I’m joking with the meme, but it’s an interesting how plot armor unintentionally places value on people’s lives in fiction.
It’s telling that censorship laws decide who it is and isn’t acceptable to kill. Just thinking about violence against sentient robots and how that’s normalized in things like Samurai Jack.
Like we know the robot has thoughts and feelings, like they’ll try to run to save themselves or plead for mercy, but a character can still heroic after essentially killing a non-human who’s acting like how we understand humans.
I feel like there’s something dangerous in how easily we can depict appropriate targets of violence. Not just robots, but anybody deemed as less than human are allowed to be more put at risk.
Unnamed people are killed in superhero fights all the time. But unless they are of a class of characters like protagonists, they are collateral damage at best.
I think Plot Armor as a trope needs more class consciousness and awareness around how deciding who gets to be protected is often an unconscious political belief.
What about you though? Any tropes in media you’d like to see explored more or written with a leftist understanding?
Period pieces from the 1940s-1960s USA made decades later where amongst a group of white people, only one of them is actually racist and the rest are fairly enlightened (see The Help, for one example). If you were a white American in 1955 and you weren’t a commie, there is a high likelihood you were hella racist. Michael Moore told the story on Chapo where they announced that MLK had been shot at his all-white church and the whole congregation started fucking cheering and celebrating. Most white people back then were very racist and this trope really whitewashes it.
That said, I really like the DS9 episode Far Beyond the Stars for this reason. Shimmerman is the only white character that is explicitly not racist but he’s also implied to be a leftist if not a commie. The others are either a bit racist or at best indifferent to Avery Brooks’ racial struggles. The cops beat him up, too. Pretty accurate. And maybe this was a throwaway line, but I love how Sisko doesn’t want to go to the 1960s Vegas holodeck program because, as he explains, that time and place wasn’t great for black folks. Don’t know if that was the intention of the writers but it’s kinda true, all the white characters are just loving Vic Fontaine and who atmosphere, completely oblivious to the broader society going on around them.
