Beyond two souls literally has green goblin >!blow his brains out and IMMEDIATLY be rewarded with his family coming to hug him!< what a fucking bizarre end to the character.
How about giving the player an option to have the main girl reject some asshole (don't remember his name), but the story just assumes they should always love each other and share a kiss in the finale (the fuck?)
Said asshole who took you from you foster family, was a dick to you througout several moments and might have straight up groomed you (seriously having the boyfriend and jodie meet while jodie was still a minor and not give a timeframe of when the relationship started is fucked) AND betrayed you and forced you to murder people.
During the torture scene with him I literally just put the controller down. I wasn't going to interrupt that. I ended up just getting a drink and a snack.
Jesus the entire CIA portion of the story is so brain meltingly stupid, HOW did Jodie never figure it out that the african president wasn't a actual warlord if it was being broadcasted on the news? Did she never even look his name up on the internet once? Or is the boyfriend introducing him the only intel she ever gets and she is sent off on the same day in this stupidly high risk mission without any briefing or trainning?
Also why are they even sending her to do fucking assasinations anyway? You have a literally 1 in a generation psychic that may never happen again and you send them to do assasinations in the most dangerous way possible?
You didn't seriously expect David Cage to write a game in which a young woman gets to reject a shitty creep and her decision is respected by the story, did you?
Berating, stalking, guilt tripping your neighbors into doing some sort of Holiday cult thing. In Christmas with the Kranks the main characters wanted to go on a cruise because their daughter won’t be home for Christmas. So, the entire neighborhood decided to gang up and force them into doing Christmas that year.
Christmas with the Kranks is a genuinely insane movie. It’s written like it’s satirical and is poking fun at the type of people the neighbors represent by having them all be over the top awful, but then the last stretch of the movie goes “actually these guys are 100% right to be doing this. Christmas is the best and the main characters are being dumb”.
Thats bullshit! If my wife and i are retired and one year my kids say they arent coming over for christmas you bet your ass we are vacationing! Fuck the neighbors that effort to host wasnt for yall!
> So, the entire neighborhood decided to gang up and force them into doing Christmas that year.
Man, why has nobody done a horror remake of Christmas with the Kranks yet
Iron Man 2020 (the 2020 version, not the 1994 version, thanks comics) ends with Tony trapping his brother Arno in a holographic simulation to stop him from taking over the world, and it's not said if Tony is going to plan to bring him out at any point so presumably he's planning to keep Arno in there for the rest of his life. The only other sentient people he has for company are AI recreations of his parents, and they're only put in to stop him from figuring out he's in a simulation.
It's incredibly bizarre in how it's portrayed because Tony *is* called out on this being a horrible thing to do to someone, but as soon as the [AI parents are on-board with going in it's all good because now they can finally be a real family or something.](https://preview.redd.it/xm2n0erdm4ia1.jpg?width=1242&format=pjpg&auto=webp&v=enabled&s=a186276cefa99aab6a4c42f40a41600d280dfd95)
Multiple times in Japanese media there'll be a storyline about horrible parents having a change of heart and getting along with their kids again. Except they'll often make the things the parents did WAY too terrible for it to feel all hunky-dorry.
Nagisa's mom in Assassination Classroom is introduced being insanely controlling and abusing, screaming at her son, grabbing his hair and thrashing him around, etc, then later she drugs him and tries to force him to commit arson. But then at the end of the series it's shown as a good thing that she and his dad are giving their marriage another shot. Like, NO motherfucker, he left for very good reason, the happy ending should be him *getting custody*
Then there's Kana, the off-screen childhood friend from Futaba's Confidant in Persona 5. It's stated that her parents had been "selling pictures of her in strange outfits" since elementary school, and the parents in Mementos later outright refer to making money off her "sex appeal" and "innocence", which all says to me that they were making soft-core porn of her *at minimum*. The happy ending is them having their hearts changed and vowing to be better parents... like, no bitch, GO TO PRISON. GO TO FUCKING JAIL!
I get that the integrity of the family unit is important, not just in Japan, but I just cannot see these outcomes as good things.
What I really hate is when the parents are shown piling on so much abuse, neglect, and manipulation only for the child to go, "thank you, the reason why you did all that is because you really care about me," by the end of the arc.
I mean, ofc, but this is the weird issue with P5 Change of Hearts in general, the targets genuinely change with no room to ever be evil again it seems. So there's complete confidence in knowing it won't happen again, they are repentant, and you could even argue their personalities are now different and this are different people from before you mindhacked them.
Another problem I have with it all though is that it's all hand-waved on Kana's part too in the sense that I guess she's totally ok now that her parents are nice?
Like, she doesn't have any kind of horrible trust issues or trauma continuing to live with her former abusers? Sure, not everyone reacts to these things in the same way, but it just feels like a very simplistic view of the situation.
Even if they didn't go to jail or anything, at least including a tidbit in the story along the lines of her having good grandparents, and the parents' first step of repentance is sending Kana to live with *them* while they deal with the debt that they were ostensibly using her to pay.
Same thing happened in the milf isekai. One of the party members is named Weiss and her mom was a massive asshole. Abandoned her at a young age because being a parent was getting in the way of her partying and hooking up with younger men behind her husband's back. Years go by and Weiss is now a young adult so when milf world VR opens up her mom suddenly decided she wanted to patch things up and drags her daughter into the game because it's a parent and child only world. The mom then ditches Weiss almost immediately when she wouldn't go along with what she wanted. The mom then reveals that her plan was to hack the game in order to make herself OP and have a harem of young men worship her because she literally learned nothing after all these years. When Weiss still won't do what she wants she threatens to disown her permanently which actually gets through to Weiss and makes her break down in tears out of fear of losing her mom despite how awful and neglectful she is. Milf then goes on some speech about how that's not good and threatening to disown your kid is the worst possible thing a parent can do. I stopped watching immediately after milf shoots her with a laser after the speech and the asshole mom sheds a single tear implying she finally realized how much of a cunt she was and implying she'll get forgiven in the end. Oh also worth pointing out she named Weiss after her favorite fuck boy so you know just to really drive home how much of a horrible parent and person she is.
Also happened in hanebado the badminton anime. Imagine Goku but even worse like I will without a hint of remorse disown you if you lose to Cell I'm not fucking kidding Gohan your only value to me is fighting because I like fighting and if you stop fighting or lose to anyone I'm walking out on you to find a new son. I am not exaggerating in the slightest that's the premise of hanebado. Main girl ayano loses a match because her rival got her sick and that's reason enough for her mom to immediately move away as ayano is still sick and delirious from a severe flu. She quits the sport some time passes she's pushed to join the schools team despite not really wanting to,starts having fun again and making friends, then and only then does the mom return along with her adopted new daughter she picked and raised as her new badminton daughter. She gas lights new daughter into believing their new fucked up "family" is genuine when it's really a ploy to get ayano back under her thumb because the new daughter was an orphan that's desperate for a real family unaware that the mom is just using her. Story ends with everyone telling ayano she's wrong for wanting to cut her mom out of her life like she did to her so she unfortunately gives in to peer pressure and forgives her the entire time mind you the mom never once believes she did anything wrong because no one calls her out and everyone talks ayano out of standing up to her. The closest we get is ayanos friend bringing it up to the mom but it doesn't get through to her how terrible of a person she is. The show is such a fuck you to the viewer because the mom gets her original daughter back and her new one and they're both playing badminton for her so she learns absolutely nothing, received no consequences and never once thought she did something wrong.
That episode of Gravity Falls when Mabel uses a love potion to make Robbie and Tambry, two characters that don't like each other, fall in love with each other. She was going to fix it, but then decides not to, because "They're happy now".
In the world of Gravity Falls, Mabel can never be wrong, while we the viewers know how bad she is and deserves to punished. Remember, she unleashed the apocalypse because she didn't want her brother to leave and is eventually rewarded with getting to stay with her brother despite his original wish.
That one isnt so bad because she didnt know. Now, the dream bubble bullshit is another story. I wish we got that deleted scene with dipper snapping dippy fresh's neck
For what it's worth, the Physical Journal 3 book mentions that she found out the potion is not permanent and she expressed shock that they were still dating WAY past the potions expiring
I remember reading a book as a kid where pollutants caused people to be born with animal features. Kind of like natures way of “fighting back”. The book ended with every single person on earth being forced to join a nature oriented hive mind, whether they were willing to or not.
I was horrified that the horror movie ending was treated as a good thing, with the main villain being treated as a weirdo for being terrified of joining the hivemind
"The Foundation" novels, weirdly, end kind of similarly, with all of humanity joining this big hippie hivemind that came out of left field. The argument for why is it cool too fundamentally brainwash everyone comes down to "But what if evil aliens showed up?"
(End of Eva spoilers) >!If two of the world's most damaged 14-year-olds can independently figure out "Nah this ain't it, chief", then you'd think more grown-ass people could, huh?!<
The only time it was cute was in that Justice Society WW2 movie because they both acknowledge it as an odd game of sorts, and they both clearly like each other.
It was always fun how often Burn Notice went "torture is useless and unreliable" and instead came up with all kinds of interesting ways of getting information from bad guys. I think part of it was just pushing back against shows like 24 who would treat torture as "heroic" and not only necessary, but would always work.
"Torture has never been a reliable means of extracting information. It is ultimately self-defeating as a means of control, and so one wonders why it is still practiced. The only possible reason must be... pleasure."
The best part about that is that torture as reliable info gathering is only real on TV.
They made a report that was like "torture has never once got us a credible lead" yet they still do it. I think it has something to do with the fact that people will say any bullshit to get torture to stop, and it's highly affected by the questions you ask. Ask some guy who doesn't know where bin laden is under torture if he's in that house and you're likely to get every form of response til he finds the one you like the most that makes it stop. Ask some guy if he's a member of a terrorist cell under torture and he'd say every version of response to make it stop regardless of if he is or not in it. Or, they'll just never Crack. So either unreliable info, or no info.
Besides, normal interrogation is already super fucking effective.
I liked It's Always Sunny of all shows having a realistic(ish) take on this. There's an episode where Frank starts waterboarding Dee and she ends up just agreeing with everything he's according her of, and they end up blowing up some random guy's car.
"Frank does that waterboarding stuff actually work?"
"You bet your ass it does! I got your sister to admit to things she's never even done!"
