“Asgardreia” by Vikingbard
Author: scribeofthevikings
Here’s a hot take: villains should be relatable.
Not every villain, not every time, and certainly not to everyone at once, but there should be moments. We should, occasionally, be able to see ourselves in the bad guys, be able to understand how they got there.
Because it reminds us not to fucking go there.
Antis who get upset about villains having relatable qualities (often couched as being “romanticized” or “woobified”) are people who cannot bear to ever think of themselves as having the capability of being wrong.
Every human alive is capable of being a horrible person. Relatable villains remind us to keep an eye on that shit.
NO!
Just no!
Everyone is doing the whole “sympathetic”, “misunderstood” and “relatable” trope with villains. It’s sickening!
And no, not because “we simply can’t imagine having the capacity to be evil”, but because this kind of trope glorifies evil. Trust me, I read the comments about how you all would love to wipe out half the world’s population in order to get rid of people like me (I also heard as much in person from such like-minded people as well): and you have the gall to call yourselves “moral”!
Relatable villains don’t caution us from evil; they desensitize us to evil. Because if you make evil “reasonable”, then all of a sudden it’s no longer evil and (like OP acknowledges, albeit in mockery) is even being worshiped and fetishized!
So fuck every and all depiction of “sympathetic”, “misunderstood” and “relatable” evil: that includes Lucifer, Sam Raimi’s sandman, MCU Loki, Maleficent from that crappy Angelina Jolie movie, Thanos, Illidan stormrage, garrosh hellscream, Sylvanas windrunner, kreia, kylo ren, and all the others!
So, we’re supposed to go back to the CCA days when all villains had to be completely and utterly irredeemable? No thanks.
That would be an improvement, actually. I’m so sick of seeing heroes getting dragged through the mud and villains being worshiped and glorified.
Here’s a hot take: villains should be relatable.
Not every villain, not every time, and certainly not to everyone at once, but there should be moments. We should, occasionally, be able to see ourselves in the bad guys, be able to understand how they got there.
Because it reminds us not to fucking go there.
Antis who get upset about villains having relatable qualities (often couched as being “romanticized” or “woobified”) are people who cannot bear to ever think of themselves as having the capability of being wrong.
Every human alive is capable of being a horrible person. Relatable villains remind us to keep an eye on that shit.
NO!
Just no!
Everyone is doing the whole “sympathetic”, “misunderstood” and “relatable” trope with villains. It’s sickening!
And no, not because “we simply can’t imagine having the capacity to be evil”, but because this kind of trope glorifies evil. Trust me, I read the comments about how you all would love to wipe out half the world’s population in order to get rid of people like me (I also heard as much in person from such like-minded people as well): and you have the gall to call yourselves “moral”!
Relatable villains don’t caution us from evil; they desensitize us to evil. Because if you make evil “reasonable”, then all of a sudden it’s no longer evil and (like OP acknowledges, albeit in mockery) is even being worshiped and fetishized!
So fuck every and all depiction of “sympathetic”, “misunderstood” and “relatable” evil: that includes Lucifer, Sam Raimi’s sandman, MCU Loki, Maleficent from that crappy Angelina Jolie movie, Thanos, Illidan stormrage, garrosh hellscream, Sylvanas windrunner, kreia, kylo ren, and all the others!
Christians are not persecuted they are persecutors. Across all of history you people have been blinded by religion The crusades The Hundred Years’ War WW2(hitler was Catholic and persecuted jews) The genocide of natives during the manifest destiny craze during the founding of America Overall since it’s conception Christianity has killed millions upon millions.
Look around the world, my friend.
My brothers and sisters are being slaughtered for trying to help bring people like you to God.
“Across all history”
Yes, anon, because Christianity existed before the birth of Christ. I’m having a hard time taking you seriously and we haven’t even gotten to the meat of your “argument.”
I guess Nero, Trajan, Diocletian, Marcus Aurelius, and Julian the Apostate didn’t exist, right?
The Crusades were a defense against Islamic aggression. The Hundred Years War was about political succession and not religious reasons at all. And no, hitler was NOT a Christian and to say so is to spread falsehood (just like the leftists who created the false narrative of national socialism being “far right Christian extremism” and not the offshoot of the same bastard – socialism – upon whose dick they suck).
If you ever want to know why education standards in the United States are slipping, here’s the reason: the progressives want people to be ignorant of history so they can push their own narrative of microaggressions and intersectionality.
