I don’t get why they don’t just make these villains self-interested megalomaniacs like the old days. Focus the drama on the protagonist instead.
Because a few movies did “tragic villain” decently, audiences liked the switch-up, and the talentless hacks took it to mean that ever villain has to be “complex”.
Those writers completely miss the point that the best sympathetic villains are the ones where their feelings of anger or other emotions that made them this way are somewhat justified, but the actions they take because of them are definitely not.
Nero from the first ST reboot was this. “my family/planet was lost: go crazy and waste everybody”
self-interested megalomaniacs
So billionaires?
Lex Luthor is the best comic book supervillain EVAR.
Especially cuz he’s just pissed about being bald
The villain is the protagonist in most superhero movies, the superheroes are generally the ones maintaining a vague status quo in the antagonist role
Only in the bad ones
Nolan’s batman movies did really well and they had more “grounded” villains (well, so long as you ignore scarecrow, ras al ghul, bane, talia al ghul…), so this one tried to follow the same trend. It also apparently brought in Nolan’s tory politics and utter contempt for the poor. Remember when Bane stages a people’s revolution in Gotham only to then decide he’s going to nuke the city for no reason?
I was gonna say that they did make Lex Luthor a billionaire tech-bro asshole in the Superman movie, but then I also remembered that his opposition to Superman was out of a commitment to a bizarre interpretation of reddit-atheism, and didn’t have anything to do with competing visions of the social good.
To some modern treat enjoyers, having villains actually just be willingly evil assholes would be “cookie cutter” and make the story seem “one dimensional.”
Why though? Magnificent bastards who act entirely out of self interest, but then do things that make you think “damn, that was smart/devious” are fun to watch.
My favorite villain of all time is Lorne Malvo in Fargo season one.
The Fargo villain from season 3 was also great. I loved how slimy, creepy and possibly full of shit he was.
Like, he can apparently brick your computer if you search his name, but his operation is apparently formed by him and two guys.
Oh yeah he was great too, but nowhere near the level of Malvo
All the villains in Fargo are great and none of them have a point. Jon Hamm’s character in season 5 is completely selfish and petty and self-aggrandizing and he’s a terrifying villain.
It’s possible to add depth without making them activists.
Perhaps they realized that, late into production, the audience would sympathize. So they added him blowing up the city to make him irredeemable.
The Bane treatment.
Also the Killinger treatment.
did you get Killmonger and
mixed up?Yes
Or just feeling the venture bros vibe
I found a YouTube link in your comment. Here are links to the same video on alternative frontends that protect your privacy:
You’re a big guy
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Seems like Magneto is kind of in the same vein too. He seems like a mutant Malcolm X who does heinous shit to justify opposing his otherwise sensible objections to the slow liberal reformism of the X-Men.
He was just committing to the
“unlimited genocide on the first world” bit because he was terminally onlineAnd then they have him blow up half the city for no reason to make him evil.
Same story with Killmonger in the first Black Panther film.
Or the Marco Inaros Faction in The Expanse, or Magneto in the old X-Men movies, and so on and so on. It’s basically mandatory to have antogonists with a relatable agenda commit acts of cartoonish evil out of nowhere to make it clear that the only answer to injustice is incrementalist fuckery in aliance with macchiavellian ruling class ghouls.
Marco Inaros
Yessss… The belt had too many legitimate grievances and reasons to go to war, so Marco has to go full pride obsessed joker mode. At least Drummer, Ashford & co get a couple good belter pirate moments before they join a corporate alliance with empire.
Which includes paling around with literal war criminal Avaserala who tells them how important tolerance is while she plans a counter revolution with Earthers and Martian and Belter collaborators who all hang out in the same luxurious lounge built by wealth pressed out of Belter workers who do not even own the air they breathe. She literally oversaw the torture of Belter PoWs personally in S1.
When Magneto betrayed the demutantized Mystique instantly I was so mad.
Especially because Mystique in the movies had such a strong anti-assimilationist energy. Answering the question why she doesn’t always look like a human with “because it shouldn’t be necessary”, having a literal shapeshifter refuse to obey passing dictates is fucking powerful for me as a trans woman.
I’ve never really considered it (probably because I’m not a trans woman) but now that you point it out it’s hard not to see it.
I didn’t think of it that way when i originally saw the movie, i was still an egg back then, but nowadays, it fits so well. I doubt it’s intentional given the time the movie was made in, but things can work as metaphors for topics the authors didn’t have in mind at all.
Genuinely one of the most egregious and frustrating character assassinations I’ve ever seen in one of these things. I know on some level all of these stories are dependent on who is behind the typewriter so its impossible to say what a character actually would or wouldn’t do but its just such a fucking infuriatingly simplistic view not just of the mutant civil rights allegory but also of how a character like magneto would perceive their struggle. Haven’t finished X-men 97 yet but the plot point with what happens to Storm and his response feels like a direct fucking response to that scene in Last Stand TBH.
Yeah, that was a great moment. Rest of the series is just as good, 97 is just a great show. I’m sure there are flaws here and there that just aren’t coming to mind but it’s shockingly good for recent Marvel content made by Disney.
Real shame about the show runner, I’m assuming s2 won’t happen or will be worse.
The girl antagonist in Falcon and the Winter Soldier probably did this the most egregiously.
“Karli Morgenthau” who is a weird Karl Marx but anarchist or something
Never noticed that lol. I do remember that she was basically the good guy until randomly deciding to blow up a hospital on one of the episodes as a “kick the dog” moment.
You can definitely tell they they went … whoops and tacked on the last 30 minutes of the movie to make him seem like the bad guy. The entire film goes into a severe tonal shift.
What if The Riddler was the Zodiac killer, but also a weird incel guy?
