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Moments in media where a characters actions are framed as wrong but actually right
- Thread starter DragonSJG
- Start date
It was immoral for Jane to threaten to snitch on drug dealers when things didn't go her way. Once you put that bad energy out it can come back to haunt you.
Yeesh, what a massive downgrade then. I remember really liking Lost Our Lisa.
And it's going to keep happening. It's the limitation of our culture.
MCU and GoT and any other property that gets the kind of production values and widespread marketing is made by people who benefit off the system as it is. They're not going to write a story where the moral of it is "The systems we live in are inherently corrupt and corrupting and must be deconstructed so that we can create something new in their place" because that would mean they have to say their own wealth and power is illegitimate.
So, the story they write is that any change to the system at hand needs to include their cooperation. Anyone who takes that decision out of their hands and tries to force change without their consent is committing an evil act. Whatever their goals, their methods cannot be condoned if it wretches power away from them.
Can't speak to the books where Robb is literally a child
But in the show yeah dunno what a grown man who made a promise he never should have made expected
Not to be murdered after peace talks. Frey would have been well within his rights to withdraw support from Robb's cause and be justified. There was no valid justification for murdering Robb and his men. That was just spite.
This is like saying Walter was justified for everyone he killed at the start of Season 5 of Breaking Bad because he needed to preserve his reputation.
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We also kinda have to remember that revolutions tend not to go the way we'd want them to go in reality. They tend to end in an oppressive dictatorship of some kind. Usually because the leaders of said revolution go too far and become corrupt themselves.
As far as the Moon Knight example goes, that's how a lot of cults tend to be. They pretend to be awesome and progressive and for all the good things to get people to sign up and feel like they belong, but then the cloth gets pulled back and it's just crazy people all the way down.
EDIT: A big part of all this is to say that you can do the wrong things for the right reasons and that winds up happening a lot in our world. The entire concept of dystopia is built on this idea.
Walt wasn't "energy." He was a human being who made the choice to let someone die in front of him when he could have easily saved her. He wasn't fulfilling some cosmic karmic bullshit. He was being an evil prick.
Don't get me wrong I'm not saying it was morally correct.
Ultimately though it's a fucked up amoral world of extreme violence and depravity and Robb Stark roled the dice and got snake eyes
It's clear he never intended to follow through with the arrangement, falling in love or not, because he assumed the Frey daughter was going to be ugly and unkempt, basically showing him zero respect and in a world where respect was becoming more and more important with the instability of power
The Starks were losing influence and power and Frey ultimately felt both that he had to hitch his horse to someone and decided it wouldn't be the guy who disrespected him.
I think maybe this wasn't the perfect thread for this lol but the show didn't do enough to highlight how much of a fucking idiot Robb Stark was
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I haven't watched Moon Knight, so I wasn't commenting on that specifically.
As for real world revolutions, I'd say that doesn't really matter. Broadly speaking, atleast from what I've read, most systems of power, be they democracies or monarchies or empires, aren't usually applied in fiction in any sense that is realistic, but more to be in some way reflective of the protagonists ideals or importance, which are often the writers ideals, and that's even moreso when you apply it to any kind of childrens or teenage media. Like, the Lion King presents a fiction that monarchies employed about, being that if an illegitimate king sits on the throne, then the whole kingdom itself will suffer. Kings are determined by the divine right, aka god, and so the land is ravaged by famine so long as Scar sits, where it was a beautiful paradise-esque land while Mufasa sat, and everything gets all green again when Simba sits. That's not because that's how real monarchies work, it's because it's conveying the idea that Simba is the Right King.
As you go up in age range, systems of power get more and more a realistic depiction, but I think their depictions never truly escape being encapsulated worldviews of their authors. Many stories, maybe even most, will depict to some degree inaccurate views of how things work, but how they are inaccurate will be determined by what values the author holds. And big corporations are obviously going to have built in values of legitimizing systems of power and capitalism, so we're going to forever be stuck with revolutionaries that 'go too far', not because they have any interest in realism, whatever it may be, but because they wholesale reject the idea that they should be made to have their power taken away against their will.
Technically I think you can avoid the hospital massacre.
I think only the doctor is the only non-optional kill.
My reading on a lot of these specific variants (where the 'bad guys' are morally correct so the writer has them do an unforgivable later on to make them less sympathetic) has been a bit more charitable, in that they know the 'villain' has a valid point so they have to overcorrect. If they thought the Flagsmashers, for example, were in the wrong from the get go they wouldn't have needed them to up the ante to justify them as the villains of the peice. They intended them to be interesting villains but wrote themselves into a corner where they weren't villains anymore and, realising it, 'fixed' it.
It does make me thankful that at least some of these things change over time (like Poison Ivy and, to a lesser extent, Harley Quinn).
In Tales of Arise, that stupid scene where one of the heroes wants to kill what is basically a Nazi Dictator Racist Genocider...and the party has already killed two almost equally as evil folks...and suddenly everyone gets cold feet and upset with him.
I almost abandoned the game then.
I almost abandoned the game then.
