this post was submitted on 27 Sep 2023
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Asklemmy
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Several. Three dimensional characters. No one is truly all good or evil.
Eliminating overused tropes. If I see another scene where the woman screams at the man for getting her pregnant while giving birth or a timer display on a bomb, I think I'll just stop watching.
And finally a little more actual humanness. By this I mean, many action movies have heroes that just move along when someone dies. There's no reason a person can't disarm a bomb, because he/she HAS to, but is crying during the act, maybe has to wipe tears away to properly see. People can have a breakdown, but still run away from danger at the same time. And afterward mourn the loss for more than 10 seconds. Even larger than life action heroes, would be made more relatable if they had nightmares about what they had done in the name of doing the right thing.
I probably have a lot more but can't think about them at the moment. All I can say is I absolutely hate how often I can predict what is about to happen. I want to be surprised without the plot going completely off the rails.
How about a group of villains that don't have much care when half their members are killed? I mean some of them likely were good friends. I always find that odd particularly is the movie was more serious and accurate.
Agreed.
I so feel this!
We're watching Ragnarok (Netflix) which is a Norwegian series that ran for four seasons. The lead character is flawed and unlikeable in a lot of ways we'd never intentionally do in an American production. And there's this character arc where one of villains is slowly turning good, while the hero begins to betray his morals. I don't know if I'm giving the producers too much credit, but I see a lot of subtlety in the characters I don't notice in US shows - behaviors which are infuriating but make sense in the context of the character's core persona.
A shame it didn't do well in Norway; one of the reviews bitingly said that it was bad and "felt more like a Danish series." We've been really enjoying it as a breath of fresh air in the superhero genre, and just finished season 2. It got only 3 seasons.
As a postfix, yes, I've seen Heroes, and yes it's a hard divergence from the typical genre. But I feel it mostly aims for shock value, and just took a trope and switched the premise - it didn't substantially add character depth.
Here are two examples: in Ragnarok, we're told repeatedly by a mother that her son has always had a strong sense of law and justice. Later, when the authority figures around him are telling him to do things and he's just passively following their orders, it was infuriating until I realized: well, what do we expect him to do? Rebel? The second example is that the hero is not a deep thinker. He's not clever, he doesn't have witty one-liners... he's literally a mouth-breather - he spends much of the show mutely standing there with his mouth open, until there's a situation where he can be violent. But he's Thor, and not American Thor. He's not a figure known for his cleverness. I can't think of a case in American film & TV where the leading protagonist is so flawed, in unattractive, un-sexy ways.