I think the message of the film was more that he was always good (to some extent) and that his earlier actions were influenced by his upbringing (in contrast to Metro Man’s)
More like, the older the character gets, the more they update his backstory to be something the audience can sympathize with. Because a villain for villain’s sake gets old fast.
In the third season of the legend of korra, a group of people try to get rid of a monarchy (which is long established as especially unequal and oppressive) in favor of self government. They also try to get rid of the avatar, because she is an infallible being with incredibly outsized power. I love the avatar universe and get how they needed to fight them, but the group wasn’t wrong
If you’re talking about Kuvira you should read the comics that take place after the show. My feelings on Kuvira became much more mixed as I ended up sympathizing with her after finishing them.
No they definitely were bad guys. You cant try to murder someone just because they were born as a specific person you dont like and be good guys. And they didnt differentiate between the Earth queen and any other ruler. Their ideology when it came down to it, was indefensible trash.
I’ve been meaning to re-watch Korra, but I remember even the first time I watched it being a bit disappointed in the “enlightened centrism” where they are trying to paint every conflict as pacifists vs extremists.
I think it’s similar to looking at BioShock 1 and BioShock Infinite. There’s a lot of writers out there who just use politics and ideology as a setting for the conflict rather than actually being central to their message. It’s simply a solid formula to make a villain: take any sort of stance and push it to violent extremes. Comstock is a religious zealot, Andrew Ryan I don’t think ever even mentions spirituality if I remember. Ken Levine’s message in the two games is not about religion, but extremes.
There are benefits. It makes the villains more nuanced and relatable. It gives the protagonist room for doubt and allows for some of the “good” guys to take on antagonistic roles. But Korra also ends up supporting an oppressive regime, and Booker DeWitt gets shoehorned into fights against the people rebelling against his enemy because… Reasons?
I think what made that group such good villains is that you could definitely see their point of view. That said, they left behind a TON of collateral damage, and they didn’t seem to care that innocent people, including children, died in their wake everywhere they went. They were terrorists that happened to have a noble underlying cause.
Even the first season had Amon, the guy that wanted equality between benders and non-benders. At one point we’re even shown that power was cut to a predominantly non-bender neighborhood, and when people went outside to protest to get their power turned back on, they were all rounded up and arrested. Afterwards, when Korra goes and tries to get the people that were arrested set free, she’s told
All equalist suspects are being detained indefinitely. They’ll be freed if and when the task force deems them no longer a threat.
Just in case it wasn’t clear enough by that point that non-benders were treated as second class citizens.
All of the LoK villains were basically correct, and had to be caricatures of their stated beliefs in order to be villains. Amon was one of the better ones IMO though. Zaheer is too unrealistic
Rose is trying to move the country off of fossil fuels and onto sustainable green energy. Somehow Gamefreak manages to portray this as being a terrorist and extremist. How dare he try to move Galar away from coal?
I mean, he did recreate a cataclysmic event in the process, and the projected crisis was bound to happen in 1000 years… One can never be too prepared I guess.
What is that even trying to say? That there is such thing as going too far when fighting the energy crisis? lol
No bad guys are good guys. And most good guys are not good guys, either.
The Shadows, the Centauri and the PSI Corps are introduced as “bad guys” but gain a lot of positive aspects during the show without becoming “good guys”. The Nightwatch and the Earth Governement under president Clark are “bad guys” – but quite a few of there supporters/members become important “good” characters, like Zach Allan, Elizabeth Lochley or Susanna Luchenko.
That’s my point about the Babylon 5 series – they deconstruct the good guy/bad guy meme. Mostly.
Centauri got positive aspects? Londo personally, maybe, but not the Centauri. Psi cops as well did not become better, but more like “even bad people have feelings” type of thing.
Achieving a state of complacementness in an unperfect world full of suffering and joy.
Yep – that’s what I like about it. Good and bad are fluid, like in reality. Even Bester is shown to be a caring character striving for the good of his people.
Voyager kinda fucks with my ability to set spoiler tags, so here is your Spoiler Warning.
The Cabin in the Woods (even tho the organisation is run by complete assholes, they also happen to postpone the end of the word)
Mass Effect series (the Geth are actually ok having peace with everyone. They just happen to be in a civil war with Reaper worshippers)
Witcher 2 (Letho turns out to be the good guy)
Wanted (the father turns out to be the good guy)
Battlestar Galactica 2004 series (yes, the Cylons enacted the nuclear holocaust on humanity, but there is a case to be made that the vast majority of them have been manipulated by a faction of ancient Cylons, which leads to a civil war later in the show)
Cylons being manipulated by other cylons doesn’t absolve them of guilt.
BSG did have a few instances of the reverse of OP’s question tho – where the “good guys” turned out to be bad" – trying to say this without spoilers; it’s a 20 year old show but ffs of you haven’t seen it, go see it now.
the (temporary) new admiral
several main characters during the part where they live on the dirty planet
a very specific set of seven main characters (wink wink) … .and more,…
And there’s one specific example of the full 360 – a character that starts good, turns bad, but turns out they were actually good all along. I won’t give the name, but they were passing messages to the resistance.
That show was awesome.
One note tho, on the topic generally: flipping character alignments is a frequent pre-shark-jump thing, and is often bad writing. In BSG, tho, all of the “flips” are pre-planned, or at least 100% true to their character (eg the 360 example above).
BSG is one of the best shows I have ever watched and not a single twist came across as forced or unnatural.
If I think about that I started watching it years after it was made and only started because I was bored out of my mind at that time. I could have missed it so easily.
Same here, I think I started it during the lack of new content after the 07-08 writers strike. I thought it would be a mid sci-fi show I would put on for background then it turned out to be awesome.
