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

Fair enough, you are correct and I concede.

Listen, from my side I have family that has been in the military: My father went to a militarized school to finish the equivalent of middle school, my uncle was a Commando who fought against Sendero Luminoso and nearly died for it, and my maternal grandfather was a sub-officer of the marine, hell I will probably assimilate to the air force once I get my degree.

Here's the thing, war scars us, most to those on the front but also the civilians who have to be in the field, and those scars never go away and will always haunt for the rest of your life. That doesn't mean one can't critize the war in on itself, nor if it was truly fought well or not, we have to consider however those criticisms tend to appear in hindsight or by people who are away enough to have another perspective.

It does require a bit of coldness to actually make a genuine criticism to the people who have risked life and limb following orders, but is a necessary one since, sometimes, you need the perspective of the civilian, the "weak", the "coward" to bring people back to reality. Being sound of mind is not something that should be dismissed since that means a person is more likely to have a more rational line of judgement.

Perhaps the greatest tragedy of Rambo is that he's a traumatized mess who got nothing in return for his loss of sanity; he went to hell in vain, following idiotic orders from irresponsible politicians and arrogant generals. Of course, it's no wonder that his speech mirros the ugly myth of being stabbed in the back that appeared in the defeated Germany of post-WWI since doing so is the easiest way to not reach the conclusion that the pain and trauma was all in vain; yet it was, and as bitter as that pill is, that should be what be enfasised lest you see the even worse consequences of clinging to said mindset.

Returning to Villain Redemption theme from before, i noticed an interesting detail and is it just me or nearly all (if not all) form of media tend to kinda pull the nastiest deeds of the villain, who supposed to be redeemed, into an Offscreen category? So that audience could simply pretend that those nasty crimes didn't happen or (in their minds) make another villain responsible for those deeds.

Its kind of funny when the shows don't do that. Vampire Diaries had Damon regularly killing innocent people on screen, enslaving female (and men) characters to be his slaves, and even killed some fan favorites but was still the romantic lead in the game.

Something similar happened in Once Upon a Time.

Is how fiction operate in general: if the public dosent mind then a chararter can redemp in any way it wans, so most bad BAD deeds only haven offscreen.

in a way, we the public are the true judge of a redemption.

Once Upon a Time had Regina repeatedly rape (and then murder) a man and the show pretty much quietly forgot about that so it could treat her like a poor misunderstood woobie.

Regina also murdered at least a dozen supporting characters by ripping their hearts out.

Once upon a time is in the idea there is not souch thing as moral horizon, and that bad people are bad because they dont want to turn good.

Is a premise that...dosent clash well with fandoms, aside of regina there is gold who after peter pan just swich from woobie to asshole depending of the season.

Meanwhile, Snow White kills Regina's mother Cora and this is enough to put a black spot of evil on her heart despite there being no alternative to stopping Cora and if anything it was her who caused the events of the entire series by being an abusive parent to Regina.

I think that moment was because snow white acept a deal with gold to do it? she kinda want to kill cora and have the intention to do it.

Found a video of Lily Peet, that i agree with kinda. She is as usual throws "sometimes we need to throw away our morals to do the right thing" (despite how much is sentence contradicts itself due to morals and right thing being connected to each other) but still i do agree that sometime violence is the solution (albeit it depends on what you consider as super violent and where is the limit):

I'm not going to watch a Lilly Orchard video, I assume she has more to say about the subject than just "sometimes we have to do violence even if we dislike violence"?

You'll know if you watch it yourself, dude.

There's an entire forum rule around not forcing people to go through links to other sites if they want to take part in the conversation, dude.

The rules say to summarize videos you post so that people who can't or won't watch them aren't left out of the discussion.

If this video is just "Sometimes violence is necessary." then that's fine, but I think it deserves a more comprehensive explanation of its points.

'd, but I'm prettier, so listen to me instead.

Edited by Parable on Feb 25th 2020 at 8:51:46 AM

Also more eloquent.

Well, if someone doesn't want to watch a video, Lily talks about the theme of forgiveness and redemption and how steven universe handled it badly (especially with Diamonds), due to wanting to tell a story about a "dysfunctional family", but also wanting to raise the stakes incredibly high, so they made them genocidal dictators too, resulting in a mess of a story.

Also she says how it is toxic, when shows teach you that you need to forgive EVERYONE (including abusive families and horrible people) no matter what or you are misguided person, who need to be taught to forgive. She also uses Family Guy as an example, asking why is it okay for Steven Universe to say that you need to stay with your abusive family, but it is atrocious for Family Guy to do so.

Also she talks about how sometimes situations demand you to use violence to save innocent lives.

In conclusion, she says that main problems with such things is that writers desperately want to raise their stakes super high, while wanting to tell stories with relatively "small scale" themes, resulting in at best very flawed plot.

Edited by VeryVileVillian on Feb 25th 2020 at 8:52:23 PM

I mean, that much I agree with. I made that same criticism back when SU concluded, that they made a mistake in trying to tell a story about an abusive family dynamic while also making those family members space dictators whose offscreen body count is probably massive.

Ok, sounds like the same old bugbears she tends to go on about then.

In short, sugar fall in one of the most typical sci fi thing ever: small plot that afect galaxys.

look star wars, the story of the skywalker...and the democracy I guess.

Or warhammer with the horus heresy, a family drama that result in everything going to shit for 10.000 years.

I think the problem is that writers want to have their cake and eat it as well when it comes to scales and relationships.

There's a certain point when the plot becomes bigger than the characters themselves, and the writers have to acknowledge that and properly address the proportions of the setting and how the characters have to react to that.

It's like Aang's hesitation to kill Ozai: on a small, "relatable" level we can sympathize with him and understand his point of view, killing is a traumatic thing and given Aang's age and background doing so is a major no-no; use the bigger picture however, which is what the previous Avatars did, and you realise that Aang is being incredibly selfish by putting his own spiritual and mental wellbeing over the lives of thousands of people, also keep in mind that fighting to kill is much easier than not to kill and Aang was going to hold himself back and jeopardize his fight with Ozai because he still had that mental block.

To sum things up, once you reach a certain scale point it's the characters who have to change and adapt to the setting and the story, not the inverse in which the characters remain "pure" while the story warps around them.

Edited by raziel365 on Feb 25th 2020 at 9:58:49 AM

Orchard made a recent video discussing the "Reylo" controversy and how the fandom's love for this particularly troubling ship revealed some very troubling things about them.

For example?

This was an issue in House where the doctors, for some reason, get an African dictator on their table for a life-saving surgery. He's portrayed as a Complete Monster and says to the face of one of the characters he's going to exterminate an ethnic minority when he gets back to his country. One of the doctors euthanizes him and makes it look like an accident.

His wife, one of the doctors, divorces him and says that he is a monster with no respect for human life.

Yeah, I get it's against the rules. I just feel the urge to point out the obvious solution. It's also the one that lends itself less to other people's interpretations.