3, 10, 21, 23, 26, 38, 42
3). any weird fears?
um, my fears are kind of basic (getting caught in a nuclear explosion, spiders, spending the rest of my life alone, going to hell)
10). are you easily scared by horror movies?
not necessarily scared, but the images in those films stay with me and will come back to haunt me later at the worst possible times
21). favorite dance song?
lol, i don’t know how to dance
23). which eye color do you find prettiest?
brown
26). describe your crush
well i don’t have one right now, but if i had to make one up on the spot: dark-hair, dark-eyes, fair skin, 5′7″ and up, with…um…substantial tracks of land
38). favorite cake flavor?
strawberry cheesecake
42). favorite color?
black, red, green, blue
Apache-Sitgreaves National Forest (P.S. I’m on a road trip).
What Was the Cold War?
From the end of World War II, the United States and its Western European allies were involved in a nearly half-century long, titanic struggle with the Soviet Union known as “the Cold War.”
It was cold only in the sense that the Russians and the Americans never came to direct blows.
But it was certainly not cold for the Cubans, Koreans, Vietnamese, and others who got caught up in the Communists’ relentless drive to destabilize the free, democratic, capitalist world.
There were, to be sure, many morally complex moments during this long struggle, but the Cold War was, at its core, as clear a conflict of good versus evil as World War II had been. Just like that war, the Cold War was a death match between the forces representing freedom and the forces representing totalitarianism.
Because hundreds of thousands—perhaps millions—died in it, the Cold War can, with good reason, be described as ‘the Third World War.’
The instigator of this war was Josef Stalin, the mass-murdering dictator of Russia and of the many non-Russian peoples he had incorporated into what was known as the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, or Soviet Union for short.
Stalin knew that his Soviet armed forces could not take on the might of the free West. Instead, he decided to wage this fight through the use of proxies, and by a massive use of disinformation and misinformation.
His initial prey was Eastern Europe: the Baltic States—Lithuania, Estonia and Latvia—as well as Poland, Romania, Hungary, Bulgaria, and Czechoslovakia. Stalin had troops in all these countries at the end of the war. Despite what he promised American President Franklin Roosevelt at the Yalta Conference, the Soviet leader had no intention of removing them. And gaining control over their governments proved to be quite easy.
In March 1946, Winston Churchill famously declared that “from Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic, an iron curtain has descended across the continent.”
When Stalin threatened both Greece and Turkey, President Harry Truman finally had enough. The so-called Truman Doctrine was born. The United States and its allies would not permit any further expansion of the communist empire.
The Cold War was on.
For the next five decades, and across four continents—Europe, Africa, Asia, and South America—the US and the Soviet Union battled for influence—sometimes overtly, like in Korea and Vietnam; and sometimes covertly, through their various spy agencies. But the moral lines of this battle never changed: the freedom of the West versus the communist tyranny of the Soviet East.
There are, nonetheless, as there were even at the time, those who argue that the Cold War was an over-reaction by the West: that the ambitions and strength of the Soviet bloc were greatly exaggerated; and that America, with its massive defense build-up, was just as responsible for the Cold War as was the Soviet Union. But this simply isn’t true—as an immense amount of archival evidence from Russia, not available until after the Cold War ended, now proves.
Nikita Khrushchev, Stalin’s successor, stated Soviet intentions plainly in 1956: “We will bury you!” he told the West. Nor would any amount of negotiation—"détente,” as it was called then—have led to a just conclusion of the war.
The American diplomat George Kennan rightly warned that, short of becoming a Communist country, there was nothing the United States could do to gain the Kremlin’s trust. The Soviets could not be appeased; only contained.
But even containment was an inadequate strategy. Yes, the Soviet Union could not have beaten the US in a head-to-head confrontation, but it didn’t have to.
Victory in the Cold War would have allowed it—through intimidation and subversion—to dominate the globe, making Communism, rather than democracy and capitalism, the preeminent ideology.
There were many times during the five decades of the war that it seemed like this would be the case. But thanks primarily to the strong leadership shown by Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher, and Pope John Paul II, the Cold War ended not with a bang, but a whimper.
The Soviet Union was, at the close of the 1980s, to use historian Paul Johnson’s description, “a bewildered giant”—economically bereft, militarily exhausted, no longer able or willing to enforce its will.
Communism had failed in every possible way—economically, politically, morally. It had tried to create a Utopia on earth and instead created hell for all of the nations that came under its sway.
Yes, the forces of liberty eventually won the Cold War. But this triumph offers little consolation to millions who died or suffered needlessly, through no fault of their own, for a never-viable and now badly discredited cause.
This needs to be shouted from the mountain tops. Too many in my generation see no problem with communism and fail to understand the brutality needed to inflict is on the populace.
The neatest my hair has been in a while #me
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