The Woke Villain - Perhaps most notable of these are the Misanthropic Malthusians who deeply believe that there are too many damned people and that they are an ecological scourge (Kingsman, Avengers Infinity War) and are performing the themes of Extinction Rebellion in an action drama. In addition you have the Return of the Repressed, like Killmonger who grew up abandoned in South Central LA and is a victim of American racism and colonization, etc.
No Country for White Men - At the other end of the villain spectrum, as the shoreline of acceptable villains shrinks (Hey, that's an Arab villain! Are trying promote hate crimes against Muslims? That's racist!), we find that it's just easier to make a white man the villain. He can be conveniently sexist. He can be conveniently racist. He can be conveniently fascist. In fact, he will prove to be at least one of these things, but the general vibe of being implicated in "White Supremacy" is afloat in these narratives. Even in Star Wars, we discover that the Empire is, in fact, a White Supremacist organization (!!!), an idea which makes absolutely no sense in a galaxy with countless alternative species (e.g., "whiteness" is an intraspecies marker, where Star Wars is interspecies, and the only real bigotry we saw before Kathleen took over was against droids).
These villains express extremes which betray a "golden mean," an ideological center which is to be morally preferred as the virtue to the vices of our villains. Hey, Republicans are evil, but uh... ...let's not get too crazy, OK? It is OK displace the whiteness we don't like, but not really the "whiteness" (at least, that is what people have taken to calling the Enlightenment project and democratic values and scientific and technological accomplishments, so let's just roll with it) itself, so the audience is told to leave the machinery and deep ideology of the status quo alone (e.g., capitalism, party politics, consumerism, technocratic problem-solving, technological optimism). Basically, pour out the bad old wine, but keep the bottle. In this bottle, of course, the same old patterns are simply rebranded and billionaires are getting richer, and mass marketing is still a method of social control, and the same old institutions remain largely unchanged (e.g., we still imprison more of our population in America than any other nation in the world).
Pay attention to your villains, for they betray your writer's politics, the politics of Hollywood, and on some occasions, the politics of the real-world.
No Country for White Men - At the other end of the villain spectrum, as the shoreline of acceptable villains shrinks (Hey, that's an Arab villain! Are trying promote hate crimes against Muslims? That's racist!), we find that it's just easier to make a white man the villain. He can be conveniently sexist. He can be conveniently racist. He can be conveniently fascist. In fact, he will prove to be at least one of these things, but the general vibe of being implicated in "White Supremacy" is afloat in these narratives. Even in Star Wars, we discover that the Empire is, in fact, a White Supremacist organization (!!!), an idea which makes absolutely no sense in a galaxy with countless alternative species (e.g., "whiteness" is an intraspecies marker, where Star Wars is interspecies, and the only real bigotry we saw before Kathleen took over was against droids).
These villains express extremes which betray a "golden mean," an ideological center which is to be morally preferred as the virtue to the vices of our villains. Hey, Republicans are evil, but uh... ...let's not get too crazy, OK? It is OK displace the whiteness we don't like, but not really the "whiteness" (at least, that is what people have taken to calling the Enlightenment project and democratic values and scientific and technological accomplishments, so let's just roll with it) itself, so the audience is told to leave the machinery and deep ideology of the status quo alone (e.g., capitalism, party politics, consumerism, technocratic problem-solving, technological optimism). Basically, pour out the bad old wine, but keep the bottle. In this bottle, of course, the same old patterns are simply rebranded and billionaires are getting richer, and mass marketing is still a method of social control, and the same old institutions remain largely unchanged (e.g., we still imprison more of our population in America than any other nation in the world).
Pay attention to your villains, for they betray your writer's politics, the politics of Hollywood, and on some occasions, the politics of the real-world.
Last edited by Corax; 11-14-21 at 08:20 PM.