Where the evil villain will go on a rant about how society is cruel and needs to change and that they're going to change it. The hero opposes this for like zero reasons and somehow we're supposed to be on the hero's side.
Are we really supposed to believe that our society doesn't need to change? Are we supposed to cheer for the status quo even when it's shown to be terrible?
I also hate the sympathetic villain trope where it's shown that the villain is the product of abuse and yet their want for revenge is still treated as unjustified.
It doesn’t take a genius to figure out what’s going on here. These “heroes” are purely reactionary, in the literal sense. They have no projects of their own, at least not in their role as heroes: as Clark Kent, Superman may be constantly trying, and failing, to get into Lois Lane’s pants, but as Superman, he is purely reactive. In fact, superheroes seem almost utterly lacking in imagination: like Bruce Wayne, who with all the money in the world can’t seem to think of anything to do with it other than to indulge in the occasional act of charity; it never seems to occur to Superman that he could easily carve free magic cities out of mountains.
Almost never do superheroes make, create, or build anything. The villains, in contrast, are endlessly creative. They are full of plans and projects and ideas. Clearly, we are supposed to first, without consciously realizing it, identify with the villains. After all, they’re having all the fun. Then of course we feel guilty for it, re-identify with the hero, and have even more fun watching the superego clubbing the errant Id back into submission.
From this passage I can conclude that Graeber liked the film megamind
and then the villian murdered a bunch of children despite it not advancing their goals at all, just to demonstrate to the auduence who is supposed to be evil.
Yes, the rich sex pests that approve which movies get made feel like society is just about right. Big surprise there.
I think the worst one of these I can remember is big hero six. Where the villan saves his daughter from a corrupt military contracting company and goes to jail for it. They really don't make any attempt to justify it other than he broke stuff. Stuff being the corrupt military contractors office
Been many moons, but didn't the main characters brother die from the villain? Or was his death completely unrelated.
It was kinda unrelated. The villan faked his death by burning dowm his office and the brother ran into a fully burning building with no plan or equipment to save him. Like A for effort but F for logistics.
Hanna is about as close to portraying the CIA, the State Department, and the DoD (and by proxy the whole US govt.) as unambiguously evil. Guy goes rogue to rescue sci-fi mkultra girl and they are forced to go hide in the Swiss alps or something in the middle of nowhere where he trains her in self-defense, hunting and foraging, until the CIA finally tracks them down and they must go on the run again. The final season does have a bit of a copout with the MKULTRA standin being a black box project that even the previously villainous government institutions were not fully aware of its scope or details, but even that isn't too far off the mark given how those institutions try to at least maintain enough separation from their most evil shit to maintain plausible deniability.
Hanna the protagonist also slaughters a shitload of CIA goons and spec ops troops so that's fun, and at one point there is a brief shot of a government kill list (you have to pause it to read it) that includes environmentalists, journalists, foreign civilians, left wing activists and politicians.
Overall I think it was one of the lesser lib shows I've seen which is a low bar but I appreciated the pandering anyway.
was confused until I realized you were talking about
Hanna (2011)the TV show based on that movieOops I forgot it had two n's it's good slop though highly recommend.
the movie was dope but it would have been even better if she spent more time killing CIA employees
That's why the show rules, the entire second season is her going ham on the CIA.
Where the evil villain will go on a rant about how society is cruel and needs to change and that they’re going to change it. The hero opposes this for like zero reasons and somehow we’re supposed to be on the hero’s side.
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The people are content with their lot but the villain just have to poison their mind with rabble-rousing.
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Better thing is impossible, the villain's goal is only achievable by doing something bad.
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The villain is lying and only use the rhetorics to gain personal power.
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The villain was good but "went too far" and just fell down the slippery slope.
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What they're going after is just not their right. It rightfully belongs to the hero or whoever they supported, as they're the only people in the society deserving of the benefits or responsibility of whatever they're fighting over by some infallible mandate.
Straight up anti-communist rhetorics from the cold war.
What they’re going after is just not their right.
People having individual choices can't be sacrificed for the greater good, c'mon. Definitely no hidden ideology in there.
