this post was submitted on 18 Dec 2024
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So many superhero-villain stories seem to follow this weird-ass pattern: the villain will show a sizable amount of class consciousness, but somewhere along the way will randomly break character and kill a humongous number of people for no fucking reason.
The Riddler from Batman 2023 is such a textbook example. He kills corrupt officials to reveal Gotham's deep corruption and rot, which is objectively a good thing. However, once Batman starts going after him, he randomly floods all of Gotham, just so the writers can show he's 'insane'.
In The Falcon and the Winter Soldier, the Flag Smashers are practically communists at the start who wanted to preserve the unity and cooperation of the world after the Snap, instead of having everything revert to the capitalist hellhole it was before. Of course, during one of their raids to get medicine for refugees, they randomly decide to blow up a warehouse with workers still inside. They eventually all get arrested or killed for being 'terrorists'. In the end, the problems they fought to solve simply get voiced by Falcon, who uses his status as an elite black soldier just to tell a senator to "do better".
In Black Panther, Killmonger becomes king of Wakanda so he can provide vibranium weapons to Africans around the world. By doing so, he wants them to fight back against their oppression, doing exactly what the Soviet Union did. Of course, he's considered crazy and has to be defeated. In the end, T'Challa decides to solve Africans' oppression by building some shitty schools around the world.
In each of these, the villian's cause is righteous, but they are either portrayed as crazy or are made by the writers to do something random and crazy. Every single one of these is perfectly formulated to show the proles that they can't take matters into their own hands because 'they'd go crazy'. Instead, we should wait for an enlightened Lord (Batman, Iron Man, etc.) to take pity on us.
Man, that Flag Smasher 180 really pissed me off. They were 100% in the right and then randomly blow up the building for no reason.