I’m joking with the meme, but it’s an interesting how plot armor unintentionally places value on people’s lives in fiction.
It’s telling that censorship laws decide who it is and isn’t acceptable to kill. Just thinking about violence against sentient robots and how that’s normalized in things like Samurai Jack.
Like we know the robot has thoughts and feelings, like they’ll try to run to save themselves or plead for mercy, but a character can still heroic after essentially killing a non-human who’s acting like how we understand humans.
I feel like there’s something dangerous in how easily we can depict appropriate targets of violence. Not just robots, but anybody deemed as less than human are allowed to be more put at risk.
Unnamed people are killed in superhero fights all the time. But unless they are of a class of characters like protagonists, they are collateral damage at best.
I think Plot Armor as a trope needs more class consciousness and awareness around how deciding who gets to be protected is often an unconscious political belief.
What about you though? Any tropes in media you’d like to see explored more or written with a leftist understanding?
Before I knew what The Absolute was, the goblin woman in the cage had my sympathy and I sincerely wanted to find out what she was talking about and set her free because leaving her in there to be inevitably killed just seemed pointlessly cruel.
I’m not saying The Absolute had to be some wholesome goblin leftist revolutionary front that would overthrow the rich assholes of Waterdeep or something, but the single note “these are ugly bad people that do bad things” messaging was really, really lazy.
Pathfinder goblins have a lot more nuance even while still being generally unruly and seen in an ungenerous light.
Wild that BG3 literally removed alignments and still made 99.9% of golbins evil
The game was generally good but the setting presented still has some pretty sus takes and messaging.
I never run “official” campaign settings and never have because I’ve always found Forgotten Realms pretty sus and sort of designed around some shitty old ideology with a lot of inertia and status quo maintenance mechanisms built right in.
I’ve even moved on to Pathfinder for that reason. Fuck WOTC and its every few years attempts to force worse licensing agreements on everyone else.
gang
What’s worse is that if you do free Sazza and bring her to Minthara, she immediately betrays you and encourages Minthara to kill you instead of rewarding you for freeing her and letting her report where the Grove is, and she gets fed to the spiders.
Because goblins born evil according to Gygax all the way back in the 70s and pretty much every representative in the modern game reinforces that but at least every single party member may be bisexually horny for you so progress I guess.
If they really wanted progress they should have let us bone some green shortstacks instead of making every goblin take the volcel oath