Why can't we just have evil villains?

[Kegg]

Arpy - I'd see Luke as the power wish fulfilment fantasy, not Vader. Luke is imbued with a special power despite being an ordinary boy, he goes on an adventure, and he defeats the incredibly powerful bully. In schoolyard terms, it's like taking on a team of bullies and coming out victorious. Vader's power role is important there, but as something to be, at best, envied rather than identified with.

It's the reason why I am not the biggest Whedon fan. It was one of the reasons I hated Alien Resurrection,

Yeah, as I like to opine it was the script that was the major flaw of that film. That and Whedoniacs frequently get on my nerves.

But yes, Whedon's tendency to write all his characters as wiseasses can be annoying. It can also blur the distinction between the castmembers. This varies; Firefly definitely had issues with how the cast was written but mostly overcame them I thought.

Fortunately, it's a false dichotomy, since these two are certainly not the only alternatives.

Indeed. It's entirely possible to write dialogue where everyone isn't a smug wisecracking sonuva... which is still excellent dialogue. No, really.

 

[stonester1]

I've already mentioned things like pain, happiness, suffering, benefit, loss... these are, to me, fairly tangible concepts; I rather think it is good/evil that comes across as so much mumbo-jumbo.

Those are emotional reactions. Tangible, but not particularly deep.

Tangibility isn't the gold standard, IMO.

Not the ones they tried indoctrinating me with, certainly. If being good and evil is a choice, however, I've got to wonder who actually chooses to be evil.

As has been discussed here, it's not just a matter of choosing to be evil, or really, choosing to be good.

Let me tell you a story. I read an article in Rolling Stone magazine, about one of the guards responsible for guarding Saddam Hussein after he was captured. US Army soldier, probably an MP. Anyway, he spent time with this guy every day. Got to the point where he talked to him, occasionally brought him stuff from a concession machine. This went on for awhile, this increasingly easy back and forth with him. Then one day, this soldier gets his orders to ship out and he does. W/O coming by to visit Saddam beforehand.

When another soldier told Saddam Hussein that this guy was gone and Saddam realized he hadn't even said goodbye, Saddam Hussein, the Butcher of Badgad, whose record of archvillainy is CLEARLY established, was visibly saddened.

This got me to thinking. Does the visual of the lonely, vulnerable man sync up with the idea of an inhuman supervillain? Yes, it does. Unless the man is insane, there is ultimately a human being still in there, with all that entails.

Good and Evil are REAL. But they are not a state. For humans, they are a CHOICE. A choice we make on a daily basis, our thoughts and actions, each one in turn. Villains can find redemption. Heroes and saints can fall. The danger of succumbing is ever present, but so is the possibility of salvation. The more you seek to be one or the other (not pursue an abstract concept of good, but seek to act in selfless and/or selfish ways), the easier one or the other becomes.

We are humans. We have that luxury. But we also have that awful responsibility. For ultimately, whatever we choose, we have only ourselves to turn to.

 

[stonester1]

I remember something he said once about Firefly, regarding the Alliance. Now the DVD case - and quite a lot of reviews and stuff - flat out labels the Alliance as a "totalitarian regime" like SW's Empire. But I think we know it's not that simple. The Alliance may be overextended, too big, but not evil. Whedon said that sometimes, the Alliance is the USA in World War II (good) and sometimes it's the USA in Vietnam (not so good).

Yes, it's clear the Alliance is NOT an evil despotic regime. It's just a big government that is well meaning but occasionally clumsy and overreaching.

While I think it's clear that the Union of Allied Planets (the Alliance's full name) is not a dictatorship or a totalitarian regime, I don't think it's accurate to say that it's not despotic, either. I mean, yeah, clearly the Alliance has a Parliament -- and presumably a democratically-elected one -- but Serenity also establishes that that same Parliament has a permanent group of Operatives who are authorized to do whatever they want when sent on a mission by the Parliament -- meaning that the Alliance, on some very fundamental issues, lacks the rule of law.

Meanwhile, the Alliance also does things like experiment without consent on mass numbers of people -- entire communities -- in order to engage in behavior modification experiments, and they also abduct and torture their own citizens such as River. And of course, episodes like "Ariel" establish that the Alliance keeps its citizenry under almost constant surveillance, to the point where it's questionable whether or not the Alliance government recognizes a right to privacy.

