• Dagwood222@lemm.ee
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    5 months ago

    Namor has entered the chat.

    There were a few anti-pollution/eco-terrorist stories long ago. Eventually it became impossible to have a Sea Lord who wasn’t justified in wanting to kill all the surface dwellers.

  • ceenote@lemmy.world
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    5 months ago

    Isn’t Magneto more in the “genocide you before you genocide us” camp? Understandable, but hardly heroic.

    • Something Burger 🍔@jlai.lu
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      5 months ago

      Xavier is in the “peace and no one gets genocided” camp, and still gets genocided. Magneto is right and is acting in self-defense.

      • VindictiveJudge@lemmy.world
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        5 months ago

        Magneto also has a tendency to shoot first and target civilians, including civilians sympathetic to his cause. He’s a sympathetic figure and he has a point, but he’s only a hero half the time for a reason.

        • Something Burger 🍔@jlai.lu
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          5 months ago

          Well, yeah, he’s on the right side, so writers have to make him do objectively unforgivable things for seemingly no reason in order to ensure the reader doesn’t sympathize with someone challenging the status quo.

    • thedirtyknapkin@lemmy.world
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      5 months ago

      yeah, it’s more a Malcolm x vs Martin luther King thing. who’s right and who’s wrong is really a spiritual opinion.

      • ryathal@sh.itjust.works
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        5 months ago

        It depends on the writer and version. Magneto ranges from mutant Hitler to Malcolm X. There are several arcs where he is clearly wrong.

        • ThatWeirdGuy1001@lemmy.world
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          5 months ago

          Yeah but they at least generally write his mutant Hitler stories sympathetically.

          He already watched the world try to exterminate his people once. He’s gonna be a bit trigger happy if he notices it happening again in even the slightest degree.

      • VindictiveJudge@lemmy.world
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        5 months ago

        His comics counterpart didn’t even have good intentions of any kind. He just wanted to sleep with Death and thought that being the biggest mass murderer in history would be a turn on for her.

    • djsoren19@yiffit.net
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      5 months ago

      Movie Thanos or Comics Thanos?

      Comics Thanos is a genuinely unhinged psychopath who really wanted to impress the manifestation of Death. Outside of some opposite day shenanigans and some really wild arcs, he’s never gonna be a hero.

      Movie Thanos is an edgelord, and will be remembered as a hero by edgelords and as an edgy idiot by everyone else because his solution is terrible. The universe would inevitably repopulate, inequality would spread again. There’s very little difference between eliminating 50% of the population and increasing total resources by 50% when you have the power of infinity.

      • GladiusB@lemmy.world
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        5 months ago

        Movie Thanos has one of the most relevant back stories in all of action films. He saw the universe as a burden amongst itself and with his order he can save it from itself. Most people relate to this. Even consider it a hero’s journey in many games. But what his actions are with this perspective in mind is what makes him a villain. And one of the reasons I think he is up there with Darth Vader or The Joker. A good villain makes the heroes win even better.

    • devfuuu@lemmy.world
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      5 months ago

      Always has been. Earth healed a fuckton the time half population was gone. Then double the population again out of nowhere and expect the planet to be able to cope with it. Avengers made things a lot worse.

      • Jomega@lemmy.world
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        5 months ago

        He could of just doubled the resources or rewritten reality so that they were no longer required. I was disappointed that neither movie even attempted to address this.

        • ramble81@lemm.ee
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          5 months ago

          That’s what always bothered me. I know the stones are limited to the user, but he could have easily expanded his views and understanding using the stones and then literally rewrite fucking reality to ensure no one is without want.

        • Buddahriffic@lemmy.world
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          5 months ago

          It gets referred to in one of the what if episodes (the one where Black Panther becomes Star Lord iirc). It was humorous but didn’t really address it strongly.

      • Sconrad122@lemmy.world
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        5 months ago

        He didn’t go far enough. World population doubling time is down to 50ish years. Thanos probably took 50 years to formulate, prep, and execute his plan, during which time the population had doubled and he was just returning to status quo. It’s like what is happening to the $15 minimum wage movement with inflation

  • thisbenzingring@lemmy.sdf.org
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    5 months ago

    Venom might have been a bad guy but he always had a moral code and a reason for his behavior. When Carnage was born, Venom was charged and had to help Spiderman stop him. Venom has always been a wildcard. A Ying Yang.

  • Yeller_king@reddthat.com
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    5 months ago

    My take is that Magneto and Xavier are both necessary. That one can’t accomplish anything without the existence of the other.

    • OneOrTheOtherDontAskMe@lemmy.world
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      5 months ago

      There must be people with great ideals, someone who will choose the high road as often as possible. Just as there must be people who know that the system cannot change from within, that it must be torn apart and began anew.

      I like the concept, minus the real life examples of Magneto-minded dictators and violent revolutionaries. I think having that balance gives the average person, the reader, the opportunity to see the places where an idealist fails and where an extremist goes too far and how to walk a path closer to the middle.

  • LavenderDay3544@lemmy.world
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    5 months ago

    You can’t just have a conversation about villains who were rewritten into heroes without mentioning the Punisher. A lot of people forget that he started out as an antagonist for Spider-Man.

      • BossDj@lemm.ee
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        5 months ago

        I used to think nuance was needed for realism to help me believe it. But the real villains of the world are just pure absolute evil sick bastards that want to take everything for themselves just for the sake of it.

        MAYBE there’s some nuance of needing to feel like winners or something. Live up to their father’s name. But I have zero pity for them. Fuck that narcissist rapist Donald Trump.

        • merc@sh.itjust.works
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          5 months ago

          The difference is that narcissist, rapist Donald Trump still thinks of himself as a good guy. OG Magneto was even more two-dimensional than that. I mean, Stan Lee and Jack Kirby gave his group the name “Brotherhood of Evil Mutants”.

      • lowleveldata@programming.dev
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        5 months ago

        Is it? Aliens are evil for no real reasons (doesn’t need one) and they are cool as fuck. Was there a reason for Venom to be evil at the beginning?

        • Couldbealeotard@lemmy.world
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          5 months ago

          Aliens aren’t evil. They are animals that are being territorial and procreating.

          Edit: assuming we are taking about the Alien franchise of aliens.

          • lowleveldata@programming.dev
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            5 months ago

            If they procreate on the cost of our lives then they are pretty evil (to us). I don’t see how being animals have anything to do with this. Humans are animals too.

        • Kusimulkku@lemm.ee
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          5 months ago

          Idk if aliens are evil or if they’re just doing natural xenomorp things. A wolf isn’t evil for hunting prey.

    • partial_accumen@lemmy.world
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      5 months ago

      We do have good old fashioned evil villains. They’re us.

      We’re the ones destroying the world, killing wildlife, and enslaving the innocent. We’re not doing it with a space aged death ray, but by emitting carbon where we don’t need. We’re not putting chains on the people living down the block and selling them into slavery, but we are supporting slavery when we buy T-shirts made of cotton from Xinjiang whose culture and religion are slowing being erased.

      Classic comic book villains look pretty shallow and vanilla when you learn what we’re doing thats far worse.