Have you ever seen those edits with AI generated text of random villains talking? Usually the comments are filled with half thought out musings about how that villain was right the whole time, and usually mention something about how any one who genuinely wants to help people is stupid. Needless to say, I hate all of these.
The most common offender in the “they were right the whole time” videos is Thanos. I’ve occasionally seen Scar from Lion King referenced, or Sher Khan from Jungle Book. It makes me question if people saw the movies, or read the books that these characters are from. It seems as if they have latched onto a pretty sounding quote, and ram with it without looking into the context. For example:
“It is better to live one day as a lion, than to live a thousand days as a sheep.” may sound like it goes hard, until you realize that Benito Musolini said that in order to justify his regime. This is usually the same case with the villains in these edits. Nine times out of ten, they’re Racist, xenophobic, homophobic, child murderers, traitors, domestic terrorists, anarchists (I don’t care what the kid in the black hoodie wearing mascara told you. Anarchism is stupid), Mass murderers, abusers of political power, advocates for deforestation, mafia members, literal personifications of Adolf Hitler, or just straight up hypocrites. Here’s a list (in no particular order) of villains I often times see in these videos, and what I actually think of these arguments.
Thanos: The man had infinite power, and still decided to murder half of the universe to make better use of its resources. You may note, that he could have used the exact same infinite power to simply make more resources.
Sher Khan: Literally wanted to murder Movli, even though he was the wolf pack’s adopted child, and wasn’t his problem. The dude references the law of the jungle which he regularly breaks to justify trying to kill Mogli. His entire motivation for this, is that Mogli is a human, and Sher Khan is xenophobic.
Scar: People usually reference the Life isn’t fair speech, in which he is talking to a mouse that he is actively stalking. For the rest of the movie, he kills his own brother, tries to have his infant nephew murdered, sets the entire pride land into complete ecological chaos, and as a general fucks everything up. His motivation for this depending on which version you watch, is that he just really wanted to be king, and wasn’t happy living a life of luxury without having to make any important decisions. If it’s not obvious that Scar is completely irredeemable, he was based off of Claudius from Hamlet, and his regime is eluded to with Nazi-like imagery.
I’m terrified that intilectualism is dying. Stuff like this just reinforces that fear. People just latch on to some pretty words from a conventionally attractive somewhat young person wearing dark colors, and run with it without looking deeper into it…or maybe just finishing the book/movie. Most of these characters that people idolize aren’t even relatable. They usually refuse to move on from some vague inconvenience that happened years ago, and make it everybody else’s problem, using it to justify entirely horrible things that a well adjusted person worth quoting would never dream of doing. Yet, the TikTok mob lives them. They usually like to spout some third grade level philosophy that simultaneously uses far too many words, and says nothing new or insightful. To keep it short, they’re stupid, and it unfortunately seems like it’s on the rise.
by F1600A