And on top of all that, the Better Days comic establishes that the Blue Hands were private contractors legally empowered by the Alliance to engage in acts of murder against innocent Alliance citizens in the course of pursuing fugitives. This, combined with comments Joss made about the ubiquitous Blue Sun Corporation -- comments to the effect that Blue Sun basically owns the government -- strongly imply that the Union of Allied Planets may be a heavily corporatist state in which democratic accountability is minimal and which is designed to exploit the masses for the enrichment of a corporate elite; this would be consistent with the apparent continued impoverishment of the Rim worlds even as the Core worlds remain flush with wealth, just as many Third World governments today intentionally deprive their peripheries of wealth while redistributing everything to the capital and its surrounding regions.

And on top of that, there's the not-at-all small fact that the Alliance expanded its borders by conquering the Independent worlds -- meaning that the Alliance engaged in the war crime known as aggressive war. The same war crime for which the leaders of the Greater German Empire were tried at Nuremburg. This is a very fundamental facet of Alliance political culture that cannot be disregarded; amongst other things, it means that the Alliance, which purports to be a democracy, rules over a vast citizenry that has not given its consent to the Alliance's reign.

In short, the Alliance may be a democracy, and its citizenry may have some rights, but if that is is, it is a democracy that is fundamentally corrupt, lacks the rule of law, lacks real democratic accountability, redistributes wealth to a minority, and routinely disregards the rights of its citizens. If the Union of Allied Planets is a democracy, it is an illiberal democracy.

These dangers lurk in any free society, especially one that has to come to grips with complicated solutions and policies in a complicated world.

All you have to do is look at the history of the US government to find parallels to most of the above. And we've done better than most.

 

[stonester1]

I'm a bit surprised at this sympathy for the Alliance. Yes, realistically, any society is going to have all kinds of people in it, but what we saw onscreen wasn't particularly nuanced. When dealing with Alliance officials--not only when 'our' characters were onscreen, but even when it was just them--they seemed to be pretty broadly callous, officious, petty, venal, egotistical and hypocritical. The show was pretty clear on whose side it expected the audience to be.

Kinda like how the British government and officials have often been depicted in various stories...from the American point of view, from commentary and literature from the period of Empire.

I daresay the Brit point of view would be somewhat different.

The Alliance we saw, what little we saw, was mainly from the viewpoint and point of contact of the crew of Serenity. That certainly wasn't the whole picture, and enough leaked out to show a much broader picture was there than what we saw much of the time.

 

[Sci]

While I think it's clear that the Union of Allied Planets (the Alliance's full name) is not a dictatorship or a totalitarian regime, I don't think it's accurate to say that it's not despotic, either.

<SNIP>

In short, the Alliance may be a democracy, and its citizenry may have some rights, but if that is is, it is a democracy that is fundamentally corrupt, lacks the rule of law, lacks real democratic accountability, redistributes wealth to a minority, and routinely disregards the rights of its citizens. If the Union of Allied Planets is a democracy, it is an illiberal democracy.

These dangers lurk in any free society, especially one that has to come to grips with complicated solutions and policies in a complicated world.

All you have to do is look at the history of the US government to find parallels to most of the above. And we've done better than most.

I think that's a fair assertion -- a liberal democracy can, indeed, find itself enacting immoral policies, both as aberrations from the norm and systematically. Certainly any one or two of the problems with the Alliance that I listed above could occur in isolation without the Alliance ceasing to be a liberal democracy.

But I would still contend that the fact that so many of them occur so systematically and so consistently, are so inherent to the Alliance's system of government, means that the Alliance is not and never was a free society in any meaningful sense of the term. Frankly, I think that the good parts about the Alliance -- if "Ariel" is to be believed, it has a much more efficient health care system than the modern United States, given the assurance that the stolen drugs would be replaced within mere hours! -- are probably more the aberrations than the norm.

The Union of Allied Planets is an illiberal democracy, and it was never really free.

