I'm joking with the meme, but it's an interesting how plot armor unintentionally places value on people's lives in fiction.
It's telling that censorship laws decide who it is and isn't acceptable to kill. Just thinking about violence against sentient robots and how that's normalized in things like Samurai Jack.
Like we know the robot has thoughts and feelings, like they'll try to run to save themselves or plead for mercy, but a character can still heroic after essentially killing a non-human who's acting like how we understand humans.
I feel like there's something dangerous in how easily we can depict appropriate targets of violence. Not just robots, but anybody deemed as less than human are allowed to be more put at risk.
Unnamed people are killed in superhero fights all the time. But unless they are of a class of characters like protagonists, they are collateral damage at best.
I think Plot Armor as a trope needs more class consciousness and awareness around how deciding who gets to be protected is often an unconscious political belief.
What about you though? Any tropes in media you'd like to see explored more or written with a leftist understanding?
thing with religious wars is they can very quickly find a modus vivendi in the right circumstances, or at the very least a conversion is an immediate reprieve for the victims---which like isn't ideal and arguably cultural genocide but it's a ways from racial extermination.
Protestants were part and parcel to the development of racism though, because the reformation was a time when skepticism of conversion became culturally endemic instead of the private purview of inquisitorial staff. the way the hatred & suspicion of catholics was transposed into racism against irish people was through the "cryptocatholic" panics of early anglicanism, which supplied an excuse to dispossess even the converted irish. come to think of it that would be a cool place for fiction to explore 'racism doesn't quite exist yet, but we're working on it'
Thanks for the compliment
Yeah, I'm still working out the details of this and that. What I really need to focus on is finish the story I've been working on since the start of this year. I keep telling people about it instead of writing it.