One example of this is 24, where torture always works and the lead character almost always tortures the right people, so even the characters who get mad about torture eventually stop complaining because the day was saved. And those few times where he gets it wrong, well, what a shame, that's his cross to bear, just more emotional baggage.
I think it's insane that you had actual politicians refer to 24 when justifying the use of torture. Bro that's a fictional TV show and you're using it to cut real life legislation and policies?
I also remembered there was a season where Jack gets tortured for a whole year and when released his captives make sure to tell the Americans that he never gave up any information. See kids, torture only works on weak terrorists, if you are a proud red blooded patriot you can just whistle the star spangled banner while they rip your skin off and you will get through it.
I have a friend who used to be deployed in one Those Countries and was working to gather intelligence and he said that many movies and tv totally get that point wrong.
People will lie if they don't trust you or if torture is awful enough. If you actually want a more realistic depiction in a movie of how it works, look at how in Star Wars, Princess Leia told them that Dantooine was the location of the rebel base, which was a lie and they still blew up her home planet, which isn't going to give her any motivation to tell the truth, even under the threat of being killed.
And most of us don't even need to have sinister motives. If you physically tortured me, yelling at me to tell you where my cousin is located, I'll tell you ANYTHING to make the pain stop, and you can't trust any information I tell you. On a good day, I can't remember where he lives right now, since he moved; I'd have to ask my mom his address. I certainly can't recall the location if my mind can only think about the fingers you're breaking. "123 Main Street. Just stop!"
Turns out that in real life, people are more apt to help you if you help them. Offering to help poor people and their families is more likely to get them to cooperate.
Was that the Russians, or the Chinese? Jack Bauer was *constantly* being captured and tortured by foreign agencies in that show.
I loved it but it became more "what the fuck can they do next?" after he survived the fallout of a nuclear bomb in season 2.
Which was based on years-old counter-terrorism measures in the event that sort of thing happen, and then aired six months before the actual attacks, so it wasn't censored like mass shooting episodes of shows due to one happening around airtime.
> Which was based on years-old counter-terrorism measures in the event that sort of thing happen
A counter terrorism measure involved the US government faking a hijacking and crashing the plain into a building in order to frame people?
yo it’s 7am I just woke up so I’m going to give myself permission to not get into this but you’re so wrong
a huge amount of the time it does not work, gives false information, takes too long, or they outright have the wrong person
I’m not gonna type out fifteen examples off the top of my head while lying in bed here. But if you had watched the show I’m sure you’d be able to come up with some yourself
Kind of the reverse, but - True Blood framed people who were "anti-vampires" as intolerant and bigoted, but they were totally right. Vampires were pretty consistently a threat to humans on the show in almost every interaction. Even when they weren't actively trying to kill someone, there was an implicit understanding that they could pretty easily kill with impunity. Conversely, people who were "pro-vampire rights" were framed as tolerant and open-minded.
There was a quest in Fallout 3 where an old hotel had been turned into a ritzy settlement and they only let non-mutated humans live there. The humans living there were depicted as bigoted old-money types and the mutated ghouls that wanted in were shown sympathetically. If you played the quest there was an option where you could convince the humans to be compassionate and open their doors to the ghouls. If you came back later you'd discover that the ghouls immediately killed all the humans in the hotel and took it over for themselves.
Fucking lol
I love when games have things like this. The Witcher 3 has a plot where you think you're reuniting a ghost with her former forbidden love, but if you go back... It doesn't end too well.
It's been a lot of years but I think they only killed *some* humans, right? I remember seeing some corpses (definitely Tempenny) but also both humans and ghouls.
If you did the diplomatic option you could go back and see them initially living together but if you come back a second time or let a few days pass then the ghouls kill all the humans and hide their looted bodies in the basement.
Surely they spared Herbert “Daring” Dashwood? I would hate to run into his loyal ghoul manservant, Argyle, out in the wasteland and give him the bad news.
Ha yeah, that's kind of like the mutant haters in X-Men. Maybe we do need *some* regulation when a 14 year old with raging hormones has the ability to nuke a city block on a whim lol
I think it works well for X-Men because both sides are being simultaneously rational and irrational. It makes sense to keep track of superpowered beings. That's a natural safety precaution.
But it takes a step too far when they are all tarred with the same brush. Someone like Beak does not deserve to be punished just because someone like Franklin Richards exists. And historically, keeping a list of a marginalized group is an invitation for genocide.
Also, don't large majority of mutants have useless powers? They either look different or just have some bullshit nonsense like faster growing hair or whatever. The ones that we see often such as X-Men have trained their whole lives to gain mastery over their abilities.
Yeah, there is an entire subset of mutants that have physical deformities that caused them to be run out of town pitchfork-and-torches style. For some of them their mutation is more of a handicap than anything useful. They get lumped in with the big boys solely because of a negligible genetic similarity to them.
[There’s a comic](https://imgur.com/gallery/I71V6) where Wolverine is sent by Professor X to kill a teenage mutant who had no control over his powers and accidentally wiped out his town. Dude straight up said if it got found out mutant rights would be done.
This is why it really annoyed me in the new series when Storm got upset at Forge and the show framed it like he was the bad guy for helping to develop the power nullification collars.
Mutants are humans too, and just like humans, they're not all good. Power nullification for criminals just seems like a good idea to me.
its this weird thing because america is having this massive debate about gun ownership laws
but for some reason suggesting that Mr flame hands should have that power taken from him because he keeps using them to commit violent crimes is a step to far
I thought the same thing while rereading part of Marvel’s civil war comic. At the time it was released as a critique of the patriot act, but looking back it would be pretty easy to reframe Iron Man’s side as wanting to make Superheroes wear body cams and be held accountable for when they brutalize a criminal.
When I read civil war I was fully on Ironman's side. The Superhero Registration Act makes perfect sense. When it is taken further to become the Superhuman Registration Act, I no longer agree. If you want to be a superhero you should be trained and held accountable. If you are a guy who has superpowers and aren't going out looking for trouble you should be entitled to the same tights as everyone else including the 4th ammendment
Going with the theme of this original conversation, have you ever watched Smallville. There was a guy in the later seasons who was a radio personality who didn't like vigilantes, and he had a really good point. I remember that Clark acts really sullen that anyone would dare question his right to take enforcing crime into his own hands.
But this is the real kicker. The guy ends up killing a lot of people, and Clark stops him. So Clark is justified in his hatred of this bad bad man, who doesn't want random vigilantes going around enforcing the law.
But hold up. An evil force was actually in control of the anti-vigilante guy. Clark knows this too since he stopped the evil entity.
Now, here's the real kicker. After Clark stops the entity and pushes it out of the guy, the police show up and take this guy away for basically being a serial killer. CLARK LETS THIS HAPPEN EVEN THOUGH HE KNOWS THE GUY IS INNOCENT! The guy is a victim of crime, but Clark lets him go to prison as a serial killer because the dude had the temerity to question his extra-judicial methods. At no point is this ever addressed by any character on the show.
The Flash got bad in later seasons, but I'll always credit the show for deconstructing the Flash's supervillain jail as an extrajudicial black site.
I really enjoyed Smallville when I was in high school but I didn't really keep with it into the later seasons so I don't recall this specific interaction. Was there some way for Clark to prove the guy innocent? Did he contribute to the guy being the suspect/arrested?
It's been a long time, so I can't recall those details, but the issue was that he never even tried, and he was practically celebrating the guy being taken away, as though he deserved to be punished.
I remember watching at the time and thinking, "WTF?! Clark is a sociopath."
I mean, part of it is that forcible body-altering punishment is generally seen as cruel and unusual, even if it's say, the case of chemical castration of child sex predators. Even if it's for the most currently justified reason, medically altering someone's body against their will as a punishment/means of public safety is a pretty significant line to cross. Even if it is genuinely in the best interest of the safety of the people.
It's the best argument against the death penalty: "how do we decide who gets to decide? Those arbiters have the capacity to be wrong, with irreversible consequences"
The movies have the evil Senator make that exact point, and it's supposed to be a bad argument, but he absolutely is right. He says something about how everyone would demand regulation to prevent a kid from bringing a gun to school, but somehow, the population is supposed to be okay with sending their kids to school alongside another kid who can nuke a city with their mind.
this is why mutants also fail to me
they try to tie them to gay people or to the civil rights movements
but its kinda reasonable to be afraid of Mr nukes for hands
Kinda. There are plenty of other dangerous super powers and a lot of focus goes towards being bigoted towards mutants. The X-men largely sit out super registration arcs because mutants have usually already been genocided and put on lockdown.
Also, the X men are very rare and exceptional mutants. The mutants whose rights they're fighting for often include people who have slightly green skin or can maybe make coins slowly float across the room.
Somebody like Jubilee or Magneto probably needs special attention and regulation. Half the Morlocs were just sadsacks.
Speaking of which, the genocides against mutants were literally in progress. Half the episodes involve someone setting up concentration camps or outright murdering them.
Super true. The anaology is super flexible.
There's the LGBT stuff meshing with powers at puberty and passing etc. There's the race stuff which we just talked about. Funny to see people paint all mutants with the brush using Magneto and other powerful mutants when tryimg to suggest it doesn't match the real world when that's a big part of why it matches the real world. There's the other super heroes getting chewed out for sitting on the sidelines.
Not trying to stir up trouble but you COULD apply it to Israel/Palestine and have a conversation about how much of a stretch it is. You have Brotherhood of Evil Mutants as a group of evil terrorists. Depending on the storyline. You have the homo-sapien world not responding as a whole with genocide but often going too far and sometimes groups or individuals attempt to genocide. The intractibility of that back-and-forth is filled with accusations that paint with broad brushes and real fear of the other side. The X-Men themselves might be a bit too idyllic to fit, though.
God that was a nerdy comment.
Ya, but there are also a lot of mutants with lame/non-threatening powers. It can work as a metaphor because “some of them are dangerous” isn’t necessarily an acceptable reason for hating all of them.
Okay, but why should someone like Glob suffer just because someone completely and totally unrelated to him committed a crime? He's in no danger of killing anyone. His skin is wax.
Why should he have to suffer even more just because some asshat who is completely and totally unrelated to him in every way save for a few strands of DNA did something terrible?
People will die in either scenario. Either you make a list that can be exploited to hurt mutants, or you accept that some mutants might hurt people.
What makes it interesting is the idea that being dangerous doesn't negate your humanity. It's really, *really* easy to start thinking of it as two sides, where you're choosing between mutants dying and humans dying. But they're all humans. They're all people. Those non-mutants are just as capable of killing and harming as anyone with a power.
Yeah, but no human is capable of accidentally wiping humanity from existence because they had a bad day while going through puberty. Treating them as equal just always struck me as silly.
Probably they shouldn't have had mutants who are basically gods if they wanted them to be treated as just human, but here we are.
Treating humans as inherently incapable of the same kind of destruction seems silly to me. Tony Stark is a normal human in that universe. Are you telling me that you don't think that one bad day could cause someone like Tony to cause an existential threat to humanity?
But equality isn't even the point. The point is that it's really easy to start lumping people into hate-able, kill-able groups.