 

[Temis the Vorta]

When another soldier told Saddam Hussein that this guy was gone and Saddam realized he hadn't even said goodbye, Saddam Hussein, the Butcher of Badgad, whose record of archvillainy is CLEARLY established, was visibly saddened.

This got me to thinking. Does the visual of the lonely, vulnerable man sync up with the idea of an inhuman supervillain? Yes, it does. Unless the man is insane, there is ultimately a human being still in there, with all that entails.

Saddam was a sociopath. He didn't empathize with the pain he inflicted on others but certainly felt pain himself. Just a selfish fuckwad, really. Human, sure, but that doesn't do anything to make me sympathize with him.

 

[Trent Roman]

Bacon and pineapple?

Hawaiian pizza (and its variants): de-freaking-licious. I never have another kind if this is on the menu.

Those are emotional reactions. Tangible, but not particularly deep.

Emotional? Hardly. If anything, my own criticism of my framework(s) is that it has a hard time accounting for feeling, and tends to be inclined towards political economy (utilitarianism, etc.).

Tangibility isn't the gold standard, IMO.

It's got to count for something. Something without effect is by definition irrevelant.

Let me tell you a story. <snip>

Call me dense, but I fail to see what any of that has to do with good, evil or even choice. Even butchers have feelings? Seems self-evident. I'm sure even Hitler loved Eva Braun. Which is why I've argued in this thread against the idea of even terrible criminals being 'evil', monsters at a remove from humanity, which misunderstands the source of such actions by displacing it onto the metaphysical, and thus dangerously disarms us in preventing, recognizing and treating (in whatever sense of the word) some of the inherent failings in our nature.

Fictitiously yours, Trent Roman

 

[sidious618]

Well, it seems that there is something I agree with Laser Beam on, after all. No, I don't like bland, prosaic dialogue, but I don't like dialogue in which everyone is constantly wisecracking and delivering "cool" one-liners. It's the reason why I am not the biggest Whedon fan. It was one of the reasons I hated Alien Resurrection, but I wasn't crazy about it in Buffy either - and I liked Buffy.

Fortunately, it's a false dichotomy, since these two are certainly not the only alternatives.

I'm with you there, too. I can't stand Whedon's dialogue.

 

[stonester1]

When another soldier told Saddam Hussein that this guy was gone and Saddam realized he hadn't even said goodbye, Saddam Hussein, the Butcher of Badgad, whose record of archvillainy is CLEARLY established, was visibly saddened.

This got me to thinking. Does the visual of the lonely, vulnerable man sync up with the idea of an inhuman supervillain? Yes, it does. Unless the man is insane, there is ultimately a human being still in there, with all that entails.

Saddam was a sociopath. He didn't empathize with the pain he inflicted on others but certainly felt pain himself. Just a selfish fuckwad, really. Human, sure, but that doesn't do anything to make me sympathize with him.

It's not an issue of sympathizing. It's the idea that Saddam is some kind of cartoon villain, pure EEEEEVVVILLLLL, and all that entails that we feel comfortable tacking on. And yet, there's this moment that seems to defy such an image.

Me, I'm compelled to examine it and what it means, rather than retreat back to the comfortable charicature.

Again, you are making the basic mistake of confusing "understanding" with "sympathizing".

 

[stonester1]

Those are emotional reactions. Tangible, but not particularly deep.

Emotional? Hardly. If anything, my own criticism of my framework(s) is that it has a hard time accounting for feeling, and tends to be inclined towards political economy (utilitarianism, etc.).

Well, then you perhaps should loosen up your framework. There is a whole mess of stuff in the human framework that doesn't lend itself to tangible analysis and categorization. In fact, most of what really makes us human fits that.

Let me tell you a story. <snip>

Call me dense, but I fail to see what any of that has to do with good, evil or even choice. Even butchers have feelings? Seems self-evident. I'm sure even Hitler loved Eva Braun. Which is why I've argued in this thread against the idea of even terrible criminals being 'evil', monsters at a remove from humanity, which misunderstands the source of such actions by displacing it onto the metaphysical, and thus dangerously disarms us in preventing, recognizing and treating (in whatever sense of the word) some of the inherent failings in our nature.

