This isn't about the vilification of real-life revolutionaries or even characters that were from the start had any sort political context, but characters who were always meant as simple villains. For me the most obvious case is with the Decepticons and their leader Megatron. they were a toy series turned into an animated show where they were just evil for the sake of evil. It was good robots who would turn into fire trucks, ambulances, and taxis versus evil robots who turned into fighter jets and tanks. Sometime around the late 2000s, there was both a fandom and source material change to the origins of this faction, where they changed their origin to be moderately political, making Optimus and Megatron former friends and casting Megatron as someone born in the lower classes who became a revolutionary but went "too far" and caused a 4-million-year-long war which destroyed his planet
>>41745>Ummm akshually batman spent all his money to improve gotham and uhh he only invests in good things and uhhh gotham is also cursed to be forever a shithole uhhBatman is fascist/billioner who loves beating up poor people, makes comic fans absolutely seethe with anger. It’s such a popular criticism of the character that the comic books come up with bullshit reasons why he is good actually and why his programs to improve gotham don’t work. In the end it’s all because batman can never end, his story can never come to a finish and gotham can never truly imrpove or there won’t be anymore batman comics to produce.
>>41737They want to make the setting deeper and keep on mass producing the toys and comic books. So they added superficial “depth” to the characters and the story.
>What are your thoughts on portraying inherently evil, simple, fictional characters as revolutionarieBased
Making Megatron his people's Spartacus Gigabased
For
>>41747 >>41759>It's the least talked about of any superhero seriesI mean, yeah, because it ended, while others keep going. The second movie (the one with the joker) has basically secured its place in the broader cultural memory, but I'd agree the other two have largely faded
>>41760Nolan's evolution from "making an anti-OWS" movie with TDKR to basically making a movie about the depravity of the American state with Oppenheimer has been truly weird to behold. The fuck happened to that guy in the space of a decade
>>41762I always roll my eyes at this take. The peak of "edgy" genre deconstruction was the 90s/00s, it faded in the 10s in favor of the more squeecore-style shit. The stuff that's still doing it gets put on blast and overexposed precisely because it's kind of a novelty for reviving/continuing it
>>41764 (me)
Also, I do wish fans of genre fiction would understand that "playing a genre serious/straight" and "deconstruction" are not necessarily always the same thing. Just as a popular example MCU Civil War is a cape movie that tonally takes itself fairly seriously and it's far, far, *far* from a deconstruction
>>41767Yeah, basically this.
People think "deconstruction" is a catch-all for "any work of fiction that's in some sort of active meta dialogue with its own genre." Like for example you see weebs go "Evangelion is a mecha deconstruction" - well, okay, sure, it is certainly in dialogue with its own genre and does things that weren't common at the time in mainstream animation, such as the bizarre experimental interludes or the increasingly fourth-wall-breaking narrative that feels like a postmodern conspiracy novel. But the specific plot elements that people claim are "deconstructive" were already done long before it came out - hell,
Mobile Suit Gundam already did the "your YA protag would actually be a traumatized child soldier and kind of a little shit" thing all the way back in 1979
Point is fandom folks need to read more nonfiction
>>41758Honestly with the appeal to Caesarism in the second movie I'd say it was more of a Fascist work.
That said, to address the point that
>>41737 is making, I think a lot of writers want to make
interesting or compelling villains, but the problem is they might not feel capable of writing a character with personal charisma. So instead they go for charismatic motivations and portray them as "taking things too far" which ends up ticking off a lot of people.
There's a difference between someone with a compelling motive and someone who's personally compelling. I think Zenos from FFXIV might be personally the best example of this because his motivation is almost comically evil/insane: he's bored and he wants to have a fun fight at the end of the world. However his lines are written well enough and his voice actor provides enough gravitas that by the end of the expansion this outright sociopath quickly becomes one of your favorite characters.
But like I said, a lot of writers may feel unable to actually write someone who's personally compelling, so they give him a compelling cause while have him killing babies.
That aside, I'd also say that the worst thing Bioshock Infinite did is make Daisy Fitzroy try to kill a kid, then walked it back when people whined loud enough. It should have committed and in fact doubled down on it imo.