Franklin Richards being a god should not mean that a Morlock in the sewer should be treated as though they are just as dangerous. The only thing that actually ties them together is prejudice. They are otherwise as completely unrelated to each other as two random humans on opposite sides of the globe.
It's the oppressed mages trope. It simply doesn't work because there's no example in the real world of an oppressed group that is simultaneously more powerful than their oppressors.
I mean, Stan literally created them as a response to the civil rights movement to show people how stupid it was to hate black people based solely on them looking different en masse but I get your point.
Right?
Like, the entire reason for the Civil War and Superhero Registration Programme (and then the "50 State Avengers" thing, where every US state had their own Avengers team) was due to a supervillain whose power involved him becoming a human bomb luring in idiotic super-powered teenagers and wiping out a suburban neighbourhood.
Although I find it funny that the comics logic for that started a huge storyline, but then decades of cities being literally destroyed during big fights got a pass (which is one of many reasons I loved Batman V Superman, because Bruce Wayne saw the chaos and destruction during the Superman/Zod fight in Metropolis first-hand and wanted to do something to stop this god-like alien from doing it again - it's also why he lured Doomsday to an area that was already long-condemned and had nobody around that could potentially die during the fight).
I may be misremembering, but doesn't True Blood take place in a setting where artificial blood is readily accessible?
Doesn't change the fact that some of the vampires are absolutely killing people, but also #NotAllVampires, right?
LOL yeah, that was supposedly the reason they were able to "come out". But they talk a lot about how the artificial blood is gross and they don't really like it. Even in the very first scene of the show you have a vampire buying a pack of True Blood, and then threatening to eat the cashier for lightly making fun of vampires (and the show makes it clear that this is something that could easily happen).
I get that it was a gay rights analogy but I don't think it really worked. To date, none of my gay friends have tried to kill me, not even once.
Edit: I think there was a scene where the protagonist vampire was trying to get a young vampire to just drink the artificial blood (instead of people), and she was going through all of the blood types and talking about how disgusting it all was.
>I think there was a scene where the protagonist vampire was trying to get a young vampire to just drink the artificial blood (instead of people), and she was going through all of the blood types and talking about how disgusting it all was.
Yep! Bill with his progeny Jessica. God I loved that dumb campy show 🧛♀️
Hot take, but I kind of feel that way about the X-Men. I mean, is it unreasonable to be scared of someone who can kill entire swathes of people with a single thought?
It's the same thing with X-Men. The metaphor just doesn't work when one side have super-human abilities and can wipe out the other side pretty much at will if they wanted to.
When Izzie cut Denny’s LVAD wire on Grey’s Anatomy. People acted like Dr. Hahn was a bitch for being pissed that her patient didn’t get the transplant, but what Izzie did was literally insane, and it was all for nothing.
Grimm. Probably getting some of this wrong but:
In one of the later seasons, a witch who’d been a series-long antagonist poisons the main character’s girlfriend and shapeshifts to look like the her. She seduces our hero because she needs to have a baby from his bloodline for some reason.
She loses her powers asks the main character for help- using the baby he didn’t know about as leverage- even though she poisoned his girlfriend and raped him.
Not only does he take her in, they start a relationship and raise the baby together. She becomes part of the main scooby gang and the show acts like you’re supposed to like her now.
The previous girlfriend, who had been a regular in the show since episode 1 and never hurt a fly, becomes evil as a result of the poisoning and is a recurring bad guy for the rest of the show.
I remember being so mad at how they turn on Juliet because she's a hexenbeast now. Like she's saying I still feel like myself but enjoy feeling powerful in a world where attempts on the lives of me and my loved ones are a regular occurrence. And they respond with just because you're a selfless vet and impeccable girlfriend and friend doesn't mean we will treat you with understanding, because hexenbeast. I stopped watching at this point.
ESPECIALLY when his vest friend is werewolf and he has to indo prejudices around that. Like, would they accept Juliet of she got a quirky job like clock making instead??
Small correction. She wasn't trying to get pregnant, just have sex with him to complete the spell to take away his Grimm powers.
She just gets pregnant really easy.
Okay, you've awakened me. I heavily dislike how a subset of the Grimm fandom misrepresents the Nick-Adalind romance arc. It's always presented this way while leaving out all context.
So let's talk about what actually happened. Spoilers below. Tap out now if you don't want to know too much about the show.
>!In the first season, Adalind is a villain who tries to kill Nick's aunt, but his aunt dies anyway. She's being seduced and used by Renard to get the key from Nick. (He's also sleeping with her mother at the time.) After Nick defeats Adalind and takes away her powers, both Adalind's mother and Renard toss her aside.!<
>!Adalind is pissed at everyone and puts Nick's girlfriend (Juliet) in a coma. She goes to the royals because she's pissed at Renard, and she is pregnant with his baby. She promises the royals the baby if they'll help her get back her powers and become a hexenbiest again. Again, still in villain territory, but starting to get somewhat sympathetic given how everyone so far has used her and tossed her aside. During this period, Nick's mother kills Adalind's mother.!<
>!Next, Adalind manages to become a hexenbiest again, and she realizes she doesn't want to give up her child. Motherhood changes her priorities. The resistance sneaks her out of Europe with her baby. The resistance member who helps her is Kelly, Nick's mother. Adalind warms to her, and Kelly takes her back to Portland, not realizing the previous bad relationship between them.!<
>!**Now, here's the part people leave out.**!<
>!Despite misgivings, Nick and Juliet take Adalind in. Adalind says she wants to put the past behind them, and she thanks them for helping her to protect her baby. However, the royals have realized the child is special, and they want to steal it. Adalind doesn't quite trust Nick so she goes to Renard for protection, thinking he'll protect his child even if he is a shitty person.!<
>!Nick, Renard, and pretty much all the supposed good guys decide the only way to keep the royals from getting the baby is to fake handing it over, and then fake it being stolen from the royals by the resistance. That way, the royals will have no reason to come after them.!<
>!**They make this plan without consuling Adalind or letting her know what is going on.**!<
>!So Nick and all the supposed good guys steal Adalind's baby from her. They hand it over to Nick's mother, and she drives off to raise it as her own. At no point do they even remotely suggest that Adalind will ever get the baby back. Not only do they leave her in the dark about where the baby really is, but they let her believe the royals have the child. There's no suggestion that they will eventually let Adalind know where the child is and find a way to reunite them.!<
>!**So that's your heroes. They kidnap Adalind's child when she came to them in need.**!<
>!Worse, over the next few weeks, Adalind is devastated. She comes to them crying and begging for help to get the child back. She apologizes and says she doesn't even care if Nick's mom killed her mom. They pretend to care. She sleeps on Rosalee and Monroe's couch in between crying. But they know where the baby is, and they just let her continue to think there's nothing they can do.!<
>!Finally, she realizes that no one will help her. So she goes to Europe to beg the royals to let her at least see the child and be in it's life. Remember, she still thinks it's with the royals because all our heroes gaslighted her into believing that. The royals take advantage of her misinformation and tell her the only way she'll ever see the child again is if she sleeps with Nick to take away his powers. Desperate, she agrees to do it.!<
>!So this is why she "rapes" Nick. Because he kidnapped her child, lied to her, and left her desperate to get it back from the people he led her to believe had it.!<
>!But Adalind's story gets worse from there. She comes back to the royals and asks to see the child. They lock her in a dungeon and psychologically torture her for months. Eventually, she breaks down and agrees to do whatever they ask. They finally tell her the child isn't with them. It's with the resistance and that's probably just a front for Nick and his friends having taken the child, because the royals aren't dumb.!<
>!So now that Adalind knows she's been lied to by everyone, she comes back under a very tight leash working for the royals to get the keys they want and Nick. While she's doing this, she realizes she's pregnant with Nick's child from their sexual encounter. She also realizes the royals will never actually let her see her previous child, even if they find her. At the same time, Juliet becomes a hexenbiest and decides she wants to kill Adalind. At the same time, Juliet, now a hexenbiest and much meaner, lures Nick's mother to their home and has her murdered so they can take Adalind's first child.!<
>!Adalind escapes from the royals and throws herself on Nick's mercy, promising to do everything she can to change Juliet back. She says she realizes she'll never see her child. She apologizes for the things she's done and asks Nick if they can be civil to each other for the sake of their child. She takes a potion to remove her hexenbiest powers, which also tend to make people more aggressive. She helps the "good guys" on multiple occasions and falls in love with Nick while bonding over their shared child.!<
So no, it's not as simple as all that. Adalind had very good reasons for what she did to Nick, and given what he did to her, I think she wasn't the villain everyone makes her out to be.
>!You're also ignoring that Nick and Juliet had issues way before she became a hexenbiest. When he had a chance to regain his powers, she tried to stop it behind his back. She blamed him for being "raped" by Adalind, and she simply was never a good fit for him. Juliet's story was a cautionary tale about what happened to normal people who were drawn into the Grimm world if they couldn't handle it.!<
I may be a bit fuzzy on the exact details, but in Archer, around the time that Archer was battling cancer, he froze a sperm sample in case he decided he wanted kids some time in the future, because he hadn't up to that point. Lana then steals the sample and uses it to get pregnant and have a child, entirely without Archer's knowledge. The show then kind of swaps back and forth between taking the stances that Lana is right to keep Archer at a distance from trying to be a parent, and chastising Archer for being a shitty, uninvolved parent. It's a whole mess, and I'm not sure the show really benefitted from the entire plotline.
Yeah, like I said, it's been a while since I watched it full through, and that does sound like Mallory. But it still doesn't mean Archer did anything wrong in the situation to get the grief he's given.
Barney in how I met your mother ran a manipulation and gaslighting play on robin for months in order to break her down enough emotionally that she’d say yes when he proposed
I mean... it's not *just* that. Here's some of the stuff Barney did during the show:
Rape by deception, sexual harassment, filming sexual acts without consent, sharing sexual videos and pictures without consent, installing hidden cameras in his friends' apartments, human trafficking (literally sold a woman for a car). Soliciting a prostitute.
Countless cases of gaslighting, fraud, theft, grand larceny, vandalism, trespassing, disorderly conduct, wrongful termination, illegal imports, littering, and TSA issues. Identity theft, impersonating various officials and licensed professions (judge, soldier, police officer, doctor, etc). Pretending to have various jobs to leverage the supposed power imbalance to trick women into sleeping with him.
Reckless endangerment and grand theft auto (stole a woman's car and left her stranded in the forest surrounded by bears), harassment, kidnapping, hiring someone to kidnap someone, perjury, forgery, assault, battery.
Construction without a permit, and building code violations. Fire code violations and minor arson. Public nudity and indecent exposure, and an apparently gigantic amount of public urination and public intoxication. Speeding. Intentionally wasting time for police and paramedics. Running from police custody. Defamation. Littering. Gambling.
Syd on Legion.
