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

That is.just bizarre because it's possible a parent wants the best for their children and still is abusive at unforgivable levels.

@Drag: Yeah, that's the issue with analogies when you really don't think enough about it.

Edited by KazuyaProta on Oct 30th 2019 at 9:24:29 AM

Watch me destroying my country

Okay, sorry in advance that this wound up being long-winded but I had a lot to talk about. >.<

See.

The thing is.

Marty isn't the only parent who is ill-intentioned. That's downplaying the heinousness of the Diamonds' actions.

Rebecca Sugar does this same thing. She has openly stated that she considers nobody in SU to be 100% evil, but SU features its "redeemable, sympathetic" villains openly discussing how much they want to murder billions of people like they're ordering takeout for dinner. If Sugar doesn't see that as evil, then that says a lot about Sugar, not about the Diamonds.

And like I said, that's not just a Sugar issue. That's a "lots of writers" issue, because writers have been doing that since Darth Vader's abrupt absolution for his actual, successful, completed genocides.

My Little Pony runs into the same issues: the show shifted focus in season five to emphasize redemption for its villains, but those villains' are atrocious people. Starlight Glimmer is the embodiment of MLP's redemption focus, but hilariously manages to avoid ever actually changing her behavior in the course of her redemption arc.

Between seasons six and eight, the show shifts its tone surrounding her from going "Starlight Glimmer is prone to violent overreaction to the slightest provocation and that's bad and she should change" to "Starlight Glimmer is prone to violent overreaction to the slightest provocation but that's just our wacky Starlight!" Starlight's redeemed not by growing as a person, but by everyone else losing the ability to care about to her terrible behavior.

Indeed, the thing that shifts Starlight from "needs work" to "no longer a bad person" is that she fights a different heinous villain in the season six finale. This has literally nothing to do with her shittiness as a person or overcoming that shittiness; indeed, her character arc for the episode is that Starlight needs to have more confidence in how cool she is and how right her ideas are. But that's considered enough for her to "graduate" from her own rehabilitation, while she continues violently and selfishly overreacting for the foreseeable future.

Even work that aren't necessarily about moral lessons tend to run afoul of this. The Saiyan Arc of Dragon Ball introduced us to three villains.

• Raditz is a violent alien who commits genocide for profit. He comes to Earth to recruit his brother Goku and is culture-shocked to see what Goku's become. After trying to persuade Goku to come back to the fold, Raditz kidnaps his nephew Gohan as a bargaining chip. Raditz's ultimate end goal is that he and his family leave Earth to go commit genocide together.
• Nappa is a violent alien who commits genocide for profit. He comes to Earth searching for the magical wish-granting Dragon Balls because Raditz was killed on Earth. Nappa overheard that the Dragon Balls can raise the dead and he wants to use the Balls to bring Raditz back.
• Vegeta is a violent alien who commits genocide for profit. He vetoes Nappa's desire to revive Raditz even though there's literally only four people left in their entire race, on the grounds that Raditz was weak enough to get killed so he deserves death. He later flat-out murders Nappa on a similar utilitarian basis; Goku broke Nappa's spine, so Vegeta kills him. Vegeta later utterly dismisses the genocide of his people, caring only about his own self-advancement; he's only arsed to care that his people are wiped out when he can use it as an argument to convince Goku to avenge his death.

All three Saiyans are evil bastards who commit genocide for profit, but between the three of them, Vegeta is the cruelest and nastiest of the lot. The arc ends with Nappa and Raditz dying, being swiftly deposited in Hell (actual place in the series' mythos), and never spoken of again.

Vegeta, meanwhile, sticks around and becomes one of the protagonists from the next arc forward. He marries long-time protagonist Bulma, they have a son together, and Vegeta lives happily ever after in his new home on Earth.

Why are redemption arcs always handed out to the nastiest villains?

Going back to MLP, Nightmare Moon is a princess of Equestria who governs the night. She was jealous of the people's love for her sister, the princess who governs the day. Ponies sleep all night and are up and active during the day. Nightmare Moon wanted to be loved too.

Discord is an impulsive and self-centered chaos spirit who uses reality-warping magic to wreak havoc on people's lives entirely for his own amusement. He's a sadistic asshole who just likes playing cosmic pranks on the universe and doesn't care who gets hurt along the way. If anything, he actively relishes their misery; it makes his lulz funnier.

Nightmare Moon's redemption was handled by bludgeoning her with violence until the magical lobotomy made her stop being evil. She spent the rest of the series moping about the cast, turning nearly every conversation she has into a dissertation on how much she sucks and is bad and just feels so awful for her shittiness in the past. At one point, she makes a magical dream avatar whose sole purpose is to torture her in her sleep.