Wot if yer dog woz a computah
I’m a computer!
dial-up noises
Stop all the downloadin’!
Help computer.
beeeep skrrrshhsssttttt beekhhhrrrhhhssttt
in what way was Paul Dano’s Riddler an incel?
Glasses
That’s a cool 40 quart pot. What kind of soup are you making with it?
Fucking looooooove Batman and so badly want there to be a movie where the villain captures Batman and opens his eyes to how wealth dynamic of Gotham is the real driving force behind all the crime.
Bruce learns that the Batman persona was just a veil for him to be recognized as an anonymous hero versus a Nepo baby who is so disconnected from reality that he thinks that building structures and donating them to the poor, destroying infrastructure, beating up the disenfranchised, and terrorizing the commoners of Gotham at their lowest points is benefiting anyone other than Gotham’s upper echelons.
So then Batman instead loots all the billionaires, destroys businesses with poor workers’ rights, murders a few corrupt figureheads, and then reveals himself to be Bruce Wayne whose cowl was only masking his privilege. Finally, he sells his properties, donates his businesses to the people actually running them, and puts all of his money into trusts that pays every citizen of Gotham a living wage.
The final scene of the movie shows a happy Bruce Wayne, no longer conflicted by his family legacy, clocking in for his shift as a security guard. He hears a commotion and finds a supervisor assaulting their employee and talking about “crunch time until the product meets the investors’ standards.” Bruce interrupts and starts monologuing while fiddling with a batarang: “You know, I used to use these as a non-lethal deterrent when I was more like you. Back when I punched down on the citizens of Gotham. But now I only punch up. And my weapons got a lot sharper!” Then he murders the fuck out of the boss. Cut to black.
In the newer comics gotham is literally cursed. Arkham basement has a portal to hell, a warlock sleeping under there for thoussnds of years cursing the land. Comics have the funniest ways of explaining why people with technology and power that makes them functionally gods would choose to keep the status quo that produces insane criminals. Just say you wanna sell books bruh its alright
“you’re about to find out why you don’t have basic healthcare”
The exact opposite of this is Arkham Origins
you didnt enjoy beating up anarchists spouting leftist rhetoric while playing as a rich kid with issues??? smdh
also they want to blow up half of Gotham for… reasons, too.
fuck that game had some sussy writing
The anarchist leader was just a kid who hadn’t grown out of it and gotten a job yet!! Some people just don’t know how the world really works, like those homeless people he saved from being brutalized by cops who sympathize with Anarky more than him (naive!!). Wait hold on I have to put down these “riots” (we see nobody being harmed except corrupt cops, who Batman was already forced to knock out numerous times at this point, but it’s different when he does it, and even after he clearly witnesses the police not only working for crime bosses but abusing innocent poor people he’ll still call them to sort out every issue after he’s done with it) and then do a grand bomb disarming finale (it’s always bombs, but don’t worry as I can put off disarming the bombs for however long I want and nothing will happen) before I can beat up the evil doctor who put innocent cops and security guards in danger to save his wife from the rich dude Batman was too stupid to realize was clearly evil!! This is very different from the first Anarky side mission where I had to disarm bombs because the stupid anarchists weren’t standing right next to them defending them from me as they exploded!!
11/10 no notes
the final scene would be the US army dropping a nuke on Gotham
Knight of the Living Dead
Kino
They need to play Batman like a straight cop next time. Literally just a brutal private security elite, killing anyone and destroying proof of Bill Clinton’s crimes aboard the Lolita Express.
I wanna go the opposite direction. All the villains are billionaires now as well, replace Alfred with a Marx to new!Batman’s Engels, have Bruce quote lines from Marxist texts while he beats up the Joker for crimes against the Proletariat.
This would be hilarious. The Joker is also a billionaire and uses the money invest in laughing gas and joker fish
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Alfred plays the part of Police Union
Really good article. Reminds me of this banger:
Morgana’s ethical awakening, her rejection of the system from which she has previously benefitted, and her identification with the oppressed, is specifically shown to stem from empathy and moral outrage at injustice… and yet, somehow, without any rhyme or reason, when she finally departs Camelot and openly goes over to the other side, she becomes a sadistic psychopath with no regard for the suffering of the innocent, acting from motives of thwarted ambition, petty jealousy and irrational vindictiveness. Her political awakening comes from compassion and simultaneously nullifies that compassion. It couldn’t be clearer: political outrage, no matter how well intentioned, instantly becomes dangerous the moment it steps beyond the boundaries of the state, of the mainstream, of the legal, of reformism, of consensus political normality.
Common Redsails W
Bless your soul! I read that several weeks ago and wanted to find it again but could not remember where it was.
Rizzler
In the Snyder extended cut, he beefs with Baby Gronk via an exchange of diss tracks
Also he has a Discord group for some reason
I keep saying to any liberals that claim the Joker is about White Male RageTM is that if it was, then Arthur would have recruited those wall street bros and now here, the Riddler would give white collar criminals a high five.
Carnival Row was a fun show, but down the line, they talk about a country that recently did a successful worker revolution.
At first it’s understandable worried about foreign agents. And then, for literally no motivation at all, it’s intimated that certain civilians are being DISAPPEARED and everybody must not remember they existed for COMMUNIST REASONS. People don’t have enough beds and that’s blamed on gommunism (where were all the beds pre-revolution???) And when they try to export the revolution they killed civilians because… uh… honestly it’s not clear at all. They just start opening fire and say killing the civilians will somehow cause a revolution.
It wasn’t the best show, but it was otherwise neat, so this just double annoyed me.
I love this movie but yeah that plot point came out of nowhere and didn’t really seem consistent. Seems like a flooded Gotham would be a cool set up for a sequel though
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