Throughout The Horseshoe Effect page, I've noticed various examples that seem off to me. However, I am not confident enough in my understanding of the trope to say they're definitely wrong. Here are some that I'm unsure about.
In The Hunchback of Notre Dame, Frollo pursues an insanely harsh and fundamentalist interpretation of Christianity. In the process, he commits numerous sins while trying to do "God's work", including pride and wrath. By the end of the movie, he goes so far as burn the very cathedral he claimed to defend, becoming the Satanic being he claimed to oppose. This seems more like hypocrisy or Becoming their own antithesis. The Romani represent what he considers sinful but he doesn't share many similarities with them. He's much worse morally.
SPECTRE is a living Horseshoe Effect, as it liberally recruits former Nazis and former Communists alike. Their successor in the Daniel Craig movies, Quantum (which is eventually revealed to be either a branch of or a forerunner to the rebooted SPECTRE), similarly declares that it works "with the left or the right, with dictators or liberators. Does the new Spectre count or are they just pragmatic? I never got the sense that they were very ideologically driven.
Monster Verse:
Mostly of the hostile Titans threaten to create ecosystem-destroying conditions on a regional, continental or global scale if they win, speculated by Monarch to be said Titans Hostile Terraforming the environment to their liking. However, amongst the Big Bad Titans that have had these goals, the MUT Os in Godzilla (2014) are prehistoric creatures which are overall Non-Malicious Monsters who merely seek to survive and reproduce according to their instincts — Ghidorah in Godzilla: King of the Monsters (2019) by contrast, is extraterrestrial in origin and is an unnaturally-sadistic Omnicidal Maniac, and the novelizations suggest Ghidorah is attempting to create an ecosphere-destroying extinction event not so much out of environmental necessity as out of malice and hatred for all other life.
If there's just two things that all the human Contrasting Sequel Antagonists of every film have in common besides being Knight Templars, it's these: they don't care how many people have to die to see their plans through, and they're too reckless to care that their actions risk causing The End of the World as We Know It. I don't see how either of these are at all relevant.
By the end of Animal Farm, the oppressive pigs running the farm are scarcely distinguishable (in appearance or beliefs) from the oppressive farmers they deposed. Contrary to "Common Knowledge", this was less about communism in general and more about Stalinism in particular — Orwell was himself a socialist, albeit one that was highly critical of the Soviet Union and highly supportive of democracy. Does lying about the political affiliation you represent and thus having similarities with the political affiliation you actually are count towards the trope? There are a number of examples in this category.
The Web Original section also seems to be a list of real life examples, just presented by a third party.
Overall, I'm not sure the trope works when not about the political spectrum.
Edited by Hellboy33 on May 18th 2022 at 7:59:50 AM
Throughout The Horseshoe Effect page, I've noticed various examples that seem off to me. However, I am not confident enough in my understanding of the trope to say they're definitely wrong. Here are some that I'm unsure about.
In The Hunchback of Notre Dame, Frollo pursues an insanely harsh and fundamentalist interpretation of Christianity. In the process, he commits numerous sins while trying to do "God's work", including pride and wrath. By the end of the movie, he goes so far as burn the very cathedral he claimed to defend, becoming the Satanic being he claimed to oppose. This seems more like hypocrisy or Becoming their own antithesis. The Romani represent what he considers sinful but he doesn't share many similarities with them. He's much worse morally.
SPECTRE is a living Horseshoe Effect, as it liberally recruits former Nazis and former Communists alike. Their successor in the Daniel Craig movies, Quantum (which is eventually revealed to be either a branch of or a forerunner to the rebooted SPECTRE), similarly declares that it works "with the left or the right, with dictators or liberators. Does the new Spectre count or are they just pragmatic? I never got the sense that they were very ideologically driven.
Monster Verse: Mostly of the hostile Titans threaten to create ecosystem-destroying conditions on a regional, continental or global scale if they win, speculated by Monarch to be said Titans Hostile Terraforming the environment to their liking. However, amongst the Big Bad Titans that have had these goals, the MUT Os in Godzilla (2014) are prehistoric creatures which are overall Non-Malicious Monsters who merely seek to survive and reproduce according to their instincts — Ghidorah in Godzilla: King of the Monsters (2019) by contrast, is extraterrestrial in origin and is an unnaturally-sadistic Omnicidal Maniac, and the novelizations suggest Ghidorah is attempting to create an ecosphere-destroying extinction event not so much out of environmental necessity as out of malice and hatred for all other life. If there's just two things that all the human Contrasting Sequel Antagonists of every film have in common besides being Knight Templars, it's these: they don't care how many people have to die to see their plans through, and they're too reckless to care that their actions risk causing The End of the World as We Know It. I don't see how either of these are at all relevant.
By the end of Animal Farm, the oppressive pigs running the farm are scarcely distinguishable (in appearance or beliefs) from the oppressive farmers they deposed. Contrary to "Common Knowledge", this was less about communism in general and more about Stalinism in particular — Orwell was himself a socialist, albeit one that was highly critical of the Soviet Union and highly supportive of democracy. Does lying about the political affiliation you represent and thus having similarities with the political affiliation you actually are count towards the trope? There are a number of examples in this category.
The Web Original section also seems to be a list of real life examples, just presented by a third party.
Overall, I'm not sure the trope works when not about the political spectrum.
Edited by Hellboy33 on May 18th 2022 at 7:59:50 AM