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?
Basing a fantasy culture off of a real-life culture. Or even worse, basing a fantasy race off of a real-life culture - that's just dehumanization. It's very common, it's very problematic, and it's a remnant of racist 20th century fantasy. The Forgotten Realms has to be destroyed, sorry. Genshin Impact as well.
If you're going to be using a real-life culture, you need to seriously know your stuff and have respect for the culture you're writing about (this is why Liyue is good and Sumeru is racist trash, for instance). I'd say to most people that if you want to use someone else's culture cause it's cool, consider worldbuilding something unique instead and save us all a headache.
What's really problematic is when they just have race wars in there, as a thing, and it's not examined at all. For all the things BG3 does well, it treats the goblins as completely disposable even within the narrative itself. There's deep gnome characters who live on the surface in Baldur's Gate, but every single goblin is a football hooligan that eats people and can't read. All they're good for is being slaughtered by the PC or slaughtering all the Tieflings at the grove.
Before I knew what The Absolute was, the goblin woman in the cage had my sympathy and I sincerely wanted to find out what she was talking about and set her free because leaving her in there to be inevitably killed just seemed pointlessly cruel.
I'm not saying The Absolute had to be some wholesome goblin leftist revolutionary front that would overthrow the rich assholes of Waterdeep or something, but the single note "these are ugly bad people that do bad things" messaging was really, really lazy.
Pathfinder goblins have a lot more nuance even while still being generally unruly and seen in an ungenerous light.
Wild that BG3 literally removed alignments and still made 99.9% of golbins evil