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A collection of some classic Lemmy memes for your enjoyment
This is something I loved about Hitman. Theres a bit of set dressing appeal around violent infiltration, but by and large, 47 uses social manipulation, knocks out only a few people, and only kills his targets, who are terrible people that make the world worse.
It also has a nice quote in a cutscene. (Paraphrased)
“We don’t take sides. ICA always remains neutral.”
“I hate to break it to you, but neutrality is a side. It’s the side of the status quo.”
Kinda like how we get people like trump for president, or any wealthy powerful person for that matter. Like the serialized fictional bad guy, they get away with it and keep getting to do shitty things because the hero can never just end the antagonist. All this fighting and legal consequences for the rabble, but when comes to actually punishing the rich or powerful person? Nah…they’re (job creators, too big to fail, might hurt their future, etc.) They go low, we go high…and do nothing.
To be fair, if my kill count was at 69420, I'd need a REALLY good reason to kill one more
If I were at 69419, he'd be dead without a second thought
If you missed 69420, don't worry about it, because 69422 is 69420, too.
See, this is why I regret dropping out of high school.
DUDE!
SWEET!
Batman is super full of shit in this department
Bateman, on the other hand...
Batman allow innocent to be harmed just so he can uphold his moral high ground.
That's the problem with contrived writing to keep escalating stakes. And the necessity of not killing off a character to keep using them.
I advocate for a return to Golden/Silver Age shenanigans for this reason. Make the Joker a prankster again, not a mass murderer in funny make-up.
Im feeling this way while playing AC Shadows. I just killed two dozen guys to get to a dude I decided to spare
For me, the best version of this is Avatar: The Last Airbender. Aang spends an entire arc lamenting how he may need to spill blood and kill the Fire Lord. Meanwhile the very same Aang had previously sunk an entire naval fleet single-handedly.
How many thousands of sailors, most of them probably people drafted against their will, did you kill that day Aang? Remember when you literally sliced entire ships in half? Your hands cut through steel, would you have even felt the flesh you were cutting through? Or how about all those ships you sank? A fair number sank instantly. You think everybody got out safely from those ships? Or how about that time you destroyed that giant drill machine, the one manned by thousands of soldiers, outside the walls of Ba Sing Se? You think everyone managed to miraculously escape that fireball? And those are just the major battles. How about the hundreds, perhaps thousands, of fire nation soldiers you casually tossed around like rag dolls with your powers of air, water, and earth during dozens of minor skirmishes? What are the odds you managed to toss all these men around like playthings and NOT have a few of them have their skulls bashed open on rocks when they hit the ground wrong?
The point of this is not to condemn Aang's actions through the series. His actions were fully justified, as he was fighting a war against an expansionist colonial military power. What he did was an objective good. But by the time he's hand wringing about having to kill Fire Lord Ozai, Aang had almost certainly already taken hundreds of lives. Hell, he probably killed hundreds just in that final climactic battle against the airship armada. The Hindenburg disaster saw 1/3 of the passenger and crew parish. And that was from an airship that crashed when it was already landing and close to the ground. Aang was dropping ships from miles in the sky. Maybe some soldiers with fire bending powers could somehow slow their own descent enough to survive, maybe they had some parachutes. But there's zero chance that Armada didn't have a fatality rate at least comparable to the Hindenburg disaster.
So Aang blithely kills hundreds of conscripts without a second thought. But then he has a crisis of conscience that takes multiple episodes to resolve, and that crisis of conscience is all about...Fire Lord Ozai? This is like if someone nonchalantly participated in the Firebombing of Dresden and then suddenly developed complex moral doubts about putting a bullet in Hitler's head. Aang had already killed hundreds of people that Ozai had sent to their deaths. No one was forcing Ozai. He wasn't a conscript. He had full autonomy; he's the absolute ruler of the Fire Nation. He doesn't even have a Congress or Parliament to answer to. He has absolute total moral responsibility for every evil thing the Fire Nation has done. Yet, when it comes to actually holding the powerful accountable, suddenly Aang wants to talk about the morality of killing.
I like the way that Aang took Ozai's bending powers.
There are at least two good aspects about it:
Aang teaches the viewers that there are sometimes non-violent solutions to hard problems that appear at first glance as if violence was the only solution. And i think it's worth it trying to find these non-violent solutions. Aang was telling himself that he needed to kill Ozai after he spoke to the previous avatars on the Lion Turtle's back; he then just luckily encountered the Lion Turtle and found another way.
