Diversity and Representation in Media

I assume that's a reference to Swarm, the Nazi supervillain made out of bees?

Yes, that's real character.

Edited by chasemaddigan on Sep 16th 2023 at 10:19:14 AM

Honestly I'm kind of embarrassed I didn't put that together on my own lol

My guess is because Disney would have been pretty reluctant to put an overt nazi in a preschool show. Likely didn't want to potentially affect marketability. Same reason why they generally downplay or completely remove Redskull's nazi connections.

The irony is that Green Goblin didn't have a prominent nose when created, and was in fact created by Jewish creators.

Also, speaking as a neuraotypical person, I related a lot to Data but had to revise his words a bit when TNG was on.

I didn't want to be "cured" but I did struggle to understand people in person. My wife and I struggled a lot early in our marriage because she was raised to always consult tone and other social cues I just don't give.

So Data being flummoxed was very relatable.

Was it Earth's Mightiest Heroes that WW 2 2 was against Hydra?

Edited by CharlesPhipps on Sep 16th 2023 at 8:34:09 AM

The Spidey thing is weird. It's a preschool show, so obviously they don't wanna get into Nazis or anything like that... yet two of the villains who appear on it are the aforementioned Swarm and Arnim Freaking Zola. I mean... you could've just not had Nazis in your preschool show. If you needed an evil scientist bad guy, you could've just used MODOK or something. It's definitely a weird choice.

Yeah, Disney gave the crew an ultimatum with the WWII stuff: they could either have actual Nazis or actual firearms. The crew figured Hydra would work as a replacement for the Nazis and that WWII soldiers shooting lasers wouldn't fit what they wanted for the show, so they chose that.

Edited by lbssb on Sep 16th 2023 at 11:44:02 AM

The Red Skull was in Spider-Man and His Amazing Friends but so was the Swarm.

The Swarm wasn't a bunch of Nazi bees, though.

I remember when the crappy 2017 cartoon had Swarm show up and specifically be antagonistic towards Miles, and you could not imagine how shocked yet gleefully amused I was that they seemingly had the stones to make him a flat-out racist. But then it turned out he was Miles' dad who thought Spider-Man was endangering the community or something, and they lost my respect again.

There's always the issue of the "Bioshock: Infinite Effect" which isn't a trope but should be.

Which is that how a depiction of something awful as awful can be co-opted by the people its satirizing. Lots of Columbia art and adds ended up being adopted by the Tea Party.

Ditto Star Wars' Empire and fascists.

That's basically Do Not Do This Cool Thing, the line between a compelling evil character and the narrative accidentally advocating for their values is razor thin. You take extra steps to denounce their ideas or remove any cool factor and it results in a weaker story for not representing the ideas properly.

I think a claim of "you can either write a memorable villain who gets worshipped by bad people, or a poor villain nobody follows" is not a genuine dichotomy. It makes it seem as though there's no difference between villains who are written to be more sympathetic than their acts truly are (like the MCU's Thanos) and villains who are still memorable but the story does not make their cause seem sympathetic (like The Owl House's Belos, or the MCU's High Evolutionary). A lot of people who would leap to such a villain's defense just because it says what they want to hear, have such poor media literacy that there's no point to treating their praise as a sign of good writing.

Edited by Tuckerscreator on Sep 16th 2023 at 9:57:32 AM

I kind of like how Inglorious Basterds handled the Nazis in that they're all the butt of the joke at least once which takes away any cool factor they may have had, Gobbles has his weird 5 second sex scene, Hitler's only major scene has him screaming and flipping out hilariously, Hellstrom died from a Groin Attack etc. Hell even Hans Landa, the "coolest" one literally organizes the destruction of the Nazi party and ends up getting a Swastika carved into his forehead. Admittedly that hasn't stopped Landa from being extremely popular regardless (I recall at least two times he was proposed as a Magnificent Bastard and we had to point out that a dude called "The Jew Hunter" really can't be considered magnificent for that trope).

Also minor thing, wasn't Hydra made because Marvel wanted to have Nazis without actually saying they're Nazis or something like that?

According to interviews and The History of Marvel if I recall correctly, actually the reverse. It was the 1960s and they wanted to get in on the spy craze but it would look abjectly silly to have Nick Fury and other WW 2 characters not killing people.

So Stan Lee went, "What if we made Hydra's head Baron Von Strucker and they're Nazis? Then you could do whatever you wanted to them."

Asshole Victim and Acceptable Target in one.

Even the Comic Book Code didn't object when blowing up bases full of these guys.