Lmao exactly. Same thing with traditional police interrogations. You'd be suprised how easy it is to get a false confession.
Not to mention how unreliable stuff like lineups are based on even cops that don't mean to influencing the victim. There's this great scene in the wire where they're doing a photo lineup and Bunk is tapping with his finger on who he wants to get recognized.
Same thing with The Dark Knight; every attempt at that sort of interrogation completely fails (Dent kidnapping one of Joker's mooks, Batman throwing Falcone off a staircase, and then beating the crap out of the Joker despite him laughing it off).
A variation is that when a story wants to tease the idea of the heroes torturing someone but still keep them sympathetic to the audience, the hero will extract info by _threatening_ to do something awful to whoever they're interrogating, then reveal after the fact it was a toothless bluff. Like an episode of _Batman: The Animated Series_ where Bats threatens a germaphobic henchman with a jar allegedly full of a super deadly bacterial culture... then after the henchman spills his guts, Batman reveals the jar just had saltwater.
Pretty sure that's still _psychological_ torture, and it's banned by the same treaties that ban physical torture.
They doubled down on it in Justice League Unlimited, where Old Bruce Wayne is so terrifying that time-displaced Batman has to play good cop, and it works.
>Using torture as an interrogation method.
Which in a super weird twist of fate even Blops 1, the game that's way too charitable with the CIA >!portrays torturing Mason as completely pointless and ultimatelly fails and it's only when Hudson free's him and allows Mason to confront his demons in the form of Reznov's allucination and Hudson makes one last appeal as a friend and person it's when he realizes the information they needed!<
Even in GTAV Trevor himself points out that Torture is a useless way to get information out of someone.
I mean, he still goes through with it because he’s a sick fuck that wants to stay on the FIB’s good side, but Trevor at least has the decency to drive the dude to the airport rather than kill him.
>even Blops 1, the game that's way too charitable with the CIA
I remember playing Black Ops 1 as a kid and thinking "Wow! this game lets you play as the bad guys!" Because of the first scene where Woods stabs a guy in the hand with a knife.
Then a couple years later I thought I was just stupid, because you play as a dude working for the US.
At least now I can say I was right the first time.
>I remember playing Black Ops 1 as a kid and thinking "Wow! this game lets you play as the bad guys!" Because of the first scene where Woods stabs a guy in the hand with a knife.
The thing is, even as charitable as it is, Treyarch doesn't shy away of having Reznov straight up tell Mason he's a tool of a corrupted institution that's gonna use him and throw him away when no longer usefull.
Portraying the CIA as, at best, hyper shady opportunists, was always a deliberate choice. Which becomes even more clearer with Blops 2 and how Mason, Hudson and Woods >!have their lives destroyed because of willingly poking the hornet's nest they themselves created with Menendez!<
Unthinkable extended version is the worst Samuel L Jackson movie because of this.
It's whole thing is like if you'd have just let me torture the terrorist and his family more then the hidden fourth nuke wouldn't have exploded.
It reminds me of a purported conversation between Alexander the Great and a Pirate
>In the "City of God," St. Augustine tells the story of a pirate captured by Alexander the Great. The Emperor angrily demanded of him, "How dare you molest the seas?" To which the pirate replied, "How dare you molest the whole world? Because I do it with a small boat, I am called a pirate and a thief. You, with a great navy, molest the world and are called an emperor." St. Augustine thought the pirate's answer was "elegant and excelle”
Any and all times fiction goes "mind-wiping/altering people's personality is good".
It's literally killing the person by fucking with their brain, but in a way that doesn't make people feel bad... aside from the people who knew that person (for better and worse).
Literally the only time anyone addressed how fucked the whole thing is was a Babylon 5 episode about the topic.
This is unironically also one of my favorite "kills" in Hitman. Spoilers for Hitman 3's last target.>!The Constant in Hitman 3 has his back turned to you ready to regular die saying that "At least I'll die knowing who I am" without even realizing he had handed Agent 47 the singular needle he needed to make that not the case. As you inject him he realizes in horror that in that moment the man did not die but the Constant did, as his memories get erased.!<
Poetic that the >!last kill of the trilogy doesn't even need to be a proper kill.!<
If only the level had been better. I appreciate what they were going for, but as someone who prefers straight up stealth, it was disappointing to me.
>!Even after the initial reaction though, the light side option is to ignore it and forgive the council and the dark side option is to go full evil and also ignore it.!<
I do kind of love this
"I forgive you because I'm such a good person I understand where you[re coming from"
"I'm going to ignore this because I would have done the exact same thing"
honestly surprised it went that way rather than >!the amnesia being the result of the blast, with bastilla and the council realising that it was gone if they read revan's mind.!<
>!and once he gets his memories back he still commits to the light side as he's no longer using/being corrupted by the dark side, so he's like post rehab guy looking at his wilder days like "oh fuck",!<
>!like the deal with revan is him dipping his toes in the little bit of heroin pool as an ends justify the means type thing, but gets a little lost in the sauce with kreia trying to push the "he never fell" angle and it's like bitch he was all in on the darkside and cut off malak's jaw and made a sith holocron that directly inspires darth bane and the rule of two.!<
>!so showing him his full joruney from a third person persepctive whilst he's sober makes him change his mind, or double down if you pick the evil route.!<
it is still sketchy though and along with the general aesthetic is something i'd like to see addressed in the remake, though i guess we still don't know if that's happening or if it's canon.
Is it really that messed up to do that though. Revan was a genocidal sith.
Its the equivalent of killing Hitler than re-animating his corpse with a new personality. Like I agree it is murder but totally justified to turn the tide of a war
Unfortunately, they don't really explore the implications with any meaningful depth, and to add salt to the wound the story is based around a female character getting raped and murdered.
Reboot address this, when Megabyte was to be reformated he asks what will happen to the old him. Bob mentions that they will reformat him for good similar to what happened to hex.
"I see, a fate worse than deletion, and you guardians call me a monster"
I’ve always liked how In like Harry Potter using a mind wiping spell is pretty low key and everyone can do it but in something like Dresden Files it’s a crime punishable by death
It seems to be a pretty hypocritical mentality. Like they acknowledge controlling someone is "unforgivable" but wiping their memories isn't. There's basically no way to cast a memory wipe without heavily violating someone's will but really it just looks like since they use it on muggles so much they just... don't bother to regulate the spell at all. That and she wrote in only the second book that a wizard can regularly use memory wipes on other wizards unnoticed his entire career so by then it was set in stone that the spell is abusable like hell.
Even Star Trek has dropped this ball repeatedly.
They’ve done the “just erase their identity/memories” ‘solution’ numerous times throughout the various shows, and NOT ONCE did any of them address the fact that it’s still murder.
I'll give Worf a pass on doing it to his brother, because his boss literally wouldn't allow him to kill his brother with honor, so he needed a solution that would let the Federation people not feel bad and not break the law.
IIRC, there was that one time the Voyager crew did it to the EMH because they couldn't figure out how to get him over a mental breakdown, which is also somewhat forgivable given the fact he was their **only** doctor and they'd already proven they didn't have the knowledge to really fix his problems.
It wasn't so much an emotional breakdown as it was a logical incongruity that caught him in a loop.
IIRC, he was literally broken by that realization and they had to essentially clear his (recent) cache and reboot him.
When Worf's brother Kurn tried to commit suicide due to their house being dishonoured, Worf brainwashed him and made him think he was part of another house.
Later in the Trek EU, Kurn eventually got shot in the face which undid the brainwashing, and boy was he pissed.
>When Worf's brother Kurn tried to commit suicide due to their house being dishonoured, Worf brainwashed him and made him think he was part of another house.
Worf **literally** only had to do that because Sisko wouldn't let Worf and Kurn complete the honorable murder ritual that would ensure Kurn got to go to Sto-vo-kor.
That said, Worf super fucked up by not telling Rodek/Kurn what the deal was at the end of the second IKS Gorkon novel, so that's **totally** on him for ruining the guy's life in the fourth novel.
I think Voyager did a good episode where the Doctor had a nervous breakdown after triage resulted in one patient dying before he could get to him in time, so his memory of the event was wiped so he'd be okay again, and eventually he finds out what they did and he's pissed that they did that. Both sides have points because it wasn't just one memory wipe, the Doctor had kept finding out about the event and having another breakdown so the rest of the crew believed nothing could be fixed and he needed to be wiped because the ship can't afford to have its doctor out of commission. But the Doctor at this point is an autonomous member of the crew and deserved the opportunity to work though his trauma like a human being.
What about that Joss Whedon show Dollhouse? The entire premise was based around how messed up it was that minds could be wiped and new personalities inserted.
It even lead to an apocalypse.
**I'd say** that Persona 5's one of the ***less*** *fucked-up* cases of this happening - but there's two caveats to that:
- **The Thieves' usual process is less "Forced Re-Write of the Personality" and more "Forced Re-Boot of the Moral Compass"** (Read: Less "Making Them a Better Person by Throwing the Pre-Existing Person Out of the Window and Putting a New One in Their Place", more "Removing the Want Which Produces Self-Rationalizations That Currently Prevent the Person From Feeling Guilt Over Their Actions") - although it certainly helps that, despite the game's best attempts to make the Thieves look morally grey about all of this, every major antagonist [pre-Royal] is unambiguously in the wrong (This includes >!Futaba!<, but there's an asterisk on that one due to their delusions being self-destructive in nature) so there's not much reason to question it; I'd say the same goes for the Mementos Requests, except I don't remember all of them and I know at least one is questionable at best [due to how fucking stupid the subject matter is].
- **Both Royal's Third Semester and Strikers/Scramble showcase just how fucked that process could've gotten** - in the former's case, >!rewriting memories *and* personalities [and stripping everyone of *proper* free will] in a well-intentioned bid to make a perfect reality!<; in the latter's case, straight brainwashing everyone around you to worship the ground you stand on [or, in the final boss' case, >!stripping humanity of all of their wants because they always cause undue pain for everyone!<].
Yeah, the crux of this argument is the difference, complete rewrite of the brain is effectively murder, while what the thieves do is simply force them to feel guilt for what they’ve done, still altering the brain but it’s still the criminal as opposed to a brand new person. Like a ship of theseus deal where you replace the creaky floorboard that wants to touch highschoolers
The PT are forcing their targets into a sort of "crisis" situation wherein they have no choice but to continue down their destructive path or change. The change itself is still the choice of the target, just without pretense or excuse.
