Why can't bad guys just be bad guys? Where did this need to redeem everyone come from?
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 Ape Out Shirt $21.68 |
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Why can't bad guys just be bad guys? Where did this need to redeem everyone come from?
Why can't bad guys just be bad guys? Where did this need to redeem everyone come from?
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Ape Out Shirt $21.68 |
|
from steven universe
I guess it's more of a writer's ego thing. They want to be seen as "revolutionary", "influential" and that makes them look like a saint so they try to distance themselves from things they consider "dated" and with that they end up with something pretentious and nonsensical. [Spoiler]Holy shit i started to sound like a Jojo character there.[/spoiler]
Writers intend for the bad guy to be this one-dimensional baby eating villain but halfway throughout the story they decide that the villain needs a redemption arc for their own ego without thinking about past characterization.
This. Good writers would justify a Villans through ends justify the means scenario (Villan had to do X to prevent Y from happening) therefore making their actions morally grey and more of a dilemma. Evil empires don't do shit in a vacuum. The Imperium of Man has to be hyper militarized and authoritarian to keep its empire safe from internal and external threats. They do some really bad shit, but the alternative would be the total destruction of the human race
If you would take an Illogical villain of pure evil (Joker, Hannibal Lester, etc.) and you try to redeem them it would make no sense. Why would they listen to reason after it is well known that they are just unequivocally evil? The only way that the heroes can change the Villans mind through reason is if the Villans show REASON themselves.
>pic how diamond arc should have gone
>Good writers would justify a Villans through ends justify the means scenario
So you're saying the only way to make a villain work is by making a copypaste of the first villain you read about in your W40K books.
No moron, I'm just saying if you were trying to make a sympathetic villain like in SU you would have to make them a logical character. There is nothing wrong with having a mega-evil Disney villain with no redeeming qualities but when you make an attempt to redeem said characters it seems campy and unrealistic.
>Why can't bad guys just be bad guys?
Because it's boring.
No, you autist. Cardboard cutout villains are just boring. They can be entertaining but if every single villain is just a different shade of "smug butthole that loves being evil" then there's no real variety, and only a handful of stories you can effectively tell.
>Holy shit i started to sound like a Jojo character there
Are you actually 16 years old?
>
I guess it's more of a writer's ego thing. They want to be seen as "revolutionary", "influential" and that makes them look like a saint so they try to distance themselves from things they consider "dated" and with that they end up with something pretentious and nonsensical. [Spoiler]Holy shit i started to sound like a Jojo character there.[/spoiler]
>No, you autist. Cardboard cutout villains are just boring. They can be entertaining but if every single villain is just a different shade of "smug butthole that loves being evil" then there's no real variety, and only a handful of stories you can effectively tell.
>
I guess it's more of a writer's ego thing. They want to be seen as "revolutionary", "influential" and that makes them look like a saint so they try to distance themselves from things they consider "dated" and with that they end up with something pretentious and nonsensical. [Spoiler]Holy shit i started to sound like a Jojo character there.[/spoiler]
>>Holy shit i started to sound like a Jojo character there
>Are you actually 16 years old?
None of this contradicts what he said. You are moronic, but in the common way that most people on Cinemaphile are.
>Why can't bad guys just be bad guys?
>Because it's boring
Someone has never watched Beast Wars.
You’re a brainlet if you believe any unredeemed villain is plain just because they’re unredeemed. A villain can be deep and still be an unrepentant butthole. In fact, most famous villains in media are like that. The Joker and Thanos have gigantic fanbases and they’re pure evil buttholes who never redeem themselves. Same for any iconic horror/slasher villain
could still beat Punished Steven at CQC
Well the thing is now everyone is doing it, so it’s more revolutionary and influential when a villain actually gets consequences for their actions
That's just Sugar's show in particular. Lots of shows still have villains that are either forces of nature or just utter c**ts, why single out SU for daring to have 0 totally evil villains?
Because cartoons are written and produced by bad guys.