Fictitiously yours, Trent Roman

Well, for me, it was a bit of an epiphany on the nature of evil. I used to think of it as a state. I don't anymore. I was just trying to give you some inkling of where those thoughts had come from.

I do definitely believe in the metaphysical, both in the greater universe and also within ourselves. But buying into the metaphysical doesn't remove from us the power of choice, or the the responsiblility for those choices.

 

[stonester1]

Well, it seems that there is something I agree with Laser Beam on, after all. No, I don't like bland, prosaic dialogue, but I don't like dialogue in which everyone is constantly wisecracking and delivering "cool" one-liners. It's the reason why I am not the biggest Whedon fan. It was one of the reasons I hated Alien Resurrection, but I wasn't crazy about it in Buffy either - and I liked Buffy.

Fortunately, it's a false dichotomy, since these two are certainly not the only alternatives.

I'm with you there, too. I can't stand Whedon's dialogue.

Not me, I love it. Whedon, Aaron Sorkin and Kevin Smith are some of my favorite dialogue writers. They all use punchy dialogue, full of snarkiness, witty wordplay and cool references.

Love it.

 

[Greg Cox]

Not me, I love it. Whedon, Aaron Sorkin and Kevin Smith are some of my favorite dialogue writers. They all use punchy dialogue, full of snarkiness, witty wordplay and cool references.

Love it.

Yeah, I admit to being slightly spoiled by Whedon's dialogue. Now when I watch a straightforward cop show or horror flick, I'm like "why is this dialogue so ordinary? Where's all the wit and snark? How come nobody on "V" is spewing bon mots all the time?"

 

[Awesome Possum]

How interesting is a protagonist with no grey areas? You want the answer to that, ask yourself who you thought was cooler - pure as the driven snow farm boy Luke, or shoot first, smuggler Han?

I'd have to say Luke. Han was a jerk, an absolutely unlikable jackass who didn't give a crap about anyone other than himself. Han's no hero; Luke is.

Did you even watch Star Wars?

Han was the everyman, out to make his way in the universe, getting by and having a good time, then when a dire situation was thrust upon him, he rose to the occasion, went after it all, head on. Saving whiny bitch Luke how many times? All without the deus ex machina that was "the force"

Han made it possible for Luke to fire those torpedoes at the original Death Star, without him, Luke would be space debris.

Han saved Luke when Luke would have frozen to death on the surface of Hoth.

Han volunteered to lead, what everyone else considered a suicide mission to Endor to destroy the shield protecting the Death Star. Without him, the Rebels would have completely failed.

Han was the character with everything to lose.

Han was the fucking man.

Han rules.

He kinda starts out as a jerk, but he is a full hero by the end of the first movie. Luke basically guilts him into it.

Not me, I love it. Whedon, Aaron Sorkin and Kevin Smith are some of my favorite dialogue writers. They all use punchy dialogue, full of snarkiness, witty wordplay and cool references.

Love it.

Yeah, I admit to being slightly spoiled by Whedon's dialogue. Now when I watch a straightforward cop show or horror flick, I'm like "why is this dialogue so ordinary? Where's all the wit and snark? How come nobody on "V" is spewing bon mots all the time?"

Whedon rules. I also like when characters go off on some random tangent on subjects like blooming onions.

 

[stonester1]

I'd have to say Luke. Han was a jerk, an absolutely unlikable jackass who didn't give a crap about anyone other than himself. Han's no hero; Luke is.

Did you even watch Star Wars?

Han was the everyman, out to make his way in the universe, getting by and having a good time, then when a dire situation was thrust upon him, he rose to the occasion, went after it all, head on. Saving whiny bitch Luke how many times? All without the deus ex machina that was "the force"

Han made it possible for Luke to fire those torpedoes at the original Death Star, without him, Luke would be space debris.

Han saved Luke when Luke would have frozen to death on the surface of Hoth.

Han volunteered to lead, what everyone else considered a suicide mission to Endor to destroy the shield protecting the Death Star. Without him, the Rebels would have completely failed.

Han was the character with everything to lose.

Han was the fucking man.

Han rules.

He kinda starts out as a jerk, but he is a full hero by the end of the first movie. Luke basically guilts him into it.

