The kid became Ronald McDonald...

I get the vague impression that this is meant to subtly influence western society into believing that the masses aren’t truly people, that only the ones steering our collective wheels are actually human. Green arrow basically said as much for like… 5 seasons. Then it got weirder.
- There were a few moments in the Marvel Universe. Spider-Man even had his first movie based off the common man and results of super hero actions to create new baddies. But the one that stands out to me is in Iron Man 3, where Tony is going to fire on one of the bad guys in the compound and the guy throws down his gun and says, "Honestly, I hate working here. They are so weird."
- I get the vague impression that this is meant to subtly influence western society into believing that the masses aren’t truly people
  Tinfoil hat theory would be that the evil leaders of real life (the ceos, the billionaires, etc) are planting the seeds so that if their plans fail and a revolution comes, they won't be summarily executed
  
  What of they don't have to intentionally plant seeds? They just cancel anything that makes their power fantasy uncomfortable? :3
  
  Could you imagine?
  “For the crimes of economy-scale larceny, murder, environmental collapse, bribery, tax evasion, and, uhh, sexual battery of a pack of golden retrievers, how do you plea?”
  “C’mon, I’m just a little guy!”
  “D’aww”
- That show was so damn weird. Felt like the writers were trapped on an island where they were forced to keep writing about the island
  
  “The island is all that we know, and we write what we know. Send help.”
- There's no conspiracy. It's just people being lazy about good writing.
  Also it doesn't happen just in western society. There are plenty of asian movies which fall in the same problem.
- Nah it's just shit writing. Occam's razor and all that.
- Arrow only ran for 2 seasons and a brief 9-episode third season. Such a shame he got shanked and thrown off a mountain to end the series.
- By story logic, the henchmen really weren't "true people", but metaphors for environment difficulties. For example, a young adult watching superhero comics would think of homeworks, social media negativities, etc.
- I get the vague impression that this is meant to subtly influence western society into believing that the masses aren’t truly people,
  Well, people can think two things at once. And whilst people may think that non-fleshed out nameless movie henchmen "aren't truly people", I don't think they apply the same standard to random people irl.
  
  The abundance of people voting against their interests around the world, both historically and presently, seemingly solely to spite a specific group, was what initially spurred the thought. There has to be dehumanization at some step in the process and something to spur and reinforce it.
  Do I believe that terribly written media is the sole impetus for the US falling apart? No. But I do see symptoms in random places.

To be fair, if my kill count was at 69420, I'd need a REALLY good reason to kill one more
If I were at 69419, he'd be dead without a second thought
- If you missed 69420, don't worry about it, because 69422 is 69420, too.
  
  DUDE!
  
  See, this is why I regret dropping out of high school.

For me, the best version of this is Avatar: The Last Airbender. Aang spends an entire arc lamenting how he may need to spill blood and kill the Fire Lord. Meanwhile the very same Aang had previously sunk an entire naval fleet single-handedly.
How many thousands of sailors, most of them probably people drafted against their will, did you kill that day Aang? Remember when you literally sliced entire ships in half? Your hands cut through steel, would you have even felt the flesh you were cutting through? Or how about all those ships you sank? A fair number sank instantly. You think everybody got out safely from those ships? Or how about that time you destroyed that giant drill machine, the one manned by thousands of soldiers, outside the walls of Ba Sing Se? You think everyone managed to miraculously escape that fireball? And those are just the major battles. How about the hundreds, perhaps thousands, of fire nation soldiers you casually tossed around like rag dolls with your powers of air, water, and earth during dozens of minor skirmishes? What are the odds you managed to toss all these men around like playthings and NOT have a few of them have their skulls bashed open on rocks when they hit the ground wrong?
The point of this is not to condemn Aang's actions through the series. His actions were fully justified, as he was fighting a war against an expansionist colonial military power. What he did was an objective good. But by the time he's hand wringing about having to kill Fire Lord Ozai, Aang had almost certainly already taken hundreds of lives. Hell, he probably killed hundreds just in that final climactic battle against the airship armada. The Hindenburg disaster saw 1/3 of the passenger and crew parish. And that was from an airship that crashed when it was already landing and close to the ground. Aang was dropping ships from miles in the sky. Maybe some soldiers with fire bending powers could somehow slow their own descent enough to survive, maybe they had some parachutes. But there's zero chance that Armada didn't have a fatality rate at least comparable to the Hindenburg disaster.
So Aang blithely kills hundreds of conscripts without a second thought. But then he has a crisis of conscience that takes multiple episodes to resolve, and that crisis of conscience is all about...Fire Lord Ozai? This is like if someone nonchalantly participated in the Firebombing of Dresden and then suddenly developed complex moral doubts about putting a bullet in Hitler's head. Aang had already killed hundreds of people that Ozai had sent to their deaths. No one was forcing Ozai. He wasn't a conscript. He had full autonomy; he's the absolute ruler of the Fire Nation. He doesn't even have a Congress or Parliament to answer to. He has absolute total moral responsibility for every evil thing the Fire Nation has done. Yet, when it comes to actually holding the powerful accountable, suddenly Aang wants to talk about the morality of killing.
- Aang was very explicitly not in control of himself during the invasion of the north, and he became scared of his power due to his experiences with the avatar state.
  The whole moral conundrum is about him consciously choosing to kill the Fire Lord. Yes, he most likely caused deaths before, but not consciously & deliberately.
  