No one's allowed to lie anymore either. Compare how flustered the Grinch was in the Illumination movie while lying to Cindy as opposed to the 60s one
because only men can be evil, women are always merely misunderstood or misguided (usually by a man)
I like villains and want to see them happy
Rembered how centaurworld ended when everyone was saying did the villian really deserve to die a gruesome death without redemption.
>without redemption
Both of his halves were corrupted beyond saving. When the two halves were made whole he accepted his fate knowing full-well that his crimes could not be redeemed. It was also a mercy killing since both halves were suffering the entire time. He was redeemed in the sense that the one person he loved was kind enough to put him out of his misery instead of locking him away.
he looks like fusing process healed him though.
technically the general and the nowhere king died in the process of fusing to they could have spared his centaur form. Not even sure if the the two personas fused to one creature with the memory of both or neither considering both personas cling to their survival while the centaur accepted death. Elktaur accepting his death was metal though.
Pink Diamond, Navy, Eyeball and Aquamarine were all basically 'just bad guys' in the end. Granted three of those four never had their plots resolved and the one that did basically just did everything she wanted then died.
Pink Diamond is fine, her arc was seen in reverse she wasn't some irredeemable monster, in actuality she was just a deeply flawed child put in a difficult scenario just like Steven was, and still chose to better herself.
>her arc was seen in reverse
The issue is the way the show treated it, with everyone basically turning their backs on her after seeing that information. If it’s that complex then they wouldn’t be bothered by her picture on the house or stop talking about her entirely, the actions and attitude of the characters absolutely give a vibe of "frick Pink Diamond" and not that she’s a complicated person. I have no reason to believe Steven has an ounce of love for her anymore and the appreciation for her actions is gone. The world became as she envisioned and nobody gives a shit about her contributions.
Because bad guys are just good guys for the other side.
This. Its modern writers TRYING to recognize the fact that the easy 'good vs evil' narratives we are fed as children are all bullshit and the real world is more complicated than that, but because western animation ONLY produces childrens shows and comedies they dont have the space needed to actually tackle that concept with any depth so its boiled down to the a minimalist approach to redemption arcs instead.
I've seen first person shooters with more nuanced villains than modern cartoons.
Evil is real. It's not bad writing to recognize that bad people really do exist.
Most of Calarts is dominated by extremely sheltered people who believe violence is never the answer and criminals are good boys who was just getting they lives back together
Rebecca Sugar and the 2 Craig of the Creek people she wrote SU with are all not from CalArts.
Reply to this post or default pose Chip and Dale will show up on your doorstep tonight.
It started with dragon ball z actually
yamcha
tenshinhan
picollo
vegeta
now theyre trying freezer
>not a single story EVER had the antagonist join the heroes' side before DBZ and Steven Universe
This is what happens when you watch nothing but cartoons all day.
What even defines a "bad guy?"
So they drill planets for their resources to help expand their own empire. That doesn't mean that they're the type to lord over that planet's native sentient lives in contrast to the other intergalactic forces that take over Earth.
I would say awareness and and intent define a bad guy.
An antagonist who is not aware of the consequences of their actions is merely an antagonist. There is no good or bad, simply wills clashing or negotiations to be made.
An antagonist who is aware of the consequences of their actions and continues anyway is a villain regardless of circumstances. They may not have the intent to harm with the harm done just being byproduct of the pursuit of their goals. They won't change their methods even if alternatives are suggested, either because the alternatives do not produce the desired results in the time frame that they want, or out of pride that their methods are inadequate. Unwillingness to listen to reason firmly puts them in the role of a bad guy.
An antagonist who dose harm with the intent to do harm is a more classical villain. The means are the ends. Or they simply want to cause as much pain and destruction as possible while in the pursuit of their goals. They may not even care about what the goal is so long as they get to cause suffering on the way there or actively sabotage themselves to continue inflicting pain.
How the frick were they redeemed? Even Steven himself self disgusted being around them in Future.
Cause Rebecca is an idiot.
They stopped acting like tyrants and started spending all their time helping the gems that they hurt and repairing the problems they caused?
