Yup, add him to the list. Maybe add Elrond to it as well. As pointed out by the post above, Lord of the Rings was certainly ahead of it’s genre for male role-models. If we look beyond Lord of the Rings itself you also have Bilbo, Beren, Eärendil, probably more I’m not thinking of right now.
I suppose all of this might make up for the scarcity of prominent women, though Eowyn and Galadriel will always have a special place for me.
Really getting tired of the Humans being the real monsters trope
I wouldn’t call that a trope, more of a “sad truth of reality”.
…Nah the kind of creatures that trope is use for (faeries, ghosts, zombies, etc) at the end of day are represented with cruelties that are, on its pure essence, distilled human evil. The trope doesn’t work in many cases because the “monsters” are meant to be actually worse than the average human.
For all the talk about how “hardcore” old fairy tales are, people still underestimate the kind of stuff ancient monsters got up to.
If it were written as introspective philosophical meaning I’d agree.
But definitely not when it’s used as a cheap racism allegory.
Isn’t that up to how the individual writer portrays them, though?
Honestly? Yes, but gotta be real here, the trick gets old very fast and like Rinnegato said, cheap racism allegories (that normally end up being quite offensive, ironically) are jarring when you know even a bit of the cultural context of those creatures.
“We deserved this!”
“Maybe you did, I didn’t do anything.”
-Left 4 Dead 2 graffiti
It’s especially jarring if there’s only like, one group of bandits, and they’re the evidence humans are “the real monsters”. No, those people are monsters. Approximately on par with the zombies but more dangerous. When disaster strikes, most people don’t immediately resort to selfish, shortsighted behavior. The brigands and bandits are typically a minority. It’s just they’re a minority capable of killing large swaths of people. Humans aren’t these ticking time bombs of savagery with hidden desires to kill our own and be immune from the consequences of our sins. That’s just dumb.
Then sometimes there’s people taking some sort of pleasure from killing the monsters, which is somehow bad even though the zombies are mindless killing machines. They’re not people. They’re not animals. They’re actively detrimental to the ecosystem so environmentalism doesn’t play into it. Why should I CARE if people have bloodlust when fighting them?
Well, there is a case that the bloodlust in itself is problematic. I kinda agree there, but in real life it’s hard to draw the line between dangerous emotions and healthy outlets. Fiction is easier though, so establishing that a character is unhealthily obsessed with violence, even against acceptable targets, can work I think.
Nah see, I’m a consequentialist. Until they try to hurt innocent people, I don’t think there’s an issue with their views on violence.
Fair enough, thay’s why I made a distinction between healthy and unhealthy. If it’s just that they’re a little giddy to be slaying zombies then no problem. If it’s shown that it’s effecting other aspects of their demeanor or relationships, then I probably won’t think too highly of such a character. Those are also consequences of their attitude, even if it doesn’t go so far as murder.
That’s true. I guess I’m also just tired of things going in that direction. I’ve grown weary of He Who Fights Monsters. I know a lot of people get incredulous if you say you’re sick of a major commentary trope on stuff that happens irl a lot but you see enough of anything, you get sick of it, especially if it precludes tropes you really want to see more often (in my case, characters who are a bit unhinged but firmly on the side of good).
When disaster strikes, most people don’t immediately resort to selfish, shortsighted behavior.
…Excuse me, what?
This may be the result of living in very different contexts, but my personal experience is the complete opposite of that: When true disaster strikes people tend to be specially vulnerable to panic, and panic too often results in precisely selfish, harmful, and sometimes even cruel actions from the part of the average person.
And while I too feel tired of the misuse of that trope, some fundamentals of it (that there is within each person a potential for cruelty and selfishness that despite lying dormant it can be brought to the surface in specific circumstances) are also absolutely true.
What we can agree about is that the overtly, unnecesarily cruel behavior depicted in media of this kind is normally not the first option of people in dire circumstances.
That reminds me of the Corrupted Blood Incident in World of Warcraft. The simplified version of it is that a debuff could be spread to anything with a health bar and it would deal damage over time. Unfortunately, for anyone not max level at the time it was almost an instant kill. This meant that a player’s amour would get broken (costing in game currency) and certain players would lose their pets (they die, they lose happiness and run away).
People reacted in a lot of different ways. Some tried to heal through it, some tried to warn low level players, and others deliberately went to other cities to infect people. It got to the point that Blizzard had to reset the server because everything was dying. Obviously, this isn’t a real world virus but the results were so interesting that various groups (like the CDC in the states) wanted to study it and it was referenced when another group was trying to model behaviour for Covid.
The Corrupted Blood Incident kind of proved that the majority of people wouldn’t descend into complete cruelty but yeah, people panic. In this case, they all panicked because of paying gold and losing pets. It’s a really fun read if anyone is interested.
All that aside, I kind of like the trope of the pyscho focusing his deviancy to hunt monsters. But I’m also a sucker for any kind of story with the evil/bad characters doing “good” things (good being subjective here) because of another character or reason. It makes me feel like there is more to the character than just ‘evil’.
The one I hate is the one guy who always messes it up for everyone else by not revealing he’s bitten or infected. I get it, people want to live but they’ve already spent months/years living in that post-apocalyptic monster world. They know what’s going to happen. They know they’re going to end up changing and killing their companions. And they’re just okay with it? It especially bothers me when it’s a character that has shown no sign of being selfish up until that point.
Yeah, but there’s a difference between panic and turning to banditry.
…Do you realize that one thing leads to the other, right? People in a state of panic and extreme stress can become uncaring, selfish and even cruel.
Most do not though.
This is probably going to sound extremely specific but… I hate the whole “vegetarian vampire” thing where they only feed from animals.
Specifically, I dislike that its always associated with being more human, despite in most occasions, the vampire is depicted killing the animal they’re drinking from while not killing any humans they drink from.
It irritates me that killing a living being is seen as more humane just because they’re an animal, when the alternative is drinking blood from, but not killing a human.
I assume the argument there is that if they’d kill an animal while feeding on it, they’d be likely to kill a human while feeding on them. In that case, I’d say it’s definitely more humane to avoid the human feeding.
Hear, hear! Every word of this! They never even try not to kill the animals they prey on - and they always seem to prey on animals that are human-size or smaller. Why not drink from a horse? a cow? an elephant? You could drink as much from an elephant as you would get from draining two humans, and the elephant would be less likely to suffer ill effects than a human at a Red Cross blood drive.
And of course, as an actual vegetarian, using that word to mean a killer of animals really rubs me the wrong way.