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It’s too close to murdering CEOs.
They don’t want peasants getting ideas.
You can kill each other, but you can’t kill the rich, deranged asshole in charge.
That tracks.
Lets leave those friends of epstein alone. We are better than them 😔
I mean, we most definitely are.
Like by a far margin.
So far you can’t see it with naked eye.
Once you spot this it becomes impossible not to see it.
Ever notice how most environmentalists in comic book movies and TV are evil, misguided, or at best ineffectual?
Or how a corrupt official can leverage whole armies to chase down the protagonist, but the conclusion is that the system itself is great and should be protected and it was just that one bad egg?
Or the villain in every 80s movies wants to build medium-density housing.
But I really want a nerdy group of white kids and their one black friend to get into hijinks to save the community center!
It’ll become an abandoned mall.
Exactly!
It’s even stupider when the game railroads you into it. If I left a trail of bodies in my wake then obviously I intend to kill the main baddie too.
Fuck games that make you let the baddie go.
If I left a trail of bodies in my wake then obviously I intend to kill the main baddie too.
Fuck games that make you let the baddie go.
I think one of the reasons people like FNV so much is kinda this. If you want to, you can tell the final boss to go away. Or you can kill them. I made a character that was speech focused. I didn’t want to reassure the end boss that “oh, logistics is hard, don’t worry, my faction will collapse eventually because of logistics” and I got to cave their head in.
Contrast Deus Ex: Human Revolution, where you’re railroaded into a conversation with the final bad guy, and the entire fucking time I’m just fixated on how I’m going to shoot him in the face the instant the dialog tree ends.
That’s kind of a lot of conversations with bosses in Deus Ex tbh. Notable exception being the terrorist leader in the first game where by the end of it you’re like wait actually he has a point
Cof cof last of us cof cof
The first game is one of the cases where it makes sense, cause you’re playing as a guy with a very lenient policy on murdering
The ending of the first one is just so terribly bad.
It makes the entire game worthless. They could have just stayed at home and the ending would have been exactly the same.
Nah, if they stayed at home a lot of people wouldn’t have been hard murdered
Wait, who let’s who go in TLOU?
Theyre talking about the second one
Oh, well that made perfect sense.
Yeah honestly the whole time I was like stoooop fightingggg
And like, literally one of the core themes of that game was the cycle of violence, how self-destructive it is, and breaking that cycle.
But if you kill him you’ll be just like him.
The term I see used for this is “ludonarrative dissonance”. Basically, your experience playing the game doesn’t match what the story is trying to tell you.
The opposite would be “ludonarrative synchronicity”. Like in Doom the protagonist is an overpowered entity feared by all enemies, both in gameplay and in the story.
Edit: specifically applied to games, I’m not sure if there’s a term for movies or other media.
Im currently rewatching Smallville and there are so many random villains whose death are directly Clarks fault, and he never takes any responsibility, but still everyone acts like taking a life is a big thing.
He also calls them meteor freaks. Because coming up with cute slurs for people with conditions beyond their control is something Superman would do i guess.
Going a bit off on a tangent but are ludonarrative synchronicity, ludonarrative resonance, ludonarrative coherence, ludonarrative harmony and ludonarrative consistency all the same thing or are there some subtle differences? Over the years I’ve see all of them be used as the opposite to ludonarrative dissonance.
That’s wild, I’ve heard ludonarrative dissonance many times, but this is the first I’ve ever heard of ANY of those other terms. But yeah, they all sound like the same thing.
I would say yes, because there’s not a standardized term for the opposite of ludonarrative dissonance so people probably just coined terms of their own
I propose ludo=narrative and ludo≠narrative. This new term will solve the explosion of terms caused by everyone coming up with their own terms.
It feels like they should be the same, but I’m also not an expert
The protagonist and the villain are both top 1%ers with class consciousness.
This exactly lol. Like bombing thousands of civilians and then decrying “political violence”.
Or libs saying ‘but we cant punish fascists!’
Far cry 4 was unbelievably frustrating with this “mechanic” a rocket launcher of 50cal round to the face means you don’t get to fuck me in a cutscene… The game disagreed.
Yeah downscaling your power level for a cut scene is stupid too. Lotta times in games I’m just like “this is 6 mercs, I could have taken them easy”
MGS is also guilty of it
Okay but have you considered something something Nanomachines something something Metal Gear something something Patriots something something Otacon pissing himself.
Kojima gets a pass from me because I want to go on whatever wild ride he feels like telling
Someone has been watching CW’s Arrow.
Like, Oliver, those henchem you shot with arrows, and your sidekicks shot with bullets are dead. Your friends are actively begging you to kill their leader who has threatened the entire city like 6 times now. Just kill him too, no one cares, they will probably build you a statue.
Is it just some cheap plot device, though? Now the big bad can escape from prison or whatever and find new plebs for Arrowman to kill and we’ll all have a big ol’ happy happy
Yup i hate this stupid trope so fucking much. It’s just being so obnoxiously hypocritical in order to deliver that another over generalized stupid notion: revenge bad
But don’t you see? Just because the greedy capitalist killed millions doesn’t mean you can kill him.
👉👈 Pwease compwy.
Not just the henchmen, but the henchwomen, and the henchchildren.
Hench Lives Matter!
Won’t you think about the goons?
Take out the henchcats and henchdogs too. Don’t want them going feral.
What about the henchboss?
Here’s to Smitty!
This is just another instance of the class morality. The lower classes are not really people for the upper classes.
Exactly. Also, there a chance the minions are black and the villain is white in this scenario.
Related: Leaving the bad guy injured or “probably dead”
Cut the head off and make sure they’re for-real dead.