Yes, but they haven't ACTUALLY learned their lesson. they are only doing any of that to make 'Pink' happy, because the only thing that really matters to the diamonds are other diamonds. If Steven goes MIA, they might stay on the 'good and nice' path for a few hundreds years, but that might as well be an afternoon to them. They are explicitly only acting like this out of an attempt to butter up an estranged family member, its all inherently insincere and they do not care one iota for the people they are actually helping by doing so.
Intent matters here.
>They are explicitly only acting like this out of an attempt to butter up an estranged family member, its all inherently insincere and they do not care one iota for the people they are actually helping by doing so.
They do though, they continued all their projects to help other gems even after they stopped trying to get Steven to move in with them. They're trying to follow Steven's example because they trust his judgment on emotional matters because he helped them through their emotional problems, but they changed their minds in the first place because they realized their tyrannical regime was hurting themselves as well.
I don't know
but I do think the best antagonists are the ones that HAVE to die at the end for their sins
Turning enemies into allies is objectively more beneficial than killing them.
Somebody somewhere decided that villains that are evil just to be evil are one dimensional and does not make good or entertaining characters. Every good villain has to have a whole ass backstory for why they decided to bad things to be considered well written now.
And if they have a reason for why they're being bad, they can be fixed. People like fixing other people
Steven Universe isn't indicative of the entire storytelling medium, anon. there are many, many shows and movies with villains that are just villains
The only reason it happened in Steven Universe is because that was the entire point of Steven Universe (and even in that show it was shown that there are some people who are just buttholes for the sake of being buttholes and refuse to change)
Steven Universe is really an anomaly honestly, most shows do just have bad guys who are bad guys
1 example and over extremely minor villains who did less damage than the ones forgiven
Because at some point, it was decided that villains always needed to be tragic or misunderstood. So it's considered lazy writing in the West for a villain to do villainous things.
I always found it weird that SU had a large focus of war but never really had the balls to kill anyone, which I found weird since they got away with fates far worse then death such as corruption and fused gems(I forgot what they were called)
Steven Universe was a preview of the sanitized hyper liberal hellscape that American media is turning into.
Because the people writing it were raised on stories where badguys survived becsise the ip owners could make moiney.
I remember a show called Star vs the Forces of Evil that had this little bird dude. In the early episodes, he was just a screeching bad guy to get beaten up. Then later he goes through this whole story arc where he loses all his shit and has to build himself back up from nothing. Like, he slowly amassed an army of wild beasts, studied hard and learned exactly one simple magic spell (one that the main character couldn't use, because she never properly studied), and actually won when he finally came back. He had the whole fricking kingdom under his grasp because it turns out the basic levitation spell was extremely broken because of how versatile is was.
So you've got this whole arc where a joke villain builds himself up to a better villain... then it's revealed he was being manipulated by the other major villain, so he just fricking retires. Then the next time we see him, he's back at home patching things up with his family. Goddamn. Who looked at that and thought it was more entertaining than just letting him be a cool villain?
Irredeemable villains still happen constantly but people act like they don't because 4 out of 5 times they end up being pretty forgettable
It's way harder to write an irredeemable villain while still make that villain entertain to follow. Ironically redeem villains is the easy option to pretend you can write a complex villain.
It subverts your expectations.
Why can't Blue Diamond just suck my wiener?
Steven, the Gems, and all of the townies are such unbelievably shitty characters that I wish White Diamond had crushed my dick I mean all of them under her perfect, cold, indestructible heel.
Maybe Gems are just easily persuadable?
Imagine if Steven develops an entire rogue’s gallery of human villains and every single attempt of using talk nojutsu fails because human beings are way more persistent and hung up on their ideologies and goals.
Then nobody let them near the Internet. You could turn them all into Christian Fundamentalists. Or Transgemder Extremists. Or Stalinist Space Dictators(which I guess they basically were)……Or Onclers.
It's canon that psychic emotional manipulation is one of the powers his diamond gives him. It's shown very clearly he can manually alter people's feelings with his pink aura (and Blue learns to do it too in Future). It's even spelled out that he's doing it in "Independent Together". While it's possible it works better on gems, we know his powers effect humans' minds since he's read, traveled into, and even swapped minds with humans before.