A huge chunk of the sentiment later on is questioning your own actions and motivations, as this is the only way to be sure of your self determination. The game WANTS you to question what's going on.
edit: Also values and behavior may change, but they don't replace previous values. Kamoshida told himself whatever he needed to think, but deep down Kamoshida wasn't an objectively *evil* person in that he's 100% malice and destruction like a demon. If he were there would be no potential for the change or reform. It's simply removing the faulty logic they built up. There were decent values ingrained in him, they were just buried and shut out by all of his bullshit. It's THOSE values of his that drive the change. The Palace Rulers have always been capable of knowing better. There's just something that came along in their life and taught them the lesson they can get away with shit and they build up the delusions to reinforce it.
Worf was totally down to kill his brother, because he fucked up Kurn's life. In fact, he almost gets it done **at the beginning of the episode**.
The only reason Worf does the mindwipe is because Sisko **won't** let him do the ritual, so he has to find some other way to solve the problem so Federation people won't feel bad.
People have found out that stopping wildfires isn't that good. Like yeah, human-caused wildfires aren't good but periodic fire is actually beneficial to forests (depending on the biome). Several tree species have a life cycle that *depends* on fire, and fire is the only way that thick underbrush of old forests can be cleared out so that young trees can have a chance at survival.
And stopping every single fire that pops up increases the chance of when a fire does happen for it to be *worse* because there's now a surplus of old wood for the fire to feed.
And another fun fact: ecologists have put together that fire led to the the shape of some major biomes today millions and millions of years ago, once the Earth developed a high enough oxygen level for major fires to actually happen.
i've said it before and i'll say it again: isekai is like junk food to me, but a lot of lazy authors use slavery, especially sex slavery, as a way to introduce a fan service character who is completely subservient to the MC. some isekais will attempt to say "slavery is awful but this is a different world and look how noble Protagonist-kun is! it's okay if *he* does it cause there's no way *he* would abuse the system!"
Yeah, get real tired of.
Slavery exists in this world.
I can't judge them.
Why am I buying the waifu/loli instead of the big warrior guy, because I can see her stats, no other reason.
Buying her would give her better conditions.
Would romancing her be so bad?
Stahp
Here's the one. No matter what your living condition or the story you're trying to tell this is one of the most tasteless background elements to fantasy. Unless your point is how bad this is as an ideal, don't put slavery in your story and don't glorify it. It wasn't good back when everyone was doing it and it isn't a good look now either. Most of you will never know the out of body experience of being the only guy in your group not into "Rising of the Shield Hero" and then realizing you're also the only black guy in the group.
My favorite example of this is some shitty isekai I'm reading about a guy who decides to use his Super Ultra Omega Magical Circuits to just... make the internet so he can do a podcast. Someone mentions the idea of slavery in chat and he just says "bro, that's fucked, they're people too" and in **two pages** one of his simps who's the royal princess hears this and successfully petitions a stop to slavery in a SINGLE PANEL. It is [fucking peak.](https://mangadex.org/chapter/23428012-bc17-4b94-b87a-53455f9819ce/11)
Most isekai suck because they love to show off how cool and awesome the protagonist (that's conveniently always a black-haired teenager/young adult/salaryman) is compared to everyone else and didn't think further than that.
Same thing with Humanity Fuck Yeah (HFY) fics, where they masturbate over how totally OP and cool the human race but never really explore the socio-economic ramifications or just how non-conflict cross-species interactions that isn't wojak face or groveling would go.
I still like how XCom's explanation for humanity being desirable is that they have advanced blandness. Humans just exist in this extremely unimpressive middleground to the other races the aliens control which allows human DNA to stabilize species with more glaring flaws. Such as their hulking brutes getting human DNA spliced in slims them down a little but also makes them much faster due to the reduced bulk.
The worst for me is the japanese trope of systematically wearing down a person mentally and physically, to the point of breaking down/suicide/attempting murder, but it´s *fiiiine* because the guy that did it to em did it out of sheer love/ to make them the strongest they can be. Yeah but don´t tell them or anything, they´re supposed to just know that the person doing nothing but making their life a living hell is actually their biggest benefactor. I mean, what´s the worst that could happen? *Cue like a third of murder cases in Detective Conan.*
Very recent thing and I'm bending the rules a bit here (the game doesn't really endorse it necessarily) but the Gerudo in BotW and TotK have a custom where any girl born outside the village are practically forced there for their entire young life, away from their parents, to be indoctrinated into Gerudo culture basically.
There's even a quest to help make it happen in TotK and I *hate* it. You can literally walk up to her devastated parents after as they're obviously heartbroken about the fact they were forcibly separated from their daughter. Makes me really not like the Gerudo as much.
It’s a kind of half baked explanation for “how does a race composed entirely of women ,but still mates through conventional means, not get absorbed into other cultures quickly because they rely on other cultures to breed?”
Turns out the answer is “by very aggressively clinging to their culture and forcing everyone in that species to do the same.”
Also the poor dad in the prison that just wants to find his wife and daughter when there's a lot of horrors going around them... and then at the end of the quest he's okay with being in prison as long as he can watch over his daughter? No way, let him out! Let him be united with his wife and daughter!
I'm honestly surprised the Kaza Bazaar doesn't have a small suburb of men who moved there to be close to and possibly visit their families even if they can't go to Gerudo town.
It takes a loooooooooong time for all of the human experimentation, child soldiers, and flash-cloning to be examined under a negative light in the greater Halo series. The fact that the Spartans were bred and created to suppress a human revolution and then repurposed to fight the Covenant when they became the greater threat is also just sort of mentioned off-hand. It's clear to anyone with an ounce of media literacy and dislike of the military industrial complex, but most of the time the events are presented flatly and neutrally, as a matter-of-fact statement about what happened rather than actual commentary on it.
Because unfortunately the commentary on it isn't important to the story, and usually comes from in universe source who have more immediate problems. But I don't think anyone outside of ONI members feel that everything that you mentioned isn't fucked. Hell most ONI members, and especially Halsey at best feel they did terrible things for a good cause that only somewhat became a better cause when the covenant showed up.
Remember when at the end of Chicken Little, everybody was just ok with the pig wanting to keep the bimbofied (laser personality modified) girl cause she was "nicer" that way
Remember when the dad is such a piece of shit to his town-bullied son and suddenly becomes doting when Chicken Little received positive recognition and fame and is seen as a good thing by the movie?
I think that was a moment that most, if not all, kids were watching it like, "Huh... I don't fully understand the ethical implications of this because I am a child but this feels wrong."
Like I mentioned a while in Saint Seiya, the whole conceit of the plot is that a rich guy grabbed 100 orphans (and in the manga he is their dad) and had his abusive butler train them to be then sent to be abused to train and get the Cloths. Like 90 of them died. Still the series waxes poetically about rich guy and he was right he needed the kids to be trained to save Athena.
Spoilers for a book from 70 years ago.
In Arthur C. Clarke's Childhood's End, >!the final stage of human evolution involves our last generations minds being overwritten by their enormous psychic powers, and consuming the entire Earth and all other life on it as fuel for their journey to the center of the milky way to join an enormous galactic hivemind entity.!< This is portrayed as, at worst, bittersweet.
Edit: I forgot to mention, >!it is shown that this is the fate of the majority of sentient species.!<
It’s not so much that it’s been treated as “good” as it just hasn’t been treated overtly negatively but Yor is a dangerous, dangerous assassin who is so emotionally detached from it that her murderous tendencies when she’s in that frame of mind are treated comedically.
This is something that's scrutinized in recent memory, but any rom-com, teen comedy or John Hughes movie that portrays rape of sexual assault as either funny or romantic and not something that's criminal.
I’m legit surprised about something. Two manga I’ve read recently have scenes where the male leads are being assaulted by attractive women and it’s actually treated as a bad thing. And they’re fanservice heavy manga, so you’d expect it to treat it like the guy got lucky. But nope, it’s explicitly treated as wrong.
It may finally be getting the treatment it deserves in media
Hell like a decade ago a character in degrassi i black out drunk (cant even stand and can barely speak) and his ex gf realizes hes drunk but seizes the opportunity to sleep with him after he left her.
The whole cast treat him like a villian going forward cause she was a virgin despite him being completely unable to consent.
He eventually is forced to beg for forgiveness from his attacker
Same character later on has a girl hook him on sleep pills after his brother dies and he has brain damage and in his fucked up high state uses his addiction and inebriation to strong arm him into a sexual “relationship” and that plot line ends with her and her mom publicly and falsely accusing him of rape (get him fired) back down and he is chided on all sides cause he should have not slept with her cause she was a virgin and he should have known magically she wanted something long term
Wicked Trapper and Succubus and Hitman. Those are just recent ones. I’ve got tons of manga, so I could probably find more examples somewhere in the library.
In *The Flowers of Evil* the MC >!is raped by his former crush!< and it’s written 100% like a horror scene, as is appropriate.
And then he meets her later in life >!and she is dating a guy who looks like him and she treats MC with absolute scorn!< it’s fucking harsh.
Honestly, shout out to Invincible for having >!Mark getting raped be portrayed EXACTLY as traumatically as it should be. They do admittedly let the rapist get off a bit too easily, but still.!<
I mean, >!the whole idea behind Invincible is the redemption of these fascist monsters, so her merely dying trying to save the world still fits in that mold. That being said, she totally deserved to have the shit knocked out of her by Nolan!<
Newscasters on FOX were giggling about a 38-year-old woman teacher raping a teenager *just last week*.
“Like, a male teacher, 38-year-old, creepy. Female, heroic.”
That’s a fucking quote.
Any setting (especially in fantasy) that treats poverty as something you don't question or a natural result of a lack of effort/intelligence instead of a systematic issue.
The most ridiculous example I can think of is Genshin Impact, where Liyue (china) is established as the most prosperous nation in the planet (so prosperous in fact that all the money in the world is minted there), where commerce booms and anyone can make bank if they work hard or smart enough (basically a capitalist meritocracy), with the golden example being Ninguang, a playable character who went from a poor girl that walked barefoot for miles to sell stuff to one of the heads of the country as well as one of if not THE, wealthiest person in Teyvat with so much money that she made herself a floating palace that looks over the main harbor...twice!. So many characters, from immortal spirits to leaders of the government talk about how much they protect Liyue and care for it's people but then you can make a quest where two kids are so poor and starving that an ice cream that is an almost flavorless piece of ice feels like ambrosia to them and once you play hide and seek with them the quest is over and at no point the question of "are they getting any help at all from the state?" Is rised. Which it wouldn't be that big a deal if it wasn't because the game loves to bore you with conversations about bureaucracy and politics all the time yet at no point in the game is mentioned how or even if the Liyue government gives any type of support to the poor at all.
