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?
There are two classes of tropes for me: the ones which serve as actual building blocks of worldbuilding and storytelling, and the ones which are cultural biases.
The former are just the usual patterns retold throughout history, like the hero's journey. They can seem boring, but it's because they are generic and need to be localized to the fictional world or a culture's mythology. Arguably, the way we identify these involves bias, eg. the hero's journey is mostly based on Indo-European mythology. But I hope my point can still be made.
The latter category are the tropes informed by biases. Or to put it another way, when you can create any possible world or write whatever story, why is it just medieval Anglo shit over and over? Ever notice how most fantasy maps are left-justified? Even hard worldbuilders who do all that meteorological calculation shit can't perceive a linguistic reality beyond the European sprachbund.
It's like learning the etymology of a word. Sometimes you find out the way we use words today is very weird, and we shouldn't assume it applies across all time and traditions ("man" used to be gender neutral, for example). Except some core words eg. "to be," "to go," "to come" are relatively very stable.
Omg I thought I was the one going crazy telling people of the implicit racism in LotR or other fantasy works!
I mean "horde" comes from the Turkish word "ordu" meaning army and was used to describe the ottoman ordu/horde. Is it then a coincidence that the orcish horde are often depicted wielding scimitars and the elves straightswords?
Why is mordor placed in the exact position as anatolia on the map? Rectangular in shape with near insurmountable geological features as its borders???
edit: I just took a look at the map for the first time in years and omg, minas morgul (once a gondor city) is so clearly gallipoli/troy coded, the black gates guarding the "main entrance" (who fell to mordor because of a plague in gondor) for Istanbul, the misty mountains the alps and the shire being obviously england doesn't even need to be mentioned
The geography is specifically based on earth's, because it's meant to be set in the distant past of our irl earth when there was still magic.
It is called Middle Earth