  Sure, there is that difference. But the series doesn't even address the fact that he's already killed hundreds of people. Intentionally or not, it's still absurd to hand wring about killing when you've already killed hundreds of people, accidentally or not, and the one person you're worrying about taking down is literal genocidal maniac. To me that just sounds like not being willing to take responsibility for your own actions. Intentionally or not, Aang killed hundreds of people. And it's not like he never went into the Avatar state again after taking out the Northern fleet. Hell, he fought Ozai while in the Avatar state. Maybe he should have just "accidentally" killed Ozai while in the Avatar state and just washed his hands of moral culpability, just like he did all the other people he killed before then.
  Regardless, Aang found a way to make peace with the fact that he had taken hundreds of lives. But when the person in question is someone of power and renown? Then it becomes something to fret over.
  
  So if I kill while high on drugs it's a-okay, right?
  
  I dunno, I think that take lacks a bit of object permanence. Just because you don't have to see the killing directly, doesn't mean you're any less morally responsible. Shielding soldiers from the direct outcomes of the violence they cause is like the defualt way of programming them and getting them to continue. A big reason why the US uses drones so much because its easier to get someone to press a button behind a screen than shoot someone in front of them.
  Causing many many deaths not consciously or deliberatley is worse IMO if you wanna judge the two against each other, it shows a flippance with lives and a lack of consideration of consequences of ones' own actions. Killing Ozai woulf have been pointed and deserved, one death with a direct positive effect, which in my eyes is much more valid and less morally questionable than hundreds of offscreen deaths.
- Plus I thought Avatar Yang Chen's argument was amazing. She told Aang that his duties to protect people as the Avatar outweighed his spiritual need to be a pacifist.
  
  Yeah, but she's forgetting about Aang's cultural duty to his people. He's the last Air Nomad. If Aang intentionally takes a life, then that cultural aspect of the Air Nomads is dead forever in his eyes.
- Clearly some people's lives are more valuable than others' /s
  
  I mean, you're not wrong without the /s, but it is hilarious whos lives are considered important in media...
- Aang is carrying an entire culture on his back. If he loses his way as an Air Nomad, then the genocide of his people is complete, and the world will never again be restored to balance.
- Lol I cringed so hard at that.
  Also
  ::: spoiler Legend of Korra spoilers Aang being the merciful idiot he is and letting Yakone live is why his recincarnation had to deal with the Amon problem. 🤦‍♂️ ::
- I like the way that Aang took Ozai's bending powers.
  There are at least two good aspects about it:
  Aang teaches the viewers that there are sometimes non-violent solutions to hard problems that appear at first glance as if violence was the only solution. And i think it's worth it trying to find these non-violent solutions. Aang was telling himself that he needed to kill Ozai after he spoke to the previous avatars on the Lion Turtle's back; he then just luckily encountered the Lion Turtle and found another way.
  The other interesting aspect that i find about the Lion Turtle is that it teaches us that besides the bending of the four elements, Lion Turtles bent the energy inside humans, which i understand in the way that Lion Turtles drove human development forward through some process maybe similar to evolution(?), and that just opens up a very interesting potential for side-stories. What else did the Lion Turtles bend? What other tricks do they have?
  
  There's more things that i like about the Lion Turtle. For example, it says to Aang:
  "Since beginningless time, darkness thrives in the void, but always yields to purifying light."
  What does that mean? What is the purifying light that the Lion Turtle talks about? Is there, maybe, a psychological state which conquers the harmful behavior without exercising violence?
  Maybe that message only makes sense to Aang, because he's an air nomad and believes in these ways. Maybe the Lion Turtle would have said something different to a water bender, or to another person in general.
  What would the Lion Turtle have said in that case?
- wrong bracket in the Link.
  Also: good writeup, I like it :)
  
  Thanks! Fixed.
- https://youtu.be/HV3NmoGJh48

Batman is super full of shit in this department
- Batman allow innocent to be harmed just so he can uphold his moral high ground.
  