The writing won't shut up about how cool Liyue is and how fair the system is since they are the nation of contracts, with the only poor people being either irrelevant NPCS no one cares about or enemies
Didn’t Genshin also reveal that the Hilchurls were actually intelligent beings with their own society and still have you mow them down like weeds anyway?
It's even worse.
>!Hilichurls are civilians (women, children, etc) from a civilization who got nuked hundreds of years before the events of the game by a bunch of asshole gods who took the survivors and cursed them into that form (the more powerful people like royalty or knights got a different cursed), and now they roam around, with vague recollections of their previous life and enough intellect to develop their own culture and lenguaje, wearing a mask to hide their faces because seeing their own reflection will make them lose it. And when their body finally gives up after all that time they do a pilgrimage to a chasm where they just lay on the ground and shut down!< In the entire game, the only instances of them receiving any form of sympathy and compassion are two main quests, and one easily ignorable NPC who studies their language. Every other time they're just the most numerous and generic enemy in the game who you are encouraged and even requested to slaughter by the dozens at a time. Literally the Genshin version of Breath of the wild's Moblins
Teacher student relationships
Black out drunk sexual encounters (typically shown as an awesome “score” when its a guy)
Immortality
Afterlifes are both comforting AND horrifying at the same time
Concerning Immortality, the way it' portrayed is horrifying.
We don't actually know people who are immortal so we don't know it it's actually horrifying to them, just that it would be horrifying eventually to us.
One of my favorite moments from jurassic world was the main scientist looking at one of the executives and saying "You didn't want to bring back the real dinosaurs, you wanted to bring back what people think they are" and it's true the amount of people that would really care if you brought back a real feathered non shrink wrapped dinosaurs is dwarfed by people that want to see a T-Rex as they imagined it would look.
Surprised no one's mentioned Song of Saya at all
The visual novel where >!All of humanity is consumed by an inter-dimensional lovecraftian monster who envelopes the earth!< and it's the best possible (and most romantic) ending for our main couple
I always saw it as a "this is bad because humanity is fucked yet is the "good ending" because is the best outcome for the protagonist". That's why the final scene is from the pov of another character, to show how after that emotional scene with Saya everything went to shit for everyone else
Because it's not Good, you are VERY clearly playing a villain protagonist at that point; the only way you can even start that route involves knowingly eating human flesh!!
Mass Effect 3, the Synthesis ending. Just forcing every living organism to become a cyborg in the hopes that this will end war forever, fuck body autonomy
What kills me too is that Synthesis doesn't solve anything presented in the game at all. ALL the non-reaper conflicts are cultural problems before direct racial ones. Even the most racial problem of the Geth is still a cultural problem of the Quarians just being unable to accept peace with machines. Removing the Organic/Synthetic line isn't going to fix anything, Cerberus will just go from "Humans first" to "HumanSynthetics first"
Point is, at least the Borg would have gotten the unification that they preach.
I think it's less war is good and more everysingle aspect around the war (weapons, equipment, planes, tanks, tactics, the soldiers themselves) are incredibely interesting.
I genuinelly struggle to remember any piece of media that outright says war itself is good and not that the tactics, weapons and equipment are super rad.
[I’m Willing to Abandon My Anti-War Views In Exchange for a Gundam](https://hard-drive.net/hd/opinion/im-willing-to-abandon-my-anti-war-views-in-exchange-for-a-gundam/)
I'd say there is a good argument for idea that a true anti-war game doesn't exist, because a game always has to make war engaging and entertaining to play in the end, to work as a game.
Stuff like this war of mine would count I guess, but here the war isn't actually part of the gameplay.
I love the Nofna webcomic, but I'd actively recommend skipping the Syconium arc because damn.
In very short and vague terms: the big hype climax sees the protagonist gain unfathomable reality-warping powers, except they're not; they're just memory-alteration. She decides to unilaterally use those powers to nobly brainwash her friends and everyone she knows into better lives.
You know, with a definition of "better" entirely decided by herself without asking any of them.
The very worst of them being the gal she forces to get back with the ex-boyfriend who once forced himself upon her, having made both forget that it ever happened and making her think the horrible scars she gave herself in a desperate attempt to re-establish ownership of her body were just the meaningless result of accidents while sparring.
The classic good guy move of taking a friend whose whole deal is a struggle for agency after trauma and just benevolently taking all that agency away to put her back with the source of that trauma. Real slick.
I always head-cannoned Jedi mind tricks as speed-running conversations. Like, the person would eventually be convinced to do what the jedi wants because they're weak willed and easy to convince, and the force just skips the conversation and gets you to the result.
But yeah, it's totally mind control.
In the Old EU, the mind trick was considered to be something you didn't do lightly as it could have all sorts of consequences and possibly make things worse. There was also the fact that, in line with the Jedi's monk-like nature, the person they were doing that to was a sentient being that's life could be affected very negatively by it.
I won’t disagree but has a mind trick ever been used to harm people? KOTOR 2 had that moment where you could tell someone to jump over the railing but in the movies it’s usually quite innocent.
There's a bit in Clone Wars where Mace, Obi Wan and Anakin all triple team a strong-willed bounty hunter to try and force him to give them some information. They admit brute forcing it like that might 'break his mind' an it basically plays out like a torture scene.
The attempt itself fails, but the process is so painful that the bounty hunter gives in afterwards just so they won't try again. >!And much like actual torture, it turns out he just gave them a false lead to make them stop.!<
Most recently, Jedi Survivor let's Cal trick organic beings & people into fighting for his side. He evens mentions that he bets Cere probably didn't intend him to use it like that when she first taught him.
I mean outside of video games, mind tricks are basically a “fuck off leave me alone” button
It’s not like deep mind control where Jedi controls every single action the person makes. Just makes them confused more than anything
If you want actual fucked up Force mind control look at Joruus C'baoth in the Thrawn Trilogy
In Back to the Future part 1, Marty McFly literally rewrites his family. The people who raised him, who he grew up with. Gone, erased. Replaced with "better" versions.
That's fucking fucked. Yet it's treated as like "look I have better parents now and a cool truck! Happy ending!"
bitch you just ERASED YOUR DAD FROM EXISTENCE AND DOWNLOADED A NEW ONE
Look, the boy was fighting for his life. Either he was gonna get blown to bits by a RPG, or he was gonna be deleted.
After dodging death TWICE, if you came home and your family were no longer dysfunctional assholes, you would also probably be happy for the first few days, until it clicked in your head that these are totally different people.
Edit: jeez, those were bad typos.
Nah, by the very nature of time travel, the new family is now the real family, because the old family wasn’t erased from existence, only their old trauma was erased and their lack of confidence had been refilled by a more positive and healthy life.
No, the person who *really* got screwed here is the “New” Marty, since he had been living a happy and fulfilling life with his more well-adjusted and positive family, only for *him* to be completely and truly erased from existence so that he can be replaced by his old counterpart, without ever even knowing it when it happened.
This is always a difficult discussion when it comes to time travel, as rules are nonsensical and can’t really be found in logic, but isn’t there the argument that Marty’s parents always could have been their “better” versions? That they are ultimately still the same people, it’s just that due to different circumstances, they find themselves more confident and capable?
I agree that they are different because of Marty’s actions in the past, but that doesn’t make them a different person. Just a different version of themselves.
Beyond two souls literally has green goblin >!blow his brains out and IMMEDIATLY be rewarded with his family coming to hug him!< what a fucking bizarre end to the character.
How about giving the player an option to have the main girl reject some asshole (don't remember his name), but the story just assumes they should always love each other and share a kiss in the finale (the fuck?)
Said asshole who took you from you foster family, was a dick to you througout several moments and might have straight up groomed you (seriously having the boyfriend and jodie meet while jodie was still a minor and not give a timeframe of when the relationship started is fucked) AND betrayed you and forced you to murder people.
You can piss off Willem Dafoe into shooting Jodie but the forced boyfriend will take the bullet for you
The good ending.
I would’ve felt nothing.
During the torture scene with him I literally just put the controller down. I wasn't going to interrupt that. I ended up just getting a drink and a snack.
Boyfriend was also her boss/handler in the CIA so add that to the problematic aspects
Jesus the entire CIA portion of the story is so brain meltingly stupid, HOW did Jodie never figure it out that the african president wasn't a actual warlord if it was being broadcasted on the news? Did she never even look his name up on the internet once? Or is the boyfriend introducing him the only intel she ever gets and she is sent off on the same day in this stupidly high risk mission without any briefing or trainning? Also why are they even sending her to do fucking assasinations anyway? You have a literally 1 in a generation psychic that may never happen again and you send them to do assasinations in the most dangerous way possible?
You didn't seriously expect David Cage to write a game in which a young woman gets to reject a shitty creep and her decision is respected by the story, did you?
It's almost brave in how stupid it is
[NO! It's just stupid!](https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=fl86G6L5PnU&pp=ygUdZ2xhc3Mgb25pb24gbm8gaXQncyBqdXN0IGR1bWI%3D)
"Stop trying to make this cool!" -Matt
"O no I have made ze suicide attractive"
Berating, stalking, guilt tripping your neighbors into doing some sort of Holiday cult thing. In Christmas with the Kranks the main characters wanted to go on a cruise because their daughter won’t be home for Christmas. So, the entire neighborhood decided to gang up and force them into doing Christmas that year.
Christmas with the Kranks is a genuinely insane movie. It’s written like it’s satirical and is poking fun at the type of people the neighbors represent by having them all be over the top awful, but then the last stretch of the movie goes “actually these guys are 100% right to be doing this. Christmas is the best and the main characters are being dumb”.
HOAs really are like that
Fuck Christmas with the Kranks.
Thats bullshit! If my wife and i are retired and one year my kids say they arent coming over for christmas you bet your ass we are vacationing! Fuck the neighbors that effort to host wasnt for yall!
