The kid became Ronald McDonald...
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It still suffers from the issue this post is talking about. I’m not telling anyone not to like it, there was a lot of good things going on with it but the kaiju battle and not killing the big bad after slaughtering a ton of henchmen was a bridge too far for me.
Movies that are just about punching the bad guy are boring. Like Man Of Steel. Snyder failed to connect the character themes and drama to the action in a meaningful way.
Seeing Marc, Steven, and Jake grapple with how to oppose Amit's ideology, and disagree, is great. Steven and Marc are broken, foolish men. But they have ideals and values. They think the only way to defeat Amit ideologically is to make a stand against killing bad people. I mean, she's a god. She gets stronger when people follow her ideology. Steven and Marc think the answer is to find a way to disable the enemy without killing, and thereby prove Amit's ideology wrong and weaken her.
And Jake doesn't give a fuck, like the more traditional depictions of Moon Knight.
I want to see a season 2 where the three come to understand one another, and where these religious questions are grappled with on a deeper level. As you say, killing bad people isn't always wrong. Perhaps they could have a discussion about how the pantheon exists for a reason, and you can't just destroy one of your gods with no consequences. Killing bad people has its place, the problem is just that Amit wanted to be too powerful.
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"Some epiphany" is a brilliant way of indicating you had no idea what the fuck was going on.
Let me ask a different question: How does letting Ellie kill her improve the story?
So, hour zero: Ellie says "I'm gonna kill that bitch."
Hour 40: Ellie says "I have killed that bitch. Damn, that was tight. Like a cold Pepsi, that was hella refreshing."What message is this communicating to you? What can we learn from such a story?
I would not have Ellie kill Abby. I'd keep the ending the same but have Abby be the one with the upper hand at the end of the fight, then she decides not to kill Ellie. It makes more sense to me that Abby would see that killing Ellie will just perpetuate the murder cycle, as Abby did when she killed Joel. That's something Ellie can't admit to herself because she lets her anger guide her actions, even when it hurts her friends and loved ones. By letting Ellie go you are robbing Ellie of her vengeance, making her sacrifices pointless, which would hopefully show her that her violent ways only lead to violent ends for her and everyone around her.
I feel like that would be a better ending because Abby seemed more like the hero of the story than Ellie did. Ellie is definitely the villain to me because at a certain point in the game I stopped sympathizing with her. I think that is why Ellie having a change of heart at the end felt so off to me. We just helped her kill hundreds of people without shedding a tear. That person would not stop when they finally had their chance for revenge, especially with what it cost them to get there.
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Im feeling this way while playing AC Shadows. I just killed two dozen guys to get to a dude I decided to spare
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Batman allow innocent to be harmed just so he can uphold his moral high ground.
That's the problem with contrived writing to keep escalating stakes. And the necessity of not killing off a character to keep using them.
I advocate for a return to Golden/Silver Age shenanigans for this reason. Make the Joker a prankster again, not a mass murderer in funny make-up.
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I mean, you're not wrong without the /s, but it is hilarious whos lives are considered important in media...
wrote on last edited by [email protected]Maybe it's inserted into media on purpose, training us like a subtle shock collar to hesitate if somehow, one of the commoners manages to get within range of an authoritarian boss-man.
/Crazy conspiracy lol
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I've never seen that movie, but okay. Many apologies.
Ah, so just from complete ignorance, then
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Aang was very explicitly not in control of himself during the invasion of the north, and he became scared of his power due to his experiences with the avatar state.
The whole moral conundrum is about him consciously choosing to kill the Fire Lord. Yes, he most likely caused deaths before, but not consciously & deliberately.
So if I kill while high on drugs it's a-okay, right?
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It always pisses me off when someone defending their life, or the lives of others, in a show is somehow a monster for stopping the threat. (Or it is somehow 'honorable' to not kill someone actively murdering others.)
Fuck no. Stop the murderer, rapist, or terrorist using as much force as is necessary. Little Timmy will be so much better off with parents who are still alive, Susan will be happy her husband wasn't murdered, etc etc.
In Dishonored people like to spare the Assassin that kicked off the events of the game. Why? Cause he is remorseful. "I killed thousands, but this one lady was different. I will never kill again. I am so sad now." Fun game, but that writing is atrocious, yet the players eat it up. Oh, that poor Assassin killing for money!
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So if I kill while high on drugs it's a-okay, right?
moreso if you were drugged unwittingly, or against your will.
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I would not have Ellie kill Abby. I'd keep the ending the same but have Abby be the one with the upper hand at the end of the fight, then she decides not to kill Ellie. It makes more sense to me that Abby would see that killing Ellie will just perpetuate the murder cycle, as Abby did when she killed Joel. That's something Ellie can't admit to herself because she lets her anger guide her actions, even when it hurts her friends and loved ones. By letting Ellie go you are robbing Ellie of her vengeance, making her sacrifices pointless, which would hopefully show her that her violent ways only lead to violent ends for her and everyone around her.