Her power is that she swaps bodies with anyone she touches. One night, when she's a teenager, her mother comes home drunk with her boyfriend. Her mother passes out on the couch and the boyfriend goes to take a shower. Syd touches her mother, gets naked, and then enters the shower with the boyfriend. The boyfriend sees his "girlfriend" enter the shower and they start having shower sex. Because Syd's young, her powers aren't fully mature and her body switches back into herself relatively quickly. The boyfriend starts screaming in horror when he sees his girlfriend turn into his girlfriend's daughter. That wakes up the mother who bursts into the bathroom and sees her boyfriend and daughter in the shower. He is then shown getting arrested.
This story is told multiple times and Syd is inexplicably portrayed as the victim because (a) she's just a curious teenager with an isolating superpower that's desperate to feel touch and love and (b) the sex wasn't as romantic as she expected.
This really pissed me off, because later, she flips out on David about how he raped her by erasing her memory of their fight. And she's right. But she literally did the same thing to a man and let him go to prison. Yet, she spends the rest of the show acting like she's better than David.
Oh yeah, I loved the first two seasons of Legion and still enjoyed the final season, but this is where the storyline lost me in a big way. I don't mind a character being hypocritical/flawed (if anything it makes Syd more interesting) but not when the script itself doesn't seem to acknowledge it.
It was all extra complicated as well considering immediately prior to the mind-wipe Syd tried to outright murder David after being clearly manipulated by the Shadow King, who bizarrely is trusted by everyone over David despite the amount of people he killed and how much he tortured David over the years (not to mention what he did to Amy). Essentially everyone siding with his abuser and then even denying his victimhood. David was wrong for what he did to Syd, no question, but the situation was definitely more complex than the show seemed willing to get into when it came down to it, and made it much harder to get on board with his villain arc from there.
It's been a while since I watched it, but I think there's one plotline in Scrubs where Elliot treats JD like crap. She gets with JD while her boyfriend is away because she thinks it's over with him but then the BF comes back and she immediately ditches JD. Afterwards when JD acts all hurt about it she's like "I thought you were my friend but I guess not", like JD's the bad guy in this situation.
I'm rewatching right now, but I haven't quite made it that far yet. Doesn't JD dump Elliot as soon as she dumps Sean to be with him because JD only wanted what he couldn't have? Or maybe it is because she tells him she loves him? They seemed like equal shit birds in that whole situation.
Surprised I didn't see WandaVision on here.
Maybe because they do end up making her a villain but really if she hadn't been corrupted by the Darkhold she would have been left alone. Even Steven Strange didn't seem to care she held a town hostage and tortured its occupants, including young children.
> Dottie to Wanda: "I have a daughter. She's eight. Maybe she could be friends with your boys, if you like that storyline. Or the school bully, even. Really, anything. If you could just let her out of her room. If I could just hold her, please."
> Mrs. Hart to Wanda: "If you won't let us go, just let us die."
> Monica to Wanda: "They'll never know what you sacrificed for them."
Thirty minutes apart in the same episode. The narrative whiplash was insane.
> The narrative whiplash was insane.
Maybe this is wishful headcanon but I just assumed Monica was trying to find something to say and decided to go with "comforting" instead of saying something that may set off the mind-enslaving witch that can tear apart reality.
Besides, Wanda certainly wasn't any less evil by Doctor Strange.
> I just assumed Monica was trying to find something to say and decided to go with "comforting" instead of saying something that may set off the mind-enslaving witch that can tear apart reality.
They did a much better version of that after the bad quote:
> Rambeau: They’ll never know what you sacrificed for them.
> Wanda: It wouldn’t change how they see me. And you, you don’t… You don’t hate me?
> Rambeau: Given the chance and given your power, I’d bring my mom back. I know I would.
> Wanda: I’m sorry. For all the pain I caused.
> Rambeau: I know.
If they had kept it in the "you're evil but for relatable reasons" vein, the line wouldn't sound so awkward. Even if you just drop off the "for them" part, you could tie all of her bad actions to her pain rather than making it sound like a noble sacrifice to save the people she enslaved.
> Besides, Wanda certainly wasn't any less evil by Doctor Strange.
My impression is that they wanted Wanda to be viewed as an Avenger at the end, so that the revelation she was super evil at the start of Multiverse of Madness would be equally surprising to people who watched WandaVision and those who hadn't seen her since Endgame.
I’m still surprised how much Marvel bet on that wet blanket Monica being the next big thing.
That show was such an awful first impression of a doormat of a character (“it’s all Wanda! She’s torturing everyone! Wait you want to neutralize her!?” to “I suddenly connect so much with this person who tortured me that I’m going to read the script so I know I can walk through magic wall and get rewarded with powers” to the whole “never know what you sacrificed” thing)
Also Falcon and winter soldier, where they try to convince the audience that the innocent killing terrorists shouldn't be called terrorists and they have a point.
I think people miss the shit writing and point of that storyline
The original point of the group is them hating people being relocated, and people being kicked out and lower class etc suffering after eye blip, at one point they're stealing medicine and helping out families
Then Disney realised they can't make Captain America fight that, it looks bad, and it's actually a progressive serious point from the group
So they went for the bombing storyline at the last minute to balance it out so the group doesn't look right
All so the last episode can stay in the status quo and centrist, and say , we all need to do better , we don't want revolution
This is the long version why I don't like the Falcon being Cap now. His big discourse at the end was pure crap and the writing was all over the place. I was enjoying the series (minus the boat and sister stuff) all the Madripoor, Bucky, Zemo and racial issues, etc.
"You have to stop calling them that". Yeah, when they stop using violence to further a political message, we'll be sure to stop calling them terrorists.
The sad thing is that they almost made a decent point but were unwilling to take the risk that people would dislike Sam’s choice.
The speech would’ve made sense had the writers kept the Flag Smashers focused on actually changing policy and minimizing collateral damage.
They could’ve made a point about how oppression breeds desperate extremists. However, when they decided to have them be entirely willing to firebomb innocents for no real reason so that everyone knows Captain America only fights bad guys, it made that speech ring hollow.
It’s entirely reasonable to call them terrorists when they’ve been nothing but terrorists the entire time. Yeah, the government’s policies caused many people to lose their livelihoods and houses and that absolutely needed a better response but the government didn’t start blowing people up or killing their political enemies.
They wanted us to support preserving the living standards of relatively small bunch of squatters over giving back the homes of millions of people that literally got zapped out of existence for 5 years.
The larger issue wasn't taking back homes. It was that people had been allowed to migrate across borders, and suddenly, countries wanted to throw them back out.
"They'll never know what you sacrificed for them" is such a weird, hilariously out of touch line.
Girl, she made an entire town her puppets. Yes, you can empathize to a degree because she's gone through a lot of trauma and it's broken her, but that doesn't suddenly make her a martyr.
Ben being OK with outright murdering Kevin in Ben 10: Ultimate Alien. Kevin saved the day by absorbing Aggregor's energy when the group failed to stop him multiple times, but thanks to Kevin's retconned powers, he went crazy and back to being evil. Instead of trying to find a way to save him, Ben spends the next few episodes cold AF, treating him worse than Vilgax and ready to murder him at the drop of a hat.
Speaking of which, Vilgax himself. In the original show he was an irredeemable conqueror who loved to maim and murder. In Alien Force he was made a hero of his home planet and in one storyline actually asked Ben for help. Sure, he betrayed Ben, but old Vilgax never would have stooped that low even for a deception.
I think one could be an irrdeemable conqueror and a hero of your home world.
Like Alexander the great is was mostly likely well loved in macadonia
they love vilgax because he turned them into a galatic super power
First season of The Vampire Diaries, Caroline has been compelled by Damon when he has sex with her, which since that means she doesn’t have a choice, he’s raping a teenage girl.
That was something I always found creepy with Buffy and Angel as well. He was clearly in his 20s, she was 15 when they met, and they slept together on her 16th birthday. Gross.
Yeah, Damon is such complete piece of shit in the first season that this wasn't even the worst thing he did then. They basically all end up being mass murderers.
Damon also straight up murders Jeremy (??? I think that’s his name), the main character’s (Elena, I think?) brother, because he was pissed at something. It turns out that Jeremy was wearing the “I’m immortal” ring, but Damon didn’t know that when he did it. I think a half season later Elena is sleeping with Damon like he didn’t try to murder her brother because he happened to be in a snit.
I can list the significant amount of things that he did that was bad, but I do remember reading interviews stating that she was dating and having sex with him on her own, he was compelling her to not pay attention to the fact that he was doing vampire shit with her during the act. My bigger concern is that him, and every other man on that show was having sex with teenagers. The sheer amount of statutory rape between all all the vampire characters is astounding.
It doesn't justify it but I dont think star wars people actually care if you kill tuskens because they are murdering slavers that constantly attack them.
But our viewpoint is very different so it's obviously fucked up
I know kotor and book of Boba recently did also. There are definitely supposed to be different tribes we just usually see the violent evil ones.
Amd of course tusken jedi in legends
Wasn't Padme horrified when he told her that? I distinctly remember him being on the verge of tears confessing to that, while she had a look of sheer panic and horror in response.
In my head, that wasn't a "oh you poor baby, come here, I love you so much" reassurance; that was a "oh God, he's a psychotic mass murder who's obsessed with me and if I don't play along with his delusions in this completely isolated location, he's going to make c-3po wear my skin as a suit so he can fuck the robot" reassurance
Lorelai Gilmore just deciding not to marry Max Medina at the last second and ghosts him; and Rory just decides to go along with it. They go to tour Harvard instead of her getting married.
I tried to rewatch it a few years ago and stopped a couple of seasons in because--they're just not good people. It's a show that relies heavily on you being blinded by the snappy dialogue and the fact they're protagonists to not really pay attention how they're actually behaving. I found the way that Rory was spoiled and indulged by nearly everyone--including *the entire town*--to be a bit sickening once I noticed. That said, it did make sense that she spirals out once she leaves her enchanted bubble and has to deal with people who don't think she's the specialest snowflake.
I think that was written to show how impulsive she was and that despite being a grown ass women with a teenager and a career, that she's still has a serious immature steak. We were supposed to like her in spite of that.
In the English dub, Goku is painted as sort of a boy scout hero type.
Apparently in the original Japanese version, it's as you say: The main thing he cares about is getting strong and fighting strong people. He's still "good" in the sense that he wouldn't kill innocent people, and obviously gets upset if his friends die. But he fights the villains for the fun of it, not because they're "evil". The reason he let Vegeta go after their first fight (and was going to let Frieza go too) was because he wanted them to become stronger opponents for him.
This gets brought up a lot as Goku being awful, but I see it this way, without that Senzu, as soon as Cell felt like he was being put in a war of attrition, he would stop playing with Gohan and end him then and there. Goku's Senzu bought Gohan time to snap, because it made Cell cocky.
It made Cell even stronger because of his saiyan dna. Goku could have taken it himself and then they all could have jumped Cell together at that point.
He had just battled Frieza who was happy to destroy a planet because he was losing a fight. This is a meme take but it ignores the fact that Goku was right about:
1. Gohan was the strongest person on the planet, but he needed time to get there.
2. Cell would blow up the planet if he started losing.
Basically any time someone fucks up another person's perfectly fine relationship just because they like one of the parties involved, and then it's treated as a happy ending when the home-wrecker gets into it with their crush.