>>41737What about taking a real-life person who was not really revolutionary and making him a being of pure evil? Oda Nobunaga seems to be the best example
Many stories and portrayals depict Oda Nobunaga as a villain or demon bent on the conquest of Japan too
He appears frequently within fiction and continues to be portrayed in many other anime, manga, video games, and cinematic films. Many depictions show him as villainous or even demonic in nature, though some portray him in a more positive light.
the novel and anime series Yōtōden portrays Nobunaga as a literal demon in addition to a power-mad warlord
Nobunaga is portrayed as evil, villainous, bloodthirsty, and/or demonic in many video games such as Ninja Master's, Sengoku, Maplestory, Inindo: Way of the Ninja and Atlantica Online, and the video game series Onimusha, Samurai Warriors, Sengoku Basara (and its anime adaptation) and Soulcalibur.
prepare for cringe
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=29gpogX3yy8and make it double
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ixWP_B7wZpE >>41762The problem isn't "edgy deconstruction" itself which can gave a genre story an interesting twist. The problem is edgy deconstruction for it's own sake that doesn't work with the larger story.
Also, beyond rain's star wars I can't think of any other mainstream movie where that happens.
>>41771>the worst thing Bioshock Infinite did is make Daisy Fitzroy try to kill a kid, then walked it back when people whined loud enough. What's also bullshit is when main characters never make hard choices because the audience's self-insert, waifu or husbando might look bad.
>>41775>he thinks a movie from 2012 is somethingWait till you hear about Marvel
Cinematic Universe and Black Panther, where the protagonist is a
legitimately deposed king of a secretly advanced African country plans to usurp the throne back with the help of the CIA, to stop the new king's vision to bring the country out of isolationism and help other African free themselves from the yoke of their oppressors and start a global revolution. He even shares technology with the CIA, and helps them kill his fellow countrymen. What makes the new king bad? He's a king, expects to stay a king and is a misogynist.
>>41778>>41780I still find it utterly hilarious that the movie where an ‘advanced’ African kingdom:
>used spears and rhinos in warfare,>had a tribal society based on worshiping animal gods(including famous Indian gof hanyman)>one tribe literally chanted like fucking monkeysis somehow seen as anti racist in this day and age, Also the only reason they were so advanced was because of an alien space rock
>>41768>>41766It's the eternal dichotomy of superhero movies: treating them realistically is generally stupid, because the source material is pulpy commercialised garbage for children; but at the same time, they mostly only get interesting when you complicate the simplistic premises with the problems and limits of the real, adult world.
I actually liked Logan if only for the WMD level threat posed by a psychic superhero with dementia.
>>41781Technological determinism and teleology is retarded, actual historians and anthropologists don’t cop to it, what you’re engaging in is more or less literal western chauvinism where advancement = looking like the West
The spears still function as ranged weapons
The rhinos are carbon neutral transportation
The dirt roads are carbon negative and their infrastructure isn’t meant for wheeled transportation anyway
The West also largely worships a completely fanciful godhead and the Wakandans don’t seem very fundamentalist to begin with
You only saw the chanting as racist because at least subconsciously you made an association between Africans and monkeys
The criticism that the film is about a deposed monarch teaming up with the CIA to take down a revolutionary is mostly valid, but the “Advanced = Western Europe” one is pure bullshit.
>>41798>what you’re engaging in is more or less literal western chauvinism where advancement = looking like the West NTA but no, it's not. It's material dialectics, the depiction in the film is fundamentally impossible, you cannot have the capacity to build impossible space-ships and energy shields without massive industry to provide the qualitative and quantitative capacity to reproduce components necessary. Said industry cannot appear from scratch, as it must develop and improve, or utilize technologies and knowledge from other societies that already have gone through the process, like China and the USSR did during their 5 year industrialization plans. The film's depiction is retarded because we don't see real industry, we see a mine and some advanced technology, but where it or any other infrastructure (such as tall glass and metal buildings) originated from is a mystery. Also I find it ironic that you bring up the point that it's not supposed to be like the West… except for the city that looks just like any Western modern city, with sky-scrapers and grids and ports, just miniaturized. How is that not just taking Western culture and tech and superficially slapping an African spin onto it?