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I think the funniest variation of that was in Arkham City where the villains' plan is just "let's make an open air prison and then kill everyone in it to inspire a wave of fascist reaction across the world!" and Batman's stance is "well I agree with your tough-on-crime stance but I think your methods are too extreme!" At least in that Batman was trying to change the status quo of Gotham having an open air prison that it was actively airstriking by trying to make it stop having an open air prison that it was actively airstriking.
still somehow a better plot than Arkham Knight's
where Venezuela helps Robin and Poison Ivy invade Gotham with robot tanks or some shit for no reason and Batman thinks that "Joker" is a communicable disease that he's caught by drinking the Joker's blood or some shit. All while zooming around in a rocket car on the sidewalk like it's GTA, except it electrocutes people it hits so they're actually totally fine, trust us that's how electricity works isn't it?
Pretty much, yes. There were still some fun parts, but overall it was nonsensical tripe.
I had some good turn my brain off fun with it but I felt it really lacked the elements that made the second one so great, which was batman stalking the night and being like superhero sam fisher, this malevolent force always lurking in the shadows terrifying the villain's goons.
I recently replayed these games and while I do think their politics are by and large reactionary as fuck (even for Batman standards) I do think that Arkham Knight's spec ops invader dudes are mostly American. They may have mentioned offhand that they had done black ops in Venezuela which is maybe what you're thinking of? But there is a throwaway line in the diner in the beginning where someone asks if Bruce Wayne is setting up North Korea style propaganda or some shit for like no reason at all, so you're right that the game does indeed have some blatant anti-socialist BS, lol.
Also that third game leans really hard into the police ass licking, doubles down on the GCPD as the last civilizing force between us GOOD PEOPLE and da FREAKIN ANIMALS. And goddam that stupid rubber bullet shooting batmobile is basically a militarized police brutality fantasy simulator.
Fun games if you can shut the politics part of your brain off, but full of yikes shit.
EDIT: ok yeah I was mostly wrong here, supposedly the antagonist trained the mercenaries in Venezuela. The degree of government involvement is left vague I think but it's still clearly leaning on "le eebil backwards corrupt soshlist country allowed a supervillain to train on their soil because they r so backwards and corrupt!!" What a dumb fucking game lol capeshit always be finding new lows
Weren't they introduced as mercenaries trained and armed by Venezuela?
It's possible there was some background detail I missed, in which case that stupid game is even more cringe than I thought lmao. One of the bright points between all the copaganda is that at least I got to violently dunk on :amerikkka: tacticool spec op war criminal loser douche bags and that would sour that a bit. Would definitely not surprise me if I was wrong on this though, par for the course with capeshit.
Third game? Arkham Origins? The police are secondary villains in that game.
Mind you, it does imply that the problem is a few cops being bad, and that they'll all be better once Jim Gordon is Commissioner.
My bad! I meant Knight, so 4th. Since origins is made by a different studio, I tend to think of it as more of a side game but I don’t think that’s correct.
If there weren't political prisoners there, you'd probably see loads of video essays about "Why Hugo Strange did nothing wrong".
Another one I hate is that Disney basically told us that Movie Thanos's* ecofascist plan was right and worked but is still bad. In Endgame society hasn't full on collapsed from the sudden death of half the planet, people are just sad.
Falcon and the Winter Soldier is far worse. It starts with the premise that the Earth was better for the five years after the Snap. There was housing and food for everyone! Everyone banded together! Not like there were terrible structures in place which would have perpetuated inequality and famine in favor of greed.
And the pseudo-Anarkiddies** who are the villains preach about the communal good, giving power back to the people, etc....then bomb a random building because reasons. Plus the Anarkiddies' reasoning doesn't exactly make sense. They were people who enjoyed the 5 years with half the planet dead, but they got moved into concentration camps when the rest of the people came back? Wouldn't it make way more sense to keep people where they were, then have the newly houseless people returned from the dead be put in concentration camps? No, because we have to have the main villains say "Thanos is right". Which in the fiction of the universe, he was.
*Comic Thanos's plan was way cooler. Killing half the universe wasn't his major plan, it was just a thing he did on a whim because he wanted to impress Lady Death. Dude was crazy and it didn't even work. Rational eco-fascist nut face from the movies is #notmythanos.
**Love for my anarchist comrades, was one once. But it's funny call these pseudo-anarchists kiddies.
Most of the time I can get over bad plot lines, but that whole “killing half the universe to save the other half” was so terrible that it pretty much ruined the movies for me. I couldn’t he instead just snap his fingers and double the resources? Or why not shrink everyone to where so they consume half as many resources? Also no discussion whatsoever of how resources are distributed and if that’s the most equitable way. I realize I’m preaching to the choir here but that really was one of the worst plot points I’ve ever seen in a big budget movie.
He is the Mad Titan, thought.