I feel like that would be a better ending because Abby seemed more like the hero of the story than Ellie did. Ellie is definitely the villain to me because at a certain point in the game I stopped sympathizing with her. I think that is why Ellie having a change of heart at the end felt so off to me. We just helped her kill hundreds of people without shedding a tear. That person would not stop when they finally had their chance for revenge, especially with what it cost them to get there.
By letting Ellie go you are robbing Ellie of her vengeance, making her sacrifices pointless, which would hopefully show her that her violent ways only lead to violent ends
This more or less happens in the middle of the game, and it does not stop her. She's not ready to stop then, so she just invents new reasons to keep going.
We just helped her kill hundreds of people without shedding a tear. That person would not stop when they finally had their chance for revenge
I don't think this is true. I think you're looking for a simple way to understand why she did what she did, but in doing so, you're kind of reducing her to a cartoon character.
When Ellie found Abby, she was already strung up, starved thin, possibly victim of a lot worse, and in the middle of being executed. And now Ellie's come to beat her... more? There's very little satisfaction to be gained from this. There's very little to do here that would feel like victory.
When Ellie cut Abby down from the pole, she was already having doubts. When Ellie moves to the other boat, the way the camera follows her almost feels like she's about to get in and paddle away. She doesn't start on Abby until after looking at her own blood, as if it had to remind her why she was even there.
In that moment, I think Ellie had already given up. It was only through inertia that she continued. She might've been thinking, as you are, "if I'm not going to kill her, what was the point of all this?"
If Ellie were so focused on the uncomplicated style of revenge I feel like you're suggesting, you might ask why Ellie cut her down at all. Why not just stab her on the pole right there? Why threaten Lev to make Abby fight back? Ellie had plenty of opportunity, but she chose something approaching fairness instead.
This comment is already long, so I don't want to burden you too much further. But I don't think the deaths from elsewhere in the game don't weigh on Ellie either. I think she's fine with it in a "you gotta do what you gotta do" kind of way—if I remember, she was rattled after she tortured what's-her-name. And when she let Abby go, I don't think this is because she suddenly adopted a moral stance against killing people in general, I think it's because the weight of what she was doing, the weight of everything she had lost, and the deeply unsatisfying nature of her victory finally got to her.
And just a final note, none of this is a defense of Ellie as a good person. I agree with you that Ellie was a villain by the end. I liked her character more, but if only one of them could live, I did not think she deserved to; the game knows you have an emotional attachment to her from the previous game and tests the strength of that feeling very heavily.
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Three Cheers For Sweet Revenge? That you?
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Ah, so just from complete ignorance, then
Just referencing a longstanding meme in line with the OP, bro. I didn't realize not watching a single movie made me completely ignorant, but then I guess that's the ignorance in action. Anyway thanks for the unnecessary condescension over fucking batman
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For me, the best version of this is Avatar: The Last Airbender. Aang spends an entire arc lamenting how he may need to spill blood and kill the Fire Lord. Meanwhile the very same Aang had previously sunk an entire naval fleet single-handedly.
How many thousands of sailors, most of them probably people drafted against their will, did you kill that day Aang? Remember when you literally sliced entire ships in half? Your hands cut through steel, would you have even felt the flesh you were cutting through? Or how about all those ships you sank? A fair number sank instantly. You think everybody got out safely from those ships? Or how about that time you destroyed that giant drill machine, the one manned by thousands of soldiers, outside the walls of Ba Sing Se? You think everyone managed to miraculously escape that fireball? And those are just the major battles. How about the hundreds, perhaps thousands, of fire nation soldiers you casually tossed around like rag dolls with your powers of air, water, and earth during dozens of minor skirmishes? What are the odds you managed to toss all these men around like playthings and NOT have a few of them have their skulls bashed open on rocks when they hit the ground wrong?
The point of this is not to condemn Aang's actions through the series. His actions were fully justified, as he was fighting a war against an expansionist colonial military power. What he did was an objective good. But by the time he's hand wringing about having to kill Fire Lord Ozai, Aang had almost certainly already taken hundreds of lives. Hell, he probably killed hundreds just in that final climactic battle against the airship armada. The Hindenburg disaster saw 1/3 of the passenger and crew parish. And that was from an airship that crashed when it was already landing and close to the ground. Aang was dropping ships from miles in the sky. Maybe some soldiers with fire bending powers could somehow slow their own descent enough to survive, maybe they had some parachutes. But there's zero chance that Armada didn't have a fatality rate at least comparable to the Hindenburg disaster.
So Aang blithely kills hundreds of conscripts without a second thought. But then he has a crisis of conscience that takes multiple episodes to resolve, and that crisis of conscience is all about...Fire Lord Ozai? This is like if someone nonchalantly participated in the Firebombing of Dresden and then suddenly developed complex moral doubts about putting a bullet in Hitler's head. Aang had already killed hundreds of people that Ozai had sent to their deaths. No one was forcing Ozai. He wasn't a conscript. He had full autonomy; he's the absolute ruler of the Fire Nation. He doesn't even have a Congress or Parliament to answer to. He has absolute total moral responsibility for every evil thing the Fire Nation has done. Yet, when it comes to actually holding the powerful accountable, suddenly Aang wants to talk about the morality of killing.
