Submitted 4 days ago by SwissArmyKazoo@lemmy.world to [deleted]
It doesn’t even have to be that the message is bad or completely objective and propaganda fuelled, it could just be its often incredibly recited, copied and pasted or just a blatantly obvious good lesson that you are completely aware of.
Anytime the moral is to not get angry about something that’s perfectly reasonable to be angry about
The inciting incident in Elmo in Grouchland will forever be scarred into my brain.
So tired of seeing revenge killing movies in Hollywood. As long as someone is truly evil and does something unforgivable in the 1st act, the “hero” is then justified in slaughtering like 100+ random people in a dark hallway in the 2nd act. I think it’s the only sort of violence we’re okay with anymore. Any other type of violence people might have a problem, but because it’s done in the name of revenge for a dead wife/dog/kidnapped daughter, that’s now been whitewashed as “good wholesome revenge killing.” Or something.
Is it better when the hero decides at the last minute to spare the life of the villain so they “don’t become like them” or is it worse?
If the hero also spares the life of the 100+ randoms, it’s better.
But killing them and sparing the life of the super evil villain, is much much worse.
At least in my opinion.
Kind of related, the stories where the protagonist slaughters dozens of people just to get to the antagonist and then let them live because they had a change of heart.
Like bro, you just killed 50 people to get to this guy and now you’re just gonna change your mind at the last minute?!? The proles can’t even catch a break in hero stories.
The Last of Us 2 Could’ve been good, but they did this and tried to have the “killing is bad actually” moral at the same time and pissed everyone off.
“This character is a freak, let’s make fun of them for being different, even run them out of town.” Character saves their lives, usually using the thing that makes them different “Hey everyone, this character is the best, we love them!”
Acceptable theoretical moral: Love everyone. Actual implied moral: Love everyone because you’ll never know when they might be useful to you.
Or worse only love them after they proved helpful
It’s so gross.
Almost as bad is if they get treated worse for saving the town, with the townspeople blaming them for any collateral damage.
Rudolph’s Nose trope.
Exactly. HATED that and the Clifford books as a kid for that reason.
It’s also kinda harmful to disabled people. The implication is they can only be accepted if they prove themselves exceptional
Right???
I don’t know if this is still a thing, but I feel there was a surge of media in the 90s and 00s telling us:
If you’re not popular at school, all you have to do is cut your hair, get contacts, and the same expensive clothes as everyone else, THEN you’ll finally be happy.
She’s soooo ugly, she has glasses and a pony tail!
She has paint on her overalls!
Character who hates being X suddenly realizes being X is helpful actually when something very contrived and unlikely happens.
They’ve got money for war, but can’t feed the poor. Best they can do is spend ten times what they would spend to feed them to torture the poor more.
I mean the worst thing you could do with poor people is feed them. Why would you want to perpetuate their suffering?
Now unless you’re ALSO talking about housing them, giving them healthcare and education? Okay, let’s do it.
Let’s not be like a guy named Dennis or Fadi on the YouTube who go out and exploit homeless for clicks and merch sales by giving them 10 star buffets y’all.. maybe once a week.
I hate it when they come up with something to help with someone’s disability, but it’s thrown out because the disability “is what makes them special”
to be fair, some in the disabled community live this way. they like refuse to accept solutions to their disabilities and see it as cultural destruction.
huge problem in the deaf community w/ the advent of cochlear implants and the advancement of that tech.
Is it really a problem though?
Let people live the way they want to live, it’s not even hard
I hate when comedies tell us that nen should always agree with their wives even when the wife is clearly wrong and irrational. And I’m a woman. If I ever get married, I want a husband who will tell me when I’m wrong. Nobody should have to just put up with their partner behaving like an irrational lunatic without saying something.
social media largely disagrees with you and is even more crazy about this type of thing.
what is the most wild to me is when a professional comes on and talks about your perspective, they get mobbed and mass reported as being misogynistic.
It’s so frustrating. A healthy relationship should consist of both partners being able to tell the other when they’re wrong. Also, it shows that in general, not just in relationships, society has a lot of people with no sense of personal accountability who think anyone who tries to hold them accountable is toxic
I legitimately want to see a movie about a husband/wife couple that gets along the whole movie. It’s not that there can’t be conflict, just have it come from outside the relationship.
Give Undercover Blues a try. Sort of a mid plot, but the acting elevates it. The main characters are a loving married couple that continues to love and respect each other throughout the movie.
There might be one somewhere, but I’m having trouble thinking of one
It’s even harder when you’re gay
I’m tired of seeing the telling of “the scorpion and the frog” fable ham fisted into so many stories. I don’t think I ever heard that one growing up, yet I’ve heard it a dozen times in shows.
The only acceptable telling of this story
The moral of every Hollywood Racism Movie^TM ends up boiling down to “We could eliminate racism if only every racist met a person of [RACE] that they actually liked.”
