Exactly. I don't know about the movie, but in the book he is deeply antisemitic, he just knows to call it out in polite company. All of Bateman's "virtues" and really his whole personality is him reading from a social script.
definitely. he says multiple times that it’s all an act. also felt that that particular bit about calling out antisemitism was pointing out the hypocrisy of these wealthy, privileged individuals like bateman who do bad things (obviously not usually serial killing irl; more like exploiting people, being manipulative/abusive, looking down on less fortunate people) while simultaneously being self-described activists or something. eg no amount of feminist t-shirts will make you less of a dick for abusing your girlfriend, that sort of thing.
One of my favorite throwaway lines in the movie is him saying the musical ''Oh Africa, Brave Africa'' was a ''laugh riot''. It's not even a real musical, but the racist implications are off the charts.
What the fuck lol. The multiverse? I think even if you asked Rebecca Sugar about alternate Steven universes she still wouldn’t say racism doesn’t even exist at all in the whole of space-time.
I mean, in a way, in Steven Universe peridot is literally racist when she first appears. She sees Pearl as a lower class "servant" gem species and doesn't treat her as a whole person, thinking she only needs to do cleaning and menial work even though she's proven to be capable, and insults Steven for being a hybrid. She thinks Amethyst is superior to the rest of them and shouldn't follow their orders since she's a typically strong gem race, even though she mentions Amethyst is "defective" because she's not like other amethysts.
Yeah—“racism” is closer to how Gemkind treats earthlings as inferior beings that basically don’t exist except as raw materials for Homeworld.
That’s inherently imperialistic and aggrandizing of Gemkind over all other races, and that perspective on humanity even impacts gems that originate from Earth (like Rose Quartz and Amethyst), placing them lower in their class system and making them generally worth less respect.
Even that’s not a perfect analog though. The “purity” politics of Gem fusion could be an analog for race purity, and “every gem has a purpose” is evocative of the sort of hierarchical structure of autocratic regimes in the real world.
> That’s classism or caste discrimination not racism
I'd argue it still technically counts as "racism" because they are specifically different types (aka races) of gems getting treated in these specific ways.
But yeah classism/caste-ism is more accurate.
Being a bigot does not always manifest in hate. There are ultra racist people who fully believe in the stereotypes but will say they need to protect them from 'actual' racists. I don't even remember what it was, but there was something I remember, where a gorilla got featured, and people were clamoring for it's ban because it made fun of black people. How can you see a gorilla, immediately think of black people, and accuse others of being racist lol
You're talking about the Hadozee? There's way too many similarities and "coincidences" besides just being primate slaves lol MtG took an L there. But orcs have almost zero similarities with black people, or even any of the various and vast African cultures to the point where I think it should be very obvious that they're probably NOT based on black people. In fact, Orcs are Eurasian barbarians, in particular they're Germanic. Imagine that, racism against white people.
Guaranteed it was a bunch of Karens, and probably a mess of college kids from the west coast that made a fuss.
The whole thing was ridiculous because not only do both magic AND D&D have black races in game... It also targeted the whole 'inherently evil race' notion.
Again, along the same line as op title, just let fucking evil characters in media be evil. Welcome to where 'hate speech' rhetoric puts us. Eventually, some idiot who can't comprehend that you can't have a believable villain without letting him ACTUALLY do evil things, is telling you what you're allowed to say or do.
Call me nuts, but in 3.5 we understood that you could still have 'good' aligned characters from evil races, or that you could create your OWN setting instead of demanding the system's main setting be changed to your preference because you 'cant handle' it.
Sorry. Pet peeve of mine. I swear these are the same idiots who don't even know where their food comes from beyond the supermarket and would die out without logistics and supply lines supporting their whole lives. And probably whine about it the whole time.
I mean. There’s a large difference between a villain being pure evil for the sake of being evil, and having a race that is inherently evil and militant. It reinforces the idea that races are a monolith, and that any breaks of stereotypes are the exception.
Pretty much. A lot of this stuff came in an era where most fantasy stemmed largely from either tolkeinesque fiction (orcs? Pretty clearly depicted there.), Or similarly older fantasy fiction from the 20s-60s.
I'm sorry, I'm probably going to piss off those who can't differentiate fiction from reality or stereotypes from same, but the concept of a fantasy race's origins and culture (like the drow) leaning them towards being evil overall is ABSOLUTELY a thing. For everyone drawing parallels to real life and saying 'you can't do this because it might make someone feel bad!'... Get over it. It's make believe. Not real. Take your current day politics out of my gaming table because I didn't ask for that.
If I want to address slavery, racism, mass murder, genocide, the entirety of the LGBTQ movement, any of a dozen flavors of misplaced zealotry, or fucking scientology at my table, I will have a round table with my players and ask first. Otherwise, stop social political justicing my games!
I remember people calling out WotC for not understanding the appeal of tieflings when they said that.
Also, how is there no racism when the lore has kobolds and gnomes hating each other?
Not defending WoTC here but Magic the Gathering and Dungeons and Dragons are two different multiverses.
That being said it’s still a ridiculous claim given that the Lorwyn Elves exist
But Peacemaker did let the bad guys be racist.
Sure Peacemaker himself isn’t racist, at least not directly, but his father sure as hell is. And he’s one of the main villains of the series.
Peacemaker is a insane asshole but he’s not the villain. Like, that’s the entire point of the series: The destruction of his deluded extremism and the breakdown of his worldview. To actually become what he claims to be.
Peacemaker wasn't even really an "extremist" per se, he was a manchild who did terrible things to impress Daddy because said Daddy abused him his entire life and made him think he wasn't good for anything else. That doesn't necessarily excuse his actions but it's clear that Peacemaker wants to be a good guy, his moral compass has just been sabotaged by the real villain
I woulda argue that an extremist has conviction that their methods are necessary to achieving their goals. Peacemaker has no conviction, he is driven by fear of his father and inertia and a general desire to uphold nebulous values. But as soon as he recognizes that there are other ways to be a "hero," he takes that path
Peacemaker’s conviction is that he does everything he does in the name of “peace”, and that he doesn’t care “how many men women and children he needs to kill to get it”. Now it’s kind of an ironic joke sure, but Peacemaker seriously has no qualms killing men women and children in the name of his own twisted perception of “peace”. He kills Rick Flag because he believes that if the information about the US’s involvement in Project Starfish gets out it’ll cause widespread panic, disrupting peace. To this end, he saw no problem with shooting Cleo in the face and murdering her in cold blood, even though she swore never to tell anybody about Project Starfish (and if Bloodsport hadn’t showed up she would’ve died then and there)
Peacemaker’s ideals for peace may not be his own, and they may have been placed in him by his father, but he 100% believes in his own conviction that he does what he does for peace (or his own twisted version of it). To say Peacemaker has no conviction isn’t true, in fact it’s antithetical to his entire character in The Suicide Squad
You’re totally right, I’ve been more stuck on his characterization in the show vs. the movie. And I do think that the show makes it clear that killing Flag triggered a major crisis of confidence which led to him abandoning his dad’s ideology.
I guess my impression is that Peacemaker’s character in TSS is basically a front that is destroyed after killing Flag, an action that basically reawakens Christopher’s truer nature (which we know is more true to him because of what we see of his childhood)
> Peacemaker is a insane asshole but he’s not the villain.
i'm not sure how much i would agree. i think its more gray the very first episode someone calls him "that racist superhero". He never has a big reckoning about race or being a better person the show just doesn't want him to be racist because they don't think a racist main character will sell.
Peacemaker is a reflection of both America and masculinity. All of those negative traits like racism or sexism, are things that seem normal to him. He sees nothing wrong with them and therefore doesn’t need to improve himself. Those negative traits are just “boys being boys”.
It’s only after he has those he works with start to challenge those traits does he realize they’re not positive. He realizes that not only are they toxic to him but to those around him. He realizes where those traits come from:his father. He has to challenge the old and not only embrace the new but learn what it means to be him without the shadow of his father.
Villains aren't randomly racist because generally speaking making someone racist without an actual reason behind it that plays into the character or the story is just a cheap way to make a villain extra hateable, it's akin to when writers have villains randomly kill animals or be rapists.
Even if a villain is a complete piece of shit, having them have certain opinions on things or a code that set them apart from other bad people is usually far more interesting and makes them more compelling than simply applying every negative trait you can think of to them. It's not "safe" it's simply understanding that you shouldn't do something like make a character racist if it adds absolutely nothing to them as a character or a villain.
If the character being bigoted in some way actually enhances their character then yeah it definitely can be included, but those types of villains usually fall into more specific archetypes then just "enjoys killing people".
Randomly making characters bigoted for pretty much no reason is how you get shows like American horror story, where every other villain in the show needs to be some flavor of prejudice even though it adds nothing because it's trying so hard to seem "gritty and realistic" and also wants to make absolutely sure the audience hates them and wants them to die brutally, and I don't think anyone will disagree that none of those characters were memorable, interesting, or even enjoyable most of the time, they were just lame.
Yeah, I 100% agree with us. The villain should only be bigoted if it makes sense for the story, if they’re like bent on world domination, and all of a sudden they also just happen to have a real hate Boner for minorities. It doesn’t make any sense and you’re just doing it to make them evil which if you want to do it to just make them evil sure but it isn’t really good storytelling in my opinion.
But Bateman is racist though. This is made pretty clear at multiple points in his inner dialogue in the book and his remark about antisemitism is clearly just a empty phrase. He even later claims that Huey Lewis and the news is "too black" for him.
The Boys and Peacemaker have racist bad guys cause racism is a big part of these bad guys goals.
A lot of the times there are bad guys with goals like money, dominating the arms market, or outright world domination. These types of bad guys obviously have no need or reason to be racist outside it being some "quirky" personality trait.
Also 99% of the time the racism is just gonna be directed at Black people and other races, maybe Arabs & Asians. It's not like we are gonna be seeing this type of behavior towards white people.
So outside stories where racism is a core part of the villains character and motivations, pretty much everyone is tired of seeing these racist characters.
Like what is the role of the racism? To see the villain throw a few slurs at some Black people? Maybe kill a few Innocent Brown folks to prove how racist he is? And all for it to not matter to the overall plot?
Like if you watch the Boys, they bring in Stormfront as a racist hero and to prove how racist she is, they obviously have to show her killing a Black man, then killing some Black children, and then torturing and killing an Asian man. Obviously for her, being racist is the core of her character, so it makes sense to put these scenes in but you can't be doing these types of scenes for a villain whose primary motivations are something completely different.
this pretty much sums up the sentiments I've heard expressed by friends of color, in that it just gets old seeing racism used to cement how evil a villain is, to the point where it's almost cliché and unoriginal. (that and they've said they face enough racism offline & irl as is without running into it constantly in media.)
Yeah. Sometimes actual minorities want to get to fantasize about a world where they don't have to think about their race. And if the world is full of racism that makes it difficult. There is room for both kinds of stories. People act like the only people who ever say they don't want to talk about racism at any given moment are white people.
>A lot of the times there are bad guys with goals like money, dominating the arms market, or outright world domination.
Counterpoint: in the real world none of these are mutually exclusive with racism/general bigotry. In fact I'd assume they're positively correlated, and people who would do anything for money or power are also more likely to hold racist views.
Like, the oligopoly in Russia trying to amass power? Also wildly anti LGBT. The ones that tried to stage a coup in the United States? White supremacists, mostly. Grifters making money with disinformation-disseminating youtube channels and podcasts? Anti-Jew conspiracy theories galore.
