a lot of characters that get called villains are actually on this sort of spectrum from anti-hero to outright evil, and somewhere closer to anti-hero is my favorite dumbass, the tantrum baby who lacks belief or understanding of the inherent value of human life. he’s just an entitled dingus with more power than he deserves, hugely overreacting to minor slights because he doesn’t know how to deal with having his feelings hurt. so, like, if you know how to handle him he actually seems like a fun dude and he enters that grey area of ‘villains we hang out with now like some kind of weird murder uncle’. but all it takes is one person being kind of a dick and haha whoops he’s. he’s a bad guy. bonus points if the tantrum baby in question is also fiercely loyal, once that loyalty has been earned, inevitably saddling some poor cinnamon roll with the world’s most excessive bodyguard.
Hhahaha yes my FAVORITE. See:
– Vex from Lost Girl
– Damien from the Bright Sessions
Tag: also kinda
baffling how much of this site is just conservative protestantism with a gay hat
you know what i’m in just enough of a bad mood that i’m ready to nail my grievances to the church door so let’s fucking go
- black and white morality wherein anyone who doesn’t believe/think/live exactly as I do is
a dirty sinnerProblematic and probably a predatory monster- everyone is
a sinnerProblematic buttrue believerspeople who activist the right way according to my worldview are still better than everyone else, and I will act in accordance to this belief in my own superiority to let everyone else know I’m better than them because Ifound Jesusam the most woke- casual and fucking omnipresent equations of womanhood with softness/goodness/purity/nurturing to remind every woman who isn’t/doesn’t want to be any of those things that they’re doing it wrong
- aggressive desexualization (particularly of women’s sexuality, to the point where it may as well not exist at all) accompanied by pastels [not a criticism directed ace ppl having a right to sex-free content and spaces but specifically targeted at a wider problem resulting from the previous point]
- YOU’RE VALID AND JESUS LOVES YOU and neither of these platitudes achieves a goddamn thing
- historical context is for people who care about nuance and we don’t have time for either (see: black and white morality)
- lots of slogans and quotes and nice little soundbites to memorize but does anybody actually study the source material with a critical eye to make their own informed analysis
- the answer is no
- I’ve been to bible study groups don’t @ me I know what the fuck I’m talking about
Good Christians™Nice Gays™don’t fraternize with/let themselves be influenced by
non-Christiansthose terrible queers- all the media one consumes must be ideologically pure or it will surely harm the children
- it is Our Sacred Duty to protect the children from Everything, thus ensuring their innocence/purity/etc until such time as they are idk probably 25 years old
- literally just “think of the children” moral panic y’all can fuckin miss me with that
- people who don’t conform to the dominant thinking WILL be excommunicated/driven from the social group, and any wrong treatment they suffer will be seen as a justified consequence of their wrong thinking
- I Saw Goody Proctor With The Devil And She Had A Bad Steven Universe Headcanon
Thank you for breaking it down like that because so many of us have been saying it but to see a play by play breakdown comparison is just…Thank you.
this parallel is incredibly apt.
i grew up a liberal protestant and watched my mom deprogram conservative women’s circles like some kind of jesus-freak natasha romanov, and i swear it looked a whole lot like roach and seebs dismantling sjw circlejerks today.
you don’t have to stop believing; you just have to start thinking too.
another place the parallel works is with people getting the most angry and doubling down on the worst instances of doublethink. the less defensible it is, the more they’ll cherish it, because it’s the gas vent of their death star. one shot there, if they let it in, will blow the whole edifice.
compare: conservative protestants furiously defending their love of war and violence, in direct contravention to everything jesus ever said; tumblr wowzers attacking women about sexuality, in direct contravention to everything real life social justice advocates stand for.
and i gotta say, being a quaker on christian forums really prepared me for dealing with these folks. y’all can’t rile me. i’ve turned the other cheek to southern baptists. i might get cranky sometimes when they tell nasty lies about people i love, but i’m not gonna lose hope or give up. i’m also not going to crack and show the seething evil beneath, or whatever they’re hoping will happen if they keep attacking long enough. this isn’t kayfabe. my faith and my activism both go all the way to the core, grown from seed over decades.
now that i think about it, i would be very interested in what the (raised)religious demographics are on this site. early programming matters a lot to how you approach problems (and problematics).