I'm just super over the trope where a narrative feels like it has to force the good guy into a position where they're killing out of self-defense in order to maintain the illusion of their innocence
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especially since protagonists are so often representations of nationalism, and the US has never been an only in self-defense type of nation. The opposite, really. But it's depended on the illusion of innocence to keep folks patriotic.
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me watching the climactic moment of a movie when the hero hesitates because they don't want to be just like the bad guyspic.twitter.com/1Zm7hvDEdr
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I also feel like it's sometimes a cheap way to avoid making the protag have to deal with having taken a life so we can like just get on with things and have a happy ending but that's not how things work.
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i don't watch firefly but i do think it's why there are such passionate opinions about han's pre-emptive greedo strikehttps://twitter.com/random_michelle/status/1016107149439766528 …
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To be clear: I don't think this happening makes a story bad, I'm just personally tired of it and I think there are larger cultural implications to the prevalence of it. The innocence thing.
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I think that's part of it yeah, which is definitely a disorganizing principle. Think it's also a forced defining of what is/isn't innocence and whose life matters.https://twitter.com/ProfessorEmily/status/1016111254967111680 …
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I really like how Avatar (the Airbender not the damn alien white savior complex shit and the show not the damn movie) handled it, because they built into Aang's character that he doesn't want to take a life from early on and it felt natural that he be conflicted about it
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which is to say, i think there are ways of keeping the protagonist from taking a life or not wanting to take a life but they have to be threaded in, not just pop up awkwardly when they're needed as a shorthand for innocence
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this is part of what made the first two seasons of Dexter so good — it was in deep conversation with these ideas of heroism, innocence, taking/saving lives.
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this is a lot of stuff I've been thinking about writing DACTYL HILL which is why it's all come out in a deluge now. Trying to let the kids deal with various levels of trauma, violence, victory, guilt, etc...but also let the story keep moving
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Lmao according to my mentions I've been subtweeting The Flash this whole time and I didn't even know!https://twitter.com/okjoi/status/1016156184129228800?s=19 …
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