The other interesting aspect that i find about the Lion Turtle is that it teaches us that besides the bending of the four elements, Lion Turtles bent the energy inside humans, which i understand in the way that Lion Turtles drove human development forward through some process maybe similar to evolution(?), and that just opens up a very interesting potential for side-stories. What else did the Lion Turtles bend? What other tricks do they have?
There's more things that i like about the Lion Turtle. For example, it says to Aang:
"Since beginningless time, darkness thrives in the void, but always yields to purifying light."
What does that mean? What is the purifying light that the Lion Turtle talks about? Is there, maybe, a psychological state which conquers the harmful behavior without exercising violence?
Maybe that message only makes sense to Aang, because he's an air nomad and believes in these ways. Maybe the Lion Turtle would have said something different to a water bender, or to another person in general.
What would the Lion Turtle have said in that case?
Aang was very explicitly not in control of himself during the invasion of the north, and he became scared of his power due to his experiences with the avatar state.
The whole moral conundrum is about him consciously choosing to kill the Fire Lord. Yes, he most likely caused deaths before, but not consciously & deliberately.
I dunno, I think that take lacks a bit of object permanence. Just because you don't have to see the killing directly, doesn't mean you're any less morally responsible. Shielding soldiers from the direct outcomes of the violence they cause is like the defualt way of programming them and getting them to continue. A big reason why the US uses drones so much because its easier to get someone to press a button behind a screen than shoot someone in front of them.
Causing many many deaths not consciously or deliberatley is worse IMO if you wanna judge the two against each other, it shows a flippance with lives and a lack of consideration of consequences of ones' own actions. Killing Ozai woulf have been pointed and deserved, one death with a direct positive effect, which in my eyes is much more valid and less morally questionable than hundreds of offscreen deaths.
My argument isn't that Aang didn't see the killing directly, it's that he was possessed by a very powerful and angry spirit, so he didn't have control over his actions.
Also, Aang managed to achieve the same effect - arguably an even more positive one - by not killing Ozai. Sure, killing him would have been simpler, but the show directly shows us that it would not have been better.
Sure, there is that difference. But the series doesn't even address the fact that he's already killed hundreds of people. Intentionally or not, it's still absurd to hand wring about killing when you've already killed hundreds of people, accidentally or not, and the one person you're worrying about taking down is literal genocidal maniac. To me that just sounds like not being willing to take responsibility for your own actions. Intentionally or not, Aang killed hundreds of people. And it's not like he never went into the Avatar state again after taking out the Northern fleet. Hell, he fought Ozai while in the Avatar state. Maybe he should have just "accidentally" killed Ozai while in the Avatar state and just washed his hands of moral culpability, just like he did all the other people he killed before then.
Regardless, Aang found a way to make peace with the fact that he had taken hundreds of lives. But when the person in question is someone of power and renown? Then it becomes something to fret over.
Hell, he fought Ozai while in the Avatar state. Maybe he should have just “accidentally” killed Ozai while in the Avatar state
Remember that he didn't just enter the avatar state during the northern water tribe attack, he spiritually fused with the raging ocean spirit. I feel like that gives him a bit more moral innocence than just straight up killing people on his own. It's also worth noting he almost did exactly this. After smacking his back on the rock and reawakening his avatar state, he barely regained control before straight up killing Ozai.
That said... I actually hate the way he solved his unwillingness to kill the fire lord. An entire season of struggling over it and then suddenly some deus ex machina lion turtle pops up out of nowhere with no foreshadowing and just gives him the answer right before the final fight. Super lame and unearned ending to his moral struggle imo.
Plus I thought Avatar Yang Chen's argument was amazing. She told Aang that his duties to protect people as the Avatar outweighed his spiritual need to be a pacifist.
Yeah, but she's forgetting about Aang's cultural duty to his people. He's the last Air Nomad. If Aang intentionally takes a life, then that cultural aspect of the Air Nomads is dead forever in his eyes.
She also didn't know he'd magically find a magical being that would give him to power to permanently strip Ozai of his powers.
Though, to be fair, he only found that magical being because he kept searching for a different solution. Had he given up and listened to everyone, he wouldn't have met the turtle.
Wasn't he already on the turtle's back when questioning the past avatars about his moral conundrum?
Had he chosen to listen to one of them, he would on the next day have still noticed that the island had moved away and found the lion head. But I get your drift, he still searched within his own mind after his friends told him to finish Ozai off.
Sure, he was on the turtles back, but I think the show explicitly tells us the turtle only came because of his strong will to finish the fight without killing Ozai. Had he been convinced by his previous lives, his will wouldn't have been strong enough to summon the turtle.
Also, even if the turtle had still come and taught him the technique, he'd have been overpowered by Ozais spirit during the final confrontation. Aang only defeated him during their battle of wills because of his unwavering spirit.