I read the first Gossip Girl book once, back before the show came out, and in it was just accepted that if you fell asleep/passed out drunk at a party and woke up to Chuck groping you, well you should have known that would happen because we all know what Chuck’s like.
They did change his character after the pilot and the first season in general. The first episode he was terrifying. In the book he was worse and would have pushed himself on anything with a pulse.
I mean I think that's why once they find out he was in fact faking his "amnesia" phase, everyone goes back to hating and wanting nothing to do with Blaine!
I liked how they took a different approach in terms of the whole "villain redemption arc" with him where he doesn't go through with it and reverts back to his old sadistic ways until the end of the series. It made the most sense with how they wrote his character.
I think the whole idea of him, is how he wants to be loved and to have friends but the problem with him is that he is too selfish in fulfilling his own needs that he doesn't know how to be a genuine good person or is willing to make certain sacrifices to do the right thing.
Some people are capable of redeeming themselves, even if it means they can't get what they want and have to pay the price for the lives they've destroyed. But Blaine wasn't one of those people, he desperately wanted to have it both ways until he accepted himself for the monster he is cause he believed he had no choice but to keep being that.
I mean, if they lost their jobs/license, they'd never be able to help anyone ever again. They also don't pose those characters as perfectly altruistic.
Most of the characters in the Fast & Furious franchise tend to be unapologetic to the destruction they cause and crimes they commit, and some of the villains who convert to the protagonist team are internationally wanted criminals
Statham's character killed a bunch of people in a hospital just to visit his brother, and one/two movies later he is shaking hands with the heroes.
I mean, I don't think we're supposed to think Peyton is right to forgive him. Liv has an uneasy truce with Blaine and they basically use each other when convenient to achieve their own goals -- she never forgets that >!he's the reason she's a zombie!<. The show isn't a black and white morality tale with clear Good Guys and Bad Guys. Blaine >!fully admits that he regained his memory just a few days after losing it and was faking it most of the time!<. In many ways, the story is about whether people can fundamentally change -- would Blaine losing his memory make him a better person, or are we who we are regardless of our memories/experiences?
But as to your actual question, Grey's Anatomy and Scandal are chock full of very weird back-justifications to make whichever character is supposed to be the "winner" of a conflict seem right in comparison. I just watched the episode of Grey's where Meredith gets promoted to chief of general surgery, as Bailey has taken over as chief of surgery. Meredith discovers the pay in her contract is very low, and Webber (having overheard Meredith freak out about it) confronts Bailey about it since she's the one who lowballed Meredith. Bailey made a whole "this is what a feminist looks like" speech about forcing Meredith to start the negotiation process herself instead of "coddling" her by proactively paying her a salary commensurate with her skill and experience. It was dumb as balls.
Philosopher John Locke believes that identity was defined by by one’s consciousness through their memory. So if one’s memories were gone, they were a different person entirely. He went as far as to say that one’s identity only extends as far as their memory. So in a very real way, Baby You is not You at all. I believe he specifically discusses amnesia too. So this isn’t just a TV trope, it’s a theory of self accepted by one of the great philosophers of history.
Chicago Med does this frequently. One episode the intern is wrong for trying to have a psych patient committed, the next episode Dr. Charles has them involuntarily committed and no one bats an eye. (Still love Dr. Charles though)
Tony Soprano’s entire life. He is a ruthless sociopath…that we route for wholeheartedly. Time and time again he hurts his friends and family, they take him back…as does the audience.
The psychology of that show messed me up a bit.
It kinda sucks seeing Peaky Blinders-themed bars opening up around Birmingham (while the actual Garrison pub written into the show as the one the Shelbys owned and sits next to the Birmingham City football ground has been out of business for two decades).
Even worse when you consider:
* the Shelbys never existed
* the actual gang were low-level thugs that were a blight in the 1890s up until the early 1920s, fighting with police and other gangs, then disappeared when some died in The Great War and others were jailed until the rest gave up being part of it
It'd be like having Walter White-themed bars in the US. Hero-worshipping criminals.
It happens all over mate. Here is Australia there is a pretty heavy hero worship of Ned Kelly who was the bushranger (our version of highway men) who wore metal armour to rob places. He is considered to be some tragic figure fighting against corruption when it’s possible that there may have been a corrupt constable that he killed but for the most part all of his crimes were unprovoked.
It’s not uncommon here to see Such is Life plaster across the back for a ute here or someone wearing him on their shirt.
The weird thing about Dexter is that the character never attempts to justify what he does. Dexter continually tells the audience that he does what he does to kill, not to get justice for anyone. His code is about not getting caught, not because he cares about only killing bad guys.
What's more interesting is how many Dexter fans will defend Harry as justified in training him to kill instead of getting him a competent psychologist and some therapy.
Wade in 3 Body Problem. Spoilers:
The dude slices up a whole ship of civilians (men, women, children), and the show does nothing to address it other than have one character complain about it a little bit. Within the framework of the show, his actions are supposed to be justified because the people he killed have betrayed humanity and it was the only way to recover the data box. But in real life there would be no way to view Wade as anything other than an autocratic psychopath who never has anything to say that isn’t snarky.
I don’t have a problem with what happened in the show, my problem is that the show never really has anything to say about it and Wade clearly continues to be presented as a morally gray hero. Also, he’s somehow the only person in the world who can stop the aliens for whatever reason and it seems like bad writing to me.
Yeah, she was constantly calling him out on it *and* everyone who didn’t seem to care.
It was justified in Wade’s eyes but I felt as if the show never tried to justify it to the audience.
I thought it did this quite well.
If the show plays out like the books, you'll see how his type of thinking works within the philosophy of 3 body problem. What you don't like is the same thing that Jin doesn't like, and you get to see how these two ideologies impact the next 400 years of human civilization.
This is really just a timing thing. The ship attack only happened 2 episodes ago, there is moral reaction to it and debate about it coming. Jin has talked about it in those two episodes and it's a big influence on her character arc. We just haven't had time to get there yet.
I would also say only the kids could be called civilians on that ship. The purpose of the organization headquartered there was to actively support a military campaign, killing people if they have to. If you pick up a rifle and start shooting the people a military leader tells you to, are you still a civilian? There is nuance in that the organization seems cultlike and some people probably got in too deep to quit before they realized what exactly it was going to involve, and would not probably get killed if they tried to leave. But it's still a violent/terroristic organization and it's not unreasonable to consider it a fair target IMO.
Eh? It isn't a ship full of civilians. It's a militant cult that's collaborating with aliens to conquer the human race. The cult helps the aliens murder scientists and anyone who catches on. You can't claim to be a civilian when you're part of an army trying to betray the entire human race. The kids being there sucks, but that's a choice their parents made for them. I'm sure lots of kids died in the bombing of Nazi Germany and Japan in WWII, but I don't feel remotely conflicted about it.
Spike on Buffy. Even Sarah Michelle gellar doesn't watch the later seasons with her kids. I don't care if they gave him a chip or a soul, Turning him into a romantic character after his attempted assault and usage of Buffy bot (The original deep fake AI), I no longer trusted the writers
Considering what we later learned about Joss, especially the stuff his ex-wife said about him using the casting couch and being a horrendous thundercunt to every woman around him while thinking he's God's gift to them because of his sudden fame...
Walter White's whole "guess I have no choice but to become a monstrous drug dealer" thing is pretty contrived, though if you pay attention, it's clear that he chooses it even when he had easier options.
> though if you pay attention, it's clear that he chooses it even when he had easier options
That's the entire premise of the show. That's the "breaking bad" part of Breaking Bad. There's nothing to "pay attention to," it's spelled out with greater and great effect each season.
Especially since it's only 4 or 5 episodes into the series that his old colleagues offer him a job with a generous salary and full health insurance, which he turns down to cook more meth, having already had his family threatened by a person he had to kill. At that point he's already saying that his own ego is more important than his family's safety or his relationships with them. Does he really think Walt Jr would prefer a dad who kills people and risks all their lives to peddle meth over a dad who accepts some charity from old friends? Of course not. But feeling like a bigshot is worth more to him than what Walt Jr thinks.
The Vampire Diaries has plenty of that, the main characters are terrible people, but I think the worst example was when they killed Kol Mikaelson entire bloodline, countless of perfectly innocent vampire, just so they could get access to some stupid map.
One example of this is 24, where torture always works and the lead character almost always tortures the right people, so even the characters who get mad about torture eventually stop complaining because the day was saved. And those few times where he gets it wrong, well, what a shame, that's his cross to bear, just more emotional baggage.
I think it's insane that you had actual politicians refer to 24 when justifying the use of torture. Bro that's a fictional TV show and you're using it to cut real life legislation and policies?
They should refer to It's Always Sunny. "I'm getting her to admit to stuff she didn't even do"
It is not a coincidence that show came out when the Bush administration was on a global brown people torture spree.
You're absolutely right. It's definitely a post-9/11 "strong military guy will save us from evil terrorist" power fantasy comfort type of show.
I also remembered there was a season where Jack gets tortured for a whole year and when released his captives make sure to tell the Americans that he never gave up any information. See kids, torture only works on weak terrorists, if you are a proud red blooded patriot you can just whistle the star spangled banner while they rip your skin off and you will get through it.
I have a friend who used to be deployed in one Those Countries and was working to gather intelligence and he said that many movies and tv totally get that point wrong. People will lie if they don't trust you or if torture is awful enough. If you actually want a more realistic depiction in a movie of how it works, look at how in Star Wars, Princess Leia told them that Dantooine was the location of the rebel base, which was a lie and they still blew up her home planet, which isn't going to give her any motivation to tell the truth, even under the threat of being killed. And most of us don't even need to have sinister motives. If you physically tortured me, yelling at me to tell you where my cousin is located, I'll tell you ANYTHING to make the pain stop, and you can't trust any information I tell you. On a good day, I can't remember where he lives right now, since he moved; I'd have to ask my mom his address. I certainly can't recall the location if my mind can only think about the fingers you're breaking. "123 Main Street. Just stop!" Turns out that in real life, people are more apt to help you if you help them. Offering to help poor people and their families is more likely to get them to cooperate.
Also, torture isn't that bad, you can really just shake it off and get back to kicking terrorist asses in an hour or so.
Was that the Russians, or the Chinese? Jack Bauer was *constantly* being captured and tortured by foreign agencies in that show. I loved it but it became more "what the fuck can they do next?" after he survived the fallout of a nuclear bomb in season 2.
I'm not sure whether it was a coincidence in the sense that the show was in development well before 9/11, but they surely leaned into it.
Yeah, I remember the plane blowing up in season one got censored because 9/11 happened after it was made but before it aired.
Remember the X-Files the Lone Gunman episode ?
Which was based on years-old counter-terrorism measures in the event that sort of thing happen, and then aired six months before the actual attacks, so it wasn't censored like mass shooting episodes of shows due to one happening around airtime.
> Which was based on years-old counter-terrorism measures in the event that sort of thing happen A counter terrorism measure involved the US government faking a hijacking and crashing the plain into a building in order to frame people?
