this post was submitted on 14 Aug 2023
29 points (79.6% liked)

Ask Lemmy

26767 readers
1686 users here now

A Fediverse community for open-ended, thought provoking questions

Please don't post about US Politics. If you need to do this, try !politicaldiscussion@lemmy.world


Rules: (interactive)


1) Be nice and; have funDoxxing, trolling, sealioning, racism, and toxicity are not welcomed in AskLemmy. Remember what your mother said: if you can't say something nice, don't say anything at all. In addition, the site-wide Lemmy.world terms of service also apply here. Please familiarize yourself with them


2) All posts must end with a '?'This is sort of like Jeopardy. Please phrase all post titles in the form of a proper question ending with ?


3) No spamPlease do not flood the community with nonsense. Actual suspected spammers will be banned on site. No astroturfing.


4) NSFW is okay, within reasonJust remember to tag posts with either a content warning or a [NSFW] tag. Overtly sexual posts are not allowed, please direct them to either !asklemmyafterdark@lemmy.world or !asklemmynsfw@lemmynsfw.com. NSFW comments should be restricted to posts tagged [NSFW].


5) This is not a support community.
It is not a place for 'how do I?', type questions. If you have any questions regarding the site itself or would like to report a community, please direct them to Lemmy.world Support or email info@lemmy.world. For other questions check our partnered communities list, or use the search function.


Reminder: The terms of service apply here too.

Partnered Communities:

Tech Support

No Stupid Questions

You Should Know

Reddit

Jokes

Ask Ouija


Logo design credit goes to: tubbadu


founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
 

For hypothetical example; Father/son duo are criminals, harming, killing, and stealing innocent civilians. Superhero fights them, resulting in the father dying. Son is now portrayed as a sympathetic villain because all he wants is to avenge his father... despite all the fathers of children they murdered whilst comitting crimes.

Side question; do you feel sympathy for the villains portrayed like this?

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] WolfyGamer29@lemmy.world 2 points 1 year ago (3 children)

It makes sense, I suppose. maybe I'm just a bit jaded about villain writing. I just feel like a lot of the time villain motivation seems to come after the villain themself. Like the villain and their methods was created, and then a motivation for that was created to make it make sense. Rather than creating a motivation and then designing the villain off the motivation. Not all villains, of course. there's some pretty complex and fantastically written ones out there. But sometimes, there's a lot of villains where it seems the writers just REALLY needed some kind of relatable motivation.

You might just not like bad writing.

[–] Rhynoplaz@lemmy.world 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I mean, they're writing a comic book. The superhero and every other character started as a concept doodle and a story was written around them.

I'm now curious why that detail bothers you for only villains.

[–] WolfyGamer29@lemmy.world 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

It doesn't only bother me for villains, I just had villains in particular on the mind. I get it though. I was just watching TV and Aquaman came on and I've seen a bunch of other superho movies on TV lately, so I was just thinking a lot about the tropes I see a lot, and that particular example was at the front of my mind.

I'd also recently scene Age of Ultron, where the twins had, in my opinion, a really questionable reason for siding with Ultron.

I also love writing fiction myself, and I have a terrible habit of disecting just about every plot point I encounter in media to see what "makes them work", or not work, to see what I can learn from them for my own writing. Makes me awful overly critical of some things.

[–] Rhynoplaz@lemmy.world 1 points 1 year ago

Villains must be tricky. It's hard to make evil motivations relatable to most people. (who I'm assuming are good people)

We really want to believe that some horrific event caused the downfall of this person, but sometimes "I just wanted to see if I could" is a legitimate, although unsatisfying, evil reason to do something.

[–] afraid_of_zombies@lemmy.world 1 points 1 year ago

Doesnt real life work that way? All the ways of doing crimes were pretty much figured out before any of us were born.