Then, for whatever reason, they wanted to separate Hydra from being Nazis and suddenly they were more generically evil and sometimes Leftist.

No, serious

The Red Skull once denounced Nazism to embrace anarchism. Because it was more evil, I guess.

Edited by CharlesPhipps on Sep 16th 2023 at 11:32:09 AM

There is compelling in the sense of being a satisfactory villain for a narrative work and there is compelling in that their viewpoint/motivation/competence is relatable to the individual or social landscape. There is multiple things at play than just writing, but acting, direction, cinematography and editing all contribute to that end result. A vile looking character who talks with garbled hatred in their voice will land much different than an attractive character saying the exact same words with a gentle voice. It is certainly possible for a character to be compelling as a villain but their ideals and whatever else they stand for is ignored or overlooked entirely, possibly because they are an obvious strawman on that subject and doesn't address anything real. So the question becomes that if they are not a decent rebuttal of those values does it subvert Do Not Do This Cool Thing.

High Evolutionary did start some discussion about animal cruelty, but his core actions surrounding genetic engineering, social constructs and genocide are kind of glossed over entirely as he was narratively just a monstrous villain for the heroes to take down at the end. As far as Col. Landa, he does defect at the end with a pseudo-heroic contribution so I could see how people might view him at least "less evil than Hitler," and it isn't until the very last scene does he no longer have any power.

By contrast, I think Landa fans are often the Alt-Right and assholes.

Huh, so Swarm was actually an option, because he had been in the show before. Having the Ever-Loving Jewish Blue-Eyed Thing take down a Nazi bee supervillain to save Rosh Hashanah is so Jewish it hurts, I'm actually kinda mad they didn't do that.

Edited by PushoverMediaCritic on Sep 17th 2023 at 1:39:53 AM

I know I only joined the thread fairly recently but I feel like I should inform you guys that I'm stepping away from the site for a bit, both for the sake of my mental health, and out of disappointment with the site's staff. Hopefully I'll come back some day.

please use the absent people's topic,thanks!

I agree that Do Not Do This Cool Thing isn't as inescapable as it may look like. It depends a lot on the social context of the moment and how those action are portrayed.

There is also the factor of how arbitrary the adoption of symbols can be. For example, Pepe the Frog became an unspoken symbol of American reactionary movements in the late 2010's even though the original comic didn't have absolutely anything to do with that. But since the social media in which the character was used as a meme the most was, he got associated by proxy.

Furthermore, I think some takes are a bit too simplistic; for example, Star Wars as a franchise is some big that it is bound that people from some political ideologies would also engage into it. The thing is that many franchises from the late 20th century got used to fuel this idea of a "culture war" in which the idealized past gets attacked by fearful future that an enemy will impose on the target audience. Thus we have things like Sarah Connor in Terminator 2 being regarded as an example of a strong female character that doesn't need to inferiorize men by some reactionary movements, even though her character in the movie had an explicitly misandric speech (which was portrayed as wrong, of course, but that wouldn't stop people from calling it part of such culture war had the movie been released nowadays).

In case of Hydra is probably because after a while Nazis just look lame as villians as WW 2 look more far away they just become those weird guys in german acent that never shut the fuck up. It become a thing againt thanks to alt right.

And with villians they are simply other villians who show values overshadow whatever idea and people like it because acting or asthetic(Like landa, awfull as he was, the actor does a great job).

But is not the first time people retroactive make villian right in order to indulge with it, same with ships and other tipical foolery

The MCU also removes Hydra from Nazi Germany making them more akin to Neo Nazis.

I think it is a good modernization as the rise of Neo Nazi is more relatable to modern audience than Those Wacky Nazis portrayal

I get the purpose of the Those Wacky Nazis trope (e.g. basically everything Mel Brooks has done) but it's certainly time to acknowledge their modern-day equivalents are no laughing matter.

Case in point: Stormfront. (Though I do admire the tongue-in-cheek casting of a Jewish actress to play her.)

Well, there's also the coolness factor of the Nazi aesthetic that neonazis tend to lack. Hence why movies keep going back to WWII over and over again.

Mel Brooks TLDR manifesto is summarized as:

• "Nazis take themselves incredibly seriously."
• "Nazis do not care if you call them evil, monsters, or terrifying. They love it."
• "Nazis are, in fact, ridiculous."
• "The best thing to do to fuck with Nazis is to make fun of them."

Edited by CharlesPhipps on Sep 21st 2023 at 3:44:22 AM