It doesn’t even have to be that the message is bad or completely objective and propaganda fuelled, it could just be its often incredibly recited, copied and pasted or just a blatantly obvious good lesson that you are completely aware of.
It doesn’t even have to be that the message is bad or completely objective and propaganda fuelled, it could just be its often incredibly recited, copied and pasted or just a blatantly obvious good lesson that you are completely aware of.
The villian being actualy some misunderstood broken character and that from their perspective they aren’t doing anything wrong.
Remember when in Hollywood the bad guy was the bad guy because they wanted to do bad things, and the hero was the hero because they wanted to do good things. And at the end the good guy defeats the bad guy and saves the day. Now every bad guy must have this complex back story of abuse or some wrong doing against then, and now their evil actions are just some justified misguided revenge against the world. FUCK THAT.
I am 90% sure that the last 20 years of this being normalized by mainstream media has let to us not properly punishing literal real life pedophiles and power hungry sociopaths, because “Well we don’t know their side of the story… there has to be due process.” Yeah, not long ago the due process was that people got linched for doing a fraction behind closed doors of what degenrate billionaires do in the open today.
Moral of the story is that there’s a side to everything… NO there isn’t, there’s pretty definitve bad and pretty definitive good. Sure there are morally ambiguous topics, but Hollywood has been bluring the line on literal genocide, rape and murder just for the sake of not wanting to write an actual interesting story.
Edit: I just want to drive home how much I despise that shit.
I agree but I also disagree. I think it depends on the story. Lots of stories work on a simple level of “these values are good” and “these values are bad”, and that’s cool from Jungian perspective, but I also don’t want to live in a world where nobody makes life better for anyone else because it’s just pre-ordained that who is going to be a rapist and who is going to be feeding homeless people.
Like do I want to read the Lord of the Rings as imperialist propaganda against orcs and Southrons and wildlings, who actually have valid political objections to the axis of Human-Elf-Dwarf hegemony? Hell yeah I do because I’m a leftist freak, but I recognize that I am fundamentally misreading the moral context the story is presented in–it’s about archetypes, about human values, about that nature of evil, not as an independent entity in itself, but how it can manifests in each one of us.
It just depends on the story.
Probably the WORST thing a story can do is mix and match “people are only evil because of we misunderstand them” and "people are purely evil.¨ I don´t see it often, but I think How to Train Your Dragon does it.
You’ll find some friends on the writing staff of Puss in Boots: The Last Wish. Big Jack Horner is very obviously written as a glorious return to characters who are simply bad.