I also dislike when the underdog genuinly starts off as an underdog and is just given a cheat code which is played off as “hard work and determination”.
Like the main character of My Hero Academia. A person born without super powers born in a world full of super heroes. You get excited at how he will overcome his limitations… and the answer to that is be given the strongest power in that world and get even more super powers on top of that.
It is especially annoying how the surrounding characters act like it isn’t a cheat code.
Funny thing is in that universe there is a character called Lemillion who had powers with drawbacks and had to learn to take advantage of them. A true underdog making the most of the cards he was dealth with. He should have been the MC of the show.
Spoken like a true nighteye
Mind you I am not saying Lemillion should have been given one for all. Just see that he should have been the main character. One for all could be a mcguffin for the heroes to keep out of the hands of the villains instead of using it like a cheat code.
This central idea is why I hate dune.
Having a so called prophesied savior capable of insane things coming from a distant royal family of some space empire is too stupid to believe in.
You can’t be both the underdog and the king at the same time, especially when your own supporters treat themselves as expendable.
Wasnt he like a test tube baby bred specifically to be the Messiah tho.
The tail end of a selective breeding program, but yes. The Bene Gesserit were (according to some internal hypotheses) belived to have been manipulated to expect the outcome later down the line, featuring an Atraides–Harkonnen child. But they were wrong.
Have you ever actually read it? The prophecies were deliberately spread over the universe by the Bene Gesserit. The department that does that is called the Missionaria Protectiva, they do that all over the universe so their members can manipulate the locals to be safe wherever they end up. This isn’t supposed to glorify those prophecies, it’s demystifying them to the point where religion as a whole is showcased as a mere tool to control the masses in later books. It’s supposed to criticise the thing you’re criticising.
OP is why we can’t have nice things. Because people will ignore things that should be obvious. So we’re left with everything softball pitched to the lowest common denominator
You can’t be both the underdog and the king at the same time
So, you hate the New Testament, too?
I mean, that’s the point of Dune? The ‘prophesies’ aren’t real, they’re seeded by the Bene Gesserit, the same group that spent millennia breeding the ‘savior’. And, he’s not meant to really be a savior, but their catspaw.
But also, he’s definitely not actually a savior, on account of all the death he brings. It’s complicated, but overall a deconstruction of white savior narratives and similar stories.
This captures why I don’t enjoy Harry Potter (in addition to JKR being a shitter)
Naruto in a nutshell
This, or the humble royalty, is most fictional hero storylines. I unironically believe capitalism uses these tropes to condition the people into believing feudalism, authoritarianism, and genetic divinity are justifiable.
The endless story of justification is powerless in the face of time, as time reduces all individuals, groups, bloodlines and ideologies to memory, and then to total obliteration.
Maybe we could spend less time justifying being shit to each other, as it is wholly without lasting merit, and - instead - create a world based on human decency. That won’t last, either, but at least it would be moral.
How bout something in reverse? In Tales of the Abyss, the protag is set up to be someone special born in royal family, but turn out he’s just a clone of an actual royal person and he have to learn to fight and accept this conflicting feeling for the rest of the game
There was something in that game that made it insufferable to me, but I don’t remember what it was. Everytime I picked it up I would play for 5 or 10 minutes and put it down again, until I eventually quit it.
It’s not helping the game is long. If you’re interested in anime they make an adaptation as well, you should check it out.
Can confirm, am poo person.
That looks like Myne reading it which makes it even funnier.
Myne needs no special bloodline! Just near death merging of personalities and Ferdinand accidentally doing the magical equivalent of sex with minors.
Theophilia? Sexually attracted to… gods?
“… be more afraid.”
I’m a theophile
Allah? More like allahp mah bussy, am I right?
Sowwy daddy, I’ve been naughty :3
Allah is actually an offensive word to other gods. You see, in Arabic, “ilah” is the word for a god. While “al” means “the one and only”. So Al-ilah, or Allah, is a term for a god that explicitly denies the existence of other gods. As a theophile, I believe all gods are beautiful, and refuse to stand for an insult against 99% of the gods.
How about this story about a young English boy that gets bullied by the poo people, until he finds out he is actually super special. And then he fights the super specials that want society to be structured around birthright, because he has a special born fate to stop them. All while the super specials have used their amazing magical powers, able to literally mold reality to their whims, to create their own version of liberal capitalism.
And after all that our bloke decides to become a copper.