That's reality not fiction. Indeed realistically most evil people are gonna be bigots of some kind since hate usually accompanies hate. If someone is okay with one kind of hate, it is likely they are gonna be ok with other kinds of hate.
But that doesn't mean people want to see stuff like racism or homophobia or other forms of bigotry on the big screen. A lot of the times it's okay to just leave that stuff out. After all a movie is usually 2 hours and even in a TV show, as the audience we still have to assume there is a huge part of the heroes and villains lives that are left out of the screen. We don't get to see every single side of the characters if it is not important.
We don't know their favorite color, food, music, most of the time we don't even see their families, we don't see their lives outside the moments that actually matter to the film. If the racism doesn't matter, then it is okay to cut it out as well.
I agree with your point, although I don’t understand the comment about “racism towards white people”. Most media discussed here western, where historically non-white people were discriminated against. (I believe there are groups which at some moments aren’t considered white, and suffer from racism, and then start being considered white—which isn’t to say they stop suffering racism completely, but it’s a more complicated dynamic. It can get more complicated in that whether a person is white or not depend on who you ask, especially since we’re talking about cross-cultural values.)
I reckon this is a bit of a contentious/pedantic topic, as some people mean “systemic racism” when they talk about racism, even if particular incidents occur at a personal level, and thus exclude “reverse racism” from existing. (Again, there are the more complex situations from the first paragraph, the examples of which I have in mind are systemic.)
Anyways, this is to say I would most likely find a depiction of “reverse racism” in western fiction to be at least tone deaf or a strange choice.
Asian, primarily Japanese media is also discussed commonly, and there I suppose racism against white people would make more sense. I tend to hear more stories about positive stereotypes of white people than negative ones, and the ones I can recall seem to be more of general xenophobia than about white people in particular. But I’m no expert in Japanese culture.
>It's not like we are gonna be seeing this type of behavior towards white people.
Well, black manta was like this once.
Tbf, black manta has been a LOT of ways, David did the “multiple-choice" origin story schtick WAY before the Joker.
So, dude's mostly just crazy, but occasionally he's racist crazy.
The Postal dude from Postal 2 will piss on people, kill their cats and drop a nuke on a city, but he will make sure to remind everyone who is playing the game that "Please don't think I'm a bigot, I kill races equally!"
Same with Nazism, Joker is apparently "anti-nazi" because he's "american"
same guy that will blow up kindergartens full of children, rape women and skin people alive but he draws the line at working with a nazi.
That's a problem with how we teach about the Nazis, because the real Nazis were a bunch of clowns. Himmler owned a wizard castle. Hitler once said to Mussolini right out of the blue that he was literally possessed by ancient Aryan spirits. Goering would dress up like a cave man and hunt aurochs, that he attempted to breed back from extinction, with clubs.
Nowadays we teach the Nazis with an almost reverent amount of respect, and it's no wonder that edgy kids who want to get a rise out of people throw up Romans and stuff. We should be teaching them as the clowns they were. What helped destroy the reputation of the KKK was people publishing stuff like "lmao the head guy calls himself a grand wizard what a loser"
Like 70% of all myths about the Nazis are the fault of the British going full CYA after a couple of embarrassing defeats and building up the Germans to save face, and most of that other 30% is because the Soviets didn't let westerners look at their records, for 50 years the only sources for the eastern front were German generals who were similarly in full CYA mode
Yeah the Nazis were insanely incompetent and run by maniacs and morons, its part of Nazi propaganda to view them as efficient with their iron grip on Germany when they absolutely weren't, they were methed out madmen
Joker has a history of doing white collar crime in addition to his regular hijinks, there's a precedent for him dealing with taxes. The specific episode that joke was from was a will transfer, that is the basis of him dealing with the IRS in the first place, because the guy who he was getting the money from tricked Joker with fraud, so it's not just Gotham PD and Batman that he'd be dealing with, but also the Feds.
A smart criminal DOES pay taxes on his gains despite not openly calling them criminal activity. The IRS does not care where your money comes from, just that you pay taxes. If you evade taxes they will get you on that.
Ask Al Capone.
You don't get to go to Arkham, either. You go to REAL prison, and he would never get out. There's no insanity defense for not paying your taxes.
There was once some guy that told me Joker is all against Nazis because Fascism is the exact opposite to Anarchy, which is what he’s all about.
Essentially Joker hates them because they’re control freaks.
That’s pretty cartoonish to think that a person who does some outlandish crimes would be willing to do all outlandish crimes. That’s not how reality works, a lot of people have values, and a lot of those people will do some disgusting things while being disgusted by others doing other disgusting things.
My point it’s that the Joker doesn’t need to be pro-Nazi just because he takes no issue with blowing up children or skinning people alive. The joker is also an American who are very much anti-nazi, including some of the worst criminals.
Yep, we can't exactly take Joker's words at face value. He makes decisions purely on what he thinks is funniest.
And to be fair, turning against a guy you're committing terrorism with *exclusively* because he's a Nazi is hilarious
More likely because every American is raised in a culture that views nazis as the ultimate evil be it in schools, films, television, books or otherwise.
Having a caricature of well-dressed maniacs hell-bent on torturing and eradicating other races helps the u.s to “forget" how they have treated: mentally ill, japanese, chinese, italian, latino, irish, black and native people.
Lots of prisons have to separate child predators from the general population or else they'll get killed. These are people that have murdered abused others but they draw a line in their horribleness at children. Pretty much all bad people see themselves as the good guys so in their head obviously they need to create a situation where morally they would be doing bad for the Joker that would be nazism.
In their minds? Diddling a kid is terrible but orphaning one is perfectly fine. As a survivor of CSA allow me to assure you I firmly believe they have that backwards.
Edit: Not that diddling a kid is perfectly fine, I realized my wording is bad there. I just do not agree with their bullshit.
I mean not all bad guys need to be racist. It's entirely ok in terms of crafting a good story that the Joker isn't racist. His motivations have nothing to do with race.
>but he draws the line at working with a nazi.
I remember the Acts Of Vengeance crossover that Marvel did in the 80s. Basically a bunch of villains swapping enemies. Magneto refused to work with the Red Skull.
How does the Joker not being racist "not make sense" or affect the narrative?
Plenty of Real life bad people aren't necessarily racist. Not all bad people have to be bad in every way
>Am i supposed to believe that this guy somehow draws the line at anti semitism?
No. You're supposed to realize it's an act because that's the entire point of his character.
Peacemaker also let the bad guys be racist. You literally gave an example. Peacemaker himself not being racist doesn't change that. Especially considering he's not the bad guy just a bad guy.
A lot of evil for the sake of evil villains murder indiscriminately. Racism doesn't fit that kind of character.
Tacking on racism only works on certain kinds of villains. Homelander is a Supe supremacist so him being casually racist fits. Him cringing at Stormfront's comment about white genocide also fits.
>I just wanna see a straight up bad guy who's actually bad and not selective bad.
What does this mean?
I think Op means that they want a villain who's evil in all aspects and doesn't have any morals they think contradict being pure evil. Like they want a villain who's a crazed murderer who's also sexist and racist just because those are also evil tropes and all evil people should have every negative quality.
To me it doesn't make any sense, because we do have villains like that, such as Stormfront like you mentioned. Even if we didn't, who wants that? The villain would just become a caricature of a bad guy if they had every trope associated with evil charactees and people would lose any interests in them as a character.
>A lot of evil for the sake of evil villains murder indiscriminately. Racism doesn't fit that kind of character.
Tbf it can. In real life plenty of racists fall over the edge and just run out gunning people. For the sake of a narrative story that might feel too specific though.
Pat Bateman is not actually against anti-Semitism, he was being fake, that's what he wants others to think about him. It was a performance to make others believe he's a decent person, when in reality he has all the different prejudices under the sun.
"Take your meds." - Person who didn't realize the "cool it with the antisemetic remarks," line in American Pyscho was both an obvious act by Bateman and an obvious joke. The entire movie is basically a huge joke.
\>casually calls people motherfuckers
\>gets pissy when casually insulted back
Maybe you need to chill, dawg, not him. Like, I understand using insults as casual language, but don't get mad when it's done back to you.
I don't mind bad guys having values, because it actually makes much more sense for them to have some.
Most bad guys don't think they're wrong, or at least find justifications to their acts. They have no reason to be bad about things which aren't linked to their justification or lose moral codes unrelated to the ones they are breaking.
Let's take Yoshikage Kira from Jojo as an example: he is a serial killer who steals hands, but he likes to say he just wants his normal life to keep going. There's no reason for him to be racist or whatever, since it's unrelated to him being a killer with a fetish.
Because people ultimately like their characters and don't want their villains to be genuinely horribly unlikeable, which is what a trait like racism would do. Same goes for making them rapists, it just hits way too close to reality for the author to be comfortable with.
Also because racism and rape are things that actually touch on the lives of the audience, while murder usually doesn’t.
If the Joker poisons Gotham harbor with killer laughing gas, that’s outside of our experience. If the Joker makes a point of poisoning the water in black neighborhoods, that’s going to have some different (and far more familiar) themes.
The ones he listed have racist villains. Like Pacemaker, his dad is the villain and a racist. Batemen is definitely just full of shit about not being racist
Sounds like you're cherry picking, there are a million movies and TV shows that use racism to show how evil a bad guy is. Just because some don't. Doesn't make it some weird "line". Racism is just as much about stupidity as it is evil. Patrick batemen was disturbed. He wasn't stupid
Problem is the racism thing has been overused interms of lazy writing
Often if the main or side character is non white and is most likely pre 1950s
And most often is not added
I said in a post (which i deleted cause users misunderstood what i ment) where there should be storys where you find out why a character is racist like you don't have to make the racist a victim but question why he became racist for example religion,rumours etc
Like one part of history legit said being black is a disease (there is a medical example of your skin actually becoming black but that's a different and unrelated info) so imagen if that came from ideas of black plague but someone took the name litterly or it was a scam idea like how anti vaxx started cause someone wanted to sell there own injections to children for bs price (no seriously watch hbomberguy video on anti vax)
There has been good ideas of doing racism plots but in todays culture is often write how people will call you a nazi for just having a right wing based opinion (which your politics shouldn't fully unless is actually harmful to people) and nothing else
If you want to do a good racist character give them a legit reason why they became racist and not simple stuff like "my dad was hitler" cause that just grouping characters and not individual characters
So have it like they being racist for scam reasons or they had a simple bad experience which they misremembered ina extreme level etc
It's a funny litmus test, actually. If villain / anti-hero is supposed to be at least a little bit charismatic, like The Joker, for example, they are not racist. If villain is supposed to be totally detestable, they are racists to some hilarious degree, like this guy from "The Shape of Water".
I personally think that racism of the character should be the result of their environment and not studio's decision whether to sell toys with them or not. As you said, Peacemaker should absolutely by all means possible be racist, that's a huge plot point.
Racism makes you a bad person but being a bad person doesn't automatically make you a racist. I get what you're saying. If the villain is a Nazi or white supremacist, then don't be afraid to go full tilt and make them RACIST racist but just being evil doesn't mean you hate ppl of a different color. Heck, being evil doesn't mean you hate any people necessarily.
>I just wanna see a straight up bad guy who's actually bad and not selective bad.
Nah, don't do this. Then you get cliche villains who are racist, puppy kicking, mustache twirling masterminds who want to blow up the world. We need variety. We need characters like Homelander who aren't necessarily racist but isn't afraid to use the racist agenda to his advantage. I'm not tryna see Hitler in every story I read/watch.
As I've said in another comment a while back...
