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

Evil Bureaucrats!!

Seriously. No one remember that they exist for a reason beyond obstructing the heroes.

You mentioned fun or engaging villain, not that they aren't CM or not. And of course, that's ignoring that there many Card-Carrying Villain CM with tons of fans.

Edited by KazuyaProta on Feb 16th 2019 at 2:29:22 PM

I purposefully use that as an example because it's one of the oldest and most common tropes in fiction. My point is that it's easy to manipulate the audience through those plot devices. Those plot devices are so comically incompetent or evil that, again, you can’t help but think the hero is in the right. Remember that the opposition is being completely worthless and incompetent doesn’t make our hero good or right by default. It is an important distinction to keep in mind. The opposition is being completely evil is more dicey, but I still think the same point can stand. This is all about the writers making the audience picking the same option as them and all those plot devices is ensuring there is really only one choice that we would take.

Edited by SteamKnight on Feb 17th 2019 at 2:36:50 AM

I talked about tendency of making CM utterly hateble, without making him fun or engaging. I just watched quite a lot of anime in the past and all that i remember from "Pure Evil" villain is them laughing and desribing their evil deeds and how evil they are for a LONG time (taking 3-8 minutes from 25 minute episode), with all plot and action stopping, just for the audience to listen to how evil and obnoxious they are.

Edited by VeryVileVillian on Feb 16th 2019 at 10:37:55 PM

To be honest, my problem with villains in manga, anime, and J-games is that they tend to try so hard to make me sympathize and cry for the villains while also having those very same villains do a lot of horrible and I mean horrible shit. And they attempt to do it most of the times by giving them some generic sad and dark past for an excuse and I say f*ck that. I am a firm believer in Freudian Excuse Is No Excuse.

Sometimes, they also give them a (for me) lame excuse for doing horrible shit like he is so bored for having no one that can challenge him to the limit. As for villains in shitty LN/WN, they aren't worth thinking or debating about most of the times. They are almost always just mere plot devices and not character.

I mentioned this over in my review of CHICAGO BY NIGHT 5E on the Onyx Path forums I really admired their write-up of a character named Brett Stryker. Brett Stryker being a extremely handsome but broken man who provided his vampire master with victims.

My response was, "It's an exceptionally well-written story that puts you in brett's shoes for a mile and at the end, doesn't pretend he's not still an enormous piece of shit."

Edited by CharlesPhipps on Feb 16th 2019 at 12:11:20 PM

YMMV, but Karmic Rape is a trope for a reason. I'm reminded of a scene in The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (different circumstances, since the victim was himself a rapist, and survives, but still...) which I don't remember being seen as too controversial, for example.

While I personally disapprove of revenge as a concept, it's not hard to see why some might find it appealing. And if it's considered okay to cheer when a guy gets eaten by dogs or a kid gets poisoned and chokes to death it honestly feels like a weird double standard imo.

I can still sort of see where you're coming from though. Rape is arguably a lot more "real" than other violent fates.

Well, I believe I said it before, but context means a lot here. The guy the villain was delivered to is a mass-murdering serial rapist, so the fact that the protagonist gave her to him without so much as a bang of conscience makes him look like a sociopath with a very self-serving sense of morality.

If that were the intention of the author, fine, Villain Protagonist and Sociopathic Hero are things that exist, and I've consumed plenty of works that use those tropes that I love.

But here the protag seems to be put under a pure heroic light, so it ends up looking, let's say, absolutely despicable and escapism for complete sociopaths.

Given that most of us are akward with torturing villains, well...

Now, I get your point. But rape is just too close and too personal. Is like the hero sending someone to a.torture chamber, it goes beyond just a painful villain death.

Dude is meant to be a Anti-Hero in a Gray-and-Black Morality situation. The villains are overwhelmingly worse.

That's why we're already having ossies with anti heroes. People is unable to meet a middle point The Paragon and The Unfettered

Sidenote but related: I'm writing a character as a soldier in a war/ war like setting and I'm trying to work with that middle point. Dude legit tries to avoid deaths but if he's threatened, he will not hesitate to killing enemies. And given his powers, things get ugly, He's no sadic and kills his enemies quickly...is just that they end with burned bodies. War Is Hell and he had no choice to doing it if he wants to survive.

No completely saintly (-un-ironically giving his religious motifs) but realistically, not different from what a regular soldier do in a war. Not even Anti-Hero.

Edited by KazuyaProta on Feb 16th 2019 at 7:32:57 AM

Rape is insidious in media in a sense murder isn't. I don't think the two are really comparable.

There's a whole rape culture built in society, but there is no "murder culture" (there's related phenomena, gun culture being the most prominent, but no "murder culture"). Most people are keenly aware that running a knife through someone will kill them And Thats Wrong, but a astoundingly high number of people have no grasp of consent. Killing someone (even if with unnecessary brutality) can be a reasonable course of action, but raping someone never is.

