Politics in Media - The Good, the Bad, and the Preachy

Let's not forget Zorro, the Lone Ranger, and, if you count jungles, the Phantom.

Oh, and then there's maybe the Doom Patrol...

Edited by Oruka on Jun 22nd 2019 at 11:55:39 AM

@Oruku: It isn't actually all that uncommon to see Spiderman or Batman solve typical armed robberies, usually as a character establishing moment. Admittedly, these are seldom the focus of stories, but they're not that uncommon either. In the MCU's first Spiderman movie (Homecoming), he does stop an ATM robbery, though it turns out the crooks have advanced tech, though the conflict of the movie is basically Spiderman worried about otherwise crooks getting their hands on supertech (which is indeed a frightening possibility).

With someone like Superman it still isn't all that uncommon to see him stop a typical armed robbery, though in his case stopping petty crime makes a bit less sense. Not because he wouldn't-it's perfectly in character. Actually it's deceptively pragmatic (you don't want street muggers thinking they're beneath Superman's notice). However, no criminal in their right mind would even try to resist all that much, they'd most likely just give up the instant he announced his presence.

Actually, I once ran a mission for a superhero RP on a MUSH, and in it, Wonder Woman ran into some pirates or smugglers in a ship. It ended with her entering a room full of Mooks, and she pulled out her sword and basically said "I'm gonna say this once: Give up now". I then had every mook in the room actually realize that was a good idea, so they all collectively did. The player thought that was funny.

Edited by Protagonist506 on Jun 22nd 2019 at 1:25:48 AM

Beautiful aversion of Shooting Superman right there. Still, watching low-level crooks attempt to hurt him is always lots of fun:

I love it when he just lays down the affectionate puns.

I mean, at least with Spidey getting away is plausible, and suppressive fire might at least buy you a little time...

With Batman, the weird thing is that he isn't dead yet. Just his grappling hook swings should have torn his arms apart at this point.

Weird fact:

I made my Superman Expy and Supergirl Expy African American with Ultragod debuting in the 1930s and continuing on to the present day. This led to my fandom asking all sorts of questions about having the most powerful man in the world be black during turbulent American history.

Icon wrestled with the issue as well.

Predictably. I too have so many questions.

Well go ahead and ask if you want.

:)

They're very popular characters for many reasons.

I do declare, how do the southern "genterfolk of good breeding" handle interacting with heroes from a race they can't stand to share a swimming pool with? What does the press say about them? Do the police shoot them on sight? Or do our heroes single-handedly change the image of the people who look like them?

In the setting it results in a slow but gradual shift of public opinion as well as is used to justify some superhero trope-isms. Superheroes in the setting are always vaguely on the progressive side and have never been entirely trusted by the conservative elements of the public. By contrast, Ultragod and the other traditional superheroes have always done their best to hold superheroes to as impeccable a standard of morality (including the No Kill rule that makes no damn sense normally) so not to give their opponents any room to criticize.

Its a Does This Remind You of Anything? element that the Society of Superheroes (Justice League/Avengers) has outlasted all the attempts to make white only nationalist heroes and also several more radical counter-culture hero groups. However, the conflict in the modern day that heroes aren't going far enough continues it on. I have the 90s, for example, have Rob Liefeld-esque fascists supported by the government's reactionary elements and the protagonist fo the supervillainy saga being a "villain" simply because he refuses to abide by any restrictions on his behavior.

Ultragod's daughter, Ultragoddess (Supergirl) and the protagonist's romance is controversial because Ultragod says they have to keep themselves to a higher standard or it all comes crashing down—a notion that isn't treated as WRONG but it's not RIGHT either.

I don't hesitate using white nationalism as a reason behind the HYDRA Expy or the Punisher types.

Edited by CharlesPhipps on Jun 22nd 2019 at 4:33:52 AM

But the 90s Anti-Hero es either were independents or the product of a Enemy Mine situation.

BTW. I've realized that I'm doing a similar story of era-based expies but using Animanga trends and tropes rather than superheroes . I can explain it too

Edited by KazuyaProta on Jun 22nd 2019 at 7:42:38 AM

Please do

More of less, the story is set After the End, in a new Century...that in a textbook "Story Repeats", is basically "a condensed Second 20th Century" and is actually acknowledged as such In-Universe for some historians.

Their first decade saw a global war that had the biggest genocide in the New Century, killing 5 millions...out of 100 millions. The overall bodycount was of 9 millions, which shoud give you a idea of how brutal it was. What do you expect of a Empire that basically was the the Armenian Empire in WW 1 that actively studied Nazi Germany to..."learn from the masters".

Back to the expies aspect. There many characters that are meant to call upon Anime Character Archetypes. The easiest example is Colonel Sai, who is basically Jotaro Kujo as a Millitary officer from the Starlight Union, he have tons of dead friends too!!

This is the crazy world where a relatively straightforward Magical Girl (no metaphysical twist or that) story happens in middle of a Fictional Cold War. And those elements bleed into each other, leading to even weirder stuff.

Beyond characters like FMA Scar, which other characters in fantasy or sci fi works are survivors from "realistic" fictional genocides?

Genocide in fiction is something that interest me, because is pretty much the highest crime against humanity and I wonder how much fiction uses it.

I suspect it’s more prevalent as backstory than the actual plot unless you’re making the story about it

I would guess most people would shy away from such a heavy subject

Does the Air Nomad genocide from Avatar the last airbender count? Cos if yes, Aang.

It depends on how you define realistic.

Alderaan for poor Leia is done by a WMD but it's still the eradication of a people. The Empire also hunts down the survivors afterward unless they are in the Imperial military and even then the ISB screws with their heads.

The new canon also has Darth Vader sterilize the Geonosians.