  That's the problem with contrived writing to keep escalating stakes. And the necessity of not killing off a character to keep using them.
  I advocate for a return to Golden/Silver Age shenanigans for this reason. Make the Joker a prankster again, not a mass murderer in funny make-up.
- Bateman, on the other hand...

This is because the villain has slain 69,421 people. Killing him would give the hero the same bodycount, and thus make them exactly the same.
- You're killing me.
  
  69,421.5
  Edit: Please update when you're fully dead, OP, so I can finalize the new count.

Strong Last of Us 2 vibes.
That game had such an interesting setup and completely fucking fumbled every single second.
The idea of a split story arc where two hurt people are hunting one another for revenge and how it devastates the both of them in the end is so cool, but then it's written with the emotional intelligence of a five year old and completely fucking missing the concept of subtlety and earned pay offs. Everything is forced, everything is overly mean spirited to the point where you just kinds hate everybody and roots for no one. You're literally forced as the player to torture and kill several people and animals throughout the game.
And when you finally get to the climax there's a lame as fuck "revenge is bad mkay" message tagged on to the end. It rings hollow and it isn't earned. Such an immature script trying to tackle such an interesting concept.
It really shows you that there are no bad ideas, only bad execution.
- "You should feel bad for utilizing these gameplay mechanics we designed the game around. You monster!"
  
  I distinctly remember them claiming that you had the choice to spare the dogs, but they would viciously attack you and blow your cover every chance you got so you literally didn't have any other choice than to kill them sometimes. Then there were the plot related actions where the story took your choices away from you and forced you to kill a dog and torture a woman to death as Ellie.
  And the ironic thing was that they claimed they wanted you to feel bad for killing people in the game and had the npcs yelling out the names of the people you killed, but I literally felt nothing.
  Meanwhile when I played the first game and got to the hospital scene, I was so fucking devastated because I didnt want to kill the fireflies. Up until that point you had mostly killed zombies and deranged people who were directly putting you and ellie in danger. But the fireflies felt different. I was so devastated making my way to Ellie. The game did a fantastic job showing how Joel was crossing a line in his humanity in order to protect the one person in the world that gave his life meaning. It was at once a very beautiful and very tragic climax to a story about humanity in dire circumstances. So beautifully made.
  Ain't gonna sit there and cry over some random dog or some dumb npc named Jason when I'm forced to plow down hundreds of them while rarely if ever getting to attack zombies becuase they're barely present in the game by comparison.
  If you want to treat human lives as precious in your game, don't make your player kill them by the hundreds the whole time. Fuck man. I sometimes wonder if Druckmann really wrote the first game at all or if he just took credit for some underling's work because I struggle to believe that the same writer who wrote this emotionally complex game is also the same writer who pooped out its sequel.
  Sorry for long rant. I just really hate that stupid game.
  
  That quote reminded me heavily of Dishonored. As much as I love the game, they punish you with a bad ending for killing people and using all the cool powers provided to you (most of which are lethal), which I can concede that it is kinda dumb.
  
  There is a good version of that.
  All you had to do was put the controller down and walk away.

- I played that game with my best friend and we hated every single second of it. To me, this is the game version of GoT season 8.
  I still find it incredible that Druckmann stuck to his guns and copy pasted this terribly executed storyline into the second season of the show. Idiot learned nothing. I'm glad I decided to skip the second season and just enjoy the first season as a stand alone. Pedro Pascal and Bella Ramsey did a great job as Joel and Ellie, but I sincerely doubt that even they could save the used toilet paper that is the script for Last of Us 2.
  
  Same. I was looking forward to it so much, loved the first one, but this ruined my mood for weeks during the already shitty covid & lockdown period. And not in a “sad story” way, but in a “I waited years and I got disappointed” way.
  Now the negative reaction of general audience to the second season of the show demonstrates how the story just sucks regardless of the medium, but gamers were gaslighted into thinking that only transphobe incels hated the game. Well, I guess not.
  I loved the gameplay and the graphics, but the story is just badly written and utter shit. My wife loves to watch me play, but was scratching her head in the final hours of this game, trying to make sense of this mess.
  And this would be fine, art is subjective, they took a risk, it didn’t work out - but if you dare point this out, you get branded a hater/bigot/etc and your opinion is discredited. Well fuck them, I paid full price for this game on day 1, and I didn’t like it. My opinion is valid, so I’m going to repeat it as many times as I want to.
  