Discord's redemption was handled by reaching out to him empathetically, befriending him, and convincing him to stop being shitty. He spent the rest of the series continuing to be shitty in the exact same ways he was before, but on a smaller scale; he transitioned his shittiness to the personal scale, tormenting the protagonists directly rather than assailing the world at large. At one point, he sells the protagonists out to a different villain so that he can resume assailing the world, but after the villain shanks him in the back, the protagonists accept him back with open arms and infinite forgiveness.

Why are we only supposed to empathize with the nastiest villains?

Edited by TobiasDrake on Oct 30th 2019 at 8:33:30 AM

My Tumblr. Currently liveblogging Haruhi Suzumiya and revisiting Danganronpa V3.

I think it might have something to do with how, when a certain threshold of awfulness is crossed, our minds, for whatever reason, don't want to acknowledge or accept that some people are just that cruel and twisted and probably always will be. I think we tend to adopt a variant of Rousseau Was Right, because the alternative is too depressing to consider.

To pity someone is to tell them "I feel bad about being better than you."

Hell, lots of media targeted at kids have done this message. Disney's Hunchback of Notre Dame, Tangled and Avatar: The Last Airbender. So the excuse of it not being child friendly doesn't even apply.

The other problem is that unfortunately, getting the Diamonds to turn over was the corner they wrote the show into.

There are two main reasons for this. The first (and the one the show focuses on) is that Steven needed all their powers in order to undo the corruption that the Gems on Earth had gone through. If they weren't willing to help them, all those people would be lost.

The second one, and arguably even more important, is that the Diamonds are probably just way too powerful for Steven and his friends to defeat in a head-to-head battle. Without Steven being able to reach them, they basically already lost.

Of course, the writers are still at fault for this because that's the way they set up the story.

But to be honest, what really bothers me isn't even that the story turned out this way. They could have made the story such that while the Diamonds' crimes are genuinely horrible and unforgivable, it's ultimately more useful to keep them around as figureheads and have them gradually make the transition of their society into a less oppressive place. They aren't forgiven for their crimes, and have to live with what they did while undoing the harm they've done.

But that's not what they did. That's what really stings: it feels like the show doesn't properly acknowledge how unfathomably shitty the Diamonds actually are as people, because the show after a certain point is mostly interested in them as an allegory for an abusive family. But obviously this is going to rub people the wrong way.

The problem is, contextualizing the sheer horror and heinousness of what they did and what they are is probably way too dark and fucked up for the kind of show Steven Universe is. So in that sense when they set up the story this way it was always going to be a problem.

Edited by Draghinazzo on Oct 30th 2019 at 11:08:36 AM

If anything, I'd say the opposite has happened for me and many other folks, Trump and lots of other folk have soured a lot of people on easy redemption arcs (SU is actually an outlier for me in this regard, I'd freely admit that if it was any other show I'd be a lot harsher about it) - recall that one of the biggest controversies re:SU shortly after the election was an episode that tried to shine a sympathetic light on a small-minded bigot (Uncle Andy), I know I for one didn't particularly take a liking to it.

Yup I think that about sums it up, they kinda mangled up the space opera trappings with the abusive family allegory going on. (Season 5 rushing things didn't help either, much as I liked stuff like the Pink Diamond backstory arc)

Lapis is basically a Bojack Horseman character - a character who due to the baggage from past relationship hurts and trauma finds it hard to place trust in others or to even do the right thing

Edited by Pachylad on Oct 30th 2019 at 11:14:23 PM

That's kind of a point in contention in general, not just the Diamonds. I've seen it argued that the only redemption arcs that really feel earned and make sense are Peridot and maybe Lapis (she wasn't really a villain per se but she did do some pretty bad shit).

I mean, at one point it stops being a writers thing and starts being a people thing. People for years didn't really think that much about Darth Vader redemption until recently when new trilogy started being a thing

That said, Trump IS probably the reason for why evil rulers being redeemed is considered in poor taste now. That or its really big coincidence that complains about fascism apologia started getting louder around time Trump got into power

Either way, I don't really see how the "Evil people must die and burn and suffer" or "PACIFISM SUCKS AND IS APOLOGIA" attitude is much better. I'm especially mad about latter :P

Edited by SpookyMask on Oct 30th 2019 at 5:46:48 PM

I agree. Also this reminds me of a post I saw about the ending of Avatar: The Last Airbender, where Aang doesn't kill the Big Bad as everyone expects him to (several people tell him the Big Bad is beyond reasoning with and cannot be stopped any other way), but finds a way to neutralize the guy while leaving him alive. The post in question interpreted it not just as consistent with Aang's pacifism, but as a giant "you said what me and my people believed in was worthless, well it ain't" to the Big Bad. Which is an interpretation I love.