The Wookiees are also shown to be not so much enslaved as being eradicated with profit.

I did include a character (an Android priestess named Vera) once in my game whose backstory included something to that effect. Her home planet was occupied by the game’s antagonists, who exterminated most of her race and attempted to suppress her religion. She ran a very influential underground church until the civilization employing your character liberated the region. She became rather famous though the official churches gave her only a very small position on account of her race.

I wonder what writing multiple genocides in the backstory of my setting says about me.

From Generalplan Ost-like attemps to continental genocide to regional ethnic cleansings. Or as someone said, From The Holocaust to Operation Al-Anfal, but somehow in the same "continent" (is roughly the same size of America, is big enought IMO).

...eh...

And of course, I do have characters that have the genocides in their background in some way or other (I.E. Characters descending from a group that got genocided somewhere).

The Valkyria Chronicles is all about the genocide of the Jew equivalents.

Kind of horrifying for an escapist fantasy.

And yet that series has a bit of a habit of bothsiding the conflict and treating one of the genre's more blatant and evil Axis power stand-ins with kid's gloves.

Edited by Rationalinsanity on Jun 25th 2019 at 8:14:36 AM

There is a survivor of genocide in Tolkien in the form of Mîm, last of the Petty Dwarves, from The Silmarillion. Elves apparently mistook the Petty Dwarves for wild animals when they arrived on Middle Earth and hunted them effectively to near extinction before realizing their mistake and backing off. By the time we actually meet them only Mîm (and his two kids, who die shortly after being introduced) is left. He's (obviously) extremely bitter and spiteful and absolutely despises Elves (be they the ones involved in the genocide or not). One of the major Elvish kingdoms of the First Age, the kingdom of Nargothrond, was literally built on the lands the Elves stole from the Petty Dwarves after hunting them to near-extinction. The end of Mîm's narrative involves him taking seat in the ruins of Nargothrond (it gets destroyed by the Orcs, it's a whole story) in a futile attempt to reclaim what once belonged to his people, now alone in a blasted ruin of a city, surrounded by Elvish corpses.

The genocide of the Petty Dwarves is one of the most wonky bits of Tolkien's Legendarium because due the unfinished and Frankenstein nature of the Silmarillion, the fact the Elves wiped out an entire people is only brought up in passing and by a single character (Mîm), no one else ever points out that they're standing on land stolen from some Dwarves. The other Dwarves never bringing up is mildly justified because the Petty Dwarves are apparently exiles outcasts from the other Dwarvish clans, so they probably didn't care much for their fate, but it's odd Elves and Men never bring this up.

The whole concept of Elves confusing Petty Dwarves for animals is also completely ridiculous in the finished text because Mîm is very clearly human-like in the final version (in earlier versions, the Dwarves were more like evil artificial constructs, so that is probably where this idea comes from) down to being able to speak (he's in fact quite verbose) and gesticulate. It comes across more as the Elves giving a bullshit excuse to their act of open genocide than the actual truth.

Where this whole thing does work is in Mîm himself and his plotline, as he ends up one of the most complex and tragic characters of the whole book and one of my personal favorites. It's also very interesting that Mîm can't fight at all and has no access to resrources, so he mostly just speaks, yet his words carry a unholy amount of power: every curse he doles out ends up bringing monumental disaster. Almost as if due being the last of his race, his words carry more power.

Edited by Gaon on Jun 25th 2019 at 4:31:13 AM

Well the Empire isn't the Third Reich nor is the Alliance.

The Third Reich is the country of the protagonists and the Nazis are defeated in the Second Game along with their Hitler Expy.

The Empire draws from Imperial Germany and the Soviet Union (though the latter is mostly names, terrain, and tank designs), but they are the clear Third Reich stand-in. They've got the blitzkrieg, the death/labour camps, the mad scientists, the super weapons, the works.

Gallia is part Switzerland, and part Low Countries. And the 2nd game's poor writing makes them into unsympathetic idiots and an outright failed state for a bit. The rebels come across as Naziesque as well, but Gallia itself does not.

The Federation are a decent stand-in for the Allied Powers (democratic, not genocidal but still racist, some mention of colonialism that never gets detailed), or they would be if the game didn't toss them the Idiot Ball (their interactions with Gallia are Stupid Evil, they've got zero reason to dick them over but do it anyway so the writers favored factions be played up) in several massive ways. And play up their atrocities (stand-ins for nuclear attacks, mostly) when they are fighting a losing war against a pack of fascist savages.

Edited by Rationalinsanity on Jun 25th 2019 at 9:16:51 AM

re: The Petty Dwarves, does the History of Midde-earth provide any clues? If I recall that series is where they published the unpolished bits and earlier versions. Given that Tolkien was so wracked by the implications of Orcs being pretty much Always Chaotic Evil in Lord of the Rings, I wouldn't be surprised if he had plans to flesh the genocide out a bit more.

That reminds me of the why I didn't touch that franchise.

Also, someone have noticed that many animanga works do use Imperial Germany like aesthetics before blending them with Nazi ones?

Sadly, Is never a attempt to foreshadow the roots of the Nazis on Imperial German cultire, but rather just a convenient way to say "I'm just a germanophile, not a Nazi!"

Edited by KazuyaProta on Jun 25th 2019 at 9:04:05 AM

Japan is very big on the idea that you can separate iconography from ideology, and that idealizing the machines, trappings, etc. of the setting doesn't mean you agree with the ideology. Which is... a fair enough point to be argued, but a lot of the time, it's Japanese artists/writers being completely ignorant of the historical context - or worse, tacitly or untacitly endorsing it.

That said, yeah, Gallia is clearly Switzerland, not the Third Reich.