The kid became Ronald McDonald...
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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.
Plus I thought Avatar Yang Chen's argument was amazing. She told Aang that his duties to protect people as the Avatar outweighed his spiritual need to be a pacifist.
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Clearly some people's lives are more valuable than others' /s
wrote on last edited by [email protected]I mean, you're not wrong without the /s, but it is hilarious whos lives are considered important in media...
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Fucking Moon Knight. That dude’s whole thing is killing mother fuckers at the top, he prides himself on being a murderer of murderers and crime bosses and he’s not going to give a fuck what you think of his moral stance, yet at the end of the Disney+ series he decides he’s a fucking universalist or some shit? Fuck that! Moon Knight is a straight up murderer, he would be the first person to tell you that he is a murderer and that he don’t give a fuck how anyone feels about it.
Also, they didn't use the song Dead Moon Night by Dead Moon when there was a dead Moon Knight. Fuck that show.
I mean, couldn't that moon knight be the personality that deus ex machina's everything in the disney+ show? The personality that they show has taken over by the end? (or became more prominent, I dunno', it's been years since I've seen it)
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I mean, couldn't that moon knight be the personality that deus ex machina's everything in the disney+ show? The personality that they show has taken over by the end? (or became more prominent, I dunno', it's been years since I've seen it)
Fuck that. Deus ex machina is just a fancy way to say bullshit writing that disregards everything. If they wanted that kind of story they should have used a different character.
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To be fair, if my kill count was at 69420, I'd need a REALLY good reason to kill one more
If I were at 69419, he'd be dead without a second thought
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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]deleted by creator
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Claims moral superiority for never buying the game and instead buying Factorio
I feed these bugs tasty stuff that makes them grow big and strong and how do they thank me!? They break the machines that make them the stuff.
So what if I burned their forests to the ground, built autoturrets right outside their homes, ran them over with tanks and rained hellfire down on them just to test my fancy new artillery?
They're the real monsters here
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Media targeted at a large audience tends to dumb moral and philosophical conundrums down to the simplest possible gesture instead of taking the ideas seriously.
wrote on last edited by [email protected]deleted by creator
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I really like this game, but... yeah
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Spec Ops the Line is art. You don’t have a “choice” to not use the white phosphorus if you are going to play - but just like Heart of Darkness and Apocalypse Now - no one needs to be there/participating to begin with.
wrote on last edited by [email protected]As much a commentary on the complicity if the general culture and specific medium it comes from as the military type guy you're playing.
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I have no idea why Jedi Survivor decided to do that with one random empire guy.
Everybody else got their fucking arms and legs cut off.
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I feed these bugs tasty stuff that makes them grow big and strong and how do they thank me!? They break the machines that make them the stuff.
So what if I burned their forests to the ground, built autoturrets right outside their homes, ran them over with tanks and rained hellfire down on them just to test my fancy new artillery?
They're the real monsters here
If they're r strategists, that was just good neitzschean nurturing.
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As much a commentary on the complicity if the general culture and specific medium it comes from as the military type guy you're playing.
wrote on last edited by [email protected]One of my favorite aspects is the way the ludonarrative/gameplay ties with the story.
::: spoiler spoiler
The enemies start showing up in unrealistic numbers, one of your dead squad mates shows up as some kind of mutated monster - it feels like the classic escalation in difficulty because you are playing a video game. But this is happening because your character is delusional and perceives it that way.
:::I’ve always wanted to teach a high school/community college elective where we read Heart of Darkness, watched Apocalypse Now and played Spec Ops - to see how the same narratives in themes are used in entirely different settings and with different methods of storytelling, but how ultimately they all reach towards the same message about humanity and war and cruelty.
The older Call of Duty’s (maybe the newer ones, haven’t played since Black Ops one) often had messages/quotes that were pretty anti war when you died, but were ultimately sabotaged by the story. Spec Ops is probably the best game at understanding how to use the FPS mechanics as part of its storytelling.
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"You're still a good person."
I feel like the questions you have about my loading screen text are all answered by my loading screen text.
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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.
Nah it's just shit writing. Occam's razor and all that.
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You might not have played the game but you are spot on. No other piece of media is as guilty of this as TLOU2. Ellie literally travels hundreds of miles and kills hundreds of people on her path to revenge, then I'm supposed to believe she has some epiphany during the final fight and she decides to not kill her target??? That target being the whole reason the game exists??? Totally ruined it for me.
You might be sympathetic to a recent video essay from Door Monster's Kyle who definitely has a bone to pick with TLOU2 (and other recentish pop culture hits)
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To be fair, if my kill count was at 69420, I'd need a REALLY good reason to kill one more
If I were at 69419, he'd be dead without a second thought
If you missed 69420, don't worry about it, because 69422 is 69420, too.
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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.
I get the vague impression that this is meant to subtly influence western society into believing that the masses aren’t truly people,
Well, people can think two things at once. And whilst people may think that non-fleshed out nameless movie henchmen "aren't truly people", I don't think they apply the same standard to random people irl.
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You might not have played the game but you are spot on. No other piece of media is as guilty of this as TLOU2. Ellie literally travels hundreds of miles and kills hundreds of people on her path to revenge, then I'm supposed to believe she has some epiphany during the final fight and she decides to not kill her target??? That target being the whole reason the game exists??? Totally ruined it for me.
"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?