From someone who has never seen anything about BSG besides jokes here and there in media, where would I start? The 2003 miniseries into the show? Should I start farther back?
I watched the miniseries then the show, and there was some additional stuff I watched also but I don’t remember exactly when. There was a spinoff called Caprica, it was good but never got a second season.
Here is a watch order that includes a couple movies and webseries, but it puts Caprica at the beginning. It is a prequel but I think it would be better watching it after everything else like it was released.
Edit: if I remember correctly Caprica either has some serious spoilers or there are some things you wouldn’t understand if you hadn’t seen the main show, I don’t want to say anything more but I don’t know why they recommend it first.
He doesn’t “turn bad”. He’s good all along, but he’s a target of a witch hunt, understandably gets jaded by it and gets absolved at the last moment. It’s the judging commission or however they called themselves who are the bad guys there. Gaeta is innocent all along, even if he is annoying at times.
You’re right, I’ll concede that – but only because BSG is an amazing show and very few characters can be reduced to “good” and “bad” – even the “antagonists” (in the traditional sense of those characters working against the stories’ progression) have pretty valid reasons for doing what they do.
Gaius (sp?) is one of the closest characters to “bad” – but not because of the bad things he does, but because of the bad things he is – ie, vain, selfish, etc – and the fact that he lets those negative characteristics drive his actions.
All the characters have flaws, but the “good” characters do their best to mitigate their flaws, and let their positive traits motivate them. For example, Adama often acts before he thinks, a trait that is awesome in combat, but can be less positive other times – and he (as best he can) seeks advice and counsel from the people he trusts (eg Saul Tigh) – he knows he can be impulsive and he knows his “instant judgement” decision making isn’t perfect.
Cavil (that’s his name I think) is close to “evil” but he does have reasons for his actions – preservation of his “species” (though really it’s just himself) – but he’s evil because of the fact that he doesn’t listen and acts with disloyalty and dishonor.
(There’s an amazing comeuppance for the titular character of the show Nathan Barley that epitomizes this idea: Barley doesn’t actually do anything wrong, but his motivations are repugnant, and his motivations are what’s revealed… Shit I should write a whole essay on that…)
Are there contemporary shows that are as good as BSG? I kind of gave up on TV after Firefly.
Snape was never a good guy though. Very brave, yes and he had some good qualities. He was also vindictive and a bully - willing to put his petty dislikes above the quality of his teaching.
The book strongly implies that Snape turns into a horrible person as a direct consequence of James Potter’s bullying. He seems to be a nice kid before that.
Jerry antagonized Tom into attacking him more often than not. He viewed it as a game rather than a life or death struggle. Tom OTOH would be kicked out on the street if he didn’t try to keep Jerry under control.
I bet its that Jerry has that toxoplasmosis making him unafraid of cats. In that light, nobody’s at fault. Its just nature shit happening to play out in the domestic sphere
Some Guinness was spilt on the barroom floor, when the pub was shut for the night. Out of his hole crept a wee brown mouse & stood in the pale moon light. He lapped up the frothy brew from the floor, then back on haunches he sat. And all night long you could hear him roar, "Bring on the goddamn cat!
Rorschach being good is debatable, he’s a Batman like vigilante who hasn’t the ‘no killing’ rule, which is dubious.
But the reason he chose death was (in my humble opinion) that he realized Veidt had found the solution, that would bring peace and create a world he would be useless in.
This point is made by the ultra nationalist frontiersman publication he sent his diary to. They complain that they have nothing to write about as the world was united in boring peace, this is when the burger munching intern gets the assignment to pull something out of the loonie pile.
I should re-read it, but the impression I got was that Oz was the epitome of this thread’s topic. A real “ends justify the means” villain, where his end goal is to save the world from itself by giving it a common enemy to vanquish. And he does it. In terms of the classical trolley problem, he pulled the lever to kill 1 instead of doing nothing and allowing 5 to die. Am I misremembering?
That’s roughly right, but that doesn’t make him in any meaningful way “good”. Of course I also don’t think anyone who decided to drop the bombs on Japan was a “good guy”. But maybe that’s why I’m not a pure utilitarian.
Veidt asked the precognitive being if his plans for utopia would come to be, and if it was all worth it in the end. Osterman cryptically responded by saying “Nothing ever ends”, and teleported away leaving Veidt once again in doubt as to whether or not his plan was successful.
From what I understood, he spent the whole story acting super-sure about what would happen if he did nothing, and how he alone could fix it. But in the end of the comic, this showed he had doubts. Veidt didnt have precognition, just very good prediction. But also an over-inflated ego. He killed a lot of people for a “maybe”.
The villains had the goal of driving back the fungal forest, which was advancing and destroying civilization. They didn't know that it was filtering pollutants out of water, and they were using militaristic techniques that have the designated "evil" tag but that IMO should be considered in a more nuanced way.
Basically, Nausicaa thought she was in the post-apocalypse and wanted to "live in harmony" with the state of the world. The Valley of the Wind had unique advantages allowing them to do that. Kushana thought the apocalypse was still ongoing, and it was - we saw that other settlements that didn't have the special meteorological layout of the Valley of the Wind were being overrun by advancing fungal forests.
From a very slightly different perspective, Kushana was the hero here. She was unifying a disorganized and doomed rabble of survivors to work against their doom, and recovered an ancient superweapon to turn it into a protective force that would save humanity instead of attacking it. She turned out to be wrong about a few things but being wrong doesn't make you evil. I'd argue that she wasn't really wrong about some of the important stuff and the movie ends on a mixed note.
It's been a little while since I've seen the movie, mind you, but it stuck with me pretty strongly.
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