Murder and rape are not comparable.

A simpler answer for most is:

"I know family members and friends who have been raped. Not so much either who have been murdered."

Given some of the discussions I've been involved in I'm not entirely convinced of that, but fair enough.

....that wording is pretty damn offensive for people that had loved ones murdered.

Edited by KazuyaProta on Feb 16th 2019 at 8:58:28 AM

Given I have had friends murdered, you don't want to hear I have to say about that.

I think that we better should stop talking about this.

Edited by KazuyaProta on Feb 16th 2019 at 9:16:38 AM

Probably.

My bad.

But it is worth pointing out that with murder audience members can only have a secondary experience at most, the same is not true of rape. Sadly there are quite a few people in the world who have experienced rape or sexual assault.

So a story can have murder that needn't cause excessive trauma in audience members while the same isn't true of rape, so using rape to 'punish' a character is in a different league then merely killing them off.

Edited by Fourthspartan56 on Feb 16th 2019 at 10:26:01 AM

Quite the contrary, I will said must people dosent have that experience with rape ether, even woman can have misconception since must of them wont be rape.

I will said is simple: people can justify murder and even we do, if a par of KKK or neo nazis get shot, it will hardly get us a reaction, we can see the use of violence as justificy because it end a "bad light".

Rape is something akin to torture and I will said it cross the fourt wall in a way murder dosent, in a way is how it play with culture: we use rape to scare people into hating other and murder as way to regin control and feel catharsis.

To say my piece on Shield Hero, it definitely comes off like something a really creepy incel wrote.

To borrow a joke from Mother's Basement, it reads like each chapter was submitted under the working title of "My Manifesto".

I bet the author calls himself a Supreme Gentleman, and isn't actually a woman at all - believing as incels do that women "can get away with this" or something.

Just the whole way things go, the slavery, the rape, the conspicuous fact most of the men who are against Shield Dude are more conventionally handsome men aka "Chads"...

Author never said anything about their gender. Is unknown. Please, stop debating the unknow genre of a person and using it as a argument

And I don't think that the author is that class of incel. Given how he explicitly had "white knight" character types mocked for the narrative and defeated for the protagonist.

I am sorry, I didn't explain that better - on Incel Tears, there were a large number of the incels quoted who intended to make "Stacy" profiles and pseudonyms to catfish and "take advantage" of "female privilege".

That was what I thought of - the person who wrote this purposefully chose a certain sort of name so as to "catfish" / present themselves differently.

As far as opposing men, there's really not much else that needs to be said beyond that one of them is a handsome guy who says to believe what Meldy says at one point. Or to use a more modern term; "believe the woman." The exact sequence of events that ensue to Spear Bro also speak to vile incel revenge fantasies about humiliating and hurting Chad until he agrees with them.

The fact the main villain is a woman and a greater iteration of Meldy also lends credence to the "author is an incel" idea; the incels have an idea in their heads that all women are exactly the same, and beneficiaries of power and advantage. And in this story, Meldy is an incarnation of Medea, ergo, basically the same person. Or to use their terms, "Stacies are all the same".

If I had to guess the motive for this gross misogynistic screed, it'd be some idiotic incel's idea to try and "blackpill" nerds who would read it.

Edited by NickTheSwing on Feb 16th 2019 at 11:33:11 AM

To be fair most incels hate white knights.

I don't think the author is quite an incel though as we don't know what they are like as far as I have seen. And their gender doesn't matter as it'd still be a problematic work.

Also women can be incels too, they just don't call themselves incels as they aren't alouded in that cult.

Edited by Wispy on Feb 16th 2019 at 11:33:23 AM

I'm just going by the evidence that is right there. I don't need to directly see the author to know what they're like, when the story does the job so aptly well.

That's actually my point

The work isn't really a good indication. I have seen creators that were total assholes but their works were good, and I have seen creators that were decent folk but made problematic works.

Their is indeed a decent chance that your correct but I am with holding my judgement on the creator because for all we know they are just very ignorant on the subject matter and are not malicious about it.

My judgement of the work though is that's its boring trash that is damaging

Okay 1) none of this actions were framed as "SUPER AWESOME" and both of victims were SHOWN to be serial and mass murderers of innocents and rapists and 2) you can argue about necessety of murder, you can't argue about necessety of rape, like never.

None of this really helping to the fact that this kind of work makes incels/sexists/racists and ec. feel more empowered and grow a large fandoms, from where this "fans" would spread their toxic views on people in real life.

Edited by VeryVileVillian on Feb 16th 2019 at 10:44:04 PM