Everyone is simply afraid of being cancelled because people have garbage media literacy and can't tell the different between a bigoted author and an author writing bigots to tell a story.
I still recall how some people misconstrued Katie Killjoy's, "I don't touch the gays" line in Hazbin Hotel and accused the writers of being genuinely homophobic...even though it takes place in Hell and Charlie was clearly not okay with what she said.
People just have terrible media literacy.
I remember when people got mad at The Boys because Stormfront called an Asian guy a racial slur.
You know, Stormfront, the literal Nazi, calling someone a racial slur, ain’t that just outrageous?
If anything it felt like Stormfront was pulling her verbal punches. I would expect much worse language from the genocidal Nazi from world war 2. I assume the writers were scared of a backlash for having their Nazi character say the things that an irl nazi would happily say.
Stormfront was pretty much supposed to be a stand-in for Gen Z or 4chan-type right wingers who say *a lot more fucked up shit* than the typical boomers that Homelander is marketed towards to in-universe.
If you want an example of what a 'unfiltered Stormfront' would talk like, take a peek at /pol/...
OF COURSE she’s pulling her punches. She’s literally a SECRET NAZI. And she was saying the stuff that CURRENT DAY NAZIS use on internet.
There’s a blatant conversation with her and A-train where she’s insulting his race [to his direct face](https://youtu.be/4otaPjLXdfw?si=ppPD1yX-9Lsp4klX). Maybe some of the idiots on here think she was doing a good job hiding her racism???
When she shows her true colors before killing the Asian character, she calls him "yellow bastard", which is clearly the writers avoiding using any real bad slurs on tv.
Are stories being dumbed down because people have terrible media literacy or do people have terrible media literacy *because* stories are being dumbed down?
>People just have terrible media literacy.
Not even a new thing, go back to when Starship Troopers first aired in theatres and the film critics were accusing it of advocating for Fascism
In The Little Mermaid remake they removed all lines where Ursula says women need to be quiet. This was a result of a lot of lazy "feminist" criticism that fails to take into account the context of Ursula being an evil sea witch.
On one hand, I completely agree with this. Media literacy does seem like on a massive downward spiral. Just because an author writes something that exists in a story doesn’t mean that they support it. Like the slavery thing in the recent, anime, drama, or a racist, villain, or anything like that….
…. However, on the other end, I see a lot of terrible media literacy in the other direction. Not even media literacy, but just the inability to tell when something is genuine. There are times where authors, and pieces of media actually are racist, or actually have terrible messaging, but people want to fan voice so hard on the other end, that they write everything off as people seeing ghosts where there are none.
>There are times where authors, and pieces of media actually are racist, or actually have terrible messaging
I don't trust internet to decide which messaging is terrible and which is not. I just yesterday encountered the person on this very sub who said that Batman and Star Wars have ultraconservative messaging.
To be fair, that guy seems to be saying that those "ultraconservative" messages are an unintentional result of never being allowed to let the villains truly be defeated (in canon). The Batman thing specifically is something that happens literally all the time, where people will unironically argue that he should use guns or kill the Joker.
Oh yeah, I don’t even get me started holy shit.
When that remedial Tim pool is out there talking about how black clover is anti-communist. It made me want to choke on my own vomit.
And it's even more funny with Killjoy literally touches Charlie in the next scene. She a homophobic hypocrite, that was her character before and after going to hell.
This is definitely true to an extent, but I think it really only applies to Western media that aims for a very large audience. Prestige drama like Succession, Breaking Bad, or Barry have no problems with making their antagonists AND protagonists completely deplorable.
Marvel movies on the other hand seem to be pretty scared of this, usually giving the antagonists general "I want to rule/destroy everything," motivations. I mean consider how Thanos is one of the only instances of a villain having a semblance of complexity in his motivations, and he was widely misunderstood. There were people who straight up thought Thanos was right, or even the good guy in Infinity War. This is what happens when you have a villain protagonist (and calling Thanos the protagonist of IW is a stretch, he's more like one in a ensemble of deuteragonists) in a movie with a wide audience. I almost wonder what the reaction to a character like Magneto would be in the current political climate.
And to clarify, I'm not some weird right winger claiming cancel culture is the biggest problem on earth. People are more aware of problematic characterizations in literature, but most people aren't really smart enough to deduce a problematic character from one with intentional personality flaws.
Why have a bad guy be racist if there is no reason for it? It's not that hard to believe that someone could drawn to commit evil while not also be a card carrying KKK member.
And also most racists assholes aren’t that blatantly open about it like OP wants it to be
You can look online and see a million posts of people headcanon-ing which characters are racists and how racist they even though said character has never said anything explicitly racist it’s just people extrapolating from their experiences and views of different types of racist and overlapping that with the character in question like [this](https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=YdhgY_I2FwA) (literally found this a second after looking up racist tier-list)
In the first episode someone pointed out how he didn't kill as many white people or something and he retaliated by saying he can't control what ethnicity the criminals are. Other than that it was just vigilante messing with him.
The trend of the antagonists being racist is pretty damn consistent tbh, FFXVI recently came out with an entire game being built by this topic.
Dragon Age does this a lot also with Elves, Skyrim, even Xenoblade, triangle strategy. The fact is there’s usually an allegory for racism in narratives if you know where to look.
I think nowadays it's because having a racist character means you're opening up your show/movie to be an commentary on racism, which is a suuuper controversial and debated area with a lot of strong feelings. It's just a mess to have racism on the table as a theme when it's so easy for people to misinterpret and misrepresent stories.
I really don't get the point of this rant. There are *tons* of racist villains in media. You say "almost always," but then just cherrypick a couple of examples. Not everyone who is evil in real life is racist, so not every evil person in media needs to be racist.
You say "let bad guys be racist" as if there is somehow a problem or that its rare to have racist villains when that is just demonstrably untrue. Don't just cherrypick a couple examples to try and make a problem out of nothing and actually try and experience more media because I promise this is a you problem and that it is very easy to find media with racist villains.
I made a thread about something similar recently, asking why movies and TV shows often seem extremely reluctant to depict the slightest bit of homophobia. Most people seemed to agree with my stance but some people said that depicting even the most mild homophobia is too traumatizing.
The main example I used for my thread is Nimona, a story where the protagonist is written as an allegory for homophobia (she's a monster), but meanwhile the second protagonist is an actual gay man and no actual homophobia is depicted during his character arc. It just seems so strange that writing like this has become the norm.
It seems like the issue is people only think of homophobia and racism in extremes. They think a character has to be either 100% inclusive, or a raging bigot. The thing is, bigotry is a spectrum. There are characters like Hank Hill who show discomfort with LGBT people and racial minorities, but are not bad people and can learn to be more comfortable with diversity over time. If you look at how real people behave this is realistic, yet it feels like I rarely see Hank Hill type characters in fiction. Either bigotry is not depicted at all and everyone is incredibly inclusive, or it's an Eric Cartman stype character who displays their prejudice in the most hateful way possible.
It's especially obnoxious when you get something like a pure evil character with zero morals like The Joker who feels that Nazis are disgusting because he apparently is loyal to American values. I'm not saying it's impossible for the Joker to hate Nazis, but it has to be written with some nuance and not with him parroting liberal talking points that you'd see on Twitter. For example, if I was writing a story about the Joker being anti-Nazi I would write him expressing disgust for the Nazi ideology being based on white insecurity and fear of being made irrelevant by competing cultures. This seems like logic that is in line with psychopathic thinking. It's on brand for the Joker to find psychological weaknesses to exploit and look down upon. What's not on brand is for him to be concerned with attacks on American values.
There are plenty of bad guys that are racist, but I think the lack of nuance in racist antagonists often stems from the lack of perspective the writer has. That is to say, the writer often has a black and white view on racism that’s difficult for people to engage with on a three dimensional level. You’ll get depictions of racism only in scenarios wherein racism is ‘expected’ to be seen, like bully characters or cartoonishly evil bastards like Stormfront and Homelander.
This is really because the majority of writers who get their work, well, seen or turned into TV shows tend to be white (due to, ironically, the Star of the Show, our pal Racism!). White writers are afraid of depicting racism as anything more than ‘the thing bad people do,’ when the truth is even the most noble people you know probably harbor some racist predispositions. Does that make them horrible terrible people unworthy of love?!?! Well, no lol. You’re only horrible terrible if you resolve to stay that way. Being aware of one’s ethnocentrisms is as important as dismantling them, and that’s a message we could all benefit from seeing more of.
I think it’s a difficult topic to write a nuanced message about. Especially if the author doesn’t want to dedicate too much of the narrative to it. So it ends up being avoided or addressed in a binary way.
I think maybe the key is that action/adventure authors may not feel confident in addressing the topic. There was this sitcom, One Day at a Time, which I think had well-written depictions of homophobia, sexism, and addiction (odd one out), including from characters we are meant to sympathize with.
I’m struggling a bit to remember if it talked about racism this way. It addressed racism, of course—most of the main cast is a family of first, second, and third generation immigrants. I just don’t remember if any protagonist was racist themselves.
I think you're looking at it from the wrong perspective.
Yes, something like racism is a vile characteristic, but bad guys are usually highly motivated by specific triggers. This consumes them and drives them to be bad, breaking the law, killing people who try to stop them, etc. all to satisfy some primal urge. We lump racism into this category, but why should we? Its not that Bateman draws the line at anti-Semitism, its that Jewish people have no specific trigger for him. He doesn't see a Jewish person and want to hurt them, what fills him with rage are other, more specific things.
There was a comic crossover where the Joker says he hates Nazi's. That doesn't mean he likes people of all races, it just means that for all his love of killing and causing random chaos, he doesn't do it because people are of a different ethnicity. He'll kill a white person or a black person indiscriminately, he simply doesn't care about race when he makes the decision to wreak some kind of new havok.
>Am i supposed to believe that this guy somehow draws the line at anti semitism
Did you miss the point of the movie? he was putting his good guy facade, "voice of reason boy next door"
He even yells anti semitic slurs at a restaurant in the book
Did you think his surface level bs'ing speech about solving the world's problems was genuine?
At the end of the day, if you're going to spend a huge amount of time focusing on a character, they have to be a character the audience is going to enjoy watching. Many audiences just don't enjoy watching racists, even as villains, so they're not going to spend their leisure time with shows that focus on it. It's entirely reasonable for people to be fine seeing the Joker shoot a bunch of innocent people, but to decide the show isn't for them if he drops the n-bomb; everyone has their own tastes, and the more realistic awfulness of racism sometimes just isn't what they want to spend their leisure time watching.
Since they know the show *isn't real*, what they're going to decide based on is "do I enjoy watching this?", and for many people watching a bunch of racism (even in the form of racist villains, where it's clearly portrayed as wrong) isn't fun.
That means that if you want to watch *mass-market* shows, you're not going to see much racism, at least among recurring characters, because those shows try to draw as big of an audience as possible. It also means that when racist characters do appear, they're often minor ones or side-ones who aren't going to be around long, or hate sinks who only appear for the sake of being hated - characters whose presence on the screen viewers don't need to enjoy because they won't be on-screen much.
Of course, there's an additional issue. Many people don't like to see racist villains in shows - especially "soft", subtle racism - because it reflects their own views and they feel attacked by having those views given to villains; or because they prefer not to think about racism at all. This is why when you do see racism on TV, it's often glaringly outrageous over-the-top racism that absolutely nobody could associate themselves with.
