Antagonist: If my ideology is enacted, everything will be better!
Liberal Protagonists: oh fuck how will we deal with this, I have no arguments to defend the status quo
Antagonist: just kidding, all that ideology was a trick, I'm Just Evil™
And then they can kill him without thinking about anything at all. Happens all the time.
Off the top of my head is legend of korra (I know im 2 weeks late for that discourse) the Black Panther movie, and even Pokemon Black/White have the same themes
To be fair, sometimes it goes:
Antagonist: My ideology is a fantasy version of eugenics!
Liberal Protagonists: oh fuck how will we deal with this, I have no arguments.
Then the protagonist kills the antagonist and a million nerds on the internet talk for years about how the antagonist was actually right.
the reason endgame was such a letdown for me is because i was actually hoping they'd show thanos the error of his ways lmao
In the final battle he's like "I guess you guys didnt appreciate what I did for you, guess I'll just destroy 100% of the world then
I liked the fan theory that the Death Stars were really meant to defend against overpowerful alien invaders from another galaxy that Palpatine sensed would come in the future. Otherwise the Death Stars seem like unnecessary overkill to deal with the internal threats to the Empire. (So Palpatine was still evil, but he at least had a motivation to acquire power and run an empire.) Then the sequel movies could have been about an entirely new enemy. ...But instead they decided to create nothing new and recycle the old shit.
The Joker in dark knight is doing anarchy when he makes the billionaire decide which ferry full of people to save.
Imagine thinking Killmonger did something wrong. Guy wanted arm black revolutionaries around the world with scifi weapons to spur them to revolution; sounds pretty based to me.
Yeah but then they made him mean and mention something about a wakandan empire or some shit to justify it
Anarchism in Mission impossible:
"The world is ruled by evil powerful people, so we are going to murder millions of innocent poor people in India"
Liberalism is about the status quo, at all costs.
I remember reading somewhere that it was tricky to write science fiction in the Soviet Union because the assumption was that they were eventually going to achieve communism, and that all alien civilizations would inevitably be communist, so you had to think outside the box to come up with interesting conflicts. Probably less of a problem from thje 60s on, if it ever was.
Check out archeologies of the future by frederic Jameson, it chronicles the difficulties and different conceptions of how to write utopian science fiction.
There's a particularly annoying strain of this in Japanese fiction (not just animanga/games, I consume a lot of detective fiction), where it's like
Antagonist: I and others have suffered grave injustices under the system
Protagonist: I'm so sorry. I see you and hear you. I promise to do better as an individual. changes absolutely nothing about the system
Did the Incredibles ever ideologically combat that kid who wanted everyone to have super powers so no one would be super? Did they just beat the breaks off of him instead?
They just killed him because objectivism good, egalitarian (technocracy tho) bad
And in the sequel, it's the same thing but also confronting public reliance on supers is not worth addressing because the person bringing up the argument is secretly evil dun dun dunnnnnn
I think a lot of the time it goes like
Antagonist: If my ideology is enacted, everything will be better!
Protagonist: oh fuck how will we deal with this, I have no arguments to defend the status quo
Antagonist: And also, for some reason, I'm going to murder a bunch of innocent people in a way that doesn't even really further my objectives
Protagonist: Killing people is bad! I will strike you down
Both Incredibles movies
Except the good guys are also objectivists and they're just better than you and that's why they can save the world
I enjoyed The Incredibles, but the politics are straight-up reactionary. Its about PC culture oppressing the superior people out of jealousy
The objectivism comes in with the narrative of the first film pushing the line that only people who are supers should be involved in saving people because they are simply better humans and thus have that right, while having (slightly) egalitarian aims like using technology to enhance and empower regular people and allowing them to save themselves (instead of relying on those who are better than them to be their saviors). They have the right to act how they wish, being better gives them more liberties (to save or not save) than regular people.
The second film presents a counter argument to this idea by saying that superheros have made people complacent and reliant (perhaps reducing their individual rights that objectivists talk about), but that argument is then countered by the filmmakers just repeating the line from the first movie, that it's because they're supers, they're better they deserve to be the ones to act with total authority.
Or something like that, reading objectivist writing smoothes my brain
But it IS an accurate critique of Amon and Unalaq though (the weaker seasons). Spoilers follow. Korra had zero response to Equalist arguments except force. It was their violent tactics and the fraud at the center of the movement that are the only justification to bring them down. Unalaq similarly had a (theocratic?) ideology that Korra has no answer to, and it's only Unalaq's corruption and willingness to kill his family members that shows him to be the bad guy.
The fact that Korra learns from both Zaheer and Kuvira (and they learn in turn) is what makes the last two seasons great.
However, Kuvira is not an ethnonationalist - she's an authoritarian irredentist/imperialist (maybe she'd have stopped after conquering Republic City, but maybe that was a lie too and she'd just keep going). She's not doing ethnic purges and accepts all willing supporters, e.g. Water Tribe's Varrick.
I mean, Pokemon Black/White isn't technically western, but there's a whole other discussion to be had of America's post-war influence on Japan. Otherwise good post.
