Three Cheers For Sweet Revenge? That you?
Im feeling this way while playing AC Shadows. I just killed two dozen guys to get to a dude I decided to spare
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.
Did Elon make this meme? Needs not cringe
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.
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!
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.
I hated that when it happened in Titan A.E.
Moment in question - late in the film
The fate of all humanity is at stake, and this guy took bribes to kill all humans - but this kid spares him.
Movie Conclusion / Moral of the story
And then the guy he spared makes the sacrifie play, saving all of humanity, so maybe don’t trust me with those kinds of judgement calls, I guess.
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.
“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 bitch.”
Hour 40: Ellie says “I have killed that bitch. 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?
I would not have Ellie kill Abby. I’d keep the ending the same but have Abby be the one with the upper hand at the end of the fight, then she decides not to kill Ellie. It makes more sense to me that Abby would see that killing Ellie will just perpetuate the murder cycle, as Abby did when she killed Joel. That’s something Ellie can’t admit to herself because she lets her anger guide her actions, even when it hurts her friends and loved ones. By letting Ellie go you are robbing Ellie of her vengeance, making her sacrifices pointless, which would hopefully show her that her violent ways only lead to violent ends for her and everyone around her.
I feel like that would be a better ending because Abby seemed more like the hero of the story than Ellie did. Ellie is definitely the villain to me because at a certain point in the game I stopped sympathizing with her. I think that is why Ellie having a change of heart at the end felt so off to me. We just helped her kill hundreds of people without shedding a tear. That person would not stop when they finally had their chance for revenge, especially with what it cost them to get there.
By letting Ellie go you are robbing Ellie of her vengeance, making her sacrifices pointless, which would hopefully show her that her violent ways only lead to violent ends
This more or less happens in the middle of the game, and it does not stop her. She’s not ready to stop then, so she just invents new reasons to keep going.
We just helped her kill hundreds of people without shedding a tear. That person would not stop when they finally had their chance for revenge
I don’t think this is true. I think you’re looking for a simple way to understand why she did what she did, but in doing so, you’re kind of reducing her to a cartoon character.
When Ellie found Abby, she was already strung up, starved thin, possibly victim of a lot worse, and in the middle of being executed. And now Ellie’s come to beat her… more? There’s very little satisfaction to be gained from this. There’s very little to do here that would feel like victory.
When Ellie cut Abby down from the pole, she was already having doubts. When Ellie moves to the other boat, the way the camera follows her almost feels like she’s about to get in and paddle away. She doesn’t start on Abby until after looking at her own blood, as if it had to remind her why she was even there.
In that moment, I think Ellie had already given up. It was only through inertia that she continued. She might’ve been thinking, as you are, “if I’m not going to kill her, what was the point of all this?”
If Ellie were so focused on the uncomplicated style of revenge I feel like you’re suggesting, you might ask why Ellie cut her down at all. Why not just stab her on the pole right there? Why threaten Lev to make Abby fight back? Ellie had plenty of opportunity, but she chose something approaching fairness instead.
This comment is already long, so I don’t want to burden you too much further. But I don’t think the deaths from elsewhere in the game don’t weigh on Ellie either. I think she’s fine with it in a “you gotta do what you gotta do” kind of way—if I remember, she was rattled after she tortured what’s-her-name. And when she let Abby go, I don’t think this is because she suddenly adopted a moral stance against killing people in general, I think it’s because the weight of what she was doing, the weight of everything she had lost, and the deeply unsatisfying nature of her victory finally got to her.
And just a final note, none of this is a defense of Ellie as a good person. I agree with you that Ellie was a villain by the end. I liked her character more, but if only one of them could live, I did not think she deserved to; the game knows you have an emotional attachment to her from the previous game and tests the strength of that feeling very heavily.
It’s just a video game, dude. Video games are entertainment, not where you should be drawing lessons from.
As a corollary to this, yes there are some learning games, but TLOU series is not Mavis Bacon Teaches Typing.
Okay, my guy, you need to read more books. I mean this in the strictest terms possible. Your country depends on you. America is stuck at a 6th grade reading level, and you’re not giving me much hope.
Why are the curtains blue, sepi? Why are they blue?
What is a Dutch angle? Why do films use them?
Why is The Matrix so green? Please!
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)
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.
Not many Marvel superheroes with schizophrenia and DID. I value the show because of the representation. I’ve never seen such a good depiction of plurality on TV. And I’m also a fan of Moon Knight in the comics. My favourite run is From The Dead. I love the sass with which he informs the somnologist that a Paladin of Khonsu is well qualified to treat dream problems.
It still suffers from the issue this post is talking about. I’m not telling anyone not to like it, there was a lot of good things going on with it but the kaiju battle and not killing the big bad after slaughtering a ton of henchmen was a bridge too far for me.
Movies that are just about punching the bad guy are boring. Like Man Of Steel. Snyder failed to connect the character themes and drama to the action in a meaningful way.
Seeing Marc, Steven, and Jake grapple with how to oppose Amit’s ideology, and disagree, is great. Steven and Marc are broken, foolish men. But they have ideals and values. They think the only way to defeat Amit ideologically is to make a stand against killing bad people. I mean, she’s a god. She gets stronger when people follow her ideology. Steven and Marc think the answer is to find a way to disable the enemy without killing, and thereby prove Amit’s ideology wrong and weaken her.
And Jake doesn’t give a fuck, like the more traditional depictions of Moon Knight.
I want to see a season 2 where the three come to understand one another, and where these religious questions are grappled with on a deeper level. As you say, killing bad people isn’t always wrong. Perhaps they could have a discussion about how the pantheon exists for a reason, and you can’t just destroy one of your gods with no consequences. Killing bad people has its place, the problem is just that Amit wanted to be too powerful.
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.
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.}(https://youtu.be/JhD9bzzkjlM?t=350)
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 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
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. 🤦♂️ ::
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.
She also didn’t know he’d magically find a magical being that would give him to power to permanently strip Ozai of his powers.
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.
So if I kill while high on drugs it’s a-okay, right?
moreso if you were drugged unwittingly, or against your will.
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.
Hell, he fought Ozai while in the Avatar state. Maybe he should have just “accidentally” killed Ozai while in the Avatar state
Remember that he didn’t just enter the avatar state during the northern water tribe attack, he spiritually fused with the raging ocean spirit. I feel like that gives him a bit more moral innocence than just straight up killing people on his own. It’s also worth noting he almost did exactly this. After smacking his back on the rock and reawakening his avatar state, he barely regained control before straight up killing Ozai.
That said… I actually hate the way he solved his unwillingness to kill the fire lord. An entire season of struggling over it and then suddenly some deus ex machina lion turtle pops up out of nowhere with no foreshadowing and just gives him the answer right before the final fight. Super lame and unearned ending to his moral struggle imo.
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…
Maybe it’s inserted into media on purpose, training us like a subtle shock collar to hesitate if somehow, one of the commoners manages to get within range of an authoritarian boss-man.
/Crazy conspiracy lol
wrong bracket in the Link.
Also: good writeup, I like it :)
Thanks! Fixed.
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
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 🤣
Nigel powers: _look at you, you don’t even have a name that! You don’t stand a chance. Put your guns down. That’s right, put them down on the floor.