Keep in mind said Big Bad does expressly not get redeemed, at all. He just gets left alive, powerless, which brings with it that other nutjobs can't make a martyr of him.

Edited by akanesarumara on Oct 30th 2019 at 4:51:21 PM

^To be fair though, I think Avatar's ending might have actually worked better if he managed to knock Ozai out without energy bending. Prisons for benders exist after all and energy bending kinda came out as last minute easy way of doing it

That said, I definitely am mad at people who are saying that "Aang should have been forced to kill Ozai because pacifism doesn't work"

Edited by SpookyMask on Oct 30th 2019 at 5:50:54 PM

Eh prisons for benders exist but can be escaped from, see the Red Lotus in Korra.

But I do agree with you about those kinds of people. It would have been a huge Character Derailment if Aang did kill Ozai.

To be fair though, how many people actually escape from prisons in real life?

Super hero comics have made people think that if villain is alive, they WILL escape.

...Doesn't that actually make politically unfortunate implications as well? Like portraying prisons like that sounds like endorsement for death penalty.

Edited by SpookyMask on Oct 30th 2019 at 5:56:09 PM

I think the main reason people objected to ATLA's ending is less because of the context of the show itself and more a general weariness of Thou Shalt Not Kill and the lengths people use to prop it and the hero up.

Because what happens a lot of the time is that the justifications they use are totally facile and hinge on complete false equivalences.

No, killing a mass murderer or serial killer does not make you as bad as them. Killing people in self-defense isn't morally wrong and does not make you as bad as the person who was trying to kill you. I could go on. It may not be ideal, but lethal force can be justifiable in certain circumstances. It doesn't make you evil. That's personally what bothers me.

The other problem is that a lot of the time, the writers try to put these characters in scenarios where they are presented with a choice to either kill someone out of a great necessity, or stick with their moral code and suffer the consequences. Except that nearly all the time, the protagonist finds some magical third way out that doesn't require them breaking their moral stance.

Of course, that's not bad in isolation, but I'm honestly kind of sick of it because to me it feels like narrative cowardice. Forcing a character to make a choice and suffer the consequences, to me, is far more interesting than them finding a convenient way out.

That's why, while you can argue the execution of the film all you want, I didn't have a problem with Superman killing Zod in Man of Steel. It forced the hero to make a choice and he had to live with it.

Yeah but under circumstances that absolutely no one saw coming (namely Zaheer getting Airbending powers and then busting out the other Red Lotus members). Most of the time, people only break out of prisons in the Avatar universe because someone on the outside is coming for them.

Precisely.

Edited by windleopard on Oct 30th 2019 at 9:03:45 AM

Yeah, the whole deal about Aang not wanting to kill Ozai just come off as strange.

Watch me destroying my country

I really liked ATLA's ending. I feel like similarly to what Ruroni Kenshin did with Shishio, it works as defeating the villain in line with the protagonist's philosophy (because killing the villain because of greater power wouldn't repudiate the villain's philosophy of might makes right).

Shame though that Legend of Korra decided to reframe removing bending as a horrific Fate Worse than Death and conversely presented torturous tailor made prisons as the morally better option.

On the topic of villain redemptions, specifically the idea of heroes who are The Atoner, it reminds me of Too Like The Lightning, which I have a very ambivalent feeling about for several reasons. The protagonist, Mycroft Canner, is the most notorious criminal in the utopian future, and the audience eventually learned that his crimes involved (major spoilers!!!) murdering several people in the most horrific, slow, and painful ways possible, including in some cases rape and cannibalism - both him eating parts of them while they were still alive and him forcing them to eat their own body parts. And doing this for what he believed were morally justified reasons.

The author has discussed this as being something of a deconstruction of characters like Himura Kenshin (the author, Ada Palmer is both a medievalist and an anime fan and scholar) who have dark pasts, but not ones that ever really make the audience have pause about rooting for them. I don't know if she's addressed this angle, but I also feel like Mycroft takes a fair amount of inspiration from various anime characters who are horrendously evil and then are treated as cool and amusing once they join the heroes.

Edited by Hodor2 on Oct 30th 2019 at 11:12:48 AM

Re: SU and the Diamonds as an allegory for an abusive family, I actually remember seeing a post arguing that the Diamonds' redemption worked for the poster as an abuse survivor themself because it felt like a fulfilment of a fantasy where the abusive parents are actually called out for what they did and they actually listen. And I think it mentioned that it helped that the Diamonds were abusive parents to Pink, not necessarily Steven since they're not his parents, and Steven serves as kind of an outside person stepping in to call them out and stop the abuse in that way... I think. This latter part I'm less sure if, it's been a while since I read the post, but I thought the former part was an interesting perspective.