That can be attributed to X-men and Harry Potter
But I’m sure there are more
In the fanfic sequel the poo people are kept addicted on magic-suppressing opioids and mind-dulling cigarettes provided by the Special owned industrial pharmaceutical companies. It’s been this way so long
Eveyone knows people who don’t smoke can’t be trusted. The temple priests say so every Sunday service.
Captain Picard drops by, breaks the opioid machine, peaces out.
But not before spending an hour debating the ethics of doing so, as is tradition.
Modern efficiency has streamlined it to around forty minutes.
Wait, it’s all just Arthurian legend? 🌍👨🚀🔫👨🚀
It’s all just the new testament. Before you fuck with poor people and nail them to a cross, make sure they aren’t just slumming it, and actually have a very powerful father.
I liked this story better the first time, when it was called Moses
No, no, you see, because she grew up as a Poo Person she now understand the world from their point and realizes how much they’ve been abused, so she pledges to lead and create a new society because it all turns out to have been a big misunderstanding. Then Poo People learn magitek and we get a sequel with the spin that now they are the oppressors.
Star wars a new hope started out with Luke as an everyman. But since then it’s all become about the bloodline. Rise of Skywalker is especially bad, tearing down the anyone can be special and saying you can only be special because of your bloodline.
A new hope started with blood line. It was established out of the gate that Luke’s father was a Jedi knight and a good friend of Obi Wan.
Force Awakens and Last Jedi seemed to go in the direction that Rey and Snoke are unrelated to previous blood lines, but nope, it’s all Palpatine.
Somehow Pal… Ah fuck it, buy this robot plushie!
The issue with the Star Wars story is that it can’t end. This means Luke cannot have been very effective, because the same issues have to repeat historically to promote an endless cycle of protagonists and antagonists and battles that relate to the previous fan-favourites (because nostalgia sells).
Therefore Luke must simultaneously be an awesome hero, and also just some loser that didn’t really do anything that worked.
This gets to the fact that all stories are lies. No one lives happily ever after, for we all die. No one is strong and wins, because strength, weakness, winning and losing are just perceptions that are eventually erased from time.
When you start to intuit that human psychology heavily based on such soporific narrative, you start to understand how people can be so stupid, both individually and collectively.
That seems a little glib to me. Not all stories are lies, not all stories have happy endings, some victors are known now thousands of years after their death. On a cosmic timescale I suppose that, trivially, nothing matters - but, conversely, the cosmic timescale is so vast that it doesn’t matter to us…
Also I couldn’t really parse what you were saying in your second paragraph so I’m gonna leave that there
but, conversely, the cosmic timescale is so vast that it doesn’t matter to us…
I agree, stories only matter because we lack objectivity.
I’m not sure that anything can objectively be said to ‘matter’. So, yeah, I guess? Things only matter to us because we.care about them, sure…
I think legends handled it okay, that the battle of yavin was the tipping point, but the empire still had remnants that needed to be countered by the New Republic. And the New Republic has its own problems, but faces an entirely different threat than the empire too.
Whereas with the new movies, they just hit the reset button back to episode four, rather than developing on the trajectory in interesting ways, which would have given Luke’s actions and the original trilogy more weight.
The point of a successful Disney media franchise is not to provide nuance and provoke thought, but instead to sell merch for profit.
As if Lucas didn’t create star wars for that sole purpose.
Homie was a film school nerd who took a gamble that paid off. People that ONLY want to make money don’t take such huge risks or put so much pretentious thought into pulp. He made it to make a ton of money because it literally couldn’t happen any other way. How else do you get rich people to invest that much money?
Lucas capitalized on his success… anyone who grew up with 80s cartoons specifically designed to sell toys to kids can tell the difference between the two.
Well at least until Return of the Jedi…
… and did so without examining why the Republic fell in the first place, or how the Rebellion could fall to the same cyclical forces. Which is the sort of thing The Last Jedi kinda hinted at? That movie was an anarchist deconstruction fanfic that somehow got filmed as a major motion picture.
They tried to fix it in the last Jedi, but the fans had too much of a tantrum.
Yeah, because just pretending the previous movie didn’t happen is also a shitty solution.
Which movie are you referencing? Last Jedi, or Rise of Skywalker? I get it for the latter and mostly don’t get it for the former.
The Last Jedi didn’t do that.
#9 did that.
That was like the only thing I really liked in Last Jedi. Her being completely a nobody made me look upon it more favorably when I watched it, because I assumed they’d make her related and was so impressed they didnt.