Althought it's kind of weird how no one in those films leaned into that. It's supposed to be a snark fest and yet NO ONE among the heroes took a potshot at his evil and dumb plan???
They did snark at the plan in the most terrible way. For some reason I watched half of the "Marvel: What If"s and the "T'Challa becomes Starlord" one was god awful. Basically they just jerk off T'Challa as the smartest nicest person ever and he's able to magically convince Thanos that his plot was dumb. Then several characters do exactly what you said, take snarky potshots at the Thanos plan being dumb. Which I hate because Disney/Marvel can't take their own premises seriously. You can't set up a sci-fi/fantasy premise then have your characters constantly joke about how dumb the premise is! Just own it!
Yeah that seemed like the most absurd part of the whole thing to me lol
Also if you cut a population in half that grows exponentially, you’re doing O(n^2) work for O(log n) results to at best kick the can down the road
Sounds like Thanos should have been promoting birth control/family planning/equitable resource distribution instead of genociding half the universe.
They did what Marvel always done with the comics: they took one aspect or plotline from the comics that was too wacky to do in a movie, then bent over backwards to try to rationalize it for the movie universe. Civil War took the hero registration plotline and reduced it to "Avengers with government oversight" since none of the heroes had a secret identity anyways..
Here come Discworld villains to the rescue with reasons related to their actions and either bad things stopped or bad people stopped but problems solved with bad people turning out to have material reasons for actions that are sympathetic (mostly)
I hate the trope that there's always another bad guy that nobody saw coming who's just worse with even less reasoning behind it being the puppetmaster. In Witches Abroad, this begins to happen but everyone is acting not too irrationally, just their reasoning/material reality now supports other things, and problems are actually resolved for a slightly better place at the end
I've not read an entire Discworld book. I know that logically they must be good. People I know who have decent taste in literature speak highly of the series. Every time I crack one open I feel like I'm reading somebody who wants to be Fantasy's answer to Douglas Adams and it grates on me.
Fuuuck my friend just Gave me the first Discworld book. I need to read it
it's because the writer wants to inject some nuance into the villain but they aren't good enough at writing to do it naturally.
I'm trying to write a book where there's a similar thread of "villain trying to change unjust society" and his means are bad, but when the hero stops him he agrees that society does need to change and works toward that by helping liberate some people. The real villain is me not actually writing.
oh shit you're not going to pull an Encanto and have only good guys????
Encanto was liberalism. The one family were patriarchs (matriarchs?) which the whole town relied on. They escaped colonialism to do colonialism. Their house is bigger than the rest of the town.
Was it? I got more ecosocialist vibes. They used superpowers to benefit the town for free, and when they lost their powers the magicless towns people enthusiastically volunteered helped rebuild the house for free.
The house was big not because it was a bourgeois luxury mansion, but because each additional family member was given their own room.
There was a character that made plants magically grow and they lived in some solarpunk af secluded mountians.
I liked it in Jojo part 7.
The bad guy wants imperialism but turned all the way up: creating a paradise for the few at the cost of untold misery.
The "good guy" just wanted some working legs, lmao.
Gyro is legit the only guy in the entire part who isn't just in it for himself lol
I think the lesson is, yes society needs changes but you don’t do it with violence or anything approaching actual power — you :vote:
Silco is great and I appreciate that
spoiler
while he is willing to do almost anything to achieve his goals, the show never even pretends that his cause is unjustived.
I also like how the only cop that
spoiler
is actually willing to help people gets mocked by her colleagues, impeded by her superiors and eventually kicked out against her will.
This post is bait to make me rant about Legend of Korra's villains again.
Actually shout-out to Fullmetal Alchemist Brotherhood, where the heroes spend some time just helping to rebuild a town that got fucked over, realise their government is very fascist and overthrow it. It's pretty uncommon to have heroes actually help people instead of just vibing until the next crisis comes around
I'm still mad about book 3's portrayal of
spoiler
the "civil unrest" that takes place in the earth kingdom when lower class citizens rise up after the "villain" kills the monarch that has exploited them for decades. Book 4 than presents two possible solutions.
1.: The crown prince who is equally selfish and unfit to rule
or
2.: Hitler.
:this: or how the villian has actual good reasons for quote unquote "villainy" but then does some shit like boiling puppies alive or something
Doesn’t the first episode of Rwby start off with the bad guy blowing up a train of people for no particular reason?
Dr Horrible is such great accidental satire* of patriarchy and it haunts me
*I think the parody was intended, but not satire
