I appreciate the degree of brain-brokenness where our society has much higher expectations of fiction than reality. Like, we want complex and ‘realistic’ villains in our fiction, but in real life, people like Donald Trump exist.

And it gets funnier when people get Really Upset about fictional villains who have Good Politics but are actually murdery power-hungry bastards. Like, sit down because you are not going to like learning anything about the real history behind whatever ideology you’re into.

I mean, if I made a movie where an anti-imperialist working-class revolutionary who also was virulently racist, homophobic, and seemed to REALLY enjoy killing civilians, it would get called anti-leftist propaganda despite being a historically accurate depiction of Che Guevara

The simple harsh truth is that unless you are a literal child whose ‘politics’ are just watching Sesame Street or some shit, your ideology is writ in blood and propagated by colossal fucking bastards. No exceptions.

Like... there are PACIFISTS who were bigots, hypocrites, or abusers. We- that is to say, humans- are so bad at this whole ideology thing that even a belief system based on ‘let’s not hurt people’ is infested with assholes and scumbags.

Despite the absolute omnipresence of real-life 2-dimensional assholes, we nonetheless demand ‘depth’ in our fictional villains. And when we get ‘depth,’ we don’t like it because we get offended and self-righteous when these fictional characters are TOO relatable.

And then we have the GALL to get angry at storytellers for doing the things that we demanded of them! And icing on the cake here, the people who get most upset by this tend to be the ones most susceptible to black-and-white moral judgements in the real world.

(By the way, I am one hundred thousand percent guilty of all the shit I’m lambasting in this thread, too. I actually don’t think there’s anyone over the age of, like, seven who isn’t)