Aang is carrying an entire culture on his back. If he loses his way as an Air Nomad, then the genocide of his people is complete, and the world will never again be restored to balance.
Three Cheers For Sweet Revenge? That you?
I get the vague impression that this is meant to subtly influence western society into believing that the masses aren’t truly people, that only the ones steering our collective wheels are actually human. Green arrow basically said as much for like… 5 seasons. Then it got weirder.
There's no conspiracy. It's just people being lazy about good writing.
Also it doesn't happen just in western society. There are plenty of asian movies which fall in the same problem.
There were a few moments in the Marvel Universe. Spider-Man even had his first movie based off the common man and results of super hero actions to create new baddies. But the one that stands out to me is in Iron Man 3, where Tony is going to fire on one of the bad guys in the compound and the guy throws down his gun and says, "Honestly, I hate working here. They are so weird."
I get the vague impression that this is meant to subtly influence western society into believing that the masses aren’t truly people
Tinfoil hat theory would be that the evil leaders of real life (the ceos, the billionaires, etc) are planting the seeds so that if their plans fail and a revolution comes, they won't be summarily executed
I have no idea why Jedi Survivor decided to do that with one random empire guy.
Everybody else got their fucking arms and legs cut off.
Fallout 3. Slaughter the vault of police officers (who you grew up knowing), but grow a conscience when you meet the overseer. Take out armies of enclave soldiers, but let the weirdo Colonel Autumn walk away.
This is because the villain has slain 69,421 people. Killing him would give the hero the same bodycount, and thus make them exactly the same.
because they want us to kill each other, the low ranking riffraff and feel nothing over that, but not the big badd bbillionaires and friends
Fucking Moon Knight. That dude’s whole thing is killing mother fuckers at the top, he prides himself on being a murderer of murderers and crime bosses and he’s not going to give a fuck what you think of his moral stance, yet at the end of the Disney+ series he decides he’s a fucking universalist or some shit? Fuck that! Moon Knight is a straight up murderer, he would be the first person to tell you that he is a murderer and that he don’t give a fuck how anyone feels about it.
Also, they didn't use the song Dead Moon Night by Dead Moon when there was a dead Moon Knight. Fuck that show.
Media targeted at a large audience tends to dumb moral and philosophical conundrums down to the simplest possible gesture instead of taking the ideas seriously.
Strong Last of Us 2 vibes.
That game had such an interesting setup and completely fucking fumbled every single second.
The idea of a split story arc where two hurt people are hunting one another for revenge and how it devastates the both of them in the end is so cool, but then it's written with the emotional intelligence of a five year old and completely fucking missing the concept of subtlety and earned pay offs. Everything is forced, everything is overly mean spirited to the point where you just kinds hate everybody and roots for no one. You're literally forced as the player to torture and kill several people and animals throughout the game.
And when you finally get to the climax there's a lame as fuck "revenge is bad mkay" message tagged on to the end. It rings hollow and it isn't earned. Such an immature script trying to tackle such an interesting concept.
It really shows you that there are no bad ideas, only bad execution.
"You should feel bad for utilizing these gameplay mechanics we designed the game around. You monster!"
I distinctly remember them claiming that you had the choice to spare the dogs, but they would viciously attack you and blow your cover every chance you got so you literally didn't have any other choice than to kill them sometimes. Then there were the plot related actions where the story took your choices away from you and forced you to kill a dog and torture a woman to death as Ellie.
And the ironic thing was that they claimed they wanted you to feel bad for killing people in the game and had the npcs yelling out the names of the people you killed, but I literally felt nothing.
Meanwhile when I played the first game and got to the hospital scene, I was so fucking devastated because I didnt want to kill the fireflies. Up until that point you had mostly killed zombies and deranged people who were directly putting you and ellie in danger. But the fireflies felt different. I was so devastated making my way to Ellie. The game did a fantastic job showing how Joel was crossing a line in his humanity in order to protect the one person in the world that gave his life meaning. It was at once a very beautiful and very tragic climax to a story about humanity in dire circumstances. So beautifully made.
Ain't gonna sit there and cry over some random dog or some dumb npc named Jason when I'm forced to plow down hundreds of them while rarely if ever getting to attack zombies becuase they're barely present in the game by comparison.
If you want to treat human lives as precious in your game, don't make your player kill them by the hundreds the whole time. Fuck man. I sometimes wonder if Druckmann really wrote the first game at all or if he just took credit for some underling's work because I struggle to believe that the same writer who wrote this emotionally complex game is also the same writer who pooped out its sequel.
Sorry for long rant. I just really hate that stupid game.