  I never played the game, but I did know about the first game's ending and about Joel's fate in the second one, due to the controversy. I really liked the first season, but the second one just ruined it. It had its moments—sure. However, the entire story hinges on an extremely flawed premise. I just couldn't get immersed being reminded of it at every step.
  I decided to take a peek at the fandom reactions and thought I was taking the crazy pills. Gamers loved it, and of course anyone who disagreed was a bigot or a hater. I guess it's just my luck to stumble into shows that turn into shit and then get gaslighted by the fandom into believing I'm somehow the crazy one.
  For TLOU S2 in particular, Abby can go get fucked, for all I care, and the writers can shove the victim blaming up their ass.
- Never played that game, what is the context?
  
  Revenge bad
  
  I recommend playing it before the context arrives
- I immediately thought about this xd
- I really like this game, but... yeah

This is something I loved about Hitman. Theres a bit of set dressing appeal around violent infiltration, but by and large, 47 uses social manipulation, knocks out only a few people, and only kills his targets, who are terrible people that make the world worse.
It also has a nice quote in a cutscene. (Paraphrased)
“We don’t take sides. ICA always remains neutral.”
“I hate to break it to you, but neutrality is a side. It’s the side of the status quo.”

Media targeted at a large audience tends to dumb moral and philosophical conundrums down to the simplest possible gesture instead of taking the ideas seriously.
- There is actually a youtube channel called "Dhar Mann" filled with stupid scenarios and end with the moral "So you see, this is why you don't treat the poor-looking guy badly... because he might be secretly rich and was about to give you a big tip on the bill". Not because you should have common decency, but because "he might be a secret rich person" 🤦‍♂️
  You're gonna die laughing of the cringe if you ever watch those videos 🤣

Batman: "I would never take the life of even the most evil of villains" Breaks the neck of a petty thief Snaps the femur of a low level Mafia grunt
- Listen, kicking mooks 10 feet into the air and then shooting them with the Bat-tank's anti-tank gun is perfectly safe because he's using rubber rounds!
- Ah, the usual "I saw that scene from Snyder's BatmanVSuperman so I feel I can authoritatively speak to the entire character"
  He has gone through probably hundreds of writers at this point, all with their own interpretations. But generally, when they stick to the "I hate killing and guns" type, he's not breaking mooks over his knee Bane style. It's not universal, and some of the writing is just bad. But that doesn't define the character anywhere except the minds of people who just want something to shit on.
  
  I've never seen that movie, but okay. Many apologies.
- Hands the Joker unscathed to the police only for him to escape 10 minutes later

because they want us to kill each other, the low ranking riffraff and feel nothing over that, but not the big badd bbillionaires and friends

Im feeling this way while playing AC Shadows. I just killed two dozen guys to get to a dude I decided to spare

I have no idea why Jedi Survivor decided to do that with one random empire guy.
Everybody else got their fucking arms and legs cut off.

Fallout 3. Slaughter the vault of police officers (who you grew up knowing), but grow a conscience when you meet the overseer. Take out armies of enclave soldiers, but let the weirdo Colonel Autumn walk away.

Usually the henchmen are actively attacking the protagonists, while the villain is already (seemingly) defeated by the time this line is uttered.
- Not always though. Sometimes it's just a guy protecting someone and they murder them. I seriously think about that guy going to work that day and how his family felt about how they died. They're not necessarily protecting good people, but it's just a job.

It always pisses me off when someone defending their life, or the lives of others, in a show is somehow a monster for stopping the threat. (Or it is somehow 'honorable' to not kill someone actively murdering others.)
Fuck no. Stop the murderer, rapist, or terrorist using as much force as is necessary. Little Timmy will be so much better off with parents who are still alive, Susan will be happy her husband wasn't murdered, etc etc.
- But with the state monopoly on violence this becomes anti social thinking.
  Only the state can do violence, and it must not be seen to be accountable to the people, so it cannot echo our aggregate morality.
- In Dishonored people like to spare the Assassin that kicked off the events of the game. Why? Cause he is remorseful. "I killed thousands, but this one lady was different. I will never kill again. I am so sad now." Fun game, but that writing is atrocious, yet the players eat it up. Oh, that poor Assassin killing for money!