I think the closest we've got to that in terms of TV is The Wire. It's obviously a far cry from the megabudget of GOT and the D+ stuff but it's at least the most obvious example that comes to mind that basically says: "son, we're fucked in this hypercapitalistic society, because the system is designed to self-propagate and self-protect. You'd need an unbelievable amount of luck, inhuman effort and boundless solidarity/empathy to break the cycle the system has put you upon".
But, yeah, the incredibly expensive and intensely marketed shows aren't gonna bite the hand that feeds them... or, actually, shoot themselves in their proverbial feet. They, too, are an integral part of that system.
Nakia was identifying all of the same problems as Killmonger, but offering real solutions instead of using it as an excuse to indulge in bloodlust. She's the real character who was right, but never got any credit for it.
Scar, from The Lion King
He wanted lions and hyenas to live together, while Mufasa and Simba defended segregation.
He wanted lions and hyenas to live together, while Mufasa and Simba defended segregation.
You've got it reversed. That's the out the writers slipped in so they could dunk on his character at the end no matter what he said or did. That shooting makes no sense for his character, just like in the Prestige Hugh Jackman's character suddenly shouting he never really loved his girlfriend/wife whatever. A completely out of character moment so the writer has an excuse to paint him as a villain. It's bullshit lazy writing.
He was literally a fascist who wanted to put himself at the top of the world.
Agreed. When I caught up on GoT years ago, the Red Wedding was the least surprising thing to happen in the show. I just nodded along like, "Yep. What a moron."
Huh? He kills all those people in the museum without flinching just because they were there. Killmonger is not some revolutionary leader who wants to make things better. He's a broken man who only knows violence and chaos and wants to bring that to the world under the guise of uplifting people.
Nah, Robb didn't actually do much wrong. If making stupid decision(s) meant death then half of the characters would have been dead way before the Red Wedding.
There's the idea that Robb was betrayed way before he broke his marriage pact. Roose Bolton makes idiotic decisions that an experienced general shouldn't be making unless his aim was to betray the Starks. His decisions somehow manage to cost Stark loyalists their lives and never Frey/Bolton men. I wonder how much Robb breaking his word actually played in the betrayal or the Frey-Stark alliance was doomed from the start because every Lord in the Seven Kingdoms though of Tywin as this god among men.
Sending Theon to the Iron Islands only resulted in Winterfell being lost because the Greyjoys were going to invade the North anyway and most likely put Winterfell under siege.
There was a miscommunication between him and his uncle that resulted in Tywin not coming West. His Aunt refused to help them in the war effort when the combined forces of the North, Vale and Riverland's would have won the war easily.
Robb basically fought a war against some of the most experienced battle commanders in Westeros (Tywin & Stannis), faced betrayal from his own allies & couldn't forge any alliances of his own through no fault of his own. He tried to make common cause with the Vale, Greyjoys and Renly but none of it worked. All the while leading an army from the region with the least people and the Riverland's which were being ravaged by war while every other Kingdom was basically untouched.
He also lost his only bargaining chip when Jaime was freed and I didn't even really touch on this debacle.
I'm not sure what else he could have done in the circumstances. He'd have had to go back North to deal with the Ironborn invasion regardless of everything else and by the time that was settled, Stannis would have lost on the Blackwater. So he'd be stuck up North in a stalemate of sorts.
Brets contract did not have creative control he had no right to decide he wasnt gonna lose the title on the ppv. Refusing to lose just because it was his hometown is nonsense. Bret screwed Bret
Yep. Killmonger is an uncommonly strong villain in the MCU because he actually voices understandable motivations and a righteous gripe (unlike Thanos), but his actual actions are unambiguously monstrous and self-aggrandizing and completely undermine what he claims to be fighting for.
Which might be fine if Vince had the guts to hash that out ahead of time. He instead chose the coward bosses way out, changing the finish at the eleventh hour to make sure no one went home happy, the belt was hung on a tantrum-throwing yes-man and ultimately opened us up to decades of suffering through Evil Vince and the Vince McMahon Assorted Bullshit Family Show.
Apologies about this old ass response comment, but I gotta comment on this.
Bret would not have shown up on Nitro with the belt because WCW got the piss sued out of them over the Medusa incident. So flat out that nobody was worried about that happening.
Also, Bret still had about 3 weeks left on his contract. The reason everybody was all he's going to show up on nitro the next night it's because point blank he was not. After they fucked him out of the title, he wasn't coming back and Vince knew it.
The reason the paranoia set in and why Vince did what he did is because as I said above, Bret Hart was not going to go to nitro the next night with the WWF championship and throw it in the trash. HOWEVER, what was the stop Eric bischoff from saying "Guess what everybody?! we just signed the current WWF champion and he'll be here in a month!".
Add to all that that Bret was a professional and wouldn't do the same shit as Madusa (who was legitimately lied to by the WWF and Vince McMahon)
He also had a 60 day no compete, claws. He couldn't have hold a Madusa even if he wanted to.
In hindsight him being screwed out of the title is a milestone of wrestling. In reality it didn't have to happen on any level.