Not me, I love it. Whedon, Aaron Sorkin and Kevin Smith are some of my favorite dialogue writers. They all use punchy dialogue, full of snarkiness, witty wordplay and cool references.

Love it.

Yeah, I admit to being slightly spoiled by Whedon's dialogue. Now when I watch a straightforward cop show or horror flick, I'm like "why is this dialogue so ordinary? Where's all the wit and snark? How come nobody on "V" is spewing bon mots all the time?"

Whedon rules. I also like when characters go off on some random tangent on subjects like blooming onions.

On a Kevin Smith tip, "No sir, the Transformers aren't a gift from God, they are a creation of the Beast we call The Desolate One..."

And an Aaron Sorkin tip of the had, full of the good stuff, but when they had Josh Lyman speaking the language of a White House Staffer who was also a Star Trek fan, dropping some Deep Space Nine knowledge, he's also da man.

 

[Greg Cox]

And as for Canadian bacon and pineapple pizza, I suspect that's a regional thing. In my experience, most New Yorkers are appalled by the very concept, but us Northwest types grew up on the stuff. Lord knows Norman Spinrad was horrified the first time he encountered it; I still remember his aghast reaction.

And a friend of mine once insisted that pineapple on pizza was the most disgusting thing she had ever heard off . . . as a tentacle of calamari dangled from her lips.

 

[stonester1]

You see, I lurves me some calamari. AND pineapple on da 'za.

But I'm a strange lad.

 

[The Borgified Corpse]

Justifications are nothing to be afraid of in storytelling.

Oh really? So for example, would you consider Nero to be justified in destroying Vulcan just because Romulus was destroyed

Well, someone up-thread just said that Nero really wasn't a very complex villain, and I agree. In order to start laying out a logical argument in support of an atrocity----and I said logical, note, not right, they're very different things----you need to have more to work from than Nero provides as a character.

Yeah. I was bothered by Nero's irrational reasons for why he did what he did, particularly because it felt like the movie thought they made sense. I still don't quite get it. And while I might accept a simple "Grief has driven him totally insane" explanation, it still doesn't explain why the rest of his crew went along with it. It seems like you have to read the tie-in comic books in order for any of his story to make a damn lick of sense. Star Trek movies really need to take a break from the 1-dimensional genocidal lunatics.

At least a few of his predecessors had motivations that made slightly more sense. Khan could draw a very clear line of responsibility from the death of his wife to Admiral Kirk. I don't think Soran ever wanted to hurt anyone. He just wanted to get back to the Nexus. The fact that he had to kill millions of people to do it was incidental. Ru'afo was irredeemably murderous but at least you had Gallatin there to call him on it. And while Shinzon's motivations were kinda murky, I suppose being a clone could automatically screw up your sanity.

And one more thing I'd like to say about FF: I. HATE. SNAPPY. DIALOGUE.

You prefer bland, prosaic dialogue?

I mean, to each their own. But I admit I don't get it. To me, that sounds like preferring vanilla ice cream to rocky road or chocolate chip mint. Or a plain cheese pizza to Canadian bacon and pineapple.

Give me a clam and garlic pizza anyday!

What about the pizza with nothing but shrimp?

You're not going to stop giving them the benefit of a doubt after they went and engaged in a war of aggression against worlds that just wanted to stay independent? The Alliance does not have a democratic mandate to govern the Rim worlds. You might as well say that you're not going to stop giving Nazi Germany the benefit of a doubt after they've gone and conquered Poland in the name of greater Lebenstraum.

As I understand it, Firefly was primarily intended to be a metaphor for the American Civil War. In that respect, you can also argue that the Union did not have a democratic mandate to govern the southern states. Or rather, the southern states did consent to being governed by the Union when the United States was 1st formed. However, that consent was revoked when the south decided to form the Confederacy.

As has been said, many of the transgressions perpetrated by the Alliance have also been perpetrated by the United States at some point, and the U.S. has done better than anyone else on nearly all these fronts. No government is trustworthy. But neither is any entire country "good" or "evil" either. While the Alliance government may have had evil intentions, there were undoubtedly good people in the Alliance. Similarly, I think there were good people in the Galactic Empire in Star Wars as well. Remember, Princess Leia was a member of the Imperial Senate, so they couldn't have been all bad. Plus, the Empire was full of ordinary working stiffs who were just trying to live their daily lives. Example: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C8JNp-_BEvI

The more you seek to be one or the other (not pursue an abstract concept of good, but seek to act in selfless and/or selfish ways), the easier one or the other becomes.