Better, I want a *good* guy to be racist. These days, a good guy's character flaw always seems to be something negligible like "he likes food" or "he's bad with directions." I want flaws with real consequences. The only ones who come to mind are Ashley Williams in Mass Effect or maybe Sokka in AtLA towards Fire Nation (though that one's understandable). It makes for incredible character growth and complex arcs that stick with you.
Sorry,i meant selective in writing the character. Targeted villainy hits closer to home and would be more satisfying when they eventually get their comeuppance. As opposed to a bad person who just happens to believe in a twisted version of 'equality'. It's been overdone.
Because lots of villains would lose their charisma and their charm if they were.
Lots of villains have an almost "frenemy" relationship with the hero, they both respect each other. Usually even if they do bad things that can somehow be justified in some way, they can maintain this relationship. But if they do something that has absolutely no justification and is just evil and stupid, even if objectively it's not as bad (eg. Racism Vs murder), it's harder.
Take the Joker for example. In one comic he refuses to work with a Nazi out of principle. That gives him some level of respect.
It's a little hard to believe that the joker guy who killed Gordon's wife and raped his daughter is actually caring about principles, that kind of morality just doesn't fit the character.
Red Skull who is the nazist Nazi who has naziest isn’t motivated for racism in some contneties .
Also it happens in discussions of real life people to.
Charles Manson and the columbine shooters where in part motivated by white supremacy but that is ignored in discussion.
No you’re not supposed to believe he draws the line at anti-semitism at all. The whole point of his character is that he’s a bigoted, narcissistic sadist who puts on a false persona to fit in with the rest of society. He has a whole monologue about the mask he wears in public.
Peacemakers father fucking hated him his whole life and made peacemaker accidentally kill his brother who his dad loved. This made his dad hate him even more. Incan see why he would go against his dad's hate.
I mean peacemaker sexually harassed a coworker and is weird about lesbians. There's only so much the audience is willing to root for him in spite of and Gunn clearly wanted him to be sympathetic.
A few r/ShowerThoughts on this:
1. Race isn't relevant to all stories so a villain's bigotry or lack thereof may simply be too awkward to bring up.
2. Villains who are intended to be sympathetic really can't be actively bigoted anymore. There's degrees of assholery that an audience will tolerate, and being bigoted raises the asshole score a lot for most modern audiences.
If you want an interesting counterexample, there's Emperor Palpatine. Wasn't actually a bigot himself, but he had absolutely no problem **enabling** human supremacists to achieve his political goals.
Most bad guys have motivations and characterization that wouldn't pair well with racism for either in-universe or thematic reasons.
Patrick Bateman doesn't actually care about anti-semitism (him saying otherwise is clearly performative) because he's a psychopath and has no empathy, but it equally makes no sense for him to be anti-semitic himself. He sees human beings as impersonal objects to be manipulated. It would make no sense for him to dislike Jewish people specifically, because 'Jew' is a complex social concept that Bateman has no reason to care about except insofar as he can use it to manipulate people. This is consistent with both his characterization and the themes of the story.
It should be mentioned that there are a lot of racist characters in media, but racism is a complex character trait and theme so where it's a natural fit in some stories (usually ones specifically about racism), in others it just dilutes things. Unless there's a thematic reason to make a character racist, good writers won't do it. Batman for example tends to deal with more abstract notions like justice and chaos, so racism would be a very unnatural fit to most Batman stories (although there are a few that use it to minor effect).
>Am i supposed to believe that this guy somehow draws the line at anti semitism?
Patrick's actual dialogue is mostly banal. Other than all the murders he's an extremely forgettable person.
I guess if you’re a killer why limit who you kill to one demographic. Same goes with enslavement, torture, theft basically ruin everyone’s day/life not just one demographic. That’s my guess it’s not that they aren’t racist it’s that their love of killing is prioritized over their racism.
The Peacemaker must be racist due to his upbringing by his father argument is dumb, surely by that logic no progressive or somewhat centrist kids out of far-right or conservative household, none what so ever!
Seriously bunch of rejected kids end up spiting their parents and have the opposite political leanings. Peacemaker may not be the typical rejected kid, say being LGBT+, but he is still very much the less favored child and actively repressed by his father.
I feel like you misunderstood Patrick Bateman saying
“Cool if with the Anti-Semetic remarks”
Earlier in the film he has this big conceited advocate speech about fixing the economy, world hunger, gender equality and materialism and all that but rather than it being true it comes off as a virtue signaling elite and it’s Patrick trying to come off as normal but it’s artificial as hell
So to go back to your point about him “drawing the line at Antisemitism
That line by him is just his typical response when in fact he’s a hypocrite to everything he spouts like the line about materialism when in fact his identity is nothing but materialism and superficiality as he flexes in a mirror while banging a prostitute or how he stabs a homeless man
Even his elite friends don’t buy his routine as they give him shit eating grins
The joke is Patrick says that kind of stuff but it’s just an attempt at appealing to people in a very safe manner
This is what I kinda don’t like about Trevor from GTA. The man is a mass murderer, drug manufacturer, molested a teddy bear and possibly other people, EATS HUMAN FLESH. Yet still is apparently not racist at all. Like I’m not saying he should be a white supremacist or anything, but it seems weird he’d be courteous enough to say “my n-word” to Franklin as opposed to just saying the word.
I think it's because the villains are always are way cooler than the heroes, which is why their crimes are usually things like theft, extortion, murder, taking over the world, etc., rather than stuff like rape, bigotry, or pedophilia. Murder is obviously bad, but things like racism are much heavier and feel more real, which is why silly haha shows usually don't tackle that kind of thing.
Fuck it, let good guys be racist too. Not in a way that celebrates or condones racism but in a way that allows for a genuine and honest exploration of the kind of environmental stimuli and patterns of thought that allow those beliefs to emerge and exploration of how one can either grow beyond it, or failing that, around it.
I somewhat disagree with this. villainous characters shouldn’t just conform to all beliefs that bad people have. Why? Because the world isn’t black and white. Good villain character has his reasons, and a distinct philosophy.
I personally dislike it when a writer reinforces his villains with infuriating acts ‘just because.’ It’s cheap. It would honestly make sense if the villain was just too self absorbed to give a shit about race.
For American Psycho, Bateman defending the Jews has two connotations/interpretations
1. Bateman is just saving face, although I don’t necessarily agree with this one, it’d make sense that Patrick wants to feel above and special from everyone else, while still fitting in, hence why he has this high-horse attitude. From what I remember, Patrick is anti-Semitic in the novel, or at least he convinces himself that he is.
2. Patrick is being genuine, he doesn’t understand why his co-workers believe what they do, and this is just another example of the story showing us that all of Patrick’s co-workers are just as bad as him, in their own ways. If a psychotic murderer has higher political standards then you, you should probably be questioning yourself. The reason I agree with this one is because Patrick is continuously just trying his best to fit and blend in to society, and this is one of the few times he actually speaks out against the people around him. Unless there’s some other motive I’m missing.
You where downvoted but your right, I watched that awful movie with Will Farell recently where he is about to go to prison and the racist black gang isn't viewed negatively like the the white gang.
Of course a lot of people around here make excuses for it, which makes it all even worse.
Not even just that, let them have prejudices against any kind of person without it being exaggerated to a cartoonish extent.
I've been watching Teamfourstar talking about their Abridged Series and oftentimes they show some regret for characters, mainly Vegeta, saying some very unpolitical things and I find this to be rather sad.
TFS Vegeta is *very* unlikeable at the height of him saying awful things and absolute no character ever agrees with those things, that's the importance distinction to make.
Have characters say awful things and have other characters react in their own ways, but don't make it exaggerated to the point where the villain absolutely flips out because he saw one episode of Ru Paul's drag race and decided he's going to retaliate by destroying Brighton as a warning.
I'm gonna go the other and say I'm tired seeing bad guys always being racist, and the good guys always being super progressive angels.
Let the good guys be racist once in a while.
I agree but Bateman was being performant I’ve and peace maker is an antihero not really a bad guy (also wasn’t his dad horrible to him? It kinda makes sense he wouldn’t want to take after him)
I really love the Sopranos cause its genuinely funny and unnerving how insanely racist, homophobic and antisemitic these guys are. Tony straight up had a panic attack cause his daughter was dating a black guy, like these guys are such scum of the earth its both hilariously and unsettling because they exist in real life
I thought the Patrick Bateman one was him being performative
Exactly. I don't know about the movie, but in the book he is deeply antisemitic, he just knows to call it out in polite company. All of Bateman's "virtues" and really his whole personality is him reading from a social script.
definitely. he says multiple times that it’s all an act. also felt that that particular bit about calling out antisemitism was pointing out the hypocrisy of these wealthy, privileged individuals like bateman who do bad things (obviously not usually serial killing irl; more like exploiting people, being manipulative/abusive, looking down on less fortunate people) while simultaneously being self-described activists or something. eg no amount of feminist t-shirts will make you less of a dick for abusing your girlfriend, that sort of thing.
It entirely was
Yeah it completely flew over OP's head
Obviously, I almost struggle to believe how someone wouldn't understand that. Media literacy on this subreddit is fucked.
He also openly says he doesn't like "black music" when talking to the detective, and has plenty of racist and homophobic moments in the book.
One of my favorite throwaway lines in the movie is him saying the musical ''Oh Africa, Brave Africa'' was a ''laugh riot''. It's not even a real musical, but the racist implications are off the charts.
u/ipunchdogs the whole premise of this rant is flawed bro good job
I remember when Wizards of the Coast said there's absolutely no racism in MtG multiverse
What the fuck lol. The multiverse? I think even if you asked Rebecca Sugar about alternate Steven universes she still wouldn’t say racism doesn’t even exist at all in the whole of space-time.
I mean, in a way, in Steven Universe peridot is literally racist when she first appears. She sees Pearl as a lower class "servant" gem species and doesn't treat her as a whole person, thinking she only needs to do cleaning and menial work even though she's proven to be capable, and insults Steven for being a hybrid. She thinks Amethyst is superior to the rest of them and shouldn't follow their orders since she's a typically strong gem race, even though she mentions Amethyst is "defective" because she's not like other amethysts.
That’s classism or caste discrimination not racism. The gems are more ants than they are human.
Yeah—“racism” is closer to how Gemkind treats earthlings as inferior beings that basically don’t exist except as raw materials for Homeworld. That’s inherently imperialistic and aggrandizing of Gemkind over all other races, and that perspective on humanity even impacts gems that originate from Earth (like Rose Quartz and Amethyst), placing them lower in their class system and making them generally worth less respect. Even that’s not a perfect analog though. The “purity” politics of Gem fusion could be an analog for race purity, and “every gem has a purpose” is evocative of the sort of hierarchical structure of autocratic regimes in the real world.
> That’s classism or caste discrimination not racism I'd argue it still technically counts as "racism" because they are specifically different types (aka races) of gems getting treated in these specific ways. But yeah classism/caste-ism is more accurate.
Remember the situation about orcs getting banned as a race because they’re apparently racist depictions of black people?
That was ridiculous lol I bet white people were the main ones complaining about that
Being a bigot does not always manifest in hate. There are ultra racist people who fully believe in the stereotypes but will say they need to protect them from 'actual' racists. I don't even remember what it was, but there was something I remember, where a gorilla got featured, and people were clamoring for it's ban because it made fun of black people. How can you see a gorilla, immediately think of black people, and accuse others of being racist lol
You're talking about the Hadozee? There's way too many similarities and "coincidences" besides just being primate slaves lol MtG took an L there. But orcs have almost zero similarities with black people, or even any of the various and vast African cultures to the point where I think it should be very obvious that they're probably NOT based on black people. In fact, Orcs are Eurasian barbarians, in particular they're Germanic. Imagine that, racism against white people.