I found Watchdogs 2 weird in this regard. You steal money from random people, who often struggle themselves, steal cars like nothing, murder a suburb’s worth of people, and still you’re “the good guys”?
- Trevor in GTA5 was notable for being the only protagonist in those sort of games who remained in character no matter what you did during gameplay.
- Well that's just how evil capitalism is
- That's why I liked the first one so much. He's an asshole and really.just a not-as-bad guy.
- it depends on your playstyle but yea i guess

Fucking Moon Knight. That dude’s whole thing is killing mother fuckers at the top, he prides himself on being a murderer of murderers and crime bosses and he’s not going to give a fuck what you think of his moral stance, yet at the end of the Disney+ series he decides he’s a fucking universalist or some shit? Fuck that! Moon Knight is a straight up murderer, he would be the first person to tell you that he is a murderer and that he don’t give a fuck how anyone feels about it.
Also, they didn't use the song Dead Moon Night by Dead Moon when there was a dead Moon Knight. Fuck that show.
- Yeah, but Steven and Marc haven't reached that point in their character development yet. They don't fully understand who they are and what Moon Knight is. They don't know about Jake. Jake does kill people in cold blood. The implication is that in season 2, Steven and Marc will have to come to terms with that, just as they both came to terms with each other. This is an origin story.
  
  They should have made a show about a different character. They did Moon Knight wrong.
- I mean, couldn't that moon knight be the personality that deus ex machina's everything in the disney+ show? The personality that they show has taken over by the end? (or became more prominent, I dunno', it's been years since I've seen it)
  
  Fuck that. Deus ex machina is just a fancy way to say bullshit writing that disregards everything. If they wanted that kind of story they should have used a different character.

Nigel powers: look at you, you don't even have a name tag! You don't stand a chance. Put your guns down. That's right, put them down on the floor.

https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/WhatMeasureIsAMook

Three Cheers For Sweet Revenge? That you?

Another reason for me to hate Spectre.

This reminds me of the death penalty. Killing someone because that person killed is still killing someone.
However society choses to do it, it's still killing someone. Because killing is bad so if you kill, someone will kill you. Oh no, it's not a murder. It's a state employee that works in the correction department. Killers are not okay. The executioner is only applying the lethal will of society towards killers by unaliving them. It's not murder, it's justice!
- An excuse I've heard is that it is society's way of passing the final judgement to God. Hence the "may God have mercy on your soul" line. Not only does that assume the existence of said judgement and entity to do it, by said deity's clock that judgement doesn't have to be so rushed, it can wait until a natural death. The reason reason is to satisfy the desire of revenge, but even that doesn't work, as killing the killer doesn't bring back anyone.
  Death penalty in a modern society is insane. Addressing the problems that lead to such behaviors is the long term fix, not killing who does it.
  
  Ha, look at this guy here, thinking society wants long term fixes.
  
  Yeah it's a weird confidence in the justice of the afterlife.
  If you want the maximum amount of suffering for the perpetrator (something the US justice system seems eager to) then killing them only with it if there's a Satan grilling his ass. If their existence just ends it's rather merciful.
  So even if you are hell bent on having a punitive sentencing system (even though it's proven to be unhelpful for everybody involved) the death sentence doesn't make sense at all.
  A life sentence where the perpetrator is kept alive for as long as possible, against their will (which is ironicall supposed the merciful thing according to the pro life folks (who also overlap with pro death sentence folk, interestingly)) is technically the most severe form of punishment.

I hated that when it happened in Titan A.E.

The Last of Us 2. I don't know, I haven't played the game yet
- You might not have played the game but you are spot on. No other piece of media is as guilty of this as TLOU2. Ellie literally travels hundreds of miles and kills hundreds of people on her path to revenge, then I'm supposed to believe she has some epiphany during the final fight and she decides to not kill her target??? That target being the whole reason the game exists??? Totally ruined it for me.
  
  You might be sympathetic to a recent video essay from Door Monster's Kyle who definitely has a bone to pick with TLOU2 (and other recentish pop culture hits)
  
  "Some epiphany" is a brilliant way of indicating you had no idea what the fuck was going on.
  Let me ask a different question: How does letting Ellie kill her improve the story?
  So, hour zero: Ellie says "I'm gonna kill that removed."
  Hour 40: Ellie says "I have killed that removed. Damn, that was tight. Like a cold Pepsi, that was hella refreshing."
  What message is this communicating to you? What can we learn from such a story?

Kinda like how we get people like trump for president, or any wealthy powerful person for that matter. Like the serialized fictional bad guy, they get away with it and keep getting to do shitty things because the hero can never just end the antagonist. All this fighting and legal consequences for the rabble, but when comes to actually punishing the rich or powerful person? Nah…they’re (job creators, too big to fail, might hurt their future, etc.) They go low, we go high…and do nothing.

Did Elon make this meme? Needs not cringe