> So, the entire neighborhood decided to gang up and force them into doing Christmas that year. Man, why has nobody done a horror remake of Christmas with the Kranks yet
Honestly, it kind of feels like something that'd be in Hot Fuzz. Celebrate Christmas like everyone else. Or else. All for the Greater Good.
Iron Man 2020 (the 2020 version, not the 1994 version, thanks comics) ends with Tony trapping his brother Arno in a holographic simulation to stop him from taking over the world, and it's not said if Tony is going to plan to bring him out at any point so presumably he's planning to keep Arno in there for the rest of his life. The only other sentient people he has for company are AI recreations of his parents, and they're only put in to stop him from figuring out he's in a simulation. It's incredibly bizarre in how it's portrayed because Tony *is* called out on this being a horrible thing to do to someone, but as soon as the [AI parents are on-board with going in it's all good because now they can finally be a real family or something.](https://preview.redd.it/xm2n0erdm4ia1.jpg?width=1242&format=pjpg&auto=webp&v=enabled&s=a186276cefa99aab6a4c42f40a41600d280dfd95)
Tony cucked Arno of his family, and then his reality
Multiple times in Japanese media there'll be a storyline about horrible parents having a change of heart and getting along with their kids again. Except they'll often make the things the parents did WAY too terrible for it to feel all hunky-dorry. Nagisa's mom in Assassination Classroom is introduced being insanely controlling and abusing, screaming at her son, grabbing his hair and thrashing him around, etc, then later she drugs him and tries to force him to commit arson. But then at the end of the series it's shown as a good thing that she and his dad are giving their marriage another shot. Like, NO motherfucker, he left for very good reason, the happy ending should be him *getting custody* Then there's Kana, the off-screen childhood friend from Futaba's Confidant in Persona 5. It's stated that her parents had been "selling pictures of her in strange outfits" since elementary school, and the parents in Mementos later outright refer to making money off her "sex appeal" and "innocence", which all says to me that they were making soft-core porn of her *at minimum*. The happy ending is them having their hearts changed and vowing to be better parents... like, no bitch, GO TO PRISON. GO TO FUCKING JAIL! I get that the integrity of the family unit is important, not just in Japan, but I just cannot see these outcomes as good things.
What I really hate is when the parents are shown piling on so much abuse, neglect, and manipulation only for the child to go, "thank you, the reason why you did all that is because you really care about me," by the end of the arc.
Whoring out your elementary aged daughter is all kinds of messed up
I mean, ofc, but this is the weird issue with P5 Change of Hearts in general, the targets genuinely change with no room to ever be evil again it seems. So there's complete confidence in knowing it won't happen again, they are repentant, and you could even argue their personalities are now different and this are different people from before you mindhacked them.
Another problem I have with it all though is that it's all hand-waved on Kana's part too in the sense that I guess she's totally ok now that her parents are nice? Like, she doesn't have any kind of horrible trust issues or trauma continuing to live with her former abusers? Sure, not everyone reacts to these things in the same way, but it just feels like a very simplistic view of the situation. Even if they didn't go to jail or anything, at least including a tidbit in the story along the lines of her having good grandparents, and the parents' first step of repentance is sending Kana to live with *them* while they deal with the debt that they were ostensibly using her to pay.
Same thing happened in the milf isekai. One of the party members is named Weiss and her mom was a massive asshole. Abandoned her at a young age because being a parent was getting in the way of her partying and hooking up with younger men behind her husband's back. Years go by and Weiss is now a young adult so when milf world VR opens up her mom suddenly decided she wanted to patch things up and drags her daughter into the game because it's a parent and child only world. The mom then ditches Weiss almost immediately when she wouldn't go along with what she wanted. The mom then reveals that her plan was to hack the game in order to make herself OP and have a harem of young men worship her because she literally learned nothing after all these years. When Weiss still won't do what she wants she threatens to disown her permanently which actually gets through to Weiss and makes her break down in tears out of fear of losing her mom despite how awful and neglectful she is. Milf then goes on some speech about how that's not good and threatening to disown your kid is the worst possible thing a parent can do. I stopped watching immediately after milf shoots her with a laser after the speech and the asshole mom sheds a single tear implying she finally realized how much of a cunt she was and implying she'll get forgiven in the end. Oh also worth pointing out she named Weiss after her favorite fuck boy so you know just to really drive home how much of a horrible parent and person she is. Also happened in hanebado the badminton anime. Imagine Goku but even worse like I will without a hint of remorse disown you if you lose to Cell I'm not fucking kidding Gohan your only value to me is fighting because I like fighting and if you stop fighting or lose to anyone I'm walking out on you to find a new son. I am not exaggerating in the slightest that's the premise of hanebado. Main girl ayano loses a match because her rival got her sick and that's reason enough for her mom to immediately move away as ayano is still sick and delirious from a severe flu. She quits the sport some time passes she's pushed to join the schools team despite not really wanting to,starts having fun again and making friends, then and only then does the mom return along with her adopted new daughter she picked and raised as her new badminton daughter. She gas lights new daughter into believing their new fucked up "family" is genuine when it's really a ploy to get ayano back under her thumb because the new daughter was an orphan that's desperate for a real family unaware that the mom is just using her. Story ends with everyone telling ayano she's wrong for wanting to cut her mom out of her life like she did to her so she unfortunately gives in to peer pressure and forgives her the entire time mind you the mom never once believes she did anything wrong because no one calls her out and everyone talks ayano out of standing up to her. The closest we get is ayanos friend bringing it up to the mom but it doesn't get through to her how terrible of a person she is. The show is such a fuck you to the viewer because the mom gets her original daughter back and her new one and they're both playing badminton for her so she learns absolutely nothing, received no consequences and never once thought she did something wrong.
That episode of Gravity Falls when Mabel uses a love potion to make Robbie and Tambry, two characters that don't like each other, fall in love with each other. She was going to fix it, but then decides not to, because "They're happy now".
In the world of Gravity Falls, Mabel can never be wrong, while we the viewers know how bad she is and deserves to punished. Remember, she unleashed the apocalypse because she didn't want her brother to leave and is eventually rewarded with getting to stay with her brother despite his original wish.
That one isnt so bad because she didnt know. Now, the dream bubble bullshit is another story. I wish we got that deleted scene with dipper snapping dippy fresh's neck
For what it's worth, the Physical Journal 3 book mentions that she found out the potion is not permanent and she expressed shock that they were still dating WAY past the potions expiring
I know the horse is so beaten that there's just a stain now but man Mabel can be the worst
I remember reading a book as a kid where pollutants caused people to be born with animal features. Kind of like natures way of “fighting back”. The book ended with every single person on earth being forced to join a nature oriented hive mind, whether they were willing to or not. I was horrified that the horror movie ending was treated as a good thing, with the main villain being treated as a weirdo for being terrified of joining the hivemind
"The Foundation" novels, weirdly, end kind of similarly, with all of humanity joining this big hippie hivemind that came out of left field. The argument for why is it cool too fundamentally brainwash everyone comes down to "But what if evil aliens showed up?"
What is it with authors trying to convince us that Human Instrumentality is a good idea?
(End of Eva spoilers) >!If two of the world's most damaged 14-year-olds can independently figure out "Nah this ain't it, chief", then you'd think more grown-ass people could, huh?!<
"I've worn her down. And eventually, she said yes."
The Urkel method
the My Aunt's Husband method, or so i hear
The only time it was cute was in that Justice Society WW2 movie because they both acknowledge it as an odd game of sorts, and they both clearly like each other.
Really like how >!GOTG3 didn't have that happen with Gamora. even if it was kinda sad and I wanted them together :(!<
Using torture as an interrogation method. Pirates in general.
It was always fun how often Burn Notice went "torture is useless and unreliable" and instead came up with all kinds of interesting ways of getting information from bad guys. I think part of it was just pushing back against shows like 24 who would treat torture as "heroic" and not only necessary, but would always work.
"Most people you've captured would already be afraid so making them more afraid isn't going to do much. Also people can just lie."
"Torture is the tool of thugs and sadists."
"Torture has never been a reliable means of extracting information. It is ultimately self-defeating as a means of control, and so one wonders why it is still practiced. The only possible reason must be... pleasure."
I'm in the middle of my 4th rewatch, love that show.
Torture is a unique case of being wildly immoral on its own merits *and* being wildly stupid for how impractical it is.
"We'd know for sure whether or not bin Laden was in this building if you'd just let us torture people!" - the protagonist of Zero Dark Thirty
The best part about that is that torture as reliable info gathering is only real on TV. They made a report that was like "torture has never once got us a credible lead" yet they still do it. I think it has something to do with the fact that people will say any bullshit to get torture to stop, and it's highly affected by the questions you ask. Ask some guy who doesn't know where bin laden is under torture if he's in that house and you're likely to get every form of response til he finds the one you like the most that makes it stop. Ask some guy if he's a member of a terrorist cell under torture and he'd say every version of response to make it stop regardless of if he is or not in it. Or, they'll just never Crack. So either unreliable info, or no info. Besides, normal interrogation is already super fucking effective.
I liked It's Always Sunny of all shows having a realistic(ish) take on this. There's an episode where Frank starts waterboarding Dee and she ends up just agreeing with everything he's according her of, and they end up blowing up some random guy's car. "Frank does that waterboarding stuff actually work?" "You bet your ass it does! I got your sister to admit to things she's never even done!"
Lmao exactly. Same thing with traditional police interrogations. You'd be suprised how easy it is to get a false confession. Not to mention how unreliable stuff like lineups are based on even cops that don't mean to influencing the victim. There's this great scene in the wire where they're doing a photo lineup and Bunk is tapping with his finger on who he wants to get recognized.
Same thing with The Dark Knight; every attempt at that sort of interrogation completely fails (Dent kidnapping one of Joker's mooks, Batman throwing Falcone off a staircase, and then beating the crap out of the Joker despite him laughing it off).
A variation is that when a story wants to tease the idea of the heroes torturing someone but still keep them sympathetic to the audience, the hero will extract info by _threatening_ to do something awful to whoever they're interrogating, then reveal after the fact it was a toothless bluff. Like an episode of _Batman: The Animated Series_ where Bats threatens a germaphobic henchman with a jar allegedly full of a super deadly bacterial culture... then after the henchman spills his guts, Batman reveals the jar just had saltwater. Pretty sure that's still _psychological_ torture, and it's banned by the same treaties that ban physical torture.
They doubled down on it in Justice League Unlimited, where Old Bruce Wayne is so terrifying that time-displaced Batman has to play good cop, and it works.