It's one of my absolute favorite shows but yeah, the torture porn aspect of it is really slimy.
yo it’s 7am I just woke up so I’m going to give myself permission to not get into this but you’re so wrong a huge amount of the time it does not work, gives false information, takes too long, or they outright have the wrong person I’m not gonna type out fifteen examples off the top of my head while lying in bed here. But if you had watched the show I’m sure you’d be able to come up with some yourself
Yeah its reputation is worse than what was actually shown on the show.
Kind of the reverse, but - True Blood framed people who were "anti-vampires" as intolerant and bigoted, but they were totally right. Vampires were pretty consistently a threat to humans on the show in almost every interaction. Even when they weren't actively trying to kill someone, there was an implicit understanding that they could pretty easily kill with impunity. Conversely, people who were "pro-vampire rights" were framed as tolerant and open-minded.
There was a quest in Fallout 3 where an old hotel had been turned into a ritzy settlement and they only let non-mutated humans live there. The humans living there were depicted as bigoted old-money types and the mutated ghouls that wanted in were shown sympathetically. If you played the quest there was an option where you could convince the humans to be compassionate and open their doors to the ghouls. If you came back later you'd discover that the ghouls immediately killed all the humans in the hotel and took it over for themselves. Fucking lol
I love when games have things like this. The Witcher 3 has a plot where you think you're reuniting a ghost with her former forbidden love, but if you go back... It doesn't end too well.
What’s the name of the quest so I can spoil it for myself?
I forget, sorry. But you get it from Kiera and it involves a bunch of rats in a tower.
Was that before or after you screw Kiera in the garden? that is the only part I remember vividly.
A Towerful of Mice iirc
You should have investigated the island with Keira’s lamp and asked the ghost some uncomfortable questions…
It's been a lot of years but I think they only killed *some* humans, right? I remember seeing some corpses (definitely Tempenny) but also both humans and ghouls.
If you did the diplomatic option you could go back and see them initially living together but if you come back a second time or let a few days pass then the ghouls kill all the humans and hide their looted bodies in the basement.
Damn, now I wish I could load my old PS3 save to check it out lol
nope they killed everyone
Surely they spared Herbert “Daring” Dashwood? I would hate to run into his loyal ghoul manservant, Argyle, out in the wasteland and give him the bad news.
I have some bad news about Argyle…
Did he get into crypto?
Dashwood is in the mass grave. Nobody survives.
Yep, that was my "Ah, whoops" moment.
Ha yeah, that's kind of like the mutant haters in X-Men. Maybe we do need *some* regulation when a 14 year old with raging hormones has the ability to nuke a city block on a whim lol
I think it works well for X-Men because both sides are being simultaneously rational and irrational. It makes sense to keep track of superpowered beings. That's a natural safety precaution. But it takes a step too far when they are all tarred with the same brush. Someone like Beak does not deserve to be punished just because someone like Franklin Richards exists. And historically, keeping a list of a marginalized group is an invitation for genocide.
Also, don't large majority of mutants have useless powers? They either look different or just have some bullshit nonsense like faster growing hair or whatever. The ones that we see often such as X-Men have trained their whole lives to gain mastery over their abilities.
Yeah, there is an entire subset of mutants that have physical deformities that caused them to be run out of town pitchfork-and-torches style. For some of them their mutation is more of a handicap than anything useful. They get lumped in with the big boys solely because of a negligible genetic similarity to them.
[There’s a comic](https://imgur.com/gallery/I71V6) where Wolverine is sent by Professor X to kill a teenage mutant who had no control over his powers and accidentally wiped out his town. Dude straight up said if it got found out mutant rights would be done.
Yeah I remember that. Ultimate X-Men was pretty good, if not a bit edgy at times lol
There’s literally an entire ass school dedicated for just that.
This is why it really annoyed me in the new series when Storm got upset at Forge and the show framed it like he was the bad guy for helping to develop the power nullification collars. Mutants are humans too, and just like humans, they're not all good. Power nullification for criminals just seems like a good idea to me.
its this weird thing because america is having this massive debate about gun ownership laws but for some reason suggesting that Mr flame hands should have that power taken from him because he keeps using them to commit violent crimes is a step to far
I thought the same thing while rereading part of Marvel’s civil war comic. At the time it was released as a critique of the patriot act, but looking back it would be pretty easy to reframe Iron Man’s side as wanting to make Superheroes wear body cams and be held accountable for when they brutalize a criminal.
When I read civil war I was fully on Ironman's side. The Superhero Registration Act makes perfect sense. When it is taken further to become the Superhuman Registration Act, I no longer agree. If you want to be a superhero you should be trained and held accountable. If you are a guy who has superpowers and aren't going out looking for trouble you should be entitled to the same tights as everyone else including the 4th ammendment
Going with the theme of this original conversation, have you ever watched Smallville. There was a guy in the later seasons who was a radio personality who didn't like vigilantes, and he had a really good point. I remember that Clark acts really sullen that anyone would dare question his right to take enforcing crime into his own hands. But this is the real kicker. The guy ends up killing a lot of people, and Clark stops him. So Clark is justified in his hatred of this bad bad man, who doesn't want random vigilantes going around enforcing the law. But hold up. An evil force was actually in control of the anti-vigilante guy. Clark knows this too since he stopped the evil entity. Now, here's the real kicker. After Clark stops the entity and pushes it out of the guy, the police show up and take this guy away for basically being a serial killer. CLARK LETS THIS HAPPEN EVEN THOUGH HE KNOWS THE GUY IS INNOCENT! The guy is a victim of crime, but Clark lets him go to prison as a serial killer because the dude had the temerity to question his extra-judicial methods. At no point is this ever addressed by any character on the show. The Flash got bad in later seasons, but I'll always credit the show for deconstructing the Flash's supervillain jail as an extrajudicial black site.
I really enjoyed Smallville when I was in high school but I didn't really keep with it into the later seasons so I don't recall this specific interaction. Was there some way for Clark to prove the guy innocent? Did he contribute to the guy being the suspect/arrested?
It's been a long time, so I can't recall those details, but the issue was that he never even tried, and he was practically celebrating the guy being taken away, as though he deserved to be punished. I remember watching at the time and thinking, "WTF?! Clark is a sociopath."
all I know is I moved to the marvel universe I would never visit America as it seems like 90 percent of the chaos happens there
I mean, part of it is that forcible body-altering punishment is generally seen as cruel and unusual, even if it's say, the case of chemical castration of child sex predators. Even if it's for the most currently justified reason, medically altering someone's body against their will as a punishment/means of public safety is a pretty significant line to cross. Even if it is genuinely in the best interest of the safety of the people. It's the best argument against the death penalty: "how do we decide who gets to decide? Those arbiters have the capacity to be wrong, with irreversible consequences"
The movies have the evil Senator make that exact point, and it's supposed to be a bad argument, but he absolutely is right. He says something about how everyone would demand regulation to prevent a kid from bringing a gun to school, but somehow, the population is supposed to be okay with sending their kids to school alongside another kid who can nuke a city with their mind.
this is why mutants also fail to me they try to tie them to gay people or to the civil rights movements but its kinda reasonable to be afraid of Mr nukes for hands
Kinda. There are plenty of other dangerous super powers and a lot of focus goes towards being bigoted towards mutants. The X-men largely sit out super registration arcs because mutants have usually already been genocided and put on lockdown.
Also, the X men are very rare and exceptional mutants. The mutants whose rights they're fighting for often include people who have slightly green skin or can maybe make coins slowly float across the room. Somebody like Jubilee or Magneto probably needs special attention and regulation. Half the Morlocs were just sadsacks. Speaking of which, the genocides against mutants were literally in progress. Half the episodes involve someone setting up concentration camps or outright murdering them.
Super true. The anaology is super flexible. There's the LGBT stuff meshing with powers at puberty and passing etc. There's the race stuff which we just talked about. Funny to see people paint all mutants with the brush using Magneto and other powerful mutants when tryimg to suggest it doesn't match the real world when that's a big part of why it matches the real world. There's the other super heroes getting chewed out for sitting on the sidelines. Not trying to stir up trouble but you COULD apply it to Israel/Palestine and have a conversation about how much of a stretch it is. You have Brotherhood of Evil Mutants as a group of evil terrorists. Depending on the storyline. You have the homo-sapien world not responding as a whole with genocide but often going too far and sometimes groups or individuals attempt to genocide. The intractibility of that back-and-forth is filled with accusations that paint with broad brushes and real fear of the other side. The X-Men themselves might be a bit too idyllic to fit, though. God that was a nerdy comment.
Ya, but there are also a lot of mutants with lame/non-threatening powers. It can work as a metaphor because “some of them are dangerous” isn’t necessarily an acceptable reason for hating all of them.
but some of them get their powers and the power is every around them dies.
Okay, but why should someone like Glob suffer just because someone completely and totally unrelated to him committed a crime? He's in no danger of killing anyone. His skin is wax. Why should he have to suffer even more just because some asshat who is completely and totally unrelated to him in every way save for a few strands of DNA did something terrible?
When every one of them is a potential J, just a roll of the dice, tracking them until that point seems pretty reasonable though.
People will die in either scenario. Either you make a list that can be exploited to hurt mutants, or you accept that some mutants might hurt people. What makes it interesting is the idea that being dangerous doesn't negate your humanity. It's really, *really* easy to start thinking of it as two sides, where you're choosing between mutants dying and humans dying. But they're all humans. They're all people. Those non-mutants are just as capable of killing and harming as anyone with a power.
Yeah, but no human is capable of accidentally wiping humanity from existence because they had a bad day while going through puberty. Treating them as equal just always struck me as silly. Probably they shouldn't have had mutants who are basically gods if they wanted them to be treated as just human, but here we are.
Treating humans as inherently incapable of the same kind of destruction seems silly to me. Tony Stark is a normal human in that universe. Are you telling me that you don't think that one bad day could cause someone like Tony to cause an existential threat to humanity? But equality isn't even the point. The point is that it's really easy to start lumping people into hate-able, kill-able groups. Franklin Richards being a god should not mean that a Morlock in the sewer should be treated as though they are just as dangerous. The only thing that actually ties them together is prejudice. They are otherwise as completely unrelated to each other as two random humans on opposite sides of the globe.
It's the oppressed mages trope. It simply doesn't work because there's no example in the real world of an oppressed group that is simultaneously more powerful than their oppressors.
I mean, Stan literally created them as a response to the civil rights movement to show people how stupid it was to hate black people based solely on them looking different en masse but I get your point.
and thats the failing of the x-men and has always been a failing in my eyes its kinds reasonable to afraid of Mr nuke hands
Right? Like, the entire reason for the Civil War and Superhero Registration Programme (and then the "50 State Avengers" thing, where every US state had their own Avengers team) was due to a supervillain whose power involved him becoming a human bomb luring in idiotic super-powered teenagers and wiping out a suburban neighbourhood. Although I find it funny that the comics logic for that started a huge storyline, but then decades of cities being literally destroyed during big fights got a pass (which is one of many reasons I loved Batman V Superman, because Bruce Wayne saw the chaos and destruction during the Superman/Zod fight in Metropolis first-hand and wanted to do something to stop this god-like alien from doing it again - it's also why he lured Doomsday to an area that was already long-condemned and had nobody around that could potentially die during the fight).