But the making the Diamonds abusive parents and imperialist dictators may not have been the best idea. I'm mostly hoping for an episode or so with the Diamonds having to deal with a Gem who *hasn't* forgiven them with the lesson being just because you've changed doesn't mean the people you've hurt have to forgive you. Something like that. I dunno, that would be good enough for me, but I'm a bit overly forgiving I guess, maybe too much so, and I'm fine with redemptions even without a seemingly appropriate punishment for their actions because it just feels unnecessary if they've sincerely changed.

Anyway. I honestly liked ATLA's ending too? I mean, I guess the bending removal was a biiiit of an Ass Pull but I thought it was nice that Aang could keep the principles of his genocided people especially in the face of the leader of the nation that killed them all.

Edited by DeathsApprentice on Oct 30th 2019 at 12:41:52 PM

Trust you? The only person I can trust is myself.

If Avatar had introduced Spiritbending sooner and never really talked about the morality of killing Ozai, its conclusion likely wouldn't have been as controversial as it was. The problem with it is that Avatar decided to sit down and have a conversation about it. Aang is literally pulled out of the plot so that he can deliberate the morality of taking the life of an enemy soldier on the field of battle.

This deliberation is presented as Aang not wanting to kill Ozai because he simply has a moral objection against taking a life for any reason ever. Through the course of the debate, Aang chats with all of the myriad Past Avatar characters the show has introduced over its run-time, and each and every one of them tell him that he needs to stop Ozai by whatever means necessary and that he can't hold back because of hand-wringing over human life. Literally all of them say this! "Killing is always wrong, always," is the minority opinion in this discussion between Avatars.

The consensus is clear: do what needs to be done, there isn't another option. But Aang isn't really listening to any of it. Finally, Aang tries to cheat the system by chatting up Yangchen. She was an Air Nomad, so he's confident that she can tell him to do the thing he'd already decided he was going to do before all this happened. But she, too, tells Aang that even though the Air Nomads' philosophy is strictly against killing, it is morally repugnant for Aang to place his own personal hangups above the safety and wellbeing of the world he is charged with protecting. There is no other option.

This is a really weird scene, because Aang soundly loses the philosophical debate, even when he cherry-picks a conversation partner that he's convinced will take his side. The ultimate outcome of the debate is that Aang is just wrong, and that's that. It's a downright bizarre creative choice to have all of his spiritual advisors dogpile him about how shitty and self-centered his position is, given that the writers wholly intend for you to agree with Aang.

Aang ultimately prevails, not because he heeded the advice of his elders or because he had the stronger position after all, but because of a last-second deus ex machina introduced after he's already lost the morality argument. Aang stuck to his guns despite very well-reasoned arguments made by everybody about why he's wrong, and was rewarded for his stubborness by the universe spontaneously inventing a brand-new, never before heard of method for him to solve the plot.

If Spiritbending had existed before Aang had this conversation with the other Avatars and they were telling him to kill Ozai just 'cause, the scene would come across very differently. In fact, if Aang had just discovered Spiritbending without ever having this conversation with the Avatars and then used it to take down Ozai, nobody would have a problem with that.

But they make such a point out of how absolutely and completely wrong-headed Aang is being about this, and then go ahead and reward him by letting his explicitly wrong position prevail anyway.

The problem with Avatar's conclusion is not that Aang should have just killed Ozai. It's that the journey from "I don't want to kill Ozai" to "Spiritbending FTW!" is very poorly handled. Aang's part of the Sozin's Comet four-parter winds up making Spiritbending feel like a last-second cop-out on the complex moral debate that something as basic as "Murdering a defeated foe: should we?" didn't really need to be anyway.

It's fine if you don't want your kid hero to murder a dude. Fictional violence ends non-lethally all the time. Even without the Spiritbending, they could totally have ended the show with Ozai being put away in Firebender Jail or some shit, like what they had P'li in during Legend of Korra. But Bryke really wanted to make this a complex moral argument and wound up getting stomped on by their own Strawmen because they weren't really equipped to actually talk about this.

Edited by TobiasDrake on Oct 30th 2019 at 10:51:27 AM

My Tumblr. Currently liveblogging Haruhi Suzumiya and revisiting Danganronpa V3.