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I get the vague impression that this is meant to subtly influence western society into believing that the masses aren’t truly people, that only the ones steering our collective wheels are actually human. Green arrow basically said as much for like… 5 seasons. Then it got weirder.
There's no conspiracy. It's just people being lazy about good writing.
Also it doesn't happen just in western society. There are plenty of asian movies which fall in the same problem.
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She also didn't know he'd magically find a magical being that would give him to power to permanently strip Ozai of his powers.
Though, to be fair, he only found that magical being because he kept searching for a different solution. Had he given up and listened to everyone, he wouldn't have met the turtle.
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Though, to be fair, he only found that magical being because he kept searching for a different solution. Had he given up and listened to everyone, he wouldn't have met the turtle.
Wasn't he already on the turtle's back when questioning the past avatars about his moral conundrum?
Had he chosen to listen to one of them, he would on the next day have still noticed that the island had moved away and found the lion head.
But I get your drift, he still searched within his own mind after his friends told him to finish Ozai off. -
Batman is super full of shit in this department
Bateman, on the other hand...
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If you missed 69420, don't worry about it, because 69422 is 69420, too.
See, this is why I regret dropping out of high school.
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Wasn't he already on the turtle's back when questioning the past avatars about his moral conundrum?
Had he chosen to listen to one of them, he would on the next day have still noticed that the island had moved away and found the lion head.
But I get your drift, he still searched within his own mind after his friends told him to finish Ozai off.wrote on last edited by [email protected]Sure, he was on the turtles back, but I think the show explicitly tells us the turtle only came because of his strong will to finish the fight without killing Ozai. Had he been convinced by his previous lives, his will wouldn't have been strong enough to summon the turtle.
Also, even if the turtle had still come and taught him the technique, he'd have been overpowered by Ozais spirit during the final confrontation. Aang only defeated him during their battle of wills because of his unwavering spirit.
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For me, the best version of this is Avatar: The Last Airbender. Aang spends an entire arc lamenting how he may need to spill blood and kill the Fire Lord. Meanwhile the very same Aang had previously sunk an entire naval fleet single-handedly.
How many thousands of sailors, most of them probably people drafted against their will, did you kill that day Aang? Remember when you literally sliced entire ships in half? Your hands cut through steel, would you have even felt the flesh you were cutting through? Or how about all those ships you sank? A fair number sank instantly. You think everybody got out safely from those ships? Or how about that time you destroyed that giant drill machine, the one manned by thousands of soldiers, outside the walls of Ba Sing Se? You think everyone managed to miraculously escape that fireball? And those are just the major battles. How about the hundreds, perhaps thousands, of fire nation soldiers you casually tossed around like rag dolls with your powers of air, water, and earth during dozens of minor skirmishes? What are the odds you managed to toss all these men around like playthings and NOT have a few of them have their skulls bashed open on rocks when they hit the ground wrong?
The point of this is not to condemn Aang's actions through the series. His actions were fully justified, as he was fighting a war against an expansionist colonial military power. What he did was an objective good. But by the time he's hand wringing about having to kill Fire Lord Ozai, Aang had almost certainly already taken hundreds of lives. Hell, he probably killed hundreds just in that final climactic battle against the airship armada. The Hindenburg disaster saw 1/3 of the passenger and crew parish. And that was from an airship that crashed when it was already landing and close to the ground. Aang was dropping ships from miles in the sky. Maybe some soldiers with fire bending powers could somehow slow their own descent enough to survive, maybe they had some parachutes. But there's zero chance that Armada didn't have a fatality rate at least comparable to the Hindenburg disaster.
So Aang blithely kills hundreds of conscripts without a second thought. But then he has a crisis of conscience that takes multiple episodes to resolve, and that crisis of conscience is all about...Fire Lord Ozai? This is like if someone nonchalantly participated in the Firebombing of Dresden and then suddenly developed complex moral doubts about putting a bullet in Hitler's head. Aang had already killed hundreds of people that Ozai had sent to their deaths. No one was forcing Ozai. He wasn't a conscript. He had full autonomy; he's the absolute ruler of the Fire Nation. He doesn't even have a Congress or Parliament to answer to. He has absolute total moral responsibility for every evil thing the Fire Nation has done. Yet, when it comes to actually holding the powerful accountable, suddenly Aang wants to talk about the morality of killing.
wrote on last edited by [email protected]I like the way that Aang took Ozai's bending powers.
There are at least two good aspects about it:
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Aang teaches the viewers that there are sometimes non-violent solutions to hard problems that appear at first glance as if violence was the only solution. And i think it's worth it trying to find these non-violent solutions. Aang was telling himself that he needed to kill Ozai after he spoke to the previous avatars on the Lion Turtle's back; he then just luckily encountered the Lion Turtle and found another way.
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The other interesting aspect that i find about the Lion Turtle is that it teaches us that besides the bending of the four elements, Lion Turtles bent the energy inside humans, which i understand in the way that Lion Turtles drove human development forward through some process maybe similar to evolution(?), and that just opens up a very interesting potential for side-stories. What else did the Lion Turtles bend? What other tricks do they have?
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