In comics and cartoons prior to the film, Wakanda is depicted as primarily agrarian with high technological development in some areas, but which they choose not to pursue further than necessary and with limited production because they wish to retain their isolated culture and way of life. Their development is not to the point where they have immense industrial capacity, but where they still make and utilize ore and produce it, which is actually more accurate to African pre-colonial development with Iron smelting and various African city states prior to Arabian and European colonization.
>spears still function as ranged weapons And the design is retarded, there's a reason that handguns developed in similar lines; regardless of culture, the human body has the same basic mechanics - limbs are more comfortable moving in certain directions and positions, and those spears do not hold well. shooting is clearly not meant to be the first use of the spear, and that's stupid because that means it's an ineffective weapon for ranged combat. The only reason nobody shot the Wakandan characters when they're outside their hidden country is because plot armor meant bad guys missed or only hit protected areas of their enemies. Remember, only Black Panther has the magic armor.
>rhinos are carbon neutral transportation Rhinos are not particularly smart, but are particularly aggressive and impossible to control, they are not cows which are docile unless provoked, they are jumpy as fuck. Also to play semantics they are not carbon-neutral, producing methane gas as part of their digestive tract. Finally, in the film these Wakandan fucks are flying around with technology that even Tony Stark doesn't have (built how?) and yet they wouldn't use something more efficient like a hover-craft of some kind, instead going for rhinos we barely see used (because it was so stupid). The rhinos aren't used to pull carts or
>their infrastructure isn’t meant for wheeled transportation anyway Something quite curious, because I have to wonder how the entire world developed the wheel (or in the case of the South Americans was in the process of doing so) but Wakanda didn't, and somehow it didn't need the infrastructure to develop its industry further (which includes transportability for supply lines) because I guess it was fun for the king to have them haul around stuff on foot apparently? The real answer is that the writers didn't think this through and wrote it as if the magical rock gave them their technology, meaning that it's not their advancement at all, and it was just gifted to them automatically without any of the struggles ANY society went through to develop. Also African cultures had wheeled transportation since ancient times, why the fuck wouldn't it materially improve like wheels did in the West or Asia?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_wheel_in_Africa?useskin=vector>Technological determinism This doesn't mean what you imply it to mean.
and by that you are insinuating technology is determined to develop in only a specific way, hence your reference to teleology>Teleology "ackchual historians" means 'Western liberal post-modernist historians/anthropologists'. People don't understand what teleology is; it is a philosophical concept that something has an end purpose or goal, and has a logical path to achieve it. If development and advancement is the
telos of a society, then the
logos is material improvement dictated by the rational self-interests of societal leadership, in this case the tribal leaders and king (sort of like the Czar and Duma).
>The West also largely worships a completely fanciful godhead and the Wakandans don’t seem very fundamentalist to begin with What the fuck does this mean? The society literally has a hierarchy with only blood of nobility and royalty able to challenge candidacy for the throne and regardless of the opinion of those serving, they will serve the king, which is why the guards slavishly fight for Killmonger despite not wanting him as king. It's even a plot point in some stories when Man-Ape took over and Black Panther's fight to return the throne involved him convincing the elders that it was time to let go of outdated tradition. The king is literally the embodiment of the Panther God and the right to rule is considered unassailable after the outdated trial by combat test. T'Challa in the movie is literally just refusing to accept his loss of the legitimate traditions of his own people. In older stories T'Challa usually wasn't the one that lost the challenge, it was his father, and either way it was usually because of under-handed trickery and interference.
>You only saw the chanting as racist because at least subconsciously you made an association between Africans and monkeys No, that's liberal projection. It's LITERALLY a monkey tribe. M'Baku is literally the "Man-Ape" and his tribe is the White Gorilla Cult.
>the “Advanced = Western Europe Not what is argued at all, you've literally projected this onto the other anon's post.
Finally Wakanda and the entire character of Black Panther is a figment of Western fiction. They are characters and stories created for a Western audience first and foremost, so when you see these things, you see what the other anon described, a racist, contradictive caricature, because the reality of what this is, is just utilizing surface aesthetics of commonly known African tribal traditions (mixed in from various completely different African tribes BTW) and mashing it with poorly thought out scifi aspects.
