This Is By No Means An Original Take, And I Probably Did Not Spend As Much Time As I Should Have Editing
This is by no means an original take, and I probably did not spend as much time as I should have editing the writing into being a coherent take, but:
In an awful lot of movies, Steve Rogers would have been right.
(Or, well, treated-as-right by the narrative, at least; in some of those movies many, many people would have died for his idealism, but this wouldn’t have been treated as wrong.)
When faced with this sort of explicit trolley problem, there are two main messages in pop culture: either you should never pull the level (you might kill a named character) or you should find a way to save everyone. For instance, take The Last Jedi: the narrative treats it as correct that Rose stopped Finn from sacrificing his life, not because his plan wouldn’t have worked, but more-or-less because we don’t trade lives. (Other examples: every fucking YA novel ever. ‘You can choose between your significant other... or saving the world.’ ‘Bye, world.’)
(She is absolutely trading lives, just not in the direction that, you know, saves people.)
(This is not to say that characters never trade off lives! The really obvious example here is that most movies are totally fine with killing the villain to protect innocents, although I’m pretty sure the message is generally closer to “the lives of villains don’t matter” than “pull the lever.” Characters will also sometimes do things like choose which of multiple locations to go to, which is generally understood in their narratives to be trading off lives at least a little. But when there’s this sort of explicit setup, the correct answer as portrayed in the narrative is almost never “pull the lever.”)
Now, I actually can think of counterexamples -- Wrath of Khan is very clear that you should pull the lever, for instance, and since I brought up The Last Jedi earlier I might as well mention Holdo’s choice at the end. But in said counterexamples, the person making the choice is almost always choosing to kill themself, not another person, and they usually would have died anyway.
But when characters are faced with the explicit choice of killing someone, maybe multiple someones, or letting far more people die, the treated-as-correct choice is almost never to kill them.
And I’m glad that we have a movie where that’s not the case.
More Posts from Mjollydragon and Others
Watch: Viral clip shows a woman in genderless clothing being ejected from a ladies’ bathroom by the police.
Yes, of course. Not letting boys wear skirts is still a form of sexism.
Reblog if you think it's ok for boys to wear skirts
How much support we got out there?
This is a remarkably effective tactic for gaining access to someone’s account for any website that uses security questions, to the point that actual hackers will use guessing them as a tactic for gaining access to people’s accounts.
(https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-intersect/wp/2014/09/03/this-is-how-easy-it-is-to-hack-someones-icloud-with-their-security-questions/)
funny story
when I was little, I would go on Nickelodeon.com all the time and they had this game similar to club penguin except it was called Nicktropolis. and if you forgot your password, a security question you could choose was “what is your eye color?” and if you got it right it’d tell you your password. so I would go to popular locations in Nicktropolis and write down random usernames who were also in those areas, and then i would log out and type in the username as if it were my own and see which of these usernames had a security question set to “what is your eye color?” (which was most of them, since it was easy and we were all kids). i would then try either brown, blue, or green, and always get in, then I would go to their house and send all of their furniture and decorations to my own account’s. and if it I didn’t want it, i could sell it for money
@johnhocksbur
Completely ignoring the abortion issue, that isn’t the full quote. According to the least biased source I could find, Fox News Insider, the full quote is "Here at Planned Parenthood, we firmly believe that every person has the right to live, work, and raise a family freely and without the threat of deportation or separation.” It’s using “live” in a different sense than the one that excerpt implies. The intended meaning is much closer to “live in” or possibly “live one’s life” than “be alive.”
Zero self-awareness
I know there’s a very good chance that in Part 2 it’s going to turn out that failing to trade lives was actually the right thing to do, because why would you ever let pulling the lever be the correct solution, but for the time being that hasn’t happened.
(I won’t be particularly surprised if the message turns out to be ‘actually, you shouldn’t kill one person to save trillions,’ but I’ll be disappointed.)
(I also want an “I Trade Lives” button. The internet is failing me here, although possibly I haven’t looked hard enough. There are buttons that say “We Don’t Trade Lives” but that is the literal opposite of what I want.)
A week or so ago, I was feeling nostalgic for my old Pokémon games, so I pulled out my old copy of Pokémon White, reset the game, and played through the main storyline.
Things I've noticed (spoilers for BW and BW2 follow):
Child!me was really bad at Pokémon. I basically just kept whichever Pokémon happened to be the highest level ones I had in my team, and if that meant randomly putting in a wild 'mon with a terrible moveset, so be it. I basically didn't consider type advantages at all. I'm pretty sure I wiped to Elesa like five times or so before I swapped in a ground type and manage to beat her, and the lesson I took from that was "wow, the Pokémon I added was only one level higher than the one I swapped it out for, amazing how much difference that makes!"
The "good guys'" arguments in the game are ... really bad. Like, I agree that they're correct about the empirical fact "is catching/training/battling Pokémon abusive," but there are a number of conversations that essentially go:
Team Plasma: have you considered that you're making Pokémon suffer, and that's bad? "Good" guy: I think it's important to consider different perspectives and let people make up their own mind on whether Pokémon suffering is bad! not everything is black and white!
Subtext I absolutely did not notice when I initially played through: Alder is really bad at his job! The Elite Four more or less tells you that he's abandoning his actual job duties to wander around Unova being sad that one of his Pokémon died several years ago. When N beats him, he randomly gets really upset about it and starts insulting him. No wonder by the sequels he's been replaced.
One thing I'd remembered as not being explicit until the second game was that outside of N, there are plenty of Team Plasma members who actually genuinely want to help Pokémon and were not abusive. I was remembering wrong -- this is pretty explicit in BW too.
@badsjw I don’t understand why you see this as a dichotomy. Why couldn’t you write several well-written and well-developed trans characters? If you can write multiple well-done cisgender characters, it seems to me that you ought to be able to write multiple well-done transgender characters.
cool ideas for characters for your story
trans
very trans
not just binary
not just trans boys
(but trans boys too)
at least 3 trans characters
more than 3 trans characters
all very cool
add more trans
I’m still laughing at this because it’s obviously not red, it’s blue and black, geez.
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