One of the things I didn't like about Star Wars was how it sometimes distilled "good" & "evil" into incomprehensible abstractions. In particular, only after slaughtering ALL of the Jedi at the Temple, even the younglings, would Anakin be "strong enough" with the Dark Side (whatever that means) to be able to learn the techniques necessary to save Padme's life. Uhh, why?

Similarly, a lot of my friends play those different Jedi video games where you can earn either Light Side points or Dark Side points. Invariably, my friends find themselves unable to be successful on the Dark Side because so much of it seems to involve exhausting, petty bullying.

Whedon, Aaron Sorkin and Kevin Smith are some of my favorite dialogue writers. They all use punchy dialogue, full of snarkiness, witty wordplay and cool references.

Love it.

I love Whedon. I'm not so sure about Sorkin though. The thing about Whedon's characters is that they talk like that all the time. It's a thorough world that he's created. OTOH, when I watched The West Wing, it seemed like the characters spoke like normal (TV) people most of the time but would periodically switch into this ultra-witty mode of speech. It was distracting.

 

[stonester1]

Similarly, I think there were good people in the Galactic Empire in Star Wars as well. Remember, Princess Leia was a member of the Imperial Senate, so they couldn't have been all bad. Plus, the Empire was full of ordinary working stiffs who were just trying to live their daily lives. Example: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C8JNp-_BEvI

Mara Jade is another example I would bring up. She was never a Dark Side practitioner. At best, she was bordering on amoral, like Martin Blank, the assassin of Grosse Pointe. If she showed up at your door, chances are, you deserved it. Palpatine purposefully kept her from more ambiguous assignments/targets, so as never to create any messy moral quandries for her.

Until his final dying command, "Kill Skywalker!". Palpatine was only able to take charge because the Old Republic WAS a mess, and lots of good people knew it. They didn't know just what Palpatine was setting up until it was too late.

Similarly, a lot of my friends play those different Jedi video games where you can earn either Light Side points or Dark Side points. Invariably, my friends find themselves unable to be successful on the Dark Side because so much of it seems to involve exhausting, petty bullying.

Well, I think the thing with Anakin was mainly deception from Palpatine manipulating Anakin. And he fell for it in his desperation.

As for the latter, honestly, I don't think computers have nearly reached the point where they can simulate a universe that truly deals in moral ambiguity and abstracts, like real life.

So you end up with the best they can do, like the above.

Whedon, Aaron Sorkin and Kevin Smith are some of my favorite dialogue writers. They all use punchy dialogue, full of snarkiness, witty wordplay and cool references.

Love it.

I love Whedon. I'm not so sure about Sorkin though. The thing about Whedon's characters is that they talk like that all the time. It's a thorough world that he's created. OTOH, when I watched The West Wing, it seemed like the characters spoke like normal (TV) people most of the time but would periodically switch into this ultra-witty mode of speech. It was distracting.

Different style and execution from the Whedon, but IMO, equally effective.

I own both the complete West Wing as well as Sports Night, as well as his films.

As I said, I'm a fan.

 

[David cgc]

As for the latter, honestly, I don't think computers have nearly reached the point where they can simulate a universe that truly deals in moral ambiguity and abstracts, like real life.

So you end up with the best they can do, like the above.

It's less about the computer and more about the writing. There's no reason you couldn't set up a situation where there were a range of choices, or even just a binary choice where the situation wasn't so stark as "Press A to Help Little Girl" and "Press B to Eat Little Girl's Brain."

 

[stonester1]

Oh, I've no doubt they can be better crafted. But for me, unless computer games are REALLY focused, they don't draw me in and convince me.

Wargames, FPS, I can get. But "rpgs"? So far, I've yet to find a computer "role playing game" that comes anywhere near the experience of world creating and the...sensation of immersion that you get with some live gamers around a table, writing on paper and chucking dice.