They’re correct that this creates cognitive dissonance. The racist, upon meeting a minority member that doesn’t uphold the stereotype, has two contradictory facts in their head:
All members of a minority group are bad.
This member of that minority group isn’t bad.
This is cognitive dissonance. Both of these cannot be true at the same time. One of these premises must be wrong.
Hollywood imagines the bigot will treat this like a physicist disproving a theory by finding a counterexample. But bigotry is anyhing but scientific. You can’t reason your way out of a place reason did not lead you to. Instead, they adjust their premises to:
Most members of a minority group are bad.
This member of that minority group is one of the few good ones.
Exactly.
I mean, that is actually the most successful way of countering racism in real life. Not 100% successful, but better than just trying to talk someone out of racist views.
Or conversely, racism will be eliminated once the head racist is defeated.
Wasn’t there a disney channel original where they explained the segregation as people dancing and singing about it.
I don’t mind specific morals I think I mind the way they’re told or if they’re pushed down our throats in ways that don’t feel genuine.
But any time media portrays war as good or cool or badass or necessary. Basically every movie from the 2000s carries a secret pro War message.
From the 2000s
Wait till you get to movies from the 50a
I feel as though most war movies, especially the famous ones, the moral is always “war is horrible.” The Best Years of Our Lives (1946) is about how hard it is to come back from war and resume life.
With the exceptions of Top Gun, Act of Valor (2012), Lone Survivor (2013), etc. Sands of Iwo Jima (1949) sticks out as propaganda-ish.
The ones I would actually call “war movies” and not propaganda. Like The Longest Day (1962), Tora Tora Tora (1970) are obsessed with their historical accuracy. Hard to call those pro-war.
Or watch American Football.
The “We know this is a silly superhero movie, we’re not taking it seriously ourselves, wink wink!” thing that, some superhero movies do. If I thought superheroes were cringe, I wouldn’t be watching the movie in the first place.
They fly now!?
Any kind, empathetic character in a book sacrifices themselves to help others? “Oh, that character is an allegory for Christ, that’s why they acted that way.” I used to hear this all the time in English classes from middle school on, and eventually it got annoying enough that I wound up sitting down and reading the whole damn bible, just so that I could ask “In what way are this character’s actions better explained by them representing Jesus than by the fact that they’ve been an empathetic, kind character who looks out for others for the whole book?” and actually be able to call out teachers that were just using it lazily.
Yes, there are plenty such allegories out there in books, but it got to the point where it seemed like some sort of thought terminating cliché for literary analysis in middle school and high school.
The amount of references to Christianity in random pieces of media makes me want to crash out God damn America cult
Christ is already a fucking allegory! Maybe there can be people who are just nice.
Anyone can achieve great things, even if they come from nothing… As long as they secretly have a great background and heritage out the wazoo. Or it is pre-ordained and has to be them; all other attempts doomed to failure.
The initial message might be fine, but it then undermines itself.
Star Trek’s treatment of the mirror universe (a parallel universe where everyone is evil) is like that. It’s introductory episode had a nice hopeful ending, where someone is convinced that the evil human empire would last longer and be more sustainable if it changed its ways to be less evil, since cooperating is a better strategy, and that they, too, could be something like the Federation.
In its next episode in Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, said person’s reforms are explicitly attributed to being the cause of the empire’s destruction, because they had weakened it.
You have to be the “good” humans, in the right universe to form the Federation, anyone else would be making a fatal mistake.
Love/friendship/family/moral high ground/any virtue/you name it always wins and is the solution for all your problems.
Reality is never that simple. So there’s nothing to take away from such a lesson except for false hopes.
The power of love saves the day
I may be biased since im ace
Interstellar and Arrival, great films ruined by this lazy pathetic trope.
excepts it’s not the day, it’s the entirety of space-time.
The original Frozen was a nice twist on that, where it wasn’t romantic love that saved the day.
I don’t know if this counts but I hate when they do male makeovers and cut the guy’s hair.
Diane Keaton was once in a movie where she gets cancer. Meryl Streep is her hairstylist sister. She makes her this wig. Marvin’s Room (1996)
Before makeover: www.imdb.com/title/tt0116999/…/rm1756714240/
After makeover: www.imdb.com/title/tt0116999/…/rm991533057/ www.imdb.com/title/tt0116999/…/rm303667201/
I laughed so fucking hard when they put on that wig and all acted like it was great.
Basically any moral plugged into hallmark movie channel or similarly designed crap. Things rarely “just”work out, and certainly never because of love, god, or good vibes.
A great power comes great responsibility.
Yeah I get it unless you’re a morally corrupt psychopath.
The villian being actualy some misunderstood broken character and that from their perspective they aren’t doing anything wrong.
Remember when in Hollywood the bad guy was the bad guy because they wanted to do bad things, and the hero was the hero because they wanted to do good things. And at the end the good guy defeats the bad guy and saves the day. Now every bad guy must have this complex back story of abuse or some wrong doing against then, and now their evil actions are just some justified misguided revenge against the world. FUCK THAT.