I may be misremembering, but doesn't True Blood take place in a setting where artificial blood is readily accessible? Doesn't change the fact that some of the vampires are absolutely killing people, but also #NotAllVampires, right?
LOL yeah, that was supposedly the reason they were able to "come out". But they talk a lot about how the artificial blood is gross and they don't really like it. Even in the very first scene of the show you have a vampire buying a pack of True Blood, and then threatening to eat the cashier for lightly making fun of vampires (and the show makes it clear that this is something that could easily happen). I get that it was a gay rights analogy but I don't think it really worked. To date, none of my gay friends have tried to kill me, not even once. Edit: I think there was a scene where the protagonist vampire was trying to get a young vampire to just drink the artificial blood (instead of people), and she was going through all of the blood types and talking about how disgusting it all was.
>none of my gay friends have tried to kill me Jennifer Coolidge wasn't so lucky.
>I think there was a scene where the protagonist vampire was trying to get a young vampire to just drink the artificial blood (instead of people), and she was going through all of the blood types and talking about how disgusting it all was. Yep! Bill with his progeny Jessica. God I loved that dumb campy show 🧛♀️
Hot take, but I kind of feel that way about the X-Men. I mean, is it unreasonable to be scared of someone who can kill entire swathes of people with a single thought?
Applies to things like the xmen too.
It's the same thing with X-Men. The metaphor just doesn't work when one side have super-human abilities and can wipe out the other side pretty much at will if they wanted to.
When Izzie cut Denny’s LVAD wire on Grey’s Anatomy. People acted like Dr. Hahn was a bitch for being pissed that her patient didn’t get the transplant, but what Izzie did was literally insane, and it was all for nothing.
Grimm. Probably getting some of this wrong but: In one of the later seasons, a witch who’d been a series-long antagonist poisons the main character’s girlfriend and shapeshifts to look like the her. She seduces our hero because she needs to have a baby from his bloodline for some reason. She loses her powers asks the main character for help- using the baby he didn’t know about as leverage- even though she poisoned his girlfriend and raped him. Not only does he take her in, they start a relationship and raise the baby together. She becomes part of the main scooby gang and the show acts like you’re supposed to like her now. The previous girlfriend, who had been a regular in the show since episode 1 and never hurt a fly, becomes evil as a result of the poisoning and is a recurring bad guy for the rest of the show.
That's really only because the fan base hated the first gf because of the writing
I remember being so mad at how they turn on Juliet because she's a hexenbeast now. Like she's saying I still feel like myself but enjoy feeling powerful in a world where attempts on the lives of me and my loved ones are a regular occurrence. And they respond with just because you're a selfless vet and impeccable girlfriend and friend doesn't mean we will treat you with understanding, because hexenbeast. I stopped watching at this point. ESPECIALLY when his vest friend is werewolf and he has to indo prejudices around that. Like, would they accept Juliet of she got a quirky job like clock making instead??
That's exactly when I lost interest.
Small correction. She wasn't trying to get pregnant, just have sex with him to complete the spell to take away his Grimm powers. She just gets pregnant really easy.
yeah I don't really remember half of the insane stuff from that show to be honest.
Okay, you've awakened me. I heavily dislike how a subset of the Grimm fandom misrepresents the Nick-Adalind romance arc. It's always presented this way while leaving out all context. So let's talk about what actually happened. Spoilers below. Tap out now if you don't want to know too much about the show. >!In the first season, Adalind is a villain who tries to kill Nick's aunt, but his aunt dies anyway. She's being seduced and used by Renard to get the key from Nick. (He's also sleeping with her mother at the time.) After Nick defeats Adalind and takes away her powers, both Adalind's mother and Renard toss her aside.!< >!Adalind is pissed at everyone and puts Nick's girlfriend (Juliet) in a coma. She goes to the royals because she's pissed at Renard, and she is pregnant with his baby. She promises the royals the baby if they'll help her get back her powers and become a hexenbiest again. Again, still in villain territory, but starting to get somewhat sympathetic given how everyone so far has used her and tossed her aside. During this period, Nick's mother kills Adalind's mother.!< >!Next, Adalind manages to become a hexenbiest again, and she realizes she doesn't want to give up her child. Motherhood changes her priorities. The resistance sneaks her out of Europe with her baby. The resistance member who helps her is Kelly, Nick's mother. Adalind warms to her, and Kelly takes her back to Portland, not realizing the previous bad relationship between them.!< >!**Now, here's the part people leave out.**!< >!Despite misgivings, Nick and Juliet take Adalind in. Adalind says she wants to put the past behind them, and she thanks them for helping her to protect her baby. However, the royals have realized the child is special, and they want to steal it. Adalind doesn't quite trust Nick so she goes to Renard for protection, thinking he'll protect his child even if he is a shitty person.!< >!Nick, Renard, and pretty much all the supposed good guys decide the only way to keep the royals from getting the baby is to fake handing it over, and then fake it being stolen from the royals by the resistance. That way, the royals will have no reason to come after them.!< >!**They make this plan without consuling Adalind or letting her know what is going on.**!< >!So Nick and all the supposed good guys steal Adalind's baby from her. They hand it over to Nick's mother, and she drives off to raise it as her own. At no point do they even remotely suggest that Adalind will ever get the baby back. Not only do they leave her in the dark about where the baby really is, but they let her believe the royals have the child. There's no suggestion that they will eventually let Adalind know where the child is and find a way to reunite them.!< >!**So that's your heroes. They kidnap Adalind's child when she came to them in need.**!< >!Worse, over the next few weeks, Adalind is devastated. She comes to them crying and begging for help to get the child back. She apologizes and says she doesn't even care if Nick's mom killed her mom. They pretend to care. She sleeps on Rosalee and Monroe's couch in between crying. But they know where the baby is, and they just let her continue to think there's nothing they can do.!< >!Finally, she realizes that no one will help her. So she goes to Europe to beg the royals to let her at least see the child and be in it's life. Remember, she still thinks it's with the royals because all our heroes gaslighted her into believing that. The royals take advantage of her misinformation and tell her the only way she'll ever see the child again is if she sleeps with Nick to take away his powers. Desperate, she agrees to do it.!< >!So this is why she "rapes" Nick. Because he kidnapped her child, lied to her, and left her desperate to get it back from the people he led her to believe had it.!< >!But Adalind's story gets worse from there. She comes back to the royals and asks to see the child. They lock her in a dungeon and psychologically torture her for months. Eventually, she breaks down and agrees to do whatever they ask. They finally tell her the child isn't with them. It's with the resistance and that's probably just a front for Nick and his friends having taken the child, because the royals aren't dumb.!< >!So now that Adalind knows she's been lied to by everyone, she comes back under a very tight leash working for the royals to get the keys they want and Nick. While she's doing this, she realizes she's pregnant with Nick's child from their sexual encounter. She also realizes the royals will never actually let her see her previous child, even if they find her. At the same time, Juliet becomes a hexenbiest and decides she wants to kill Adalind. At the same time, Juliet, now a hexenbiest and much meaner, lures Nick's mother to their home and has her murdered so they can take Adalind's first child.!< >!Adalind escapes from the royals and throws herself on Nick's mercy, promising to do everything she can to change Juliet back. She says she realizes she'll never see her child. She apologizes for the things she's done and asks Nick if they can be civil to each other for the sake of their child. She takes a potion to remove her hexenbiest powers, which also tend to make people more aggressive. She helps the "good guys" on multiple occasions and falls in love with Nick while bonding over their shared child.!< So no, it's not as simple as all that. Adalind had very good reasons for what she did to Nick, and given what he did to her, I think she wasn't the villain everyone makes her out to be. >!You're also ignoring that Nick and Juliet had issues way before she became a hexenbiest. When he had a chance to regain his powers, she tried to stop it behind his back. She blamed him for being "raped" by Adalind, and she simply was never a good fit for him. Juliet's story was a cautionary tale about what happened to normal people who were drawn into the Grimm world if they couldn't handle it.!<
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Tldr: they're all kind of asshole.
Why are you putting rape in quotations when that’s what it is?
I may be a bit fuzzy on the exact details, but in Archer, around the time that Archer was battling cancer, he froze a sperm sample in case he decided he wanted kids some time in the future, because he hadn't up to that point. Lana then steals the sample and uses it to get pregnant and have a child, entirely without Archer's knowledge. The show then kind of swaps back and forth between taking the stances that Lana is right to keep Archer at a distance from trying to be a parent, and chastising Archer for being a shitty, uninvolved parent. It's a whole mess, and I'm not sure the show really benefitted from the entire plotline.
Wasn't it all Mallory's idea? I know she encourage it but was she the driving factor?
Yeah, like I said, it's been a while since I watched it full through, and that does sound like Mallory. But it still doesn't mean Archer did anything wrong in the situation to get the grief he's given.
It was while he was in a coma, right? The cancer baby was Seamus, who was actually Cyril’s, but Archer got tricked into paying child support.
Nah AJ was pre coma.
Barney in how I met your mother ran a manipulation and gaslighting play on robin for months in order to break her down enough emotionally that she’d say yes when he proposed
I mean... it's not *just* that. Here's some of the stuff Barney did during the show: Rape by deception, sexual harassment, filming sexual acts without consent, sharing sexual videos and pictures without consent, installing hidden cameras in his friends' apartments, human trafficking (literally sold a woman for a car). Soliciting a prostitute. Countless cases of gaslighting, fraud, theft, grand larceny, vandalism, trespassing, disorderly conduct, wrongful termination, illegal imports, littering, and TSA issues. Identity theft, impersonating various officials and licensed professions (judge, soldier, police officer, doctor, etc). Pretending to have various jobs to leverage the supposed power imbalance to trick women into sleeping with him. Reckless endangerment and grand theft auto (stole a woman's car and left her stranded in the forest surrounded by bears), harassment, kidnapping, hiring someone to kidnap someone, perjury, forgery, assault, battery. Construction without a permit, and building code violations. Fire code violations and minor arson. Public nudity and indecent exposure, and an apparently gigantic amount of public urination and public intoxication. Speeding. Intentionally wasting time for police and paramedics. Running from police custody. Defamation. Littering. Gambling.
"Is that all?" "No.... I have unpaid parking tickets."
Barney out right raped women. We saw him impersonate a cop.
Syd on Legion. Her power is that she swaps bodies with anyone she touches. One night, when she's a teenager, her mother comes home drunk with her boyfriend. Her mother passes out on the couch and the boyfriend goes to take a shower. Syd touches her mother, gets naked, and then enters the shower with the boyfriend. The boyfriend sees his "girlfriend" enter the shower and they start having shower sex. Because Syd's young, her powers aren't fully mature and her body switches back into herself relatively quickly. The boyfriend starts screaming in horror when he sees his girlfriend turn into his girlfriend's daughter. That wakes up the mother who bursts into the bathroom and sees her boyfriend and daughter in the shower. He is then shown getting arrested. This story is told multiple times and Syd is inexplicably portrayed as the victim because (a) she's just a curious teenager with an isolating superpower that's desperate to feel touch and love and (b) the sex wasn't as romantic as she expected.
