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 see what you mean there. I’d have to guess it’s someone else’s explanation though. It’s for sure not in the Silmarillion or published letters and it doesn’t sound like how Tolkien considered his own work. He may have had that influence but his ‘anti allegory’ (big quotes) brain would just deny it. It’s both there and totally subverted at the same time, actually, yeah, that does kinda cover it, I can’t think of a character or story in the legendary that doesn’t apply to and even thematically it does both all the time every time.