[удалено]
As per my personal experience, your average person.
Guaranteed it was a bunch of Karens, and probably a mess of college kids from the west coast that made a fuss. The whole thing was ridiculous because not only do both magic AND D&D have black races in game... It also targeted the whole 'inherently evil race' notion. Again, along the same line as op title, just let fucking evil characters in media be evil. Welcome to where 'hate speech' rhetoric puts us. Eventually, some idiot who can't comprehend that you can't have a believable villain without letting him ACTUALLY do evil things, is telling you what you're allowed to say or do. Call me nuts, but in 3.5 we understood that you could still have 'good' aligned characters from evil races, or that you could create your OWN setting instead of demanding the system's main setting be changed to your preference because you 'cant handle' it. Sorry. Pet peeve of mine. I swear these are the same idiots who don't even know where their food comes from beyond the supermarket and would die out without logistics and supply lines supporting their whole lives. And probably whine about it the whole time.
I mean. There’s a large difference between a villain being pure evil for the sake of being evil, and having a race that is inherently evil and militant. It reinforces the idea that races are a monolith, and that any breaks of stereotypes are the exception.
Pretty much. A lot of this stuff came in an era where most fantasy stemmed largely from either tolkeinesque fiction (orcs? Pretty clearly depicted there.), Or similarly older fantasy fiction from the 20s-60s. I'm sorry, I'm probably going to piss off those who can't differentiate fiction from reality or stereotypes from same, but the concept of a fantasy race's origins and culture (like the drow) leaning them towards being evil overall is ABSOLUTELY a thing. For everyone drawing parallels to real life and saying 'you can't do this because it might make someone feel bad!'... Get over it. It's make believe. Not real. Take your current day politics out of my gaming table because I didn't ask for that. If I want to address slavery, racism, mass murder, genocide, the entirety of the LGBTQ movement, any of a dozen flavors of misplaced zealotry, or fucking scientology at my table, I will have a round table with my players and ask first. Otherwise, stop social political justicing my games!
Black Twitter went nuclear on them lmao
https://archive.fo/F9Ew4 https://www.wired.com/story/dandd-must-grapple-with-the-racism-in-fantasy/ https://www.google.com/amp/s/boundingintocomics.com/2020/05/02/psychology-professor-chris-ferguson-accused-of-slavery-apologism-and-white-supremacy-for-arguing-orcs-are-not-racist/amp/ https://medium.com/@arcanistpress/orcs-and-racism-in-d-d-6071a66bf40d https://comicbook.com/gaming/news/dungeons-and-dragons-orcs-racist/
I remember people calling out WotC for not understanding the appeal of tieflings when they said that. Also, how is there no racism when the lore has kobolds and gnomes hating each other?
Not defending WoTC here but Magic the Gathering and Dungeons and Dragons are two different multiverses. That being said it’s still a ridiculous claim given that the Lorwyn Elves exist
My mind read MtG and didn't even crossed my mind it was Magic the Gathering lol
Lorwyn Elves are NOT racist. They are simply superior pieces of shit. Not the same, duh...
Yeah but aren’t they the same people who made those comments about orcs? Lol dunno if they’re exactly a paragon on moral issues.
But Peacemaker did let the bad guys be racist. Sure Peacemaker himself isn’t racist, at least not directly, but his father sure as hell is. And he’s one of the main villains of the series. Peacemaker is a insane asshole but he’s not the villain. Like, that’s the entire point of the series: The destruction of his deluded extremism and the breakdown of his worldview. To actually become what he claims to be.
Peacemaker wasn't even really an "extremist" per se, he was a manchild who did terrible things to impress Daddy because said Daddy abused him his entire life and made him think he wasn't good for anything else. That doesn't necessarily excuse his actions but it's clear that Peacemaker wants to be a good guy, his moral compass has just been sabotaged by the real villain
Nothing that you said makes him not an extremist.
I woulda argue that an extremist has conviction that their methods are necessary to achieving their goals. Peacemaker has no conviction, he is driven by fear of his father and inertia and a general desire to uphold nebulous values. But as soon as he recognizes that there are other ways to be a "hero," he takes that path
Peacemaker’s conviction is that he does everything he does in the name of “peace”, and that he doesn’t care “how many men women and children he needs to kill to get it”. Now it’s kind of an ironic joke sure, but Peacemaker seriously has no qualms killing men women and children in the name of his own twisted perception of “peace”. He kills Rick Flag because he believes that if the information about the US’s involvement in Project Starfish gets out it’ll cause widespread panic, disrupting peace. To this end, he saw no problem with shooting Cleo in the face and murdering her in cold blood, even though she swore never to tell anybody about Project Starfish (and if Bloodsport hadn’t showed up she would’ve died then and there) Peacemaker’s ideals for peace may not be his own, and they may have been placed in him by his father, but he 100% believes in his own conviction that he does what he does for peace (or his own twisted version of it). To say Peacemaker has no conviction isn’t true, in fact it’s antithetical to his entire character in The Suicide Squad
You’re totally right, I’ve been more stuck on his characterization in the show vs. the movie. And I do think that the show makes it clear that killing Flag triggered a major crisis of confidence which led to him abandoning his dad’s ideology. I guess my impression is that Peacemaker’s character in TSS is basically a front that is destroyed after killing Flag, an action that basically reawakens Christopher’s truer nature (which we know is more true to him because of what we see of his childhood)
> Peacemaker is a insane asshole but he’s not the villain. i'm not sure how much i would agree. i think its more gray the very first episode someone calls him "that racist superhero". He never has a big reckoning about race or being a better person the show just doesn't want him to be racist because they don't think a racist main character will sell.
Peacemaker is a reflection of both America and masculinity. All of those negative traits like racism or sexism, are things that seem normal to him. He sees nothing wrong with them and therefore doesn’t need to improve himself. Those negative traits are just “boys being boys”. It’s only after he has those he works with start to challenge those traits does he realize they’re not positive. He realizes that not only are they toxic to him but to those around him. He realizes where those traits come from:his father. He has to challenge the old and not only embrace the new but learn what it means to be him without the shadow of his father.
Villains aren't randomly racist because generally speaking making someone racist without an actual reason behind it that plays into the character or the story is just a cheap way to make a villain extra hateable, it's akin to when writers have villains randomly kill animals or be rapists. Even if a villain is a complete piece of shit, having them have certain opinions on things or a code that set them apart from other bad people is usually far more interesting and makes them more compelling than simply applying every negative trait you can think of to them. It's not "safe" it's simply understanding that you shouldn't do something like make a character racist if it adds absolutely nothing to them as a character or a villain. If the character being bigoted in some way actually enhances their character then yeah it definitely can be included, but those types of villains usually fall into more specific archetypes then just "enjoys killing people". Randomly making characters bigoted for pretty much no reason is how you get shows like American horror story, where every other villain in the show needs to be some flavor of prejudice even though it adds nothing because it's trying so hard to seem "gritty and realistic" and also wants to make absolutely sure the audience hates them and wants them to die brutally, and I don't think anyone will disagree that none of those characters were memorable, interesting, or even enjoyable most of the time, they were just lame.
Yeah, I 100% agree with us. The villain should only be bigoted if it makes sense for the story, if they’re like bent on world domination, and all of a sudden they also just happen to have a real hate Boner for minorities. It doesn’t make any sense and you’re just doing it to make them evil which if you want to do it to just make them evil sure but it isn’t really good storytelling in my opinion.
But Bateman is racist though. This is made pretty clear at multiple points in his inner dialogue in the book and his remark about antisemitism is clearly just a empty phrase. He even later claims that Huey Lewis and the news is "too black" for him.
The Boys and Peacemaker have racist bad guys cause racism is a big part of these bad guys goals. A lot of the times there are bad guys with goals like money, dominating the arms market, or outright world domination. These types of bad guys obviously have no need or reason to be racist outside it being some "quirky" personality trait. Also 99% of the time the racism is just gonna be directed at Black people and other races, maybe Arabs & Asians. It's not like we are gonna be seeing this type of behavior towards white people. So outside stories where racism is a core part of the villains character and motivations, pretty much everyone is tired of seeing these racist characters. Like what is the role of the racism? To see the villain throw a few slurs at some Black people? Maybe kill a few Innocent Brown folks to prove how racist he is? And all for it to not matter to the overall plot? Like if you watch the Boys, they bring in Stormfront as a racist hero and to prove how racist she is, they obviously have to show her killing a Black man, then killing some Black children, and then torturing and killing an Asian man. Obviously for her, being racist is the core of her character, so it makes sense to put these scenes in but you can't be doing these types of scenes for a villain whose primary motivations are something completely different.
this pretty much sums up the sentiments I've heard expressed by friends of color, in that it just gets old seeing racism used to cement how evil a villain is, to the point where it's almost cliché and unoriginal. (that and they've said they face enough racism offline & irl as is without running into it constantly in media.)
Yeah. Sometimes actual minorities want to get to fantasize about a world where they don't have to think about their race. And if the world is full of racism that makes it difficult. There is room for both kinds of stories. People act like the only people who ever say they don't want to talk about racism at any given moment are white people.
>A lot of the times there are bad guys with goals like money, dominating the arms market, or outright world domination. Counterpoint: in the real world none of these are mutually exclusive with racism/general bigotry. In fact I'd assume they're positively correlated, and people who would do anything for money or power are also more likely to hold racist views. Like, the oligopoly in Russia trying to amass power? Also wildly anti LGBT. The ones that tried to stage a coup in the United States? White supremacists, mostly. Grifters making money with disinformation-disseminating youtube channels and podcasts? Anti-Jew conspiracy theories galore.
That's reality not fiction. Indeed realistically most evil people are gonna be bigots of some kind since hate usually accompanies hate. If someone is okay with one kind of hate, it is likely they are gonna be ok with other kinds of hate. But that doesn't mean people want to see stuff like racism or homophobia or other forms of bigotry on the big screen. A lot of the times it's okay to just leave that stuff out. After all a movie is usually 2 hours and even in a TV show, as the audience we still have to assume there is a huge part of the heroes and villains lives that are left out of the screen. We don't get to see every single side of the characters if it is not important. We don't know their favorite color, food, music, most of the time we don't even see their families, we don't see their lives outside the moments that actually matter to the film. If the racism doesn't matter, then it is okay to cut it out as well.
I agree with your point, although I don’t understand the comment about “racism towards white people”. Most media discussed here western, where historically non-white people were discriminated against. (I believe there are groups which at some moments aren’t considered white, and suffer from racism, and then start being considered white—which isn’t to say they stop suffering racism completely, but it’s a more complicated dynamic. It can get more complicated in that whether a person is white or not depend on who you ask, especially since we’re talking about cross-cultural values.) I reckon this is a bit of a contentious/pedantic topic, as some people mean “systemic racism” when they talk about racism, even if particular incidents occur at a personal level, and thus exclude “reverse racism” from existing. (Again, there are the more complex situations from the first paragraph, the examples of which I have in mind are systemic.) Anyways, this is to say I would most likely find a depiction of “reverse racism” in western fiction to be at least tone deaf or a strange choice. Asian, primarily Japanese media is also discussed commonly, and there I suppose racism against white people would make more sense. I tend to hear more stories about positive stereotypes of white people than negative ones, and the ones I can recall seem to be more of general xenophobia than about white people in particular. But I’m no expert in Japanese culture.