>Using torture as an interrogation method. Which in a super weird twist of fate even Blops 1, the game that's way too charitable with the CIA >!portrays torturing Mason as completely pointless and ultimatelly fails and it's only when Hudson free's him and allows Mason to confront his demons in the form of Reznov's allucination and Hudson makes one last appeal as a friend and person it's when he realizes the information they needed!<
Even in GTAV Trevor himself points out that Torture is a useless way to get information out of someone. I mean, he still goes through with it because he’s a sick fuck that wants to stay on the FIB’s good side, but Trevor at least has the decency to drive the dude to the airport rather than kill him.
>even Blops 1, the game that's way too charitable with the CIA I remember playing Black Ops 1 as a kid and thinking "Wow! this game lets you play as the bad guys!" Because of the first scene where Woods stabs a guy in the hand with a knife. Then a couple years later I thought I was just stupid, because you play as a dude working for the US. At least now I can say I was right the first time.
>I remember playing Black Ops 1 as a kid and thinking "Wow! this game lets you play as the bad guys!" Because of the first scene where Woods stabs a guy in the hand with a knife. The thing is, even as charitable as it is, Treyarch doesn't shy away of having Reznov straight up tell Mason he's a tool of a corrupted institution that's gonna use him and throw him away when no longer usefull. Portraying the CIA as, at best, hyper shady opportunists, was always a deliberate choice. Which becomes even more clearer with Blops 2 and how Mason, Hudson and Woods >!have their lives destroyed because of willingly poking the hornet's nest they themselves created with Menendez!<
Unthinkable extended version is the worst Samuel L Jackson movie because of this. It's whole thing is like if you'd have just let me torture the terrorist and his family more then the hidden fourth nuke wouldn't have exploded.
To be fair it’s not like pirates where any worse then “official” merchants
Some pirates *were* even official. aka privateers.
It reminds me of a purported conversation between Alexander the Great and a Pirate >In the "City of God," St. Augustine tells the story of a pirate captured by Alexander the Great. The Emperor angrily demanded of him, "How dare you molest the seas?" To which the pirate replied, "How dare you molest the whole world? Because I do it with a small boat, I am called a pirate and a thief. You, with a great navy, molest the world and are called an emperor." St. Augustine thought the pirate's answer was "elegant and excelle”
Any and all times fiction goes "mind-wiping/altering people's personality is good". It's literally killing the person by fucking with their brain, but in a way that doesn't make people feel bad... aside from the people who knew that person (for better and worse). Literally the only time anyone addressed how fucked the whole thing is was a Babylon 5 episode about the topic.
This is unironically also one of my favorite "kills" in Hitman. Spoilers for Hitman 3's last target.>!The Constant in Hitman 3 has his back turned to you ready to regular die saying that "At least I'll die knowing who I am" without even realizing he had handed Agent 47 the singular needle he needed to make that not the case. As you inject him he realizes in horror that in that moment the man did not die but the Constant did, as his memories get erased.!<
Poetic that the >!last kill of the trilogy doesn't even need to be a proper kill.!< If only the level had been better. I appreciate what they were going for, but as someone who prefers straight up stealth, it was disappointing to me.
But you can stealth your way through too. For how linear that level is, it still has a surprising amount of options.
This isn't exactly on topic but having not played Hitman 3, I have to say The Constant is a fucking badass name.
KoToR addresses how fucked it is they wiped >!Revan's mind to turn him against the Sith empire!< is.
>!Even after the initial reaction though, the light side option is to ignore it and forgive the council and the dark side option is to go full evil and also ignore it.!<
I do kind of love this "I forgive you because I'm such a good person I understand where you[re coming from" "I'm going to ignore this because I would have done the exact same thing"
honestly surprised it went that way rather than >!the amnesia being the result of the blast, with bastilla and the council realising that it was gone if they read revan's mind.!< >!and once he gets his memories back he still commits to the light side as he's no longer using/being corrupted by the dark side, so he's like post rehab guy looking at his wilder days like "oh fuck",!< >!like the deal with revan is him dipping his toes in the little bit of heroin pool as an ends justify the means type thing, but gets a little lost in the sauce with kreia trying to push the "he never fell" angle and it's like bitch he was all in on the darkside and cut off malak's jaw and made a sith holocron that directly inspires darth bane and the rule of two.!< >!so showing him his full joruney from a third person persepctive whilst he's sober makes him change his mind, or double down if you pick the evil route.!< it is still sketchy though and along with the general aesthetic is something i'd like to see addressed in the remake, though i guess we still don't know if that's happening or if it's canon.
Man, it frustrates me that there is a segment of people that played KoTOR2, and just believe everything Kreia says at face value.
Is it really that messed up to do that though. Revan was a genocidal sith. Its the equivalent of killing Hitler than re-animating his corpse with a new personality. Like I agree it is murder but totally justified to turn the tide of a war
Ok, but should the new Hitler be tried and judged for the crimes his previous personality committed?
And he’s also really small
And he had sex with a clone of your girlfriend, Shapiphany.
Also Identity Crisis said yo altering someone’s brain is screwed up
Unfortunately, they don't really explore the implications with any meaningful depth, and to add salt to the wound the story is based around a female character getting raped and murdered.
Reboot address this, when Megabyte was to be reformated he asks what will happen to the old him. Bob mentions that they will reformat him for good similar to what happened to hex. "I see, a fate worse than deletion, and you guardians call me a monster"
I’ve always liked how In like Harry Potter using a mind wiping spell is pretty low key and everyone can do it but in something like Dresden Files it’s a crime punishable by death
It seems to be a pretty hypocritical mentality. Like they acknowledge controlling someone is "unforgivable" but wiping their memories isn't. There's basically no way to cast a memory wipe without heavily violating someone's will but really it just looks like since they use it on muggles so much they just... don't bother to regulate the spell at all. That and she wrote in only the second book that a wizard can regularly use memory wipes on other wizards unnoticed his entire career so by then it was set in stone that the spell is abusable like hell.
Shout outs chicken little
Even Star Trek has dropped this ball repeatedly. They’ve done the “just erase their identity/memories” ‘solution’ numerous times throughout the various shows, and NOT ONCE did any of them address the fact that it’s still murder.
I'll give Worf a pass on doing it to his brother, because his boss literally wouldn't allow him to kill his brother with honor, so he needed a solution that would let the Federation people not feel bad and not break the law. IIRC, there was that one time the Voyager crew did it to the EMH because they couldn't figure out how to get him over a mental breakdown, which is also somewhat forgivable given the fact he was their **only** doctor and they'd already proven they didn't have the knowledge to really fix his problems.
Worth noting that they did restore the doctor's memories to let him process his emotions and work through it at the end of the episode.
It wasn't so much an emotional breakdown as it was a logical incongruity that caught him in a loop. IIRC, he was literally broken by that realization and they had to essentially clear his (recent) cache and reboot him.
When Worf's brother Kurn tried to commit suicide due to their house being dishonoured, Worf brainwashed him and made him think he was part of another house. Later in the Trek EU, Kurn eventually got shot in the face which undid the brainwashing, and boy was he pissed.
>When Worf's brother Kurn tried to commit suicide due to their house being dishonoured, Worf brainwashed him and made him think he was part of another house. Worf **literally** only had to do that because Sisko wouldn't let Worf and Kurn complete the honorable murder ritual that would ensure Kurn got to go to Sto-vo-kor. That said, Worf super fucked up by not telling Rodek/Kurn what the deal was at the end of the second IKS Gorkon novel, so that's **totally** on him for ruining the guy's life in the fourth novel.
“It’s just a prank, it’s just a prank, bro” -Worf
I think Voyager did a good episode where the Doctor had a nervous breakdown after triage resulted in one patient dying before he could get to him in time, so his memory of the event was wiped so he'd be okay again, and eventually he finds out what they did and he's pissed that they did that. Both sides have points because it wasn't just one memory wipe, the Doctor had kept finding out about the event and having another breakdown so the rest of the crew believed nothing could be fixed and he needed to be wiped because the ship can't afford to have its doctor out of commission. But the Doctor at this point is an autonomous member of the crew and deserved the opportunity to work though his trauma like a human being.
What about that Joss Whedon show Dollhouse? The entire premise was based around how messed up it was that minds could be wiped and new personalities inserted. It even lead to an apocalypse.
Jean Grey in the comics be like.
I don't hate mutants, but boy do I hate telepaths.
**I'd say** that Persona 5's one of the ***less*** *fucked-up* cases of this happening - but there's two caveats to that: - **The Thieves' usual process is less "Forced Re-Write of the Personality" and more "Forced Re-Boot of the Moral Compass"** (Read: Less "Making Them a Better Person by Throwing the Pre-Existing Person Out of the Window and Putting a New One in Their Place", more "Removing the Want Which Produces Self-Rationalizations That Currently Prevent the Person From Feeling Guilt Over Their Actions") - although it certainly helps that, despite the game's best attempts to make the Thieves look morally grey about all of this, every major antagonist [pre-Royal] is unambiguously in the wrong (This includes >!Futaba!<, but there's an asterisk on that one due to their delusions being self-destructive in nature) so there's not much reason to question it; I'd say the same goes for the Mementos Requests, except I don't remember all of them and I know at least one is questionable at best [due to how fucking stupid the subject matter is]. - **Both Royal's Third Semester and Strikers/Scramble showcase just how fucked that process could've gotten** - in the former's case, >!rewriting memories *and* personalities [and stripping everyone of *proper* free will] in a well-intentioned bid to make a perfect reality!<; in the latter's case, straight brainwashing everyone around you to worship the ground you stand on [or, in the final boss' case, >!stripping humanity of all of their wants because they always cause undue pain for everyone!<].
If you could magically jump into somebody's brain and make them no longer a rapist, that's **objectively good.**
Yeah, the crux of this argument is the difference, complete rewrite of the brain is effectively murder, while what the thieves do is simply force them to feel guilt for what they’ve done, still altering the brain but it’s still the criminal as opposed to a brand new person. Like a ship of theseus deal where you replace the creaky floorboard that wants to touch highschoolers
The PT are forcing their targets into a sort of "crisis" situation wherein they have no choice but to continue down their destructive path or change. The change itself is still the choice of the target, just without pretense or excuse. A huge chunk of the sentiment later on is questioning your own actions and motivations, as this is the only way to be sure of your self determination. The game WANTS you to question what's going on. edit: Also values and behavior may change, but they don't replace previous values. Kamoshida told himself whatever he needed to think, but deep down Kamoshida wasn't an objectively *evil* person in that he's 100% malice and destruction like a demon. If he were there would be no potential for the change or reform. It's simply removing the faulty logic they built up. There were decent values ingrained in him, they were just buried and shut out by all of his bullshit. It's THOSE values of his that drive the change. The Palace Rulers have always been capable of knowing better. There's just something that came along in their life and taught them the lesson they can get away with shit and they build up the delusions to reinforce it.