Or you know, check like a pulse.
Too many “aha but i secretly can slow my heart rate!” tricks. Cut off the head. Granted, the plot could still pull some “it was a clone” nonsense.
Have you ever cut off anyone’s head? Without the proper equipment it is serious work.
Wolfenstein new order. Chick gets her head caved in by a mech, still comes back just as agile and obnoxious as ever, with no apparent effects other than being slightly uglier.
TBF she’s a Nazi so her head was empty to start with
Followed by TNC wherein Blaszco
Spoiler
is beheaded
and continues to be a supersoldier thereafter.
I love these games
Yeah, maybe just slit their neck WIDE open. Or, if you’ve got the ammo, unload a magazine into their skull.
Partial credit goes a long way toward the general goal.
What do you define as the proper equipment? Can do it with pocket knife if you’re dedicated.
Aang be like:
Aang doesn’t kill anyone, though. It’s an important part of his character for the entire series.
Yeah. In universe his personal human body count is zero. Out of universe, there’s no way the water spirit merging didn’t kill hundreds of fire nation sailors, but as far as the story itself is concerned, aang didn’t actually kill anyone.
https://screenrant.com/avatar-last-airbender-aang-killed-people-pacifist/
I think it’s pretty well established that he doesn’t personally have control of his actions in the avatar state, at least at that point in the story. He doesn’t even know how it works. Thats a pretty major plot point. Combine that with him also being merged with the twin spirit of the one that was just killed, and justifying an argument of “but what about all those soldiers” really just falls flat.
I’d say the closest he came to killing of his own volition was when the sandbenders stole Appa… and he still didn’t pull the trigger.
That was the moon spirit channeling through him. Different situation.
Externalities are a hell of a drug.
When I was young I thought the ending was the coolest thing ever because taking a person’s elemental bending away is like ripping your entire being away. Like stripping a billionaire of all of their assets and cash. Horrible blow to their ego, lifetime of suffering, etc.
But now that I’m older, Aang should have just killed the bastard. The fight was hella cool tho.
Amazing how, as you got older, your opinions got more basic and animalistic.
Kids really are incredible.
There are good reasons to not leaving Ozai alive that a child wouldn’t factor in but an adult would. Namely a revanchistic coup against Zuko to reinstate either Ozai or Azula and restore the Fire Nation empire, while Azula was redeemable in theory Ozai wasn’t, my source for that last bit being that he is voiced by Mark Hamill.
Point is that leaving him alive while idealistic and honestly pretty gnarly also leaves loose ends.
Caillou looking centrist loser 😶
Meanwhile Sokka and Toph do a dozen hindenbergs and no one cares
It makes sense for him as he is the equivalent of a Buddhist monk. They follow the virtue of no harm. Same way he is vegetarian in the story.
Well, the henchmen usually wears masks or helmets so we and the protagonist don’t humanize them.
Exactly, the random goons in games are designed to be without humanity and to fade into the background as much as possible.
Imagine if instead of dying quick and going immediately still and silent, random goons crawled around on the floor for two minutes in absolute agony after you shoot them like “Oh God there’s so much blood! I don’t want to die!”
Would totally change the tone of the game.
“I have 4 kids and my wife has cancer! This was the only available job in this economy! I had 3 PHDs! Would you at least go to my house and give this letter to my #coughing blood# wife?”
[Sure, buddy] [I’ll do everything I can to make sure they’re safe] [How do you think I got this address, mate?]
I would absolutely play this game. Lol
Hey now sometimes they also wear masks to save on game resources. Like with Fallout NV where the Legion has so masked guys is because the game would shit itself if it didn’t.
Also I want that second one, best im probably gonna get is watching a dementia patient crawl around with a blown off leg in Rimworld.
Protags who do this would normally also spare henchmen who were incapacitated or surrendered, right? Those 7,455 henchmen who died all went down swinging. Accepting the villain’s surrender is only notable because for some reason all of their underlings were fanatics who fought to the death.
Nah. All those henchmen who “fought to the death” are almost never even given a chance to surrender. The excuse is closer to “it was in the heat of battle” but the only reason that excuse doesn’t fly for the villain is plot armor. How many of these movies even have the protag doing stealth kills of guards, coming up behind some poor underling on watch duty and doing the magic neck-snap move or a knife to the throat or a quick pewt-pewt from a “silenced” gun before the guard even knows what hit them. Those guys were probably the most likely to lay down their weapon and say “yeah, go ahead, I’m not paid nearly enough for this shit,” but they don’t matter because they’re underling fodder. We’re never introduced to them as having any motivations or personalities, so they’re just there to provide some action. They are not to be given moral consideration, only the villain is shown with agency, so the audience is only supposed to care about what the “hero” does with the villain. It’s laziness that is widely accepted and goes mostly unquestioned because of what Collatz_problem said, it’s class morality and we’re all used to that because that shit is ingrained.
I am actually having trouble thinking of any recent movies where this happens, so I’m mostly thinking about video games where every enemy that sees you instantly decides that it’s you or them, and no matter how many you kill the next guy is always like “I’ve definitely got this.”
Although I also haven’t recently played any games where you can spare the main villain, so… are we even still doing this? Maybe I’m not consuming the right media.
Edit: Wait I thought of one recent game where the protag spares the final boss because they’re sort of the same. I don’t know if I can say which game it is without it being a major spoiler. The “class” consciousness thing basically is the text though, it’s not like subtle or unintentional.
This feels like the right moment for this video
The color of this kid’s clothes makes me hear the text in Winnie the Pooh’s voice and I can’t stop laughing.