The most ironic thing is that the comics have addressed all these problems, pic rel. Wakanda is technological but while it has uniquely advanced areas, it is not impossibly futuristic while lacking industrialization. Its troops carry melee weapons that can double as ranged weapons, but also have vibranium powered guns. The cities resembler old African cities but more technological. Roads are made of smoothed stone, hover-craft are used for transport etc. So there is literally no excuse for the writers to make the movie so retardedly inconsistent other than performative liberal pandering.
>>41772The guy was a genius in both military and economic matters and saw people for their value rather than their birth status. If he hadn't been betrayed and assassinated it's pretty obvious he would have become Shogun himself.
He's only seen as a villain because of that whole burning 20,000 women and children thing.
>"Not one scroll, building, or rectory was left unscathed. At once young and old, men and women from around the mountain, were burnt asunder and left as ash on the earth. [Nobunaga] brought chaos to every corner… Monks, children, wise men, and saints, one by one were beheaded under Lord Nobunaga's assent…"This is from the Shinchoukouki by Nobunaga's own personal historian.
>>41839cartoon Optimus
>freedom is the right of all sentient beings bay optimus
>I'll rip out your optics! >>41822>>41811I think this is why people don't like Michael Bay's Prime. It's not that he kills. It's HOW he kills.
There's a difference between Optimums shooting a Decepticon that's trying to kill you dead and punching through the Fallen’s back and out his chest, holding the spark in front of his peeled face, and then crushes it. Then he says, “I rise. You fall.” Which is such an ominous line that I have no idea what kind of cocaine Bay was on to think that was a cool hero line instead of a borderline villain one.
It’s fucking bizarre, man. The Autobots are so fucking brutal (especially in the second and third ones) that it stops being action heroes beating the shit out of treacherous villains, into a bunch of hateful soldiers committing cartel-level executions and literal war crimes on their rival faction.
There’s a fucking scene in the third movie where the Autobots first come back after being “killed.” They first shoot down a Decepticon pilot, Optimus then appears and pumps his gun saying, “we’ll kill them all,” and then the Autobots proceed to LITERALLY tear apart the downed pilot limb from limb like a bunch of goddamn crazed maniacs.
>>41859Yeah, it's to the point where you have to wonder why the US government doesn't just kill them all off because the autobots aren't really much better than the decepticons.
>I rise. You fall. Isn't that the line he says after killing Nimoy's robot? I remember physically cringing at that part just from how cold blooded it was. It's been a minute, but weren't he and Optimus supposed to have been friends or allies or something at one point? And then he just murders him.
I guess it is a Michael Bay movie and you're supposed to shut your brain off completely and enjoy the boomy zoomies but did you have to make Optimus Prime a fucking murderer? Jesus.
>>41839Dude, the plot and writing of the Micheal Bay-era Transformers films is literally schizophrenic and it doesn't matter since big names like Optimus Prime and Bumblebee always survive each film anyways which is what matters to the (then) kid viewers at the time. I'm a Transformers fan and as soon as the first film came out back in 2007 all of the old-school G1 fans discarded it and were never interested in the entire Bayformers franchise. It's sole "fanbase" were kids who were solely interested in the action, nothing else.
No one actually follows the plot. Every movie literally contradicts the next one right after. People just want their dumb robots fighting each other with racial stereotypes jokes and subliminal pro-pedophillia propaganda mixed in (look up the age of consent scene in one of the Mark Wahlberg Transformers films lmaoooo). Oh and CCP shilling.
While I think Rian Johnson and J. J. Abrams are both hackfrauds, they are capable of writing the basic structure of a saga that is mid at best, stupid at most but I can at least comprehend it.
What writers did the Transformers people even have??? It's always "ancient Transformers-related threat resurfaces from 9 trillion years ago to enact Total Human/Autobot Death, now it's up to the guy from 'He Will Not Divide Us' or that guy who screamed the n-word five times alongside his plucky robot sidekicks and a hot bitch to help him save the day!" simple as'.
Not like that matters now since the new generation of Transformers film is going back to its lighter G1 roots and the last Bayformers did so badly they had to reboot it with the aforementioned.
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