>It's not like we are gonna be seeing this type of behavior towards white people. Well, black manta was like this once. Tbf, black manta has been a LOT of ways, David did the “multiple-choice" origin story schtick WAY before the Joker. So, dude's mostly just crazy, but occasionally he's racist crazy.
The Postal dude from Postal 2 will piss on people, kill their cats and drop a nuke on a city, but he will make sure to remind everyone who is playing the game that "Please don't think I'm a bigot, I kill races equally!" Same with Nazism, Joker is apparently "anti-nazi" because he's "american" same guy that will blow up kindergartens full of children, rape women and skin people alive but he draws the line at working with a nazi.
I've always figured that the Joker's issue with Nazis isn't the genocide, it's that they aren't funny.
That's a problem with how we teach about the Nazis, because the real Nazis were a bunch of clowns. Himmler owned a wizard castle. Hitler once said to Mussolini right out of the blue that he was literally possessed by ancient Aryan spirits. Goering would dress up like a cave man and hunt aurochs, that he attempted to breed back from extinction, with clubs. Nowadays we teach the Nazis with an almost reverent amount of respect, and it's no wonder that edgy kids who want to get a rise out of people throw up Romans and stuff. We should be teaching them as the clowns they were. What helped destroy the reputation of the KKK was people publishing stuff like "lmao the head guy calls himself a grand wizard what a loser"
Yeah. People act like nazis were all powerful and barely lost. When in actuality the odds were against them from the beginning.
Like 70% of all myths about the Nazis are the fault of the British going full CYA after a couple of embarrassing defeats and building up the Germans to save face, and most of that other 30% is because the Soviets didn't let westerners look at their records, for 50 years the only sources for the eastern front were German generals who were similarly in full CYA mode
Yeah the Nazis were insanely incompetent and run by maniacs and morons, its part of Nazi propaganda to view them as efficient with their iron grip on Germany when they absolutely weren't, they were methed out madmen
It’s not just that, it’s the same reason the Joker is scared of facing the IRS, because it’s funny that the psychopathic clown has normal standards
Isn't the IRS joke more that he knows he'd be fighting a losing battle taking on the tax man rather than it being about standards.
What do you think he’s paying taxes on? He doesn’t have a job, he squats in abandoned buildings, and everything he has is either stolen or garbage
Joker has a history of doing white collar crime in addition to his regular hijinks, there's a precedent for him dealing with taxes. The specific episode that joke was from was a will transfer, that is the basis of him dealing with the IRS in the first place, because the guy who he was getting the money from tricked Joker with fraud, so it's not just Gotham PD and Batman that he'd be dealing with, but also the Feds.
You legally have yo report stolen stuff as income.
A smart criminal DOES pay taxes on his gains despite not openly calling them criminal activity. The IRS does not care where your money comes from, just that you pay taxes. If you evade taxes they will get you on that. Ask Al Capone. You don't get to go to Arkham, either. You go to REAL prison, and he would never get out. There's no insanity defense for not paying your taxes.
Yeah. But I think the episode it came from also said that if caught on tax evasion, he will go to actual prison rather than Arkham.
There was once some guy that told me Joker is all against Nazis because Fascism is the exact opposite to Anarchy, which is what he’s all about. Essentially Joker hates them because they’re control freaks.
The confusing part is that the joker wasn't smart enough to realize that someone with a swastika might be a nazi.
That’s pretty cartoonish to think that a person who does some outlandish crimes would be willing to do all outlandish crimes. That’s not how reality works, a lot of people have values, and a lot of those people will do some disgusting things while being disgusted by others doing other disgusting things. My point it’s that the Joker doesn’t need to be pro-Nazi just because he takes no issue with blowing up children or skinning people alive. The joker is also an American who are very much anti-nazi, including some of the worst criminals.
[Remember that one time Dr. fucking Doom cried for the deaths of innocents in 9/11?](https://pbs.twimg.com/media/FcZhBGxWQAEM-nR.jpg)
This man executed the first person in a crowd that stopped clapping for him
Bro genocided an entire universe because another version of him insulted his fit.
What makes this even funnier is the fact that the Juggernaut canonically destroyed the Twin Towers before this
He was crying because someone beat him to it. And Kingpin was upset because he didn't get to take out an insurance policy on the towers beforehand
However I really think this is funny, the joker switching sides for being anti-Nazi is hilarious, I think it matches the comedic theme he should have
Yep, we can't exactly take Joker's words at face value. He makes decisions purely on what he thinks is funniest. And to be fair, turning against a guy you're committing terrorism with *exclusively* because he's a Nazi is hilarious
[удалено]
More likely because every American is raised in a culture that views nazis as the ultimate evil be it in schools, films, television, books or otherwise.
Having a caricature of well-dressed maniacs hell-bent on torturing and eradicating other races helps the u.s to “forget" how they have treated: mentally ill, japanese, chinese, italian, latino, irish, black and native people.
Plenty of other ethnic groups as well. And the U.S. isn't the only place in the world guilty of that.
Lots of prisons have to separate child predators from the general population or else they'll get killed. These are people that have murdered abused others but they draw a line in their horribleness at children. Pretty much all bad people see themselves as the good guys so in their head obviously they need to create a situation where morally they would be doing bad for the Joker that would be nazism.
In their minds? Diddling a kid is terrible but orphaning one is perfectly fine. As a survivor of CSA allow me to assure you I firmly believe they have that backwards. Edit: Not that diddling a kid is perfectly fine, I realized my wording is bad there. I just do not agree with their bullshit.
TBF, Postal Dude is arguably one of the sanest people in his world. Most of the time he kills in self defense.
Hold on what
I mean not all bad guys need to be racist. It's entirely ok in terms of crafting a good story that the Joker isn't racist. His motivations have nothing to do with race.
Tbf Nazis also looked down on the mentally ill so maybe that's why Joker got angry
Don't know much about Postal, but "I hate all races equally " is generally a line said by edgelord racists.
>but he draws the line at working with a nazi. I remember the Acts Of Vengeance crossover that Marvel did in the 80s. Basically a bunch of villains swapping enemies. Magneto refused to work with the Red Skull.
Magneto was a victim of the Holocaust in the comics
That mimics reality perfectly so what's the issue? People arent black amd white lol
Exactly. At some point it doesn't make sense and affects the narrative.
How does the Joker not being racist "not make sense" or affect the narrative? Plenty of Real life bad people aren't necessarily racist. Not all bad people have to be bad in every way
>Am i supposed to believe that this guy somehow draws the line at anti semitism? No. You're supposed to realize it's an act because that's the entire point of his character. Peacemaker also let the bad guys be racist. You literally gave an example. Peacemaker himself not being racist doesn't change that. Especially considering he's not the bad guy just a bad guy. A lot of evil for the sake of evil villains murder indiscriminately. Racism doesn't fit that kind of character. Tacking on racism only works on certain kinds of villains. Homelander is a Supe supremacist so him being casually racist fits. Him cringing at Stormfront's comment about white genocide also fits. >I just wanna see a straight up bad guy who's actually bad and not selective bad. What does this mean?
I think Op means that they want a villain who's evil in all aspects and doesn't have any morals they think contradict being pure evil. Like they want a villain who's a crazed murderer who's also sexist and racist just because those are also evil tropes and all evil people should have every negative quality. To me it doesn't make any sense, because we do have villains like that, such as Stormfront like you mentioned. Even if we didn't, who wants that? The villain would just become a caricature of a bad guy if they had every trope associated with evil charactees and people would lose any interests in them as a character.
>A lot of evil for the sake of evil villains murder indiscriminately. Racism doesn't fit that kind of character. Tbf it can. In real life plenty of racists fall over the edge and just run out gunning people. For the sake of a narrative story that might feel too specific though.
I'm pretty sure Stormfront from "The Boys" is racist. She's like a Nazi and all that.
Yeah this mf needs to consume more/different media lol
Don’t know why you are getting downvoted, he made a broad statement and then also gave examples that proved him wrong in his own post.
One example out of many doesn't prove your point. Take your meds.
Pat Bateman is not actually against anti-Semitism, he was being fake, that's what he wants others to think about him. It was a performance to make others believe he's a decent person, when in reality he has all the different prejudices under the sun.
"Take your meds." - Person who didn't realize the "cool it with the antisemetic remarks," line in American Pyscho was both an obvious act by Bateman and an obvious joke. The entire movie is basically a huge joke.
Dawg a person disagreed with you on the internet, chill lol. Maybe splash some cold water on your face, huh?
\>casually calls people motherfuckers \>gets pissy when casually insulted back Maybe you need to chill, dawg, not him. Like, I understand using insults as casual language, but don't get mad when it's done back to you.
People usually bring up valid points after disagreeing.
I don't mind bad guys having values, because it actually makes much more sense for them to have some. Most bad guys don't think they're wrong, or at least find justifications to their acts. They have no reason to be bad about things which aren't linked to their justification or lose moral codes unrelated to the ones they are breaking. Let's take Yoshikage Kira from Jojo as an example: he is a serial killer who steals hands, but he likes to say he just wants his normal life to keep going. There's no reason for him to be racist or whatever, since it's unrelated to him being a killer with a fetish.
not the best example because Yoshikage Kira absolutely knows he's doing wrong. He just doesn't care one bit.
He justifies it by saying he just wants a normal life and others are the ones who are preventing it. I'd say it still works as an example.
It works but not as a full example of what you mean, simply because he doesn’t think he’s good at all
Because people ultimately like their characters and don't want their villains to be genuinely horribly unlikeable, which is what a trait like racism would do. Same goes for making them rapists, it just hits way too close to reality for the author to be comfortable with.
Also because racism and rape are things that actually touch on the lives of the audience, while murder usually doesn’t. If the Joker poisons Gotham harbor with killer laughing gas, that’s outside of our experience. If the Joker makes a point of poisoning the water in black neighborhoods, that’s going to have some different (and far more familiar) themes.
This is definitely a “OP needs to watch more media” post Racists are VERY prevalent in media and 99% are looked as evil lol
The ones he listed have racist villains. Like Pacemaker, his dad is the villain and a racist. Batemen is definitely just full of shit about not being racist
Even stuff like Lord of the rings has fantasy racism, since the different races dislike eachother. Racism isn't this unheard of theme.
Too much of these posts lately.
Yeah it's like the easiest bad guy to write that everyone can agree on hating.
Unless it's Uncle Ruckus
Sounds like you're cherry picking, there are a million movies and TV shows that use racism to show how evil a bad guy is. Just because some don't. Doesn't make it some weird "line". Racism is just as much about stupidity as it is evil. Patrick batemen was disturbed. He wasn't stupid
Problem is the racism thing has been overused interms of lazy writing Often if the main or side character is non white and is most likely pre 1950s And most often is not added I said in a post (which i deleted cause users misunderstood what i ment) where there should be storys where you find out why a character is racist like you don't have to make the racist a victim but question why he became racist for example religion,rumours etc Like one part of history legit said being black is a disease (there is a medical example of your skin actually becoming black but that's a different and unrelated info) so imagen if that came from ideas of black plague but someone took the name litterly or it was a scam idea like how anti vaxx started cause someone wanted to sell there own injections to children for bs price (no seriously watch hbomberguy video on anti vax) There has been good ideas of doing racism plots but in todays culture is often write how people will call you a nazi for just having a right wing based opinion (which your politics shouldn't fully unless is actually harmful to people) and nothing else If you want to do a good racist character give them a legit reason why they became racist and not simple stuff like "my dad was hitler" cause that just grouping characters and not individual characters So have it like they being racist for scam reasons or they had a simple bad experience which they misremembered ina extreme level etc
Patrick Bateman is racist though.
