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

Spawn, The Darkness, and Witchblade all count at least.

Ironically, in a Spawn Batman Crossover, Spawn thought Batman was the bigger asshole.

The Darkness's host, Jackie estacado, is the most like punisher, but he actually is very sympathetic, especially in gthe video games where its shown that The Darkness itself is willining to torment him despite being part of his powerset.

Witchblade has many hosts, but the most well known ones from the mainline comics and the Anime are also very much brutal but fair.

The Spawn/Batman crossover was written by Frank Miller, which helps explain why Batman acts like a dick in it.

That explains a lot.

You know, despite spawn often being parodied by being the poster child for Bad 90's anti-hero tropes, but when you look at his overall history, he tends to actually justify them in story pretty well, and its probably the reason why he's survived in pop culture compared to someone like Youngblood.

Jackie Escatado is at his Adaptation Distillation-est in the video game.

He's the anti-Punisher given he's a mobster not a guy who fights them.

From what little I read of the comics Spawn himself seemed mostly well-intentioned. He's brutal but he doesn't indiscriminately kill and genuinely wants to protect people. Unlike many of those edgy nineties anti-heroes the narrative overall tries to humanize him and give him sympathetic qualities (like his love for his ex-wife and her family), which I think is part of the reason why he was much more successful than most of the worst examples like Youngblood.

I watched the HBO series too and honestly I was surprised to find it was kind of good actually, it's edgy yes, but it has some legitimate heart and ambition and was very atmospheric.

That all being said while he is remembered more fondly than most characters from that era, he doesn't have much of a presence these days.

Edited by Draghinazzo on Jan 17th 2020 at 12:04:42 PM

Granted, Al Simmons did end up in Hell for a reason. And he is painfully aware of it.

Yeah, anti-heroes who are just edgy or brutal are pretty lame. Their real charm come out when they are frail or vulnerable.

Heck, even vanilla heroes who used to be "perfect" more or less learn a thing or two about that from them. Unfortunately, it also tends to manifest as them becoming more edgy or brutal instead of having moments of vulnerability.

Heroes who are just brutal are, you know, just thugs with better branding...

I remember reading all of Spawn and it did have some edgy narmy moments (specifically in earlier issues), where they tried to show off Spawn as "Super cool badass" in 90s style.

Which does remind me, that even the good antihero stories, for some reason consider it their duty to include edgy badass moments", that were considered badass in 1990s, when writers discovered that they can use blood, sex and gore in comics, so they decided to "fill" their stuff with it to show it off.

Granted I will said edgy have indeed become "dark things that I dont like" specially nowdays were the thing is ironcly liking something.

We've been over this before - edgy is a specific kind of over-the-top, shallow "darkness" that's meant to be shocking or provocative without any kind of depth to it. Yes, it's subjective, but that doesn't make it worthless as a descriptor. What does make it worthless is trying to flatten it out into "dark thing I don't like".

It's not like "edgy" is exclusively a bad thing. Doom Slayer is edgy, but he's one of gaming's most beloved icons. There are also a lot of Japanese anti-heroes that fit the '90s Anti-Hero criteria but are generally well liked.

On a sidenote: The '90s Anti-Hero page is still full of passive aggressive negativity that I hope gets fixed one day.

Looks like most of the examples could use a cleanup, at least. While I'm not opposed to snarky trope pages, even if that page is preserved as a timeline page (like Silver Age or whatever), I'm pretty sure characters like Black Rock Shooter and Yagami Light don't count.

BRS definitely counts both in aesthetic and methods, especially in the anime. BRS in general has a very "edgy" aesthetic.

Light, however, definitely does not qualify.

I agree it's not worthless as a descriptor, but I do often see it used to describe "dark thing I don't like" or not even that. I once saw someone call FFXV's character designs "edgy" just because Noctis and his friends all wore black outfits.

