Edit: sorry that was petty, was in a bad mood when I first typed that out.
Lemme reframe what I was saying, "morality play" wasn't really the right term to use. There were people on this site who seemed to think fans always emulate the negative attributes of the characters in the media they consume, not matter how blatant the writers try and make it that these are flaws, or even if they evolve past the flaws. The fans always end up emulating the douchebag version of the character so we need more media where the protagonists are upstanding people from chapter 1 to give people better figures to admire.
The only places I’ve seen this talked about is Rick and Morty and Breaking Bad and, while I am a Lib because I have not finished either so I am literally speaking without investigation, what I’ve seen of Rick and Morty makes me think they REALLY like pushing the “Rick is a cool superhero science man who doesn’t care about dumb stuff like fee fees” angle, even if it’s done in an ironic tone. And neither piece of media has any actual, persistent and memorable examples of actually good behavior depicted in a positive light, as far as I know, which is HUGE, because if you just mock someone and then leave it at that, then people are going to interpret that however the fuck they will and 80% of the time it’ll be assuming you just thought murder was good or whatever. Because having bad things happen and then not providing even a glimpse of what a good thing could have looked like without mocking that too will result in viewers just assuming the point is nihilism.
Rick and Morty is a good example of people trying to write flawed characters and mostly failing. They've made attempts to flesh Rick out, including an extended side plot about him going to therapy, but it seems like every time they get close to doing something interesting with it they end up reversing it, and I suspect it's probably because the network wants to keep milking the IP, and having Rick actually resolve some issues would effectively be the end of the show so they're holding off on that till they hit a season where they barely make any profit and decide it's time to close up shop.
Breaking Bad has it's flaws but overall I think it handled things a lot better. It does become glaringly obvious what a terrible person Walter is becoming as the show goes on and he pays dearly for his crimes in the end. I think the number of fans who still celebrate him as a hero is overstated, every fan I've met of the show IRL is fully aware he's the villain. Yeah there are dumb Reddit 14 year olds but they have their head so far up there ass I don't think you can make thing blatant enough for them, really that's the actual problem here, no piece of media can be made misinterpretation-proof, I've seen people almost willfully misinterpret works where the author basically delivered a monologue at the end laying out their intended message in excruciating detail. People are going to read into something what they want to read, you really can't stop them and you can't really hold authors accountable for it, the only real solution would be just to not make media anymore.
Yeah I don't either I'm and idiot
Edit: sorry that was petty, was in a bad mood when I first typed that out.
Lemme reframe what I was saying, "morality play" wasn't really the right term to use. There were people on this site who seemed to think fans always emulate the negative attributes of the characters in the media they consume, not matter how blatant the writers try and make it that these are flaws, or even if they evolve past the flaws. The fans always end up emulating the douchebag version of the character so we need more media where the protagonists are upstanding people from chapter 1 to give people better figures to admire.
The only places I’ve seen this talked about is Rick and Morty and Breaking Bad and, while I am a Lib because I have not finished either so I am literally speaking without investigation, what I’ve seen of Rick and Morty makes me think they REALLY like pushing the “Rick is a cool superhero science man who doesn’t care about dumb stuff like fee fees” angle, even if it’s done in an ironic tone. And neither piece of media has any actual, persistent and memorable examples of actually good behavior depicted in a positive light, as far as I know, which is HUGE, because if you just mock someone and then leave it at that, then people are going to interpret that however the fuck they will and 80% of the time it’ll be assuming you just thought murder was good or whatever. Because having bad things happen and then not providing even a glimpse of what a good thing could have looked like without mocking that too will result in viewers just assuming the point is nihilism.
Rick and Morty is a good example of people trying to write flawed characters and mostly failing. They've made attempts to flesh Rick out, including an extended side plot about him going to therapy, but it seems like every time they get close to doing something interesting with it they end up reversing it, and I suspect it's probably because the network wants to keep milking the IP, and having Rick actually resolve some issues would effectively be the end of the show so they're holding off on that till they hit a season where they barely make any profit and decide it's time to close up shop.
Breaking Bad has it's flaws but overall I think it handled things a lot better. It does become glaringly obvious what a terrible person Walter is becoming as the show goes on and he pays dearly for his crimes in the end. I think the number of fans who still celebrate him as a hero is overstated, every fan I've met of the show IRL is fully aware he's the villain. Yeah there are dumb Reddit 14 year olds but they have their head so far up there ass I don't think you can make thing blatant enough for them, really that's the actual problem here, no piece of media can be made misinterpretation-proof, I've seen people almost willfully misinterpret works where the author basically delivered a monologue at the end laying out their intended message in excruciating detail. People are going to read into something what they want to read, you really can't stop them and you can't really hold authors accountable for it, the only real solution would be just to not make media anymore.
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