About SU and family:this is something a lot of sci fi, specially space opera struggle A LOT, because they are personal conflict expanded into a galactic scale, that is why Star wars focus on the skywalker drama with the fate of the galaxy as back drop and in fact is one of my complains about Rey no having family connection to them: she is just a normal girl who he plot forced into this huge drama between the space hobo(luke) not dealing with the space emo(Kylo), which I feel is somewhat unfair.

About trump:...well yeah, in any other show Trump would be the typical cartoon saturday villain who get defeated and mock every episode, he is to petty to get redemption but it wasnt important enough to be punished.....then he become president and everything goes to hell.

With Avatar happen a problem is pacifism through superior firepower: The character can maintain is pacifism because he is more powerful than the rest of the cast, getting in the paradoxical situation because is ability to beat the crap out of everything allow him to be a pacifist. So when deal with a situation were they cant bluster the solution by sheer force, the character start to packing it and ether he surrender or he cheat is way out, Superman in Man of Steel is the former and Avatar is the later.

If you ask me, a good example of pacifism is Trigun, at first we see Vash dealing with bad guys in his typical fashion of being over everyone, out smarting is enemies and finding way to end struggle without harming anyone, other times because the enemy of the week is not really that bad or have a change of heart and is talk about it, the show stay that way until episode 12(kinda half way of the show) were the first Gun ho(a squad of minion send by Knive, Vash brother who hate humanity) is introduced, a men who kill SEVERAL people and yet vash save him, the more episodes we see, the more we understand WHY pacifism matter so much to him beyond so wishy washy "I dont want people to get killed" and how much is push into is breaking point, with Vash humiliating him and in one episode just outright begging a guy to not kill the other.

This kinda culminate with Legato, a creepy ass son of bit with Mind powers, who push Vash into killing him because that would break him, it ends......well....look for yourself.

Edited by unknowing on Oct 30th 2019 at 1:57:10 PM

"My Name is Bolt, Bolt Crank and I dont care if you believe or not"

Yeah, that’s also my hang up with the ending of Avatar, Aang is supposed to put the well being of the world over his personal feelings, and Ozai is the sort of character that could do much harm even without his powers.

Hell, if this was about him not killing Ozai because he wants him to face a war crimes tribunal and bring closure to all the nations, that would have been fine. No, this is about Aang putting his moral code over the safety of the world, his friends and his loved ones.

I feel like a better way to end the story would have been that Aang kills Ozai and both fall of a cliff and into the sea due to exhaustion in the former’s case, you can then have Aang debating with Roku whether or not he should save himself now that he fulfilled his role and broke his code and have Roku convince him to not run away and face life with the consequences of his actions.

Edited by raziel365 on Oct 30th 2019 at 10:48:42 AM

Instead of focusing on relatives that divide us, maybe we should try to find the absolutes that tie us.

It's I think less that he is "allowed" to "be pacifist" just because the Avatar it supposed to be stronger than anyone. Remember when Zaheer got his powers and used them on the Earth Queen? Many thought "I knew it! The reason why Airbenders are so pacifistic is because they know if they aren't there's nobody to stop them!"

What I mean is... there is a difference between realizing your own overwhelming power (and declining to use it for this reason) and "being allowed the luxury of pacifism".

Zaheer is another ofender because Korran didnt want to deal with the earth queen, even if she was corrupt as hell so bad guys do the dirty job happen here.

"My Name is Bolt, Bolt Crank and I dont care if you believe or not"

Let's spare a moment for the poor townspeople during the chaos and looting that resulted from the Earth Queen's death too though. Earth Queen or no Earth Queen, the townspeople had it rough.

Edited by akanesarumara on Oct 30th 2019 at 7:23:19 PM

I'm just offended by all this anti pacifist sentiment

Like, Aang hasn't killed anyone else in war either, but because its Ozai, he needs to stop being pacifist because he is the avatar? Like even with the whole "with avatar comes great responsibility" thing, being avatar is type of responsibility you don't get to choose.

(that said, I agree its definitely case of flawed execution, just like its flawed as hell to use dictatorship for abusive family metaphor)

There is also that Korra isn't pacifist, but she isn't exactly stronger than Aang in combat or overwhelmingly powerful.

Edited by SpookyMask on Oct 30th 2019 at 9:16:22 PM

While i agree that Steven Universe messed up with the Diamonds, i also want to point out that Lily Peet ( whose video started this whole debate here now) herself is very pro-dictatorship (based on her statements and her planned fanfic story). Hell, this is where all her praise for Star Wars The Old Republic MMORPG (about which she talks in "Steven Universe is Garbage" video) comes from, since it allows you to play "benevolent dictator". So, she is not the one to talk about criticism, as she released several videos where she basically goes "you can't criticize something unless you made something, like a story.