Homophobia: Murder, corrective rape, conversion therapy, being disowned, losing your job, getting denied housing, harassment, etc
“Heterophobia”: being called a “straighty” on the internet.
Racism: Murder, police brutality, corrupt criminal justice system, not being hired for a job you’re qualified to do, denied housing, racial profiling, hate crimes, etc
“Reverse Racism”: being called a “whitey” on the internet.
Transphobia: Murder, police brutality, being disowned, being kept out of gendered spaces you belong in, getting denied housing, losing your job or not being hired, etc
Okay, but Jack Noir is THE perfect cartoon villain, and cartoon villains are hard to do well.
-Hilarious:
Goes on a murderous rampage because he doesn’t want to wear a silly outfit, and because he’s bored. Gets off on dog magazines. Which is funny because later he actually becomes a dog. Murderous impulses prevent him from escaping prison. Don’t tell me that didn’t have you laughing your ass off.
But also Terrifying: Ho. Ly. Fuck.
With the body horror chimera thing goin on and the fact he pops out of nowhere and Then he gets the pool ball eyes and Holy Actual living fuck. Bout wet my pants when he killed bro. What good is a villain if they can’t get your heart pounding a little?
-Not exactly a complex well rounded human being-(doesn’t really need to be since we understand he’s supposed to be like a video game NPC)–But multifaceted he can hold his own in comedic, dramatic, and action scenes. And he can do them in quick succession. Hates Queens.
Loves Jade, and Licorice Scotty dogs, and Murder.
-But most importantly-Narratively logical. His motivations are silly, and irrational, but he still HAS very clear motivations we can some up in one or two sentences.
He kills everything in sight because being omnipotent is boring. He chases after the Felt because it’s his town and his turf. He Stabs the guard because we’ve establish over and over again that he kind of is addicted to bloodshed. There’s never any confusion as to what his motivations are. And if there is, it is perfectly obvious a mystery is being set up and we’re not SUPPOSED to know, not because the author doesn’t know. This makes him scarier because we know that he’s actually driven to do evil deeds. And it makes him funnier too because watching strange and quirky characters be themselves in awkward situations is one of the oldest forms of comedy there is.
But seriosuly though, how many cartoon villains, or villains outside cartoon genres, have you seen who only ever want one thing, only ever function in one type of scene?
How many Bond villains are called ingenious criminal masterminds and yet they do the most stupid things imaginable, because their narrative has no logic to it? And how many villains can be BOTH funny AND scary? Not many?
One thing that makes Steve Trevor work in Wonder Woman is that they manage to hit the “Tries and fails to be protective” angle, but without any of the normal sexism you see in that trope.
It’s not “No honey, this is a job for a MAN, You can’t do that!” it’s “Diana! Stop! No! PEOPLE DIE WHEN THEY DO THAT! You can’t do that! I CAN’T DO THAT! NOBODY CAN DO THAT…Except You, apparently”
Yes! Exactly! And not only that but there’s no wounded pride scene where he goes like “How could she do that?”, “Why didn’t you tell me you could do that?” blah blah blah. Instead, he’s more like “Woah, can you show me more?” and “Hey guys, you know that thing we haven’t been able to do? SHE’S DOING THE THING! LET’S GO!”
Your professor will not be happy with you if he says the Stanford Prison Experiment shows human nature and you say it shows the nature of white middle class college-aged boys.
Like he will not be happy at all.
For real though. That experiment. Scary shit.
This reminds me of a discussion that I read once which said Lord of the Flies would have turned out a hell of a lot differently if it was a private school of young girls (who are expected to be responsible and selfless instead), or a public school where the children weren’t all from an inherently entitled, emotionally stunted social class (studies have shown that people in lower socioeconomic classes show more compassion for others).
Or that the same premise with children raised in a different culture than the toxic and opressive British Empire and it’s emphasis on social hierarchy and personal wealth and status.
And that what we perceive as the unchangable truth deep inside humanity because of things like Lord of the Flies and the Stanford Prison Experiment, is just the base truths about what happens when you remove any accountabilty controlling one social group with an overwhelming sense of entitlement and an inability to feel compassion.
I will always reblog this.
I just wanna say that the Lord of the Flies was explicitly written about high-class private school boys to make this exact point. Golding wrote Lord of the Flies partially to refute an earlier novel about this same subject: The Coral Island by
R.M. Ballantyne. Golding thought it was absolutely absurd that a bunch of privileged little shits would set up some sort of utopia, so his book shows them NOT doing that.
This is also generally true about most psychological experiments.
There’s an experiment called “The Ultimatum Game”. It goes something like this.
Subject A is given an amount of money (Say, $100).
Subject A must offer Subject B some percentage of that money.
If Subject B accepts Subject A’s offer, both get the agreed upon amount of money. If Subject B refuses, no one gets any money.
The most common result was believed to be that people favored 50/50 splits. Anything too low was rejected; people wanted fairness. This was believed to be universal.
And then a researcher went to Peru to do the experiment with members of the indigenous Machiguenga population, and was baffled to find that the results were totally different.
Because, to the Machiguenga, refusing any amount of free money (even an unfair amount) was considered crazy.
So the researcher took his work on the road (to 14 other ‘small scale’ societies and tribes) , and to his shock found the results varied wildly depending on where the test was done.
In fact, the “universal” result? Was an outlier.
And that’s the problem. 96% percent of test subjects for psychological research come from 12% of the population. Stuff that we consider to be universal facts of human nature… even things like optical illusions, just… aren’t.
You can read an article about it here. But the crux of it is that psychology is plagued with confirmation bias, and people are shaped more by their environment than we realize.
I am Silver Tongue, I am an artist. I have many characters and you can check out my art in the art tag. I occasionally practice witchcraft though I don't do anything too complicated. I am girl 2 and don't know what else to put here.