All they needed to do was make Bret lose the belt before the Montreal show. Bret said at his book that his contract said he had creative control for the last 30 days of his contract, and that he offered to lose to Taker, Austin or anyone else but Shawn. But Vince wanted Shawn with the belt and made his choice.
They literally had Backlund lose the belt to Nash at a fucking house show, it was not really hard to make Bret lose to somebody and then Shawn beats the transitional champ.
Holdo had to commit suicide because of how badly Poe fucked up.
I mean, they must have changed this last minute, right? There's no way that that was the story all along and everyone was calling him a mutant hitler... for wanting to save mutants from a toxic cloud?
Isn't the whole point of Black Panther to contrast Nakia and Killmonger's plans while looking at the inaction of the Wakandan Kings? I can admit that the writers were a bit heavy handed at times. Killmonger is a good villain but a villain nonetheless.
TLoU, the writing around the Fireflies is weird. Why are they working on a vaccine for a fungal infection? Why is a brain biopsy going to kill Ellie? None of that excuses Joel's action leading up to the ending and the ending itself.
Bae vs Bay - I don't really care for either ending but considering the game tries to kill Chloe constantly I just figured it was some Final Destination situation. I went with save the bay. Though I am not sure anything in the story hints that either solution would actually work but it has been a long time.
Surprised no one has mentioned Homura Akemi. Is it right to kidnap god and brainwash your friends so everyone can be happy for a bit?
TLoU, the writing around the Fireflies is weird. Why are they working on a vaccine for a fungal infection? Why is a brain biopsy going to kill Ellie? None of that excuses Joel's action leading up to the ending and the ending itself.
Bae vs Bay - I don't really care for either ending but considering the game tries to kill Chloe constantly I just figured it was some Final Destination situation. I went with save the bay. Though I am not sure anything in the story hints that either solution would actually work but it has been a long time.
Surprised no one has mentioned Homura Akemi. Is it right to kidnap god and brainwash your friends so everyone can be happy for a bit?
The first two arcs of the Trails series have two antagonists who use grossly unethical means to amass supernatural power because they're afraid they'll one day lose their small country to the aggressively expansionist (and massive) empire to the north (and without a supernatural trump card, their small armies wouldn't stand a chance) and while the protagonists rightly call them out on the means they went to, they don't really come up with any alternatives aside from "we can overcome anything as long as we work together". Then the series moves on to said expansionist empire and we see that it is every bit the threat that said antagonists insisted it was.
It's even worst in the context of JK saying Hermione is a self insert. Something clearly happened between Chamber of Secrets and Goblet of Fire that changed her perception of bigotry.
Also the "maybe if you guys weren't so mean to the wizard nazis they wouldn't be so bad" rhetoric that's become increasingly prevent in the series.
A prophecy means someone will do it, not that someone will be forced against their will to do it. He made his choice.
If he had respected the chain of command then there would have been a fuckton more bombers and fighters to buy them more time.
More like 50%. He was right about Wakanda ignoring everyone but themselves, but the other half of his plan was murdering pretty much all non-black people and killing anyone in his way.
Not a Christian but didn't someone have to betray Jesus in order for him to be sacrificed and absolve mankind of the original sin, or whatever? Like as an outsider it feels like no matter what someone had to draw the short straw and end up fulfilling that role.
Slight spoilers for Stranger Things Season 4.
In Episode 2 of S4, Eleven bludgeons with a roller skate a girl who was bullying her both inside their school's grounds and *outside* of them, leaving her bleeding. The episode frames this act as if Eleven has done something so horrific the entire place just freezes and gasps and stands there as if she's a complete monster for daring to do such a thing, despite only moments earlier the same people not doing anything when Eleven was visibly bullied/humiliated by a bunch of kids including the aforementioned "victim" and by the place's discjockey, and said bullying included not only a very visible group shaming in the middle of the rink - it also included Eleven being showered with food/drink *and* being recorded with a very visible handheld camera.
It fucking infuriated me. I know it's "by design", but the way the scenario was built felt so... artificially, unnaturally unfair. Like "hey, let's just pile misery upon misery and have no one argue otherwise".
Disclaimer: I haven't finished the season yet. Gotta watch Episode 4 later.
In Episode 2 of S4, Eleven bludgeons with a roller skate a girl who was bullying her both inside their school's grounds and *outside* of them, leaving her bleeding. The episode frames this act as if Eleven has done something so horrific the entire place just freezes and gasps and stands there as if she's a complete monster for daring to do such a thing, despite only moments earlier the same people not doing anything when Eleven was visibly bullied/humiliated by a bunch of kids including the aforementioned "victim" and by the place's discjockey, and said bullying included not only a very visible group shaming in the middle of the rink - it also included Eleven being showered with food/drink *and* being recorded with a very visible handheld camera.
It fucking infuriated me. I know it's "by design", but the way the scenario was built felt so... artificially, unnaturally unfair. Like "hey, let's just pile misery upon misery and have no one argue otherwise".
Disclaimer: I haven't finished the season yet. Gotta watch Episode 4 later.