fandomsecrets | [ SECRET POST #5648 ]

[ SECRET POST #5648 ]

⌈ Secret Post #5648 ⌋
Warning: Some secrets are NOT worksafe and may contain SPOILERS.

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Notes:

Secrets Left to Post: 01 pages, 09 secrets from Secret Submission Post #808.
Secrets Not Posted: [ 0 - broken links ], [ 0 - not!secrets ], [ 0 - not!fandom ], [ 0 - too big ], [ 0 - repeat ].
Current Secret Submissions Post: here.
Suggestions, comments, and concerns should go here.

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Mel Brooks once said: "If you stand on a soapbox and trade rhetoric with a dictator, you never win. That's what they do so well: they seduce people. But if you ridicule them, bring them down with laughter, they can't win. You show how crazy they are."
-- So I beg of media, please stop showing "cool" and "badass" villains, stop showing powerful villains, stop giving them power like that, and treat them like sad, pathetic, laughable, jokes of the inadequate people that they are. Especially in the Superhero genre. If we can mock Hitler as a guy who can't stop farting, and Stalin as the guy who pissed himself to death, then maybe we can mock our current real life horrors without giving them power in fiction. I swear, WW2 propaganda might have had racial issues, but at least it knew how to rob the enemy of power while doing it.

That's exactly how the media showed Trump before he was elected. And after, too. But it was worse before. Nobody believed the possibility of him being elected was real. So no thanks, do the reverse. Show "harmless idiots" in power as real threats instead of jokes more often.

It is fine to do it after he was elected, because that robs his legacy of power and his supporters of social status. It is never appropriate to do that prior to someone seizing power.

this.

…and from a writing standpoint, it destroys the stakes in fiction when your villains are completely impossible to take seriously.

Agreed. Homelander in The Boys is just too triggering for me to watch right now because of how real he is.

Fictional villains are not real life evil. Fiction is fiction.

I'm not sure it works that way. I wish it did.

Lionizing real life dictators and fascist shitheads is different than making up cool fictional villains, though. Also look at Trump and Boris Johnson, squeaking around in their clownshoes and still fucking the countries they were supposed to lead over.

The premise of this argument seems to be that villains, in general, are coterminous with real-life horrors? And that seems like it's clearly not the case

Comparing apples and handgrenades here.
One is fictional, the other isn't.

Personally, I loathe played-for-laughs and butt-of-the-joke villains in fiction because when the villain is a ridiculous dumbass, the stakes appear super low and if the heroes still struggle against the villain despite them being such a weak embarassing character, it makes the heroes seem even more pathetic and the eventual victory very hollow and unsatisfying.

You've got a power fantasy and an over-identification with powerful characters, got it.

What the fuck are you smoking?

Lol but anyway, nope, I just hate shitty cringe humour and weak dumb villains are really fucking boring.

This is an incredibly dumb take.

Except Hitler and Stalin weren't brought down by ridicule? Ridicule didn't stop Trump from being elected or having fervent supporters.

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[ SECRET POST #5648 ]

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