigies to be burned: one of young Guido and the other of the Pope. Wonder if they still do that… It’s probably illegal now.
I dunno if it’s just me, but do most futuristic British dystopia fictions involve fascism? The only example offhand I can think of where the bugaboo was runaway communism was 1984. Since then, it’s been mostly “American-style capitalism/racism/fundamentalism is coming to get us!” over and over. Geez, lighten up, Tommy…
Judge Dredd is pretty damn fascistic, off the top of my head.
There is also this obscure comic about a guy who has some sort of mask related to a historical character of sorts… title’s on the tip of my tongue… 
Well we never wet ourselves over the "threat"of communism in the same way. And we had a bit of history, that was pretty formative to many of our writers where there was a significant danger out a fascist takeover.
During the height of the cold war, though, you could find fiction re commie takeovers. Golgotha by John Gardner springs to mind.
1984 wasn’t really about the threat of communism , though. It was about totalitarianism, and Stalinism in particular.Orwell was a pretty hard core socialist himself.
Specifically the Thatcher years.
At the time Alan Moore wrote V he was genuinely scared that she would usher a thoroughly unpleasant era for the UK considering her popularity, her authoritarinism, and the fact it seemed she was all the more popular the more authoritarian she got. I’m sure he wasn’t the only one.
Yeah the preface to V makes that clear. But I was talking a few years earlier.
By the way, was Fawkes’ mission a suicidal one? Was he there in the cellar to detonate the gunpowder by torch, expecting to die in the process — or did he have a fuse to light so that he could escape in time?
Better yet — did he have a digital detonator with red LED numbers, ticking down the seconds, with the authorities finding him just as the counter reached single digits?
Haha. It’s been a while since I read The Gunpowder plot but I ‘think’ he was there to guard and maybe light the fuse, but not to blow himself up.
I never said assassinating a monarch was good. 
I agree.