I’m joking with the meme, but it’s an interesting how plot armor unintentionally places value on people’s lives in fiction.
It’s telling that censorship laws decide who it is and isn’t acceptable to kill. Just thinking about violence against sentient robots and how that’s normalized in things like Samurai Jack.
Like we know the robot has thoughts and feelings, like they’ll try to run to save themselves or plead for mercy, but a character can still heroic after essentially killing a non-human who’s acting like how we understand humans.
I feel like there’s something dangerous in how easily we can depict appropriate targets of violence. Not just robots, but anybody deemed as less than human are allowed to be more put at risk.
Unnamed people are killed in superhero fights all the time. But unless they are of a class of characters like protagonists, they are collateral damage at best.
I think Plot Armor as a trope needs more class consciousness and awareness around how deciding who gets to be protected is often an unconscious political belief.
What about you though? Any tropes in media you’d like to see explored more or written with a leftist understanding?
I feel like I should point out that he does kill humans in season 5, and the show more or less says that not only is he still cool and heroic for doing it, he’s actually even more awesome now that it can be shown with blood and everything.
Yeah that’s wild from a creative perspective. The morals didn’t change, the censorship level did because it was on adult swim.
And even then there was still this level of acceptable violence when you’re not considered human enough.
They were considered evil enough to kill even if they were born human and made evil against the will.
I mean, I think that was completely the correct decision, artistically. Samurai Jack was openly influenced by chanbara movies and samurai anime and manga, and particularly by Lone Wolf and Cub. The samurai characters in those stories are cool and heroic precisely because they kill people in stylish and gruesome ways. Shying away from that or rejecting it would have been hypocritical weak. I also think “cinematic violence is incredibly cool and our hero is incredibly cool for killing people in cool ways” is FAR less problematic than “it’s cool to kill robots because they’re not ‘real’ people, even when we show them as fully sentient, but killing humans is a big no no.”