Also, there's an interesting element to Spawn that often goes unmentioned which is the fact that he's black. He's not really defined by his blackness in the stories, but it was a deliberate decision by Mcfarlane because he felt that whiteness was often assumed by most fans and creators with many superheroes just because they're covered head to toe in costumes and he wanted to do something different. He talked about this one spider-man story he never got do where spider-man saves a white man from a black criminal, and the white man thanks him by talking about the black man in a racist way. The punch line was spider-man getting grossed out and saying "What color do you think I am under this costume?".

Edited by Draghinazzo on Jan 18th 2020 at 10:27:00 AM

@Rynnec: Edgy, yes (or at the very least, gothicool, in a similar vein as "tacticool" expresses military trying-too-hard), but definitely not for Nineties Anti-Hero, which is the page I meant those two were listed on. Concerns about that particular trope page's tone aside, none of the qualifying... uh, qualities apply to BRS.

Buuut this is Politics in Media, not a trope cleanup thread, so. I admittedly don't read a lot of comics at all, but this is the first I've ever heard that Spawn is black - which proves Macfarlane's point, I guess, though mostly I avoided Spawn because I have no interest in his whole deal.

Part of the reason why is that he became Spawn by making a Deal with the Devil and he was resurrected as basically a corpse with a symbiotic demon thing that makes up his costume and gives him powers. His actual body is all burnt and deformed and you can't tell what this race is supposed to be from it. So you don't really see him pre-transformation that often even in the comics.

I think is a usless monkier that get used because is convinent for people.

Specially since the point of edgy as perjorative is not is darkness but is try hard nature, a somewhat agresive way to make things, after all the term can be use to thing that were on the edge or push bounderies, so what is edgy can varies A LOT.

Now BRS...yeah it is, not way around that, is not just the aesthetic of it which is pretty heavy, is how it use this pseudo magical girl who beat each other, the behivor of all chararter like yomi, light yagami...I dont know, he sound like your typical senien villian so I wont put it there.

On the Doom Slayer, we have to remember that the 2016 game and onwards gives him a characterization beyond just being a badass in a Show, Don't Tell manner.

The Doomslayer has a characterization, though that characterization is...rather edgy, and I'd call them an antihero, though not quite because they're bad.

I would say the appeal of the character is that they're a downright brutal Blood Knight edgelord with no social skills, yet simultaneously they're not apparently a bad person at all per se.

The Doom Slayer also has a sense of humour, which helps.

One way I've heard edgy described is that its supposed to be dark in shocking way Like you are supposed to be taken back(aka feel like designer/author is trying to be shocking) by how dark and edgy it is for it to be edgy

Edited by SpookyMask on Jan 20th 2020 at 11:10:43 AM

The thing about Doom Slayer is, while I agree with what others said about being edgy, he is still firmly on humanity's side. After waking up being trapped in a sarcophagus for who knows how damn long, he finds the UAC base on Mars in tatters after a demonic invasion. Then he learns that they've been exploiting hell for its resources! He especially has zero time for Dr. Samuel Hayden's crap (in an instance riding up the elevator, Hayden goes about "for the betterment of mankind" and DS looks at a corpse, then back at the intercomm). So yeah he really has no manners but when UAC did this to themselves, he's just trying to clean up their shit they smeared everywhere.

I am curious to see how his character evolves, develops or changes in Doom Eternal.

Classic Doomguy is decidedly less edgy but that's because he's truly a Flat Character meant to project yourself into.

Edited by Dhiruxide on Jan 20th 2020 at 11:11:54 AM

It helps that everyone we've seen Doom Slayer (literally) rip and tear until it is done is a demon.

He's at worst kind of a rude jerk to humans — note that one poor technician in that trailer whom he just drags via his keycard chain to use it.

Edited by M84 on Jan 20th 2020 at 6:01:19 PM

I don't know how much of a Flat Character Doom Guy truly is. Our trope page states "only the bare minimum of characteristics necessary to play their role in the story", and though his characterisation is pretty subtle, he has more than that, as the Jim Sterling video properly explains.

I was talking about classic Doomguy specifically in my sentence but the order I wrote implies I was talking about DS so I edited it, swapped the sentences to make more sense.