Why is "evil ecoterrorist" such a common villain trope? Is it a psyop to stop people from caring about the planet?
Why is "evil ecoterrorist" such a common villain trope?
Why is "evil ecoterrorist" such a common villain trope? Is it a psyop to stop people from caring about the planet?
Is it really?
>is it a psyop to stop people from caring about the planet
YES.
I would say it's less psyop and more of a cop-out as it's a really good excuse to get a nature powered supervillian that wants to destroy buildings and cause general mayhem.
Also it can add some complexity into a situation where good intentions don't equal good actions.
Name 3 of them. No using google.
Poison Ivy
Team Aqua
Team Magma
>Most examples come not only from a non-Cinemaphile related media, but are basically in the same game and serve as recolors of each other
poison ivy
floronic man
dinosaurus
planetina
Poison Ivy
every single villain from Captain Planet
Daniel Bryan when he had the hemp championship title
captain planet villains are the opposite of ecoterrorists. they're evil polluters.
If anything the planeteers are the ecoterrorists.
ah, right
Planetina then
Poison Ivy. Ras Agul. Planetina from Rick and Morty. Doctor Dinousarus from invincible. Movie Thanos. That tentacle guy from the Inhumanoids?
Less come to mind than I thought.
I think that dude from Ex Machina counts.
I think it would work fine. The problem is a dude mailing shit isn't enough of a threat.
"Evil ecoterrorist" is the result of having a trope for a character for such a long time. This isn't even Isley's main character trope; he's a man-hater because some guy used and abused her before dumping her into an experiment that turned her into Poison Ivy. The whole "care about plants more than humans" came about when they wanted to give her some motivations and intents beyond just hating guys, and because who would care more for a tree than a human life? But then it slipped into full ecoterrorist, which got kind of awkward because the values of that sort of ideal aren't necessarily wrong; it's the methodology.
It's why D.C. typically tiptoes around the implications of Ivy's motivations. You don't exactly want her to have actual ecological motives and have the superheroes fighting FOR global warming and deforestation. That would be kind of strange. And it's also why there aren't really many "evil ecoterrorists" running around, because it's kind of an odd situation to put an evil character in. It could work if you wanted to build a story around the idea, but for a villain who's job it is to be wrong and punchable? Not a great situation.
Movie Thanos is concerned by overpopulation, not by the ecology. By his view, the problem is overtaxing the planets, not necessarily taking anything from the people and giving back to the planet. Ras Agul is somewhat similar, although he'd just like to run everything himself.
Poison Ivy is literally the only one
Don’t know, but I know Poison Ivy is hot
It's a quick and easy motivation for a villain. They are especially driven to do bad since they think they are the only good person on Earth and they are helping. Anyone trying to stop them must be the REAL villain.
Much like how Stop Oil conveniently only does things that piss people off
An easy way to add moral ambiguity tland depth to a villain is to give them a somewhat justifiable or noble cause but make their methods for achieving that cause overtly villainous or extremist.
Ecoterrorists are a good real world example of people who act in the defense of a noble cause but who take on extremist, criminal methods to achieve their objectives. It follows that fiction would often pull from real life by making ecoterrorist villains.
It's no different than a lot of villains being Malcolm X style violent civil revolutionary types like Magneto
Eco terrorists are real and have always caused problems. Art imitates life.
Ecoterrorists are real, but have been completely hamstrung by doofuses like the ones in your picture.
They're unambigiously funded by an oil tycoon's family, even. Hilarious.
They're honestly not that common in media though, except as the butt of a joke.
Protesting isn’t terrorism
It can be, but I specifically called the people in that picture a bunch of doofuses, not ecoterrorists.
Everything is shitter than it used to be, even eco-terrorists.
They put some food coloring in a pool and swam around in it with signs. Zoomer tier braindead plans. I swear it's the hormones they're all on that's fricking them up.
Now I want a Poison Ivy story where she sends poisoned letters to industrialists and associated people where Batman has to actually try and do some detective work.
But then you'd need smart writers who are well-read, and actually read people like Linkola and Ted beforehand.
I mean, Poison Ivy is meant to be smart, right? Batman is meant to be smart, right? So why are they always so fricking dumb?
The Riddler in the most recent Batman movie was inspired by the Zodiac Killer, I don't see why a Ted inspired Poison Ivy wouldn't work.
Probably have to set it in the past for it to make sense, what with all the tracking and shit that parcels have now.
Unless it's like the idea of Isely being a college lecturer who grooms some of her students to be in a weird eco-terrorist/nature cult and they just blow up things like relay stations.
You also can't have that because pamela is now the generic stand in for feminist shit and she'd rather go around graphically torturing random one night stands or sexist middle managers to death.
All the hard-core commited and competent ecoterrorists were killed or imprisoned in the 80s and 90s. The FBI infiltrated organizations like Green Peace and found the cells within willing to do actual crimes and took them out.
Just Stop Oil is funded by oil companies. It exists to make protestors look stupid.
After Occupy Wallstreet the wealthy realized they needed to control protest movements from within to keep them useless. Any time one gains traction you'll quickly see big money take over.
>do shit to make your campaign go viral
>people make it go viral
Seems to work
Caring about some shitty plants and animals more than your friends and family is a nihilistic ideology that only sociopaths truly believe in
t. Locust
Love for kin and kin above all is nothing more than prejudice and discrimination, in the purest sense of the words.
Most fictional villains are psyops to stop people doing anything
>yes the status quo is awful and leads to death and despair on a massive scale
>NOOOO, you can't even mildly inconvenience people to try to change it, that makes you just as bad
>please go back to doing moronic ineffectual shit like writing your local business-owned congressman or purchasing from approved rainbow-capitalist orgs
, you can't even mildly inconvenience people to try to change it, that makes you just as bad
This
The moment you write a capeshit character who accepts that some people will be worse off or even hurt as a necessary part of any large scale change they're immediately vilified and bad writers refuse to show the heroes changing the status quo to actually dismiss those notions
The problem is that there is zero reason for that to happen in the context of the universe. Ivy can violate the laws of biology and thermodynamics, creating self-sustaining ecosystems that don't require inputs, she could solve a huge chunk of environmental issues without hurting a single person.
Ecoterrorist?
I thought Ivy was just Harley's girlfriend.
She's fighting to return the world into its natural state so she can chill with Harley without trappings of civilization.
It’s not that common
They're also the most empathic/sympathetic.
I'd say it's more of a cautionary tale not to go against the status quo, kinda like Greek legends. Their intentions are protrayed as noble, but they're going about it the wrong way.
For that same reason it also makes for pretty compelling villains.
we need to have a kl aus schw ab esque eco villain with antifa pooner as frank horrigan-esque super soldier
Nah. Just having her be Ted but as a green girl is a better direction. Even better if she has a small semi-cult of gullible idiots around, probably calling her Auntie Pam or some other gay shit.
We are literally trying to subvert ted kazcnytski posion ivy in this thread