So many superhero-villain stories seem to follow this weird-ass pattern: the villain will show a sizable amount of class consciousness, but somewhere along the way will randomly break character and kill a humongous number of people for no fucking reason.
The Riddler from Batman 2023 is such a textbook example. He kills corrupt officials to reveal Gotham's deep corruption and rot, which is objectively a good thing. However, once Batman starts going after him, he randomly floods all of Gotham, just so the writers can show he's 'insane'.
In The Falcon and the Winter Soldier, the Flag Smashers are practically communists at the start who wanted to preserve the unity and cooperation of the world after the Snap, instead of having everything revert to the capitalist hellhole it was before. Of course, during one of their raids to get medicine for refugees, they randomly decide to blow up a warehouse with workers still inside. They eventually all get arrested or killed for being 'terrorists'. In the end, the problems they fought to solve simply get voiced by Falcon, who uses his status as an elite black soldier just to tell a senator to "do better".
In Black Panther, Killmonger becomes king of Wakanda so he can provide vibranium weapons to Africans around the world. By doing so, he wants them to fight back against their oppression, doing exactly what the Soviet Union did. Of course, he's considered crazy and has to be defeated. In the end, T'Challa decides to solve Africans' oppression by building some shitty schools around the world.
In each of these, the villian's cause is righteous, but they are either portrayed as crazy or are made by the writers to do something random and crazy. Every single one of these is perfectly formulated to show the proles that they can't take matters into their own hands because 'they'd go crazy'. Instead, we should wait for an enlightened Lord (Batman, Iron Man, etc.) to take pity on us.
Man, that Flag Smasher 180 really pissed me off. They were 100% in the right and then randomly blow up the building for no reason.
It's called 'The Swerve', and it's not just limited to superhero stories. Here's a short essay exploring it further: https://redsails.org/the-swerve/
I think they do it by purpose. Bane had a similar thing going on for a bit in The Dark Knight Rises, but he was more anarchist than anything before he decided to blow up the entire city.
r/antiwork was explicitly anti-Marxist the last time I checked lmao
Only radlibs allowed!
I remember /r/antiwork in its heydey, it was building towards class consciousness and people were bitching and memein less, rumblings about organizing more, before it got broken up. I had heard of but never knowingly experienced FUD happenin in real time until after that FOX interview when so many of the loudest voices demanded a break to /r/workreform. I loved the energy of that place before it got fedfucked.... Like really thought it had a chance to be something real. Thinking about it now, i think it was a bigger blow to me than i gave it credit at the time, i started my search for a reddit alternative then.
if reddit dies there will be nothing to put at the end of a google search to make it work
Reddit did to the internet what China did to manufacturing. But China did it better.
If I remember correctly, that sub was started by an investment banker or something. Just an absolute joke.
Did any of the mass shooters who targeted black churches, synagogues, mosques or that mall where black shoppers were targeted get tried as terrorists?
do cops terrorizing black people get charged with terrorism?
I love the way this contrasts with the corrupt official thats getting executing in China. It demonstrates what a dictatorship of the proles vs what a dictatorship of the bourgeoisie equate to in practice. The best way to determine who holds power is to look at who receives the hammer.
