So.

[Booyakasha]

...I have a huge problem with how characters keep gettin represented in the damn media.

Like, these kind of apex good-guy archetypes, they've been infected with this gen-x bad-boy bullsh*t lately. This Wolverine/Batman biz.

Don't get me wrong-----I love Wolverine. I love Batman. But this shouldn't be everybody.

I mean, I think of my conception of really good characters. Like, characters who have a really strong moral core. Good guys, innit, who don't ride the line.

Spock, who used to be all about logic over emotion. Strong good guy. Now we see him flipping his sh*t and punchin dudes whilst roaring in anger. (Oh my god, remember in ST6, when Nimoy!Spock knocks Valeris' phaser out of her hand, seething but restrained. So much subtle emotion. This was so good.).

Or, like, Yoda, who originally seemed so passive and peaceable, now to be seen choppin dudes in half with his dang lightsaber, twirlin about like an assh*ole and all. Going active offense against clone-trooper guys who, aside from posing literally no threat, also were basically children designed not to disobey. That's bad, man. Especially lookin at his general passivity in the real movies

Optimus Prime who...okay. I get it. The Autobots and Decepticons...there was going to be blood spilled. But I saw the apex of that third flick, when Optimus executes Megatron as he's begging for mercy...that just feels f*ckin wrong, homey.

Superman in the latest movie, straight-up killing Zod. Snapping his neck whilst roaring in fury. Same Superman was once meant to represent truth, justice and the American way.

Does anyone know what I'm talking about?

I could about feel like I'm halfway round the bend, here.

Like, I used to entertain plans of giving all my old comics to my niece and nephew, but nowadays I'm not sure that's such a great idea. What the hell happened here. Am I off my nut, or what.

[Apiary Tazy]

I think I see what you mean. I suppose a lot of it has to do with how it's movies based off of long running franchises. Sometimes it's the director wanting old fashioned violence and sometimes it's this weird obsession with killing the villain that causes comic book movies to run out of popular villains.

Not really sure why it happens exactly. Maybe a fear that villains need absolute punishment for thier actions?

[Apollo the Just]

I feel like there's this shift of priorities from mercy to justice that's gone from absolutely one extreme to another. The ultimate good guy used to be the guy who could refuse to kill even the most deserving of bad dudes and now the ultimate good guy is the guy who brings the bad dude to justice and takes him off the streets permanently.

While its nice to not have every single bad guy ever be redeemable or forgivable anymore, it's become exactly just as predictable and two dimensional except in the opposite direction lol

And yeah agreed most protags are douchelords

[Booyakasha]

I just don't get it. Like...we have the Punisher. The Punisher is great, like who doesn't love the Punisher. So why does every character have to be the Punisher now? I ask you. This is bewildering to me.

Like, neverminding all the others, remember how R2-D2 and C-3PO were dedicated non-combat characters once upon a time? And then the sh*tty prequels show up, and we get C-3PO shooting dudes when his head accidentally gets transplanted onto a battle droid body in ep II, and we get R2 murdering loads of robots and all in ep III, like, to the point of being buried in the damn things. What was wrong with them being good old C-3PO and R2-D2?

God damn it. Like, there are times when I'm actually overjoyed we never got that live-action version of 'The Last Unicorn' they were teasing forever and a day-------I think I would literally die of sadness if I witnessed the sad spectacle of the Unicorn or Molly Grue or Schmendrick, Haggard or Lir, Captain Cully, any of them being all gen-x-badass-ified. Nevermind character derailment------that would damn near be sacrilege.

(EDIT: Man. If 'Willow' or 'Princess Bride' or 'Labyrinth' had been made today instead of thirty years ago...I don't even want to think about it. Like, just the thought of scary gen-x Madmartigan, or inevitable bad-boy Inigo, or dark nasty Jareth...it makes me unhappy. Just ugh. Ugh forever.)

[Auron]

I think those Star Wars changes could be attributed less to the overall change in how good guys are viewed and more to George Lucas just being a ****.

[Kil'jaeden]

It actually always annoyed me that certain morals are pushed so much. "Don't ever kill anyone, even if the person in question is literally demonic Mecha-Hitler" because it is wrong and good guys can't do that. Do it once, and you go to being a crazy person that executes every petty criminal or jaywalker.

And nevermind things out there in the world. Some comic books and such have literal embodiments of evil. Or people that have committed enough acts of mass murder that Sweden or the Netherlands would arrange a firing squad.

