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.
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.
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.
Character who hates being X suddenly realizes being X is helpful actually when something very contrived and unlikely happens.
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 buy 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!
The power of love saves the day
I may be biased since im ace
The original Frozen was a nice twist on that, where it wasn’t romantic love that saved the day, but familial love.
Interstellar and Arrival, great films ruined by this lazy pathetic trope.
except it’s not the day, it’s the entirety of space-time.
God how much better they would have been had they had like a cool science solution to the plot, but they’d have never made any money without the hackneyed ‘love saves the universe’ shit endings they had.
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
Literally this:
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.
“I can’t believe you convinced me that we shouldn’t be letting corporations pollute the planet! I’m never falling for that again!”
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.
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.
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.
Edit: I just want to drive home how much I despise that shit.
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.
“We are not so different, you and I,” soliloquies the villain.
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.”
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.
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:
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All members of a minority group are bad.
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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:
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Most members of a minority group are bad.
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This member of that minority group is one of the few good ones.
Exactly.
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Or conversely, racism will be eliminated once the head racist is defeated.
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.
A great power comes great responsibility.
Yeah I get it unless you’re a morally corrupt psychopath.
The “We know this is a silly action movie, we’re not taking it seriously ourselves, wink wink!” thing that some action movies do. If I thought action movies were cringe, I wouldn’t be watching the movie in the first place. Can the folks making it please make a movie that they aren’t themselves embarrassed of?
They fly now!?
I hate when media tells us that men 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 than mass media is.
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.
a lot of egotistical nutbags, man or woman, seem to think they can never be wrong any partner who would confront them is evil and hateful for doing so. or it’s a form of partner abuse. i had a couple of exes who basically told me I was abusive and hateful when I pointed out their financial problems were entirely of their own making…
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.
There might be one somewhere, but I’m having trouble thinking of one
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.
It’s even harder when you’re gay
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.
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.