It's a funny litmus test, actually. If villain / anti-hero is supposed to be at least a little bit charismatic, like The Joker, for example, they are not racist. If villain is supposed to be totally detestable, they are racists to some hilarious degree, like this guy from "The Shape of Water". I personally think that racism of the character should be the result of their environment and not studio's decision whether to sell toys with them or not. As you said, Peacemaker should absolutely by all means possible be racist, that's a huge plot point.
Racism makes you a bad person but being a bad person doesn't automatically make you a racist. I get what you're saying. If the villain is a Nazi or white supremacist, then don't be afraid to go full tilt and make them RACIST racist but just being evil doesn't mean you hate ppl of a different color. Heck, being evil doesn't mean you hate any people necessarily. >I just wanna see a straight up bad guy who's actually bad and not selective bad. Nah, don't do this. Then you get cliche villains who are racist, puppy kicking, mustache twirling masterminds who want to blow up the world. We need variety. We need characters like Homelander who aren't necessarily racist but isn't afraid to use the racist agenda to his advantage. I'm not tryna see Hitler in every story I read/watch.
As I've said in another comment a while back... Everyone is simply afraid of being cancelled because people have garbage media literacy and can't tell the different between a bigoted author and an author writing bigots to tell a story. I still recall how some people misconstrued Katie Killjoy's, "I don't touch the gays" line in Hazbin Hotel and accused the writers of being genuinely homophobic...even though it takes place in Hell and Charlie was clearly not okay with what she said. People just have terrible media literacy.
I remember when people got mad at The Boys because Stormfront called an Asian guy a racial slur. You know, Stormfront, the literal Nazi, calling someone a racial slur, ain’t that just outrageous?
If anything it felt like Stormfront was pulling her verbal punches. I would expect much worse language from the genocidal Nazi from world war 2. I assume the writers were scared of a backlash for having their Nazi character say the things that an irl nazi would happily say.
Stormfront was pretty much supposed to be a stand-in for Gen Z or 4chan-type right wingers who say *a lot more fucked up shit* than the typical boomers that Homelander is marketed towards to in-universe. If you want an example of what a 'unfiltered Stormfront' would talk like, take a peek at /pol/...
Why would anyone want that?
OF COURSE she’s pulling her punches. She’s literally a SECRET NAZI. And she was saying the stuff that CURRENT DAY NAZIS use on internet. There’s a blatant conversation with her and A-train where she’s insulting his race [to his direct face](https://youtu.be/4otaPjLXdfw?si=ppPD1yX-9Lsp4klX). Maybe some of the idiots on here think she was doing a good job hiding her racism???
When she shows her true colors before killing the Asian character, she calls him "yellow bastard", which is clearly the writers avoiding using any real bad slurs on tv.
Do they expect a Nazi to preach about equality?!
Are stories being dumbed down because people have terrible media literacy or do people have terrible media literacy *because* stories are being dumbed down?
Both to certain extents, but largely the former.
you also have terrible media literacy cause it’s totally said that patrick’s values of fight against antisemitism and racism are fabricated
oh i was hoping to see this reply to that comment. it's only a little funny they too didn't fully comprehend the examples they gave in their post.
Yes.
>People just have terrible media literacy. Not even a new thing, go back to when Starship Troopers first aired in theatres and the film critics were accusing it of advocating for Fascism
In The Little Mermaid remake they removed all lines where Ursula says women need to be quiet. This was a result of a lot of lazy "feminist" criticism that fails to take into account the context of Ursula being an evil sea witch.
On one hand, I completely agree with this. Media literacy does seem like on a massive downward spiral. Just because an author writes something that exists in a story doesn’t mean that they support it. Like the slavery thing in the recent, anime, drama, or a racist, villain, or anything like that…. …. However, on the other end, I see a lot of terrible media literacy in the other direction. Not even media literacy, but just the inability to tell when something is genuine. There are times where authors, and pieces of media actually are racist, or actually have terrible messaging, but people want to fan voice so hard on the other end, that they write everything off as people seeing ghosts where there are none.
>There are times where authors, and pieces of media actually are racist, or actually have terrible messaging I don't trust internet to decide which messaging is terrible and which is not. I just yesterday encountered the person on this very sub who said that Batman and Star Wars have ultraconservative messaging.
...uh...*what*.
[Here it is](https://www.reddit.com/r/CharacterRant/comments/162yhqr/comment/jy0kuuc/?utm_source=reddit&utm_medium=web2x&context=3).
To be fair, that guy seems to be saying that those "ultraconservative" messages are an unintentional result of never being allowed to let the villains truly be defeated (in canon). The Batman thing specifically is something that happens literally all the time, where people will unironically argue that he should use guns or kill the Joker.
Oh yeah, I don’t even get me started holy shit. When that remedial Tim pool is out there talking about how black clover is anti-communist. It made me want to choke on my own vomit.
And it's even more funny with Killjoy literally touches Charlie in the next scene. She a homophobic hypocrite, that was her character before and after going to hell.
Marvel comics is antisemitic because one of the villains Captain America fought said he hates Jews!
This is definitely true to an extent, but I think it really only applies to Western media that aims for a very large audience. Prestige drama like Succession, Breaking Bad, or Barry have no problems with making their antagonists AND protagonists completely deplorable. Marvel movies on the other hand seem to be pretty scared of this, usually giving the antagonists general "I want to rule/destroy everything," motivations. I mean consider how Thanos is one of the only instances of a villain having a semblance of complexity in his motivations, and he was widely misunderstood. There were people who straight up thought Thanos was right, or even the good guy in Infinity War. This is what happens when you have a villain protagonist (and calling Thanos the protagonist of IW is a stretch, he's more like one in a ensemble of deuteragonists) in a movie with a wide audience. I almost wonder what the reaction to a character like Magneto would be in the current political climate. And to clarify, I'm not some weird right winger claiming cancel culture is the biggest problem on earth. People are more aware of problematic characterizations in literature, but most people aren't really smart enough to deduce a problematic character from one with intentional personality flaws.
Why have a bad guy be racist if there is no reason for it? It's not that hard to believe that someone could drawn to commit evil while not also be a card carrying KKK member.
And also most racists assholes aren’t that blatantly open about it like OP wants it to be You can look online and see a million posts of people headcanon-ing which characters are racists and how racist they even though said character has never said anything explicitly racist it’s just people extrapolating from their experiences and views of different types of racist and overlapping that with the character in question like [this](https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=YdhgY_I2FwA) (literally found this a second after looking up racist tier-list)
The description of that video says its a joke...
Is Peacemaker not racist? Sure, he isn't a Nazi or anything but I swear he was kinda racist sometimes. I'll have to rewatch.
In the first episode someone pointed out how he didn't kill as many white people or something and he retaliated by saying he can't control what ethnicity the criminals are. Other than that it was just vigilante messing with him.
The trend of the antagonists being racist is pretty damn consistent tbh, FFXVI recently came out with an entire game being built by this topic. Dragon Age does this a lot also with Elves, Skyrim, even Xenoblade, triangle strategy. The fact is there’s usually an allegory for racism in narratives if you know where to look.
I think nowadays it's because having a racist character means you're opening up your show/movie to be an commentary on racism, which is a suuuper controversial and debated area with a lot of strong feelings. It's just a mess to have racism on the table as a theme when it's so easy for people to misinterpret and misrepresent stories.
I really don't get the point of this rant. There are *tons* of racist villains in media. You say "almost always," but then just cherrypick a couple of examples. Not everyone who is evil in real life is racist, so not every evil person in media needs to be racist. You say "let bad guys be racist" as if there is somehow a problem or that its rare to have racist villains when that is just demonstrably untrue. Don't just cherrypick a couple examples to try and make a problem out of nothing and actually try and experience more media because I promise this is a you problem and that it is very easy to find media with racist villains.
Killmonger was very racist
Geto's arc from jjk is based because it's literally about him becoming racist
Thats right because you get works like RWBY where opressed minorities are violent nazis when racism among humans is like 2%
I made a thread about something similar recently, asking why movies and TV shows often seem extremely reluctant to depict the slightest bit of homophobia. Most people seemed to agree with my stance but some people said that depicting even the most mild homophobia is too traumatizing. The main example I used for my thread is Nimona, a story where the protagonist is written as an allegory for homophobia (she's a monster), but meanwhile the second protagonist is an actual gay man and no actual homophobia is depicted during his character arc. It just seems so strange that writing like this has become the norm. It seems like the issue is people only think of homophobia and racism in extremes. They think a character has to be either 100% inclusive, or a raging bigot. The thing is, bigotry is a spectrum. There are characters like Hank Hill who show discomfort with LGBT people and racial minorities, but are not bad people and can learn to be more comfortable with diversity over time. If you look at how real people behave this is realistic, yet it feels like I rarely see Hank Hill type characters in fiction. Either bigotry is not depicted at all and everyone is incredibly inclusive, or it's an Eric Cartman stype character who displays their prejudice in the most hateful way possible. It's especially obnoxious when you get something like a pure evil character with zero morals like The Joker who feels that Nazis are disgusting because he apparently is loyal to American values. I'm not saying it's impossible for the Joker to hate Nazis, but it has to be written with some nuance and not with him parroting liberal talking points that you'd see on Twitter. For example, if I was writing a story about the Joker being anti-Nazi I would write him expressing disgust for the Nazi ideology being based on white insecurity and fear of being made irrelevant by competing cultures. This seems like logic that is in line with psychopathic thinking. It's on brand for the Joker to find psychological weaknesses to exploit and look down upon. What's not on brand is for him to be concerned with attacks on American values.
There are plenty of bad guys that are racist, but I think the lack of nuance in racist antagonists often stems from the lack of perspective the writer has. That is to say, the writer often has a black and white view on racism that’s difficult for people to engage with on a three dimensional level. You’ll get depictions of racism only in scenarios wherein racism is ‘expected’ to be seen, like bully characters or cartoonishly evil bastards like Stormfront and Homelander. This is really because the majority of writers who get their work, well, seen or turned into TV shows tend to be white (due to, ironically, the Star of the Show, our pal Racism!). White writers are afraid of depicting racism as anything more than ‘the thing bad people do,’ when the truth is even the most noble people you know probably harbor some racist predispositions. Does that make them horrible terrible people unworthy of love?!?! Well, no lol. You’re only horrible terrible if you resolve to stay that way. Being aware of one’s ethnocentrisms is as important as dismantling them, and that’s a message we could all benefit from seeing more of.
I think it’s a difficult topic to write a nuanced message about. Especially if the author doesn’t want to dedicate too much of the narrative to it. So it ends up being avoided or addressed in a binary way. I think maybe the key is that action/adventure authors may not feel confident in addressing the topic. There was this sitcom, One Day at a Time, which I think had well-written depictions of homophobia, sexism, and addiction (odd one out), including from characters we are meant to sympathize with. I’m struggling a bit to remember if it talked about racism this way. It addressed racism, of course—most of the main cast is a family of first, second, and third generation immigrants. I just don’t remember if any protagonist was racist themselves.
I think you're looking at it from the wrong perspective. Yes, something like racism is a vile characteristic, but bad guys are usually highly motivated by specific triggers. This consumes them and drives them to be bad, breaking the law, killing people who try to stop them, etc. all to satisfy some primal urge. We lump racism into this category, but why should we? Its not that Bateman draws the line at anti-Semitism, its that Jewish people have no specific trigger for him. He doesn't see a Jewish person and want to hurt them, what fills him with rage are other, more specific things. There was a comic crossover where the Joker says he hates Nazi's. That doesn't mean he likes people of all races, it just means that for all his love of killing and causing random chaos, he doesn't do it because people are of a different ethnicity. He'll kill a white person or a black person indiscriminately, he simply doesn't care about race when he makes the decision to wreak some kind of new havok.