That said, I actually agree with some of that. The "bad boy" image or whatever you want to call it. Seems like it is hard to mix the capacity for being a merciless death machine of justice with being a nice guy. That said, Batman is actually one of the most most firmly moral guys in the DC lineup. In most iterations of "the Justice League has gone out of control", he is one of the dissenters. He also flatly refuses to break his code no matter what is done to provoke him. He just also happens to be unpersonable.

[Deepfake]

Yeah, one of the reasons why I liked Venom in the comics, as an antihero, is because he's basically Spiderman on the warpath without a sense of reason - they didn't need Spiderman to lose his cool and beat someone within an inch of his life or whatever, and the movies that work with him are all him being empathetic to his villains and trying to reach out to them - he's putting himself at risk to talk some sense and then he actually saves people in great, dramatic ways. He doesn't just beat up guys with the idea looming in the background somewhere that those were bad guys who wanted to hurt somebody - he saves people from circumstance as part of just about every film. Without that to contrast a character like Venom, you kind of lose all of the punch that made him such an interesting reflection.

Showing somebody snap can be really powerful, but it's got to be the focus of the whole film. When Earp finally loses his cool in Tombstone, it's after the Cowboys have shot both of his brothers, killing one of them, and even then he only comes after them after they try to ambush his family at a train station, and it's after he's been telling his brothers the whole film not to get mixed up in anything, and that they don't want to know what it feels like to take a man's life. When he steps over that line, the tone of the whole film changes. It matters because he has an internal conflict.

Superman's only conflict in their most recent film has him setup to just be a superhero because whatever, and eventually he offs Zod, there's nothing that gives him the personality to make it seem much like a change of heart. There isn't any character present to empathise with, he doesn't have opinions or dreams. It's an attempt at the same arc, but there's no heart in it, and that's just tiring.

[Booyakasha]

I don't get it. I mean, yes, take an iconic character and run with it------I'm super-cool with seeing more of these guys. But what the hell are you even doing, depicting them so far outside their regular steez? My conception of Yoda never once involved him giving battle-cries and hacking away at people with a dicksabre (what's that you say, Yoda? 'wars not make one great'? Huh). My idea of Spock never had him screaming in rage and punching people (he was always so calm------that's part of why that moment in ST6 stuck with me). My idea of Optimus Prime the good guy doesn't allow for executing defeated foes. This isn't character development, it's character derailment.

This is the same kind of thing bothers me about having Nick Fury suddenly be Samuel L. Jackson instead of the craggy old Clint Eastwood-ass WWII veteran-turned superspy he was only a couple years ago. It's f*ckin dumb and cowardly. If you're going to depict an iconic character, depict him already-------don't show us some assh*le version of him doing contrived things for the sake of your plot, show us the real character being true to himself. I'd like to see how the real Yoda would have handled the prequel crap. I'd like to see how the real Spock would have reacted to the events of the Abrams films. Missed opportunities.

God. This really bothers me.

[ScottyMcGee]

At the turn of the millennium, I think filmmakers wanted to do "realistic and gritty" stuff. The 90's were all cheesy and happy, and then the mood switched where we wanted to get serious.

All this comes out strained sometimes. The Dark Knight trilogy is awesome but at the same time tedious to go through. My problem with it is that it's not REALLY Batman, it's "What if Batman were in the real world?" Same thing with Man of Steel. Man of Steel had very little humor. Superman is supposed to have some campy-ness written into it.

I was annoyed too by the casting of Samuel L. Jackson as Fury. I mean, the guy's in EVERYTHING ELSE to begin with. He just keeps being cast too much, and not only that but he's also cast as "loud tough black guy", which was fun in Pulp Fiction but died around the 100th time. I don't feel that Samuel L. Jackson is cast as Fury, I feel that Samuel L. Jackson is cast as Samuel L. Jackson with an eye-patch. I feel like filmmakers have made a running gag about his personae ever since Pulp Fiction.
And for those who saw Captain America: Winter Soldier...
[SPOILER]
The writing on his tombstone for his "grave" was a reference to Pulp Fiction.[/SPOILER]

[Deku Tree]

At least Captain America is still a straightforward good guy.

[Deepfake]

[QUOTE="Deku Trii, post: 1490771, member: 18320"]At least Captain America is still a straightforward good guy.[/QUOTE]
Yeah, I feel like the Avengers stuff is pretty spot-on. Winter Soldier was probably the best super hero movie made yet, IMO.