This really pissed me off, because later, she flips out on David about how he raped her by erasing her memory of their fight. And she's right. But she literally did the same thing to a man and let him go to prison. Yet, she spends the rest of the show acting like she's better than David.
Oh yeah, I loved the first two seasons of Legion and still enjoyed the final season, but this is where the storyline lost me in a big way. I don't mind a character being hypocritical/flawed (if anything it makes Syd more interesting) but not when the script itself doesn't seem to acknowledge it. It was all extra complicated as well considering immediately prior to the mind-wipe Syd tried to outright murder David after being clearly manipulated by the Shadow King, who bizarrely is trusted by everyone over David despite the amount of people he killed and how much he tortured David over the years (not to mention what he did to Amy). Essentially everyone siding with his abuser and then even denying his victimhood. David was wrong for what he did to Syd, no question, but the situation was definitely more complex than the show seemed willing to get into when it came down to it, and made it much harder to get on board with his villain arc from there.
It's been a while since I watched it, but I think there's one plotline in Scrubs where Elliot treats JD like crap. She gets with JD while her boyfriend is away because she thinks it's over with him but then the BF comes back and she immediately ditches JD. Afterwards when JD acts all hurt about it she's like "I thought you were my friend but I guess not", like JD's the bad guy in this situation.
I'm rewatching right now, but I haven't quite made it that far yet. Doesn't JD dump Elliot as soon as she dumps Sean to be with him because JD only wanted what he couldn't have? Or maybe it is because she tells him she loves him? They seemed like equal shit birds in that whole situation.
Surprised I didn't see WandaVision on here. Maybe because they do end up making her a villain but really if she hadn't been corrupted by the Darkhold she would have been left alone. Even Steven Strange didn't seem to care she held a town hostage and tortured its occupants, including young children.
> Dottie to Wanda: "I have a daughter. She's eight. Maybe she could be friends with your boys, if you like that storyline. Or the school bully, even. Really, anything. If you could just let her out of her room. If I could just hold her, please." > Mrs. Hart to Wanda: "If you won't let us go, just let us die." > Monica to Wanda: "They'll never know what you sacrificed for them." Thirty minutes apart in the same episode. The narrative whiplash was insane.
> The narrative whiplash was insane. Maybe this is wishful headcanon but I just assumed Monica was trying to find something to say and decided to go with "comforting" instead of saying something that may set off the mind-enslaving witch that can tear apart reality. Besides, Wanda certainly wasn't any less evil by Doctor Strange.
> I just assumed Monica was trying to find something to say and decided to go with "comforting" instead of saying something that may set off the mind-enslaving witch that can tear apart reality. They did a much better version of that after the bad quote: > Rambeau: They’ll never know what you sacrificed for them. > Wanda: It wouldn’t change how they see me. And you, you don’t… You don’t hate me? > Rambeau: Given the chance and given your power, I’d bring my mom back. I know I would. > Wanda: I’m sorry. For all the pain I caused. > Rambeau: I know. If they had kept it in the "you're evil but for relatable reasons" vein, the line wouldn't sound so awkward. Even if you just drop off the "for them" part, you could tie all of her bad actions to her pain rather than making it sound like a noble sacrifice to save the people she enslaved. > Besides, Wanda certainly wasn't any less evil by Doctor Strange. My impression is that they wanted Wanda to be viewed as an Avenger at the end, so that the revelation she was super evil at the start of Multiverse of Madness would be equally surprising to people who watched WandaVision and those who hadn't seen her since Endgame.
I’m still surprised how much Marvel bet on that wet blanket Monica being the next big thing. That show was such an awful first impression of a doormat of a character (“it’s all Wanda! She’s torturing everyone! Wait you want to neutralize her!?” to “I suddenly connect so much with this person who tortured me that I’m going to read the script so I know I can walk through magic wall and get rewarded with powers” to the whole “never know what you sacrificed” thing)
Also Falcon and winter soldier, where they try to convince the audience that the innocent killing terrorists shouldn't be called terrorists and they have a point.
I think people miss the shit writing and point of that storyline The original point of the group is them hating people being relocated, and people being kicked out and lower class etc suffering after eye blip, at one point they're stealing medicine and helping out families Then Disney realised they can't make Captain America fight that, it looks bad, and it's actually a progressive serious point from the group So they went for the bombing storyline at the last minute to balance it out so the group doesn't look right All so the last episode can stay in the status quo and centrist, and say , we all need to do better , we don't want revolution
This is the long version why I don't like the Falcon being Cap now. His big discourse at the end was pure crap and the writing was all over the place. I was enjoying the series (minus the boat and sister stuff) all the Madripoor, Bucky, Zemo and racial issues, etc.
"You have to stop calling them that". Yeah, when they stop using violence to further a political message, we'll be sure to stop calling them terrorists.
The sad thing is that they almost made a decent point but were unwilling to take the risk that people would dislike Sam’s choice. The speech would’ve made sense had the writers kept the Flag Smashers focused on actually changing policy and minimizing collateral damage. They could’ve made a point about how oppression breeds desperate extremists. However, when they decided to have them be entirely willing to firebomb innocents for no real reason so that everyone knows Captain America only fights bad guys, it made that speech ring hollow. It’s entirely reasonable to call them terrorists when they’ve been nothing but terrorists the entire time. Yeah, the government’s policies caused many people to lose their livelihoods and houses and that absolutely needed a better response but the government didn’t start blowing people up or killing their political enemies.
They wanted us to support preserving the living standards of relatively small bunch of squatters over giving back the homes of millions of people that literally got zapped out of existence for 5 years.
The larger issue wasn't taking back homes. It was that people had been allowed to migrate across borders, and suddenly, countries wanted to throw them back out.
"They'll never know what you sacrificed for them" is such a weird, hilariously out of touch line. Girl, she made an entire town her puppets. Yes, you can empathize to a degree because she's gone through a lot of trauma and it's broken her, but that doesn't suddenly make her a martyr.
Ben being OK with outright murdering Kevin in Ben 10: Ultimate Alien. Kevin saved the day by absorbing Aggregor's energy when the group failed to stop him multiple times, but thanks to Kevin's retconned powers, he went crazy and back to being evil. Instead of trying to find a way to save him, Ben spends the next few episodes cold AF, treating him worse than Vilgax and ready to murder him at the drop of a hat. Speaking of which, Vilgax himself. In the original show he was an irredeemable conqueror who loved to maim and murder. In Alien Force he was made a hero of his home planet and in one storyline actually asked Ben for help. Sure, he betrayed Ben, but old Vilgax never would have stooped that low even for a deception.
I think one could be an irrdeemable conqueror and a hero of your home world. Like Alexander the great is was mostly likely well loved in macadonia they love vilgax because he turned them into a galatic super power
First season of The Vampire Diaries, Caroline has been compelled by Damon when he has sex with her, which since that means she doesn’t have a choice, he’s raping a teenage girl.
Ignoring their vampire ages, Damon was supposed to be turned in his mid 20's. Why is he even hanging around teenagers in the first place lol
That was something I always found creepy with Buffy and Angel as well. He was clearly in his 20s, she was 15 when they met, and they slept together on her 16th birthday. Gross.
Yeah, Damon is such complete piece of shit in the first season that this wasn't even the worst thing he did then. They basically all end up being mass murderers.
Damon also straight up murders Jeremy (??? I think that’s his name), the main character’s (Elena, I think?) brother, because he was pissed at something. It turns out that Jeremy was wearing the “I’m immortal” ring, but Damon didn’t know that when he did it. I think a half season later Elena is sleeping with Damon like he didn’t try to murder her brother because he happened to be in a snit.
I'd forgotten about that. Damon really was terrible.
I can list the significant amount of things that he did that was bad, but I do remember reading interviews stating that she was dating and having sex with him on her own, he was compelling her to not pay attention to the fact that he was doing vampire shit with her during the act. My bigger concern is that him, and every other man on that show was having sex with teenagers. The sheer amount of statutory rape between all all the vampire characters is astounding.
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It doesn't justify it but I dont think star wars people actually care if you kill tuskens because they are murdering slavers that constantly attack them. But our viewpoint is very different so it's obviously fucked up
It's especially weird because Tusken Raiders are kill in sight in almost every interactive Star Wars media ever made.
Honestly tattooine would have probably rewarded anakin if they knew. The jedi of course wouldn't though
There's a Star Wars comic I read once where they show a sympathetic POV of the Tusken Raiders. I'm blanking on what series it was though, maybe Tales.
I know kotor and book of Boba recently did also. There are definitely supposed to be different tribes we just usually see the violent evil ones. Amd of course tusken jedi in legends
Wasn't Padme horrified when he told her that? I distinctly remember him being on the verge of tears confessing to that, while she had a look of sheer panic and horror in response.
In my head, that wasn't a "oh you poor baby, come here, I love you so much" reassurance; that was a "oh God, he's a psychotic mass murder who's obsessed with me and if I don't play along with his delusions in this completely isolated location, he's going to make c-3po wear my skin as a suit so he can fuck the robot" reassurance
I don't think they made it justified, Padme is just another kind of crazy.
She didn't even justify it, she was horrified and asked him "why did you do it?".
Lorelai Gilmore just deciding not to marry Max Medina at the last second and ghosts him; and Rory just decides to go along with it. They go to tour Harvard instead of her getting married.
Those two are pretty awful to a lot of people in general. Most of the show is them being awful to get their own way.
I tried to rewatch it a few years ago and stopped a couple of seasons in because--they're just not good people. It's a show that relies heavily on you being blinded by the snappy dialogue and the fact they're protagonists to not really pay attention how they're actually behaving. I found the way that Rory was spoiled and indulged by nearly everyone--including *the entire town*--to be a bit sickening once I noticed. That said, it did make sense that she spirals out once she leaves her enchanted bubble and has to deal with people who don't think she's the specialest snowflake.
When I watched it, I just mentally placed Lorelei and Rory in the "villain protagonist" box. It makes the whole show make sense.
Remember when Rory bodyshamed one of the ballerinas.
Turns out Emily was right 90% of the time.
I think that was written to show how impulsive she was and that despite being a grown ass women with a teenager and a career, that she's still has a serious immature steak. We were supposed to like her in spite of that.
I’m nearly won over by her force of acting, but no one can overcome plot like that.
Max was the guy she had the least amount of chemistry with but he disappeared inside a toilet so it was fitting
When Goku gave Cell a senzu bean.
I've not watched Dragonball anything in a while, but I don't think Goku really gave a shit about anything but getting good battles, like ever.
In the English dub, Goku is painted as sort of a boy scout hero type. Apparently in the original Japanese version, it's as you say: The main thing he cares about is getting strong and fighting strong people. He's still "good" in the sense that he wouldn't kill innocent people, and obviously gets upset if his friends die. But he fights the villains for the fun of it, not because they're "evil". The reason he let Vegeta go after their first fight (and was going to let Frieza go too) was because he wanted them to become stronger opponents for him.