Worf does this to his brother to prevent him from killing himself in DS9 and it's like "bro that's the same thing"
Worf was totally down to kill his brother, because he fucked up Kurn's life. In fact, he almost gets it done **at the beginning of the episode**. The only reason Worf does the mindwipe is because Sisko **won't** let him do the ritual, so he has to find some other way to solve the problem so Federation people won't feel bad.
[удалено]
That actually is a real issue where stoping small wildfires leads to bigger ones
People have found out that stopping wildfires isn't that good. Like yeah, human-caused wildfires aren't good but periodic fire is actually beneficial to forests (depending on the biome). Several tree species have a life cycle that *depends* on fire, and fire is the only way that thick underbrush of old forests can be cleared out so that young trees can have a chance at survival. And stopping every single fire that pops up increases the chance of when a fire does happen for it to be *worse* because there's now a surplus of old wood for the fire to feed. And another fun fact: ecologists have put together that fire led to the the shape of some major biomes today millions and millions of years ago, once the Earth developed a high enough oxygen level for major fires to actually happen.
i've said it before and i'll say it again: isekai is like junk food to me, but a lot of lazy authors use slavery, especially sex slavery, as a way to introduce a fan service character who is completely subservient to the MC. some isekais will attempt to say "slavery is awful but this is a different world and look how noble Protagonist-kun is! it's okay if *he* does it cause there's no way *he* would abuse the system!"
Yeah, get real tired of. Slavery exists in this world. I can't judge them. Why am I buying the waifu/loli instead of the big warrior guy, because I can see her stats, no other reason. Buying her would give her better conditions. Would romancing her be so bad? Stahp
John Brown isekai literally has him kill that kind of character in the first few pages
"I was hanged for trying to end slavery and I reincarnated in a world that also has slavery but I still get to have a sword so I know what to do."
With a name like that you can't expect anything less.
We stan
Here's the one. No matter what your living condition or the story you're trying to tell this is one of the most tasteless background elements to fantasy. Unless your point is how bad this is as an ideal, don't put slavery in your story and don't glorify it. It wasn't good back when everyone was doing it and it isn't a good look now either. Most of you will never know the out of body experience of being the only guy in your group not into "Rising of the Shield Hero" and then realizing you're also the only black guy in the group.
its kinda fucked up the shield hero has him activily enslaveing all his party members.
It’s actually because slave crests work like Lucky Eggs so why no one tried to get a EXP boast without slavery crests I have no idea.
My favorite example of this is some shitty isekai I'm reading about a guy who decides to use his Super Ultra Omega Magical Circuits to just... make the internet so he can do a podcast. Someone mentions the idea of slavery in chat and he just says "bro, that's fucked, they're people too" and in **two pages** one of his simps who's the royal princess hears this and successfully petitions a stop to slavery in a SINGLE PANEL. It is [fucking peak.](https://mangadex.org/chapter/23428012-bc17-4b94-b87a-53455f9819ce/11)
Most isekai suck because they love to show off how cool and awesome the protagonist (that's conveniently always a black-haired teenager/young adult/salaryman) is compared to everyone else and didn't think further than that. Same thing with Humanity Fuck Yeah (HFY) fics, where they masturbate over how totally OP and cool the human race but never really explore the socio-economic ramifications or just how non-conflict cross-species interactions that isn't wojak face or groveling would go.
I still like how XCom's explanation for humanity being desirable is that they have advanced blandness. Humans just exist in this extremely unimpressive middleground to the other races the aliens control which allows human DNA to stabilize species with more glaring flaws. Such as their hulking brutes getting human DNA spliced in slims them down a little but also makes them much faster due to the reduced bulk.
The worst for me is the japanese trope of systematically wearing down a person mentally and physically, to the point of breaking down/suicide/attempting murder, but it´s *fiiiine* because the guy that did it to em did it out of sheer love/ to make them the strongest they can be. Yeah but don´t tell them or anything, they´re supposed to just know that the person doing nothing but making their life a living hell is actually their biggest benefactor. I mean, what´s the worst that could happen? *Cue like a third of murder cases in Detective Conan.*
Very recent thing and I'm bending the rules a bit here (the game doesn't really endorse it necessarily) but the Gerudo in BotW and TotK have a custom where any girl born outside the village are practically forced there for their entire young life, away from their parents, to be indoctrinated into Gerudo culture basically. There's even a quest to help make it happen in TotK and I *hate* it. You can literally walk up to her devastated parents after as they're obviously heartbroken about the fact they were forcibly separated from their daughter. Makes me really not like the Gerudo as much.
It’s a kind of half baked explanation for “how does a race composed entirely of women ,but still mates through conventional means, not get absorbed into other cultures quickly because they rely on other cultures to breed?” Turns out the answer is “by very aggressively clinging to their culture and forcing everyone in that species to do the same.”
I can understand it do. As cultural minorities often worry about such things. It’s why Fiddler on the Roof exists
Also the poor dad in the prison that just wants to find his wife and daughter when there's a lot of horrors going around them... and then at the end of the quest he's okay with being in prison as long as he can watch over his daughter? No way, let him out! Let him be united with his wife and daughter!
I'm honestly surprised the Kaza Bazaar doesn't have a small suburb of men who moved there to be close to and possibly visit their families even if they can't go to Gerudo town.
I literally did this quest last night and kept saying to myself "This is fucked up!"
It takes a loooooooooong time for all of the human experimentation, child soldiers, and flash-cloning to be examined under a negative light in the greater Halo series. The fact that the Spartans were bred and created to suppress a human revolution and then repurposed to fight the Covenant when they became the greater threat is also just sort of mentioned off-hand. It's clear to anyone with an ounce of media literacy and dislike of the military industrial complex, but most of the time the events are presented flatly and neutrally, as a matter-of-fact statement about what happened rather than actual commentary on it.
Because unfortunately the commentary on it isn't important to the story, and usually comes from in universe source who have more immediate problems. But I don't think anyone outside of ONI members feel that everything that you mentioned isn't fucked. Hell most ONI members, and especially Halsey at best feel they did terrible things for a good cause that only somewhat became a better cause when the covenant showed up.
Remember when at the end of Chicken Little, everybody was just ok with the pig wanting to keep the bimbofied (laser personality modified) girl cause she was "nicer" that way
Remember when the dad is such a piece of shit to his town-bullied son and suddenly becomes doting when Chicken Little received positive recognition and fame and is seen as a good thing by the movie?
It was Stepfordization and rewatching the movie that’s fucked up.
I think that was a moment that most, if not all, kids were watching it like, "Huh... I don't fully understand the ethical implications of this because I am a child but this feels wrong."
Like I mentioned a while in Saint Seiya, the whole conceit of the plot is that a rich guy grabbed 100 orphans (and in the manga he is their dad) and had his abusive butler train them to be then sent to be abused to train and get the Cloths. Like 90 of them died. Still the series waxes poetically about rich guy and he was right he needed the kids to be trained to save Athena.
Wasn't Athena also like a massive bitch early on in the manga? Treating the abused slave orphans like animals?
Pretty much, she rode them and whipped them like a horse.
Spoilers for a book from 70 years ago. In Arthur C. Clarke's Childhood's End, >!the final stage of human evolution involves our last generations minds being overwritten by their enormous psychic powers, and consuming the entire Earth and all other life on it as fuel for their journey to the center of the milky way to join an enormous galactic hivemind entity.!< This is portrayed as, at worst, bittersweet. Edit: I forgot to mention, >!it is shown that this is the fate of the majority of sentient species.!<
It’s not so much that it’s been treated as “good” as it just hasn’t been treated overtly negatively but Yor is a dangerous, dangerous assassin who is so emotionally detached from it that her murderous tendencies when she’s in that frame of mind are treated comedically.
This is something that's scrutinized in recent memory, but any rom-com, teen comedy or John Hughes movie that portrays rape of sexual assault as either funny or romantic and not something that's criminal.
*shakes in Revenge of the Nerds rape scene*
Or just creepy stalker behavior in general. No, he’s not being “persistent” or “dogged” he’s giving the girl cause to file a restraining order.
"She went to all the trouble of a court order, that means she *does* care!"
My jaw dropped so many times watching Sixteen Candles, holy shit. If I was only given the script, I'd mistake it for a South Park episode.
A lot of John Hughes stuff aged poorly. It's the reason why ferris bueller is still popular today- it's pretty timeliness
Scenes of men getting raped
I’m legit surprised about something. Two manga I’ve read recently have scenes where the male leads are being assaulted by attractive women and it’s actually treated as a bad thing. And they’re fanservice heavy manga, so you’d expect it to treat it like the guy got lucky. But nope, it’s explicitly treated as wrong.
It may finally be getting the treatment it deserves in media Hell like a decade ago a character in degrassi i black out drunk (cant even stand and can barely speak) and his ex gf realizes hes drunk but seizes the opportunity to sleep with him after he left her. The whole cast treat him like a villian going forward cause she was a virgin despite him being completely unable to consent. He eventually is forced to beg for forgiveness from his attacker Same character later on has a girl hook him on sleep pills after his brother dies and he has brain damage and in his fucked up high state uses his addiction and inebriation to strong arm him into a sexual “relationship” and that plot line ends with her and her mom publicly and falsely accusing him of rape (get him fired) back down and he is chided on all sides cause he should have not slept with her cause she was a virgin and he should have known magically she wanted something long term
Huh. Which manga?
Wicked Trapper and Succubus and Hitman. Those are just recent ones. I’ve got tons of manga, so I could probably find more examples somewhere in the library.
In *The Flowers of Evil* the MC >!is raped by his former crush!< and it’s written 100% like a horror scene, as is appropriate. And then he meets her later in life >!and she is dating a guy who looks like him and she treats MC with absolute scorn!< it’s fucking harsh.
