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?
if you’re interested in the discussion of whose lives matter in fiction and what measure is a non human listen to a more civilized age, which is constantly getting into this over droids and clones and aliens
my pet issue is i would like to see trans characters who are both chill (neither transphobic stereotypes nor suffering for cis people to feel bad about) and not just cis people with different genitals (this one’s less mainstream, but it’s obvious in some books and it bugs me). basically what i want is for trans writers to get more mainstream positions, because there are plenty of characters like that, they’re just only in shit like unjust depths. which i love dearly and i love that it’s free, and it couldn’t be as openly revolutionary and marxist if it was less indie, but i would love to be able to talk to other people who have read it outside the 50 people in the official discord server. basically i want madiha (or another transgender communist, there are others writing good stuff) to be given the reins to a prestige tv show and not have any oversight
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.
Super villian bad guys could program the protagonist to do bad things but couldn’t figure out how to get the protagonist to off themself after doing the villian’s dirty work… which winds up with the villian(s) getting thwarted by the protagonist… (Lookin at you Bioshock)
Honorable mention… Everybody who matters knows what the control words are but weren’t smart enough to say something like, “Would you kindly, stop breathing”, and instead hands you a golf club and says, “Would you kindly, beat me to death”.
Bonus one… (its got to have been mentioned by now)… Nobody ever learns anything from the last crisis. I really got into The Expanse, but holy did the constant repeat of “nobody learning from the things that happened last week” start to get exhausting.
Andrew Ryan ordering you to beat him to death was his way of dying with dignity, of choosing his manner of death and robbing you of choice in the same moment.
In other words, he was a fucking idiot. You can also uncover this fact by learning that he is an Objectivist.
“Secret cabal controlling the world from behind the shadows” traffics in anti-Semitism. The trope doesn’t predate The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. It validates the fascist idea of an enemy being both weak and strong. If the cabal actually control the world, they obviously don’t need to hide behind the shadows.
The trope doesn’t predate The Protocols of the Elders of Zion
yes it does, the illuminati & freemasons are from the 18th century
now modern interpretations of it definitely have interwoven secret society tropes with antisemitic ones. and the original panics about masons and illuminati were kind of colored with antisemitic tropes it’s all kind of a mess so i guess i’m saying you’re broadly correct just too late in your chronology
Just stay the hell away from time travel. It can be neat and thought provoking when done with enough thought put into it as a central conceit, but more often it’s just a narrative ass-pull that causes more problems than it solves.