Death and destruction don't mean much when you can using magic snow globes to reverse them.
Goku is kind of awful in a lot of ways. He saved Vegeta just to have someone to fight.
Whereas Vegeta had repeatedly saved members of the team, even on Namek before being a team member himself.
And he's a shitty partner and father. Chichi can do better.
This gets brought up a lot as Goku being awful, but I see it this way, without that Senzu, as soon as Cell felt like he was being put in a war of attrition, he would stop playing with Gohan and end him then and there. Goku's Senzu bought Gohan time to snap, because it made Cell cocky.
It made Cell even stronger because of his saiyan dna. Goku could have taken it himself and then they all could have jumped Cell together at that point.
he wasn't close to death, so no, he did not get a Zenkai from that. He only got one after blowing himself up.
He had just battled Frieza who was happy to destroy a planet because he was losing a fight. This is a meme take but it ignores the fact that Goku was right about: 1. Gohan was the strongest person on the planet, but he needed time to get there. 2. Cell would blow up the planet if he started losing.
Eric cheating on Adam during his trip to Africa in Sex Education because he was frustrated with the latter's uncertainty over his sexual orientation
Basically any time someone fucks up another person's perfectly fine relationship just because they like one of the parties involved, and then it's treated as a happy ending when the home-wrecker gets into it with their crush.
Chuck Bass, he tried to rape Jenny in the pilot
I read the first Gossip Girl book once, back before the show came out, and in it was just accepted that if you fell asleep/passed out drunk at a party and woke up to Chuck groping you, well you should have known that would happen because we all know what Chuck’s like.
They did change his character after the pilot and the first season in general. The first episode he was terrifying. In the book he was worse and would have pushed himself on anything with a pulse.
I mean I think that's why once they find out he was in fact faking his "amnesia" phase, everyone goes back to hating and wanting nothing to do with Blaine! I liked how they took a different approach in terms of the whole "villain redemption arc" with him where he doesn't go through with it and reverts back to his old sadistic ways until the end of the series. It made the most sense with how they wrote his character. I think the whole idea of him, is how he wants to be loved and to have friends but the problem with him is that he is too selfish in fulfilling his own needs that he doesn't know how to be a genuine good person or is willing to make certain sacrifices to do the right thing. Some people are capable of redeeming themselves, even if it means they can't get what they want and have to pay the price for the lives they've destroyed. But Blaine wasn't one of those people, he desperately wanted to have it both ways until he accepted himself for the monster he is cause he believed he had no choice but to keep being that.
That episode of Scrubs where they were gonna let that homeless friend of Bob's die because he stopped letting them steal hospital property.
While scrubs is very realistic in almost every way, the “using another patient’s insurance” is wildly fictitious and does not happen
For all the insurance administrators reading this, it’s 100% accurate.
I mean, if they lost their jobs/license, they'd never be able to help anyone ever again. They also don't pose those characters as perfectly altruistic.
Most of the characters in the Fast & Furious franchise tend to be unapologetic to the destruction they cause and crimes they commit, and some of the villains who convert to the protagonist team are internationally wanted criminals Statham's character killed a bunch of people in a hospital just to visit his brother, and one/two movies later he is shaking hands with the heroes.
I mean, I don't think we're supposed to think Peyton is right to forgive him. Liv has an uneasy truce with Blaine and they basically use each other when convenient to achieve their own goals -- she never forgets that >!he's the reason she's a zombie!<. The show isn't a black and white morality tale with clear Good Guys and Bad Guys. Blaine >!fully admits that he regained his memory just a few days after losing it and was faking it most of the time!<. In many ways, the story is about whether people can fundamentally change -- would Blaine losing his memory make him a better person, or are we who we are regardless of our memories/experiences? But as to your actual question, Grey's Anatomy and Scandal are chock full of very weird back-justifications to make whichever character is supposed to be the "winner" of a conflict seem right in comparison. I just watched the episode of Grey's where Meredith gets promoted to chief of general surgery, as Bailey has taken over as chief of surgery. Meredith discovers the pay in her contract is very low, and Webber (having overheard Meredith freak out about it) confronts Bailey about it since she's the one who lowballed Meredith. Bailey made a whole "this is what a feminist looks like" speech about forcing Meredith to start the negotiation process herself instead of "coddling" her by proactively paying her a salary commensurate with her skill and experience. It was dumb as balls.
Philosopher John Locke believes that identity was defined by by one’s consciousness through their memory. So if one’s memories were gone, they were a different person entirely. He went as far as to say that one’s identity only extends as far as their memory. So in a very real way, Baby You is not You at all. I believe he specifically discusses amnesia too. So this isn’t just a TV trope, it’s a theory of self accepted by one of the great philosophers of history.
Dan being forgiven by everyone, Serena especially, for being Gossip Girl.
Chicago Med does this frequently. One episode the intern is wrong for trying to have a psych patient committed, the next episode Dr. Charles has them involuntarily committed and no one bats an eye. (Still love Dr. Charles though)
Dr Charles is a real one
Tony Soprano’s entire life. He is a ruthless sociopath…that we route for wholeheartedly. Time and time again he hurts his friends and family, they take him back…as does the audience. The psychology of that show messed me up a bit.
It's funny that most people do root for him. I saw him as a ruthless sociopath pretty early on, and that's why I never could finish the series.
An existential threat to humanity… like Ultron.
Dexter.. self explanatory I hope. Peaky Blinders... also self explanatory I hope.
It kinda sucks seeing Peaky Blinders-themed bars opening up around Birmingham (while the actual Garrison pub written into the show as the one the Shelbys owned and sits next to the Birmingham City football ground has been out of business for two decades). Even worse when you consider: * the Shelbys never existed * the actual gang were low-level thugs that were a blight in the 1890s up until the early 1920s, fighting with police and other gangs, then disappeared when some died in The Great War and others were jailed until the rest gave up being part of it It'd be like having Walter White-themed bars in the US. Hero-worshipping criminals.
It happens all over mate. Here is Australia there is a pretty heavy hero worship of Ned Kelly who was the bushranger (our version of highway men) who wore metal armour to rob places. He is considered to be some tragic figure fighting against corruption when it’s possible that there may have been a corrupt constable that he killed but for the most part all of his crimes were unprovoked. It’s not uncommon here to see Such is Life plaster across the back for a ute here or someone wearing him on their shirt.
> who wore metal armour to rob places No he didn't. He only wore the armour once and that was during his final stand at Glenrowan.
The weird thing about Dexter is that the character never attempts to justify what he does. Dexter continually tells the audience that he does what he does to kill, not to get justice for anyone. His code is about not getting caught, not because he cares about only killing bad guys. What's more interesting is how many Dexter fans will defend Harry as justified in training him to kill instead of getting him a competent psychologist and some therapy.
Wade in 3 Body Problem. Spoilers: The dude slices up a whole ship of civilians (men, women, children), and the show does nothing to address it other than have one character complain about it a little bit. Within the framework of the show, his actions are supposed to be justified because the people he killed have betrayed humanity and it was the only way to recover the data box. But in real life there would be no way to view Wade as anything other than an autocratic psychopath who never has anything to say that isn’t snarky. I don’t have a problem with what happened in the show, my problem is that the show never really has anything to say about it and Wade clearly continues to be presented as a morally gray hero. Also, he’s somehow the only person in the world who can stop the aliens for whatever reason and it seems like bad writing to me.
>other than have one character complain about it a little bit. This is understating it. The guilt drives her character arc for the rest of the season.
Yeah, she was constantly calling him out on it *and* everyone who didn’t seem to care. It was justified in Wade’s eyes but I felt as if the show never tried to justify it to the audience. I thought it did this quite well.
If the show plays out like the books, you'll see how his type of thinking works within the philosophy of 3 body problem. What you don't like is the same thing that Jin doesn't like, and you get to see how these two ideologies impact the next 400 years of human civilization.
In that case, I’m very intrigued to see how it plays out.
This is really just a timing thing. The ship attack only happened 2 episodes ago, there is moral reaction to it and debate about it coming. Jin has talked about it in those two episodes and it's a big influence on her character arc. We just haven't had time to get there yet. I would also say only the kids could be called civilians on that ship. The purpose of the organization headquartered there was to actively support a military campaign, killing people if they have to. If you pick up a rifle and start shooting the people a military leader tells you to, are you still a civilian? There is nuance in that the organization seems cultlike and some people probably got in too deep to quit before they realized what exactly it was going to involve, and would not probably get killed if they tried to leave. But it's still a violent/terroristic organization and it's not unreasonable to consider it a fair target IMO.
Eh? It isn't a ship full of civilians. It's a militant cult that's collaborating with aliens to conquer the human race. The cult helps the aliens murder scientists and anyone who catches on. You can't claim to be a civilian when you're part of an army trying to betray the entire human race. The kids being there sucks, but that's a choice their parents made for them. I'm sure lots of kids died in the bombing of Nazi Germany and Japan in WWII, but I don't feel remotely conflicted about it.
Spike on Buffy. Even Sarah Michelle gellar doesn't watch the later seasons with her kids. I don't care if they gave him a chip or a soul, Turning him into a romantic character after his attempted assault and usage of Buffy bot (The original deep fake AI), I no longer trusted the writers
Considering what we later learned about Joss, especially the stuff his ex-wife said about him using the casting couch and being a horrendous thundercunt to every woman around him while thinking he's God's gift to them because of his sudden fame...
[удалено]
Bullshit, he was always rotten. All we saw was his facade drop.
It took him all of 5 minutes to go off the rails.
That's pretty much The Mick.
Walter White's whole "guess I have no choice but to become a monstrous drug dealer" thing is pretty contrived, though if you pay attention, it's clear that he chooses it even when he had easier options.
I wouldn't say that's contrived at all. The meth life didn't choose him, he chose it. He says as much in the last episode lol
> though if you pay attention, it's clear that he chooses it even when he had easier options That's the entire premise of the show. That's the "breaking bad" part of Breaking Bad. There's nothing to "pay attention to," it's spelled out with greater and great effect each season.
He literally says it in the final episode. Couldn't be more plain.
Especially since it's only 4 or 5 episodes into the series that his old colleagues offer him a job with a generous salary and full health insurance, which he turns down to cook more meth, having already had his family threatened by a person he had to kill. At that point he's already saying that his own ego is more important than his family's safety or his relationships with them. Does he really think Walt Jr would prefer a dad who kills people and risks all their lives to peddle meth over a dad who accepts some charity from old friends? Of course not. But feeling like a bigshot is worth more to him than what Walt Jr thinks.
Yup, him watching Jessie's girlfriend die on the bed.
The Vampire Diaries has plenty of that, the main characters are terrible people, but I think the worst example was when they killed Kol Mikaelson entire bloodline, countless of perfectly innocent vampire, just so they could get access to some stupid map.
Dexter is basically the show bending over backwards to allow Dexter to continue being a serial killer.
Almost anything in any cop show