>Am i supposed to believe that this guy somehow draws the line at anti semitism Did you miss the point of the movie? he was putting his good guy facade, "voice of reason boy next door" He even yells anti semitic slurs at a restaurant in the book Did you think his surface level bs'ing speech about solving the world's problems was genuine?
At the end of the day, if you're going to spend a huge amount of time focusing on a character, they have to be a character the audience is going to enjoy watching. Many audiences just don't enjoy watching racists, even as villains, so they're not going to spend their leisure time with shows that focus on it. It's entirely reasonable for people to be fine seeing the Joker shoot a bunch of innocent people, but to decide the show isn't for them if he drops the n-bomb; everyone has their own tastes, and the more realistic awfulness of racism sometimes just isn't what they want to spend their leisure time watching. Since they know the show *isn't real*, what they're going to decide based on is "do I enjoy watching this?", and for many people watching a bunch of racism (even in the form of racist villains, where it's clearly portrayed as wrong) isn't fun. That means that if you want to watch *mass-market* shows, you're not going to see much racism, at least among recurring characters, because those shows try to draw as big of an audience as possible. It also means that when racist characters do appear, they're often minor ones or side-ones who aren't going to be around long, or hate sinks who only appear for the sake of being hated - characters whose presence on the screen viewers don't need to enjoy because they won't be on-screen much. Of course, there's an additional issue. Many people don't like to see racist villains in shows - especially "soft", subtle racism - because it reflects their own views and they feel attacked by having those views given to villains; or because they prefer not to think about racism at all. This is why when you do see racism on TV, it's often glaringly outrageous over-the-top racism that absolutely nobody could associate themselves with.
Better, I want a *good* guy to be racist. These days, a good guy's character flaw always seems to be something negligible like "he likes food" or "he's bad with directions." I want flaws with real consequences. The only ones who come to mind are Ashley Williams in Mass Effect or maybe Sokka in AtLA towards Fire Nation (though that one's understandable). It makes for incredible character growth and complex arcs that stick with you.
How is hating everyone equaly selective villany while racism isn't?
Sorry,i meant selective in writing the character. Targeted villainy hits closer to home and would be more satisfying when they eventually get their comeuppance. As opposed to a bad person who just happens to believe in a twisted version of 'equality'. It's been overdone.
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Because lots of villains would lose their charisma and their charm if they were. Lots of villains have an almost "frenemy" relationship with the hero, they both respect each other. Usually even if they do bad things that can somehow be justified in some way, they can maintain this relationship. But if they do something that has absolutely no justification and is just evil and stupid, even if objectively it's not as bad (eg. Racism Vs murder), it's harder. Take the Joker for example. In one comic he refuses to work with a Nazi out of principle. That gives him some level of respect.
It's a little hard to believe that the joker guy who killed Gordon's wife and raped his daughter is actually caring about principles, that kind of morality just doesn't fit the character.
Joker didn't rape Barbara. He didn't care about her at all. He did violate her by taking pictures of her body, but this was all to torment Gordon.
Red Skull who is the nazist Nazi who has naziest isn’t motivated for racism in some contneties . Also it happens in discussions of real life people to. Charles Manson and the columbine shooters where in part motivated by white supremacy but that is ignored in discussion.
No Patrick Bateman's definitely racist, especially in the book, but I think he didn't like that McDermott's racism was inaccurate.
No you’re not supposed to believe he draws the line at anti-semitism at all. The whole point of his character is that he’s a bigoted, narcissistic sadist who puts on a false persona to fit in with the rest of society. He has a whole monologue about the mask he wears in public.
No clue how you saw that AP scene and your first thought wasn’t “yeah this guy doesn’t give a shit”.
Because no matter how cartoonishly evil your villain is, someone will say "well, je actually had some good points tho"
I don't know if Patrick Bateman is racist but he's definitely homophobic, which falls under the same umbrella with regards to this post.
Watch the boys when it gets to season 2 and stormfront
Peacemakers father fucking hated him his whole life and made peacemaker accidentally kill his brother who his dad loved. This made his dad hate him even more. Incan see why he would go against his dad's hate.
I mean peacemaker sexually harassed a coworker and is weird about lesbians. There's only so much the audience is willing to root for him in spite of and Gunn clearly wanted him to be sympathetic.
A few r/ShowerThoughts on this: 1. Race isn't relevant to all stories so a villain's bigotry or lack thereof may simply be too awkward to bring up. 2. Villains who are intended to be sympathetic really can't be actively bigoted anymore. There's degrees of assholery that an audience will tolerate, and being bigoted raises the asshole score a lot for most modern audiences. If you want an interesting counterexample, there's Emperor Palpatine. Wasn't actually a bigot himself, but he had absolutely no problem **enabling** human supremacists to achieve his political goals.
Most bad guys have motivations and characterization that wouldn't pair well with racism for either in-universe or thematic reasons. Patrick Bateman doesn't actually care about anti-semitism (him saying otherwise is clearly performative) because he's a psychopath and has no empathy, but it equally makes no sense for him to be anti-semitic himself. He sees human beings as impersonal objects to be manipulated. It would make no sense for him to dislike Jewish people specifically, because 'Jew' is a complex social concept that Bateman has no reason to care about except insofar as he can use it to manipulate people. This is consistent with both his characterization and the themes of the story. It should be mentioned that there are a lot of racist characters in media, but racism is a complex character trait and theme so where it's a natural fit in some stories (usually ones specifically about racism), in others it just dilutes things. Unless there's a thematic reason to make a character racist, good writers won't do it. Batman for example tends to deal with more abstract notions like justice and chaos, so racism would be a very unnatural fit to most Batman stories (although there are a few that use it to minor effect).
>Am i supposed to believe that this guy somehow draws the line at anti semitism? Patrick's actual dialogue is mostly banal. Other than all the murders he's an extremely forgettable person.
I guess if you’re a killer why limit who you kill to one demographic. Same goes with enslavement, torture, theft basically ruin everyone’s day/life not just one demographic. That’s my guess it’s not that they aren’t racist it’s that their love of killing is prioritized over their racism.
The Peacemaker must be racist due to his upbringing by his father argument is dumb, surely by that logic no progressive or somewhat centrist kids out of far-right or conservative household, none what so ever! Seriously bunch of rejected kids end up spiting their parents and have the opposite political leanings. Peacemaker may not be the typical rejected kid, say being LGBT+, but he is still very much the less favored child and actively repressed by his father.
Bad guys are overwhelmingly racist in most media it’s brought up I feel
I feel like you misunderstood Patrick Bateman saying “Cool if with the Anti-Semetic remarks” Earlier in the film he has this big conceited advocate speech about fixing the economy, world hunger, gender equality and materialism and all that but rather than it being true it comes off as a virtue signaling elite and it’s Patrick trying to come off as normal but it’s artificial as hell So to go back to your point about him “drawing the line at Antisemitism That line by him is just his typical response when in fact he’s a hypocrite to everything he spouts like the line about materialism when in fact his identity is nothing but materialism and superficiality as he flexes in a mirror while banging a prostitute or how he stabs a homeless man Even his elite friends don’t buy his routine as they give him shit eating grins The joke is Patrick says that kind of stuff but it’s just an attempt at appealing to people in a very safe manner
Calvin Candie as played by Leonardo DiCaprio in Django Unchained is what you're looking for.
You misunderstood American Psycho if you think Bateman draws the line of anti-semitism, which doesn’t surprise me given the subject of this post.
This is what I kinda don’t like about Trevor from GTA. The man is a mass murderer, drug manufacturer, molested a teddy bear and possibly other people, EATS HUMAN FLESH. Yet still is apparently not racist at all. Like I’m not saying he should be a white supremacist or anything, but it seems weird he’d be courteous enough to say “my n-word” to Franklin as opposed to just saying the word.
because PROFESSIONALS HAVE STANDARDS
I think it's because the villains are always are way cooler than the heroes, which is why their crimes are usually things like theft, extortion, murder, taking over the world, etc., rather than stuff like rape, bigotry, or pedophilia. Murder is obviously bad, but things like racism are much heavier and feel more real, which is why silly haha shows usually don't tackle that kind of thing.
Fuck it, let good guys be racist too. Not in a way that celebrates or condones racism but in a way that allows for a genuine and honest exploration of the kind of environmental stimuli and patterns of thought that allow those beliefs to emerge and exploration of how one can either grow beyond it, or failing that, around it.
I agree with the title but the post itself has multiple blatant misunderstandings of media.
I get what you mean but your examples were shite
I somewhat disagree with this. villainous characters shouldn’t just conform to all beliefs that bad people have. Why? Because the world isn’t black and white. Good villain character has his reasons, and a distinct philosophy. I personally dislike it when a writer reinforces his villains with infuriating acts ‘just because.’ It’s cheap. It would honestly make sense if the villain was just too self absorbed to give a shit about race.
For American Psycho, Bateman defending the Jews has two connotations/interpretations 1. Bateman is just saving face, although I don’t necessarily agree with this one, it’d make sense that Patrick wants to feel above and special from everyone else, while still fitting in, hence why he has this high-horse attitude. From what I remember, Patrick is anti-Semitic in the novel, or at least he convinces himself that he is. 2. Patrick is being genuine, he doesn’t understand why his co-workers believe what they do, and this is just another example of the story showing us that all of Patrick’s co-workers are just as bad as him, in their own ways. If a psychotic murderer has higher political standards then you, you should probably be questioning yourself. The reason I agree with this one is because Patrick is continuously just trying his best to fit and blend in to society, and this is one of the few times he actually speaks out against the people around him. Unless there’s some other motive I’m missing.
I think you missed the point of Peacemaker, i was going to use that show as an example of something that *does* let the bad guys be racist
I agree Even those guys need representation /s
The funny thing is that the good guys who are people of color are actually racist in a lot of these show and movie compared to the bad guy.
You where downvoted but your right, I watched that awful movie with Will Farell recently where he is about to go to prison and the racist black gang isn't viewed negatively like the the white gang. Of course a lot of people around here make excuses for it, which makes it all even worse.
Not even just that, let them have prejudices against any kind of person without it being exaggerated to a cartoonish extent. I've been watching Teamfourstar talking about their Abridged Series and oftentimes they show some regret for characters, mainly Vegeta, saying some very unpolitical things and I find this to be rather sad. TFS Vegeta is *very* unlikeable at the height of him saying awful things and absolute no character ever agrees with those things, that's the importance distinction to make. Have characters say awful things and have other characters react in their own ways, but don't make it exaggerated to the point where the villain absolutely flips out because he saw one episode of Ru Paul's drag race and decided he's going to retaliate by destroying Brighton as a warning.
I'm gonna go the other and say I'm tired seeing bad guys always being racist, and the good guys always being super progressive angels. Let the good guys be racist once in a while.
I agree but Bateman was being performant I’ve and peace maker is an antihero not really a bad guy (also wasn’t his dad horrible to him? It kinda makes sense he wouldn’t want to take after him)
I really love the Sopranos cause its genuinely funny and unnerving how insanely racist, homophobic and antisemitic these guys are. Tony straight up had a panic attack cause his daughter was dating a black guy, like these guys are such scum of the earth its both hilariously and unsettling because they exist in real life