I am 90% sure that the last 20 years of this being normalized by mainstream media has let to us not properly punishing literal real life pedophiles and power hungry sociopaths, because “Well we don’t know their side of the story… there has to be due process.” Yeah, not long ago the due process was that people got linched for doing a fraction behind closed doors of what degenrate billionaires do in the open today.
Moral of the story is that there’s a side to everything… NO there isn’t, there’s pretty definitve bad and pretty definitive good. Sure there are morally ambiguous topics, but Hollywood has been bluring the line on literal genocide, rape and murder just for the sake of not wanting to write an actual interesting story.
I agree but I also disagree. I think it depends on the story. Lots of stories work on a simple level of “these values are good” and “these values are bad”, and that’s cool from Jungian perspective, but I also don’t want to live in a world where nobody makes life better for anyone else because it’s just pre-ordained that who is going to be a rapist and who is going to be feeding homeless people.
Like do I want to read the Lord of the Rings as imperialist propaganda against orcs and Southrons and wildlings, who actually have valid political objections to the axis of Human-Elf-Dwarf hegemony? Hell yeah I do because I’m a leftist freak, but I recognize that I am fundamentally misreading the moral context the story is presented in–it’s about archetypes, about human values, about that nature of evil, not as an independent entity in itself, but how it can manifests in each one of us.
It just depends on the story.
Probably the WORST thing a story can do is mix and match “people are only evil because of we misunderstand them” and "people are purely evil.¨ I don´t see it often, but I think How to Train Your Dragon does it.
You’ll find some friends on the writing staff of Puss in Boots: The Last Wish. Big Jack Horner is very obviously written as a glorious return to characters who are simply bad.
Like do I want to read the Lord of the Rings as imperialist propaganda against orcs and Southrons and wildlings, who actually have valid political objections to the axis of Human-Elf-Dwarf hegemony? Hell yeah I do because I’m a leftist freak, but I recognize that I am fundamentally misreading the moral context the story is presented in–it’s about archetypes, about human values, about that nature of evil, not as an independent entity in itself, but how it can manifests in each one of us.
Funnily enough, I think Tolkein might have also enjoyed that. He was long-conflicted about the nature of orcs, being that his religious beliefs maintained that evil could not create from nothing, but only twist, and even then, it could not corrupt someone past possibility of redemption.
So orcs were stuck between being elves corrupted past redemption, or something sauron created.
Probably the WORST thing a story can do is mix and match “people are only evil because of we misunderstand them” and "people are purely evil.¨ I don´t see it often, but I think How to Train Your Dragon does it.
Or change it on the fly for the same character.
Cruella de Ville going from someone so single-mindedly obsessed with the idea of the perfect coat, that she didn’t care for how she got there, even if she had to skin a hundred puppies, to someone who developed a lifelong phobia and hatred of Dalmatians after they scared her mother off a cliff, weakened her character a bit, I feel.
If she had been one of the other from the get-go, that would have been fine, but it was switching between that wasn’t.
I don’t (at least, I try not to) consume media with typical “morals of the story” and narratives. But looking back into my childhood, I hate the stories about solving conflicts diplomatically, in a nonviolent way. I wish I had someone to teach me stand up for myself with my fists. I really lacked the skill of giving one a good smack when needed, and still do. Because in real life nobody listens to what you say, unless you can back your words with something sensable.
Jon Stewart. He’s full of jokes and fallacies.
They encourage you to “want to” laugh at something you probably should “want to” kill somebody over. These aren’t Martin Luther King’s. These are Charlie Kirks with a democratic base.
Maybe they’re peace bringers. Maybe they’re just fire starters. Maybe they’re complicit. The way I look at it is classes. All warfare is class warfare. And I’m perfectly okay with putting all their millionaire/billionaire asses on a rocket to Mars.
arctanthrope@lemmy.world 4 days ago
when the “villain” is objectively correct, pointing out the failure of the establishment and that change is necessary, and then also skins puppies alive for no reason, and then the points they bring up are never addressed again
Carl@anarchist.nexus 4 days ago
Literally this:
Image
Fredthefishlord@lemmy.blahaj.zone 3 days ago
I mean it feels kinda silly but holy shit it’s such a real life thing. Many people are much better at identifying issues than solutions.
snooggums@piefed.world 4 days ago
The most interesting villains are objectively correct in their reason for acting but their methods are monstrous because they lost perspective.
A good example is the military antagonists in The Rock, where the military guys have decided that threatening terrorism is the only way to get benefits for vets and some of them decide to actually follow through with it. They were justifiably angry about something valid, but went too far.
Evil just to be evil is rarely engaging.
FluidBeef@quokk.au 3 days ago
Kind of like how the Suffragettes were objectively correct and had to blow men up to create change because otherwise they would simply have been written off as hysterical women.
schipelblorp@sh.itjust.works 4 days ago
I can’t believe you convinced me that we shouldn’t be letting corporations pollute the planet! I’m never falling for that again!