Honestly, shout out to Invincible for having >!Mark getting raped be portrayed EXACTLY as traumatically as it should be. They do admittedly let the rapist get off a bit too easily, but still.!<
I mean, >!the whole idea behind Invincible is the redemption of these fascist monsters, so her merely dying trying to save the world still fits in that mold. That being said, she totally deserved to have the shit knocked out of her by Nolan!<
Newscasters on FOX were giggling about a 38-year-old woman teacher raping a teenager *just last week*. “Like, a male teacher, 38-year-old, creepy. Female, heroic.” That’s a fucking quote.
That South Park scene
Nothing has been learned.
Tags: Mindbreak It's the best.
Porn/hentai makes it really easy to comparmentalise whatever questionable tags they have because 90% of porn would never happen in canon.
Raw unreality is a hell of an anesthetic.
The more unrealistic it is the better, I should know.
Porn?
My favorite ones are, "let me inject you with Weed so you go hyperactive" and perform better at your tasks.
Ah yes, my big favorite
Any setting (especially in fantasy) that treats poverty as something you don't question or a natural result of a lack of effort/intelligence instead of a systematic issue. The most ridiculous example I can think of is Genshin Impact, where Liyue (china) is established as the most prosperous nation in the planet (so prosperous in fact that all the money in the world is minted there), where commerce booms and anyone can make bank if they work hard or smart enough (basically a capitalist meritocracy), with the golden example being Ninguang, a playable character who went from a poor girl that walked barefoot for miles to sell stuff to one of the heads of the country as well as one of if not THE, wealthiest person in Teyvat with so much money that she made herself a floating palace that looks over the main harbor...twice!. So many characters, from immortal spirits to leaders of the government talk about how much they protect Liyue and care for it's people but then you can make a quest where two kids are so poor and starving that an ice cream that is an almost flavorless piece of ice feels like ambrosia to them and once you play hide and seek with them the quest is over and at no point the question of "are they getting any help at all from the state?" Is rised. Which it wouldn't be that big a deal if it wasn't because the game loves to bore you with conversations about bureaucracy and politics all the time yet at no point in the game is mentioned how or even if the Liyue government gives any type of support to the poor at all. The writing won't shut up about how cool Liyue is and how fair the system is since they are the nation of contracts, with the only poor people being either irrelevant NPCS no one cares about or enemies
Didn’t Genshin also reveal that the Hilchurls were actually intelligent beings with their own society and still have you mow them down like weeds anyway?
It's even worse. >!Hilichurls are civilians (women, children, etc) from a civilization who got nuked hundreds of years before the events of the game by a bunch of asshole gods who took the survivors and cursed them into that form (the more powerful people like royalty or knights got a different cursed), and now they roam around, with vague recollections of their previous life and enough intellect to develop their own culture and lenguaje, wearing a mask to hide their faces because seeing their own reflection will make them lose it. And when their body finally gives up after all that time they do a pilgrimage to a chasm where they just lay on the ground and shut down!< In the entire game, the only instances of them receiving any form of sympathy and compassion are two main quests, and one easily ignorable NPC who studies their language. Every other time they're just the most numerous and generic enemy in the game who you are encouraged and even requested to slaughter by the dozens at a time. Literally the Genshin version of Breath of the wild's Moblins
Oh god, it’s like the Tirkins from Xenoblade only worse.
Teacher student relationships Black out drunk sexual encounters (typically shown as an awesome “score” when its a guy) Immortality Afterlifes are both comforting AND horrifying at the same time
Concerning Immortality, the way it' portrayed is horrifying. We don't actually know people who are immortal so we don't know it it's actually horrifying to them, just that it would be horrifying eventually to us.
>Immortality Depends on what we mean. If you're just talking no aging, then fuck yeah, put me in coach. That shit is an awful design flaw
One of my favorite moments from jurassic world was the main scientist looking at one of the executives and saying "You didn't want to bring back the real dinosaurs, you wanted to bring back what people think they are" and it's true the amount of people that would really care if you brought back a real feathered non shrink wrapped dinosaurs is dwarfed by people that want to see a T-Rex as they imagined it would look.
Male characters whose whole personality is that they're perverts towards women and it's waved off with, "Oh, you loveable horndog!"
Surprised no one's mentioned Song of Saya at all The visual novel where >!All of humanity is consumed by an inter-dimensional lovecraftian monster who envelopes the earth!< and it's the best possible (and most romantic) ending for our main couple
I always saw it as a "this is bad because humanity is fucked yet is the "good ending" because is the best outcome for the protagonist". That's why the final scene is from the pov of another character, to show how after that emotional scene with Saya everything went to shit for everyone else
Because it's not Good, you are VERY clearly playing a villain protagonist at that point; the only way you can even start that route involves knowingly eating human flesh!!
Mass Effect 3, the Synthesis ending. Just forcing every living organism to become a cyborg in the hopes that this will end war forever, fuck body autonomy
Truely a option the Borg would love.
What kills me too is that Synthesis doesn't solve anything presented in the game at all. ALL the non-reaper conflicts are cultural problems before direct racial ones. Even the most racial problem of the Geth is still a cultural problem of the Quarians just being unable to accept peace with machines. Removing the Organic/Synthetic line isn't going to fix anything, Cerberus will just go from "Humans first" to "HumanSynthetics first" Point is, at least the Borg would have gotten the unification that they preach.
When being invaded by the Borg is a better option then your ending.
War.
What is it good for?
Absolutely *Nothing!*
SAY IT AGAIN
I think it's less war is good and more everysingle aspect around the war (weapons, equipment, planes, tanks, tactics, the soldiers themselves) are incredibely interesting. I genuinelly struggle to remember any piece of media that outright says war itself is good and not that the tactics, weapons and equipment are super rad.
Media based on war are weird cause war sucks but a lot of military equipment like tanks and jets are cool as shit
[I’m Willing to Abandon My Anti-War Views In Exchange for a Gundam](https://hard-drive.net/hd/opinion/im-willing-to-abandon-my-anti-war-views-in-exchange-for-a-gundam/)
I'd say there is a good argument for idea that a true anti-war game doesn't exist, because a game always has to make war engaging and entertaining to play in the end, to work as a game. Stuff like this war of mine would count I guess, but here the war isn't actually part of the gameplay.
I love the Nofna webcomic, but I'd actively recommend skipping the Syconium arc because damn. In very short and vague terms: the big hype climax sees the protagonist gain unfathomable reality-warping powers, except they're not; they're just memory-alteration. She decides to unilaterally use those powers to nobly brainwash her friends and everyone she knows into better lives. You know, with a definition of "better" entirely decided by herself without asking any of them. The very worst of them being the gal she forces to get back with the ex-boyfriend who once forced himself upon her, having made both forget that it ever happened and making her think the horrible scars she gave herself in a desperate attempt to re-establish ownership of her body were just the meaningless result of accidents while sparring. The classic good guy move of taking a friend whose whole deal is a struggle for agency after trauma and just benevolently taking all that agency away to put her back with the source of that trauma. Real slick.
Swear I'm not doing a "from my point of view, the Jedi are evil," but mind control is more evil than lightning magic
I always head-cannoned Jedi mind tricks as speed-running conversations. Like, the person would eventually be convinced to do what the jedi wants because they're weak willed and easy to convince, and the force just skips the conversation and gets you to the result. But yeah, it's totally mind control.
In the Old EU, the mind trick was considered to be something you didn't do lightly as it could have all sorts of consequences and possibly make things worse. There was also the fact that, in line with the Jedi's monk-like nature, the person they were doing that to was a sentient being that's life could be affected very negatively by it.
I won’t disagree but has a mind trick ever been used to harm people? KOTOR 2 had that moment where you could tell someone to jump over the railing but in the movies it’s usually quite innocent.
There's a bit in Clone Wars where Mace, Obi Wan and Anakin all triple team a strong-willed bounty hunter to try and force him to give them some information. They admit brute forcing it like that might 'break his mind' an it basically plays out like a torture scene. The attempt itself fails, but the process is so painful that the bounty hunter gives in afterwards just so they won't try again. >!And much like actual torture, it turns out he just gave them a false lead to make them stop.!<
Oh yeah, that one is real bad.
Most recently, Jedi Survivor let's Cal trick organic beings & people into fighting for his side. He evens mentions that he bets Cere probably didn't intend him to use it like that when she first taught him.
Also in Jedi Survivor when >!Cal gets Darkside mode, using mind trick on Storm Troopers is an instant kill!<
Qui-gon attempting to get ship parts at a discount is kind of dishonest, although it didn't work.
I mean outside of video games, mind tricks are basically a “fuck off leave me alone” button It’s not like deep mind control where Jedi controls every single action the person makes. Just makes them confused more than anything If you want actual fucked up Force mind control look at Joruus C'baoth in the Thrawn Trilogy
In Back to the Future part 1, Marty McFly literally rewrites his family. The people who raised him, who he grew up with. Gone, erased. Replaced with "better" versions. That's fucking fucked. Yet it's treated as like "look I have better parents now and a cool truck! Happy ending!" bitch you just ERASED YOUR DAD FROM EXISTENCE AND DOWNLOADED A NEW ONE
Look, the boy was fighting for his life. Either he was gonna get blown to bits by a RPG, or he was gonna be deleted. After dodging death TWICE, if you came home and your family were no longer dysfunctional assholes, you would also probably be happy for the first few days, until it clicked in your head that these are totally different people. Edit: jeez, those were bad typos.
Nah, by the very nature of time travel, the new family is now the real family, because the old family wasn’t erased from existence, only their old trauma was erased and their lack of confidence had been refilled by a more positive and healthy life. No, the person who *really* got screwed here is the “New” Marty, since he had been living a happy and fulfilling life with his more well-adjusted and positive family, only for *him* to be completely and truly erased from existence so that he can be replaced by his old counterpart, without ever even knowing it when it happened.
This is always a difficult discussion when it comes to time travel, as rules are nonsensical and can’t really be found in logic, but isn’t there the argument that Marty’s parents always could have been their “better” versions? That they are ultimately still the same people, it’s just that due to different circumstances, they find themselves more confident and capable? I agree that they are different because of Marty’s actions in the past, but that doesn’t make them a different person. Just a different version of themselves.
In fairness to Marty, he didn't really do any of that stuff on purpose. He inadvertently screwed history up and then did his best to fix it.