For me, the best version of this is Avatar: The Last Airbender. Aang spends an entire arc lamenting how he may need to spill blood and kill the Fire Lord. Meanwhile the very same Aang had previously sunk an entire naval fleet single-handedly.
How many thousands of sailors, most of them probably people drafted against their will, did you kill that day Aang? Remember when you literally sliced entire ships in half? Your hands cut through steel, would you have even felt the flesh you were cutting through? Or how about all those ships you sank? A fair number sank instantly. You think everybody got out safely from those ships? Or how about that time you destroyed that giant drill machine, the one manned by thousands of soldiers, outside the walls of Ba Sing Se? You think everyone managed to miraculously escape that fireball? And those are just the major battles. How about the hundreds, perhaps thousands, of fire nation soldiers you casually tossed around like rag dolls with your powers of air, water, and earth during dozens of minor skirmishes? What are the odds you managed to toss all these men around like playthings and NOT have a few of them have their skulls bashed open on rocks when they hit the ground wrong?
The point of this is not to condemn Aang's actions through the series. His actions were fully justified, as he was fighting a war against an expansionist colonial military power. What he did was an objective good. But by the time he's hand wringing about having to kill Fire Lord Ozai, Aang had almost certainly already taken hundreds of lives. Hell, he probably killed hundreds just in that final climactic battle against the airship armada. The Hindenburg disaster saw 1/3 of the passenger and crew parish. And that was from an airship that crashed when it was already landing and close to the ground. Aang was dropping ships from miles in the sky. Maybe some soldiers with fire bending powers could somehow slow their own descent enough to survive, maybe they had some parachutes. But there's zero chance that Armada didn't have a fatality rate at least comparable to the Hindenburg disaster.
So Aang blithely kills hundreds of conscripts without a second thought. But then he has a crisis of conscience that takes multiple episodes to resolve, and that crisis of conscience is all about...Fire Lord Ozai? This is like if someone nonchalantly participated in the Firebombing of Dresden and then suddenly developed complex moral doubts about putting a bullet in Hitler's head. Aang had already killed hundreds of people that Ozai had sent to their deaths. No one was forcing Ozai. He wasn't a conscript. He had full autonomy; he's the absolute ruler of the Fire Nation. He doesn't even have a Congress or Parliament to answer to. He has absolute total moral responsibility for every evil thing the Fire Nation has done. Yet, when it comes to actually holding the powerful accountable, suddenly Aang wants to talk about the morality of killing.
To be fair, if my kill count was at 69420, I'd need a REALLY good reason to kill one more
If I were at 69419, he'd be dead without a second thought
Strong Last of Us 2 vibes.
That game had such an interesting setup and completely fucking fumbled every single second.
The idea of a split story arc where two hurt people are hunting one another for revenge and how it devastates the both of them in the end is so cool, but then it's written with the emotional intelligence of a five year old and completely fucking missing the concept of subtlety and earned pay offs. Everything is forced, everything is overly mean spirited to the point where you just kinds hate everybody and roots for no one. You're literally forced as the player to torture and kill several people and animals throughout the game.
And when you finally get to the climax there's a lame as fuck "revenge is bad mkay" message tagged on to the end. It rings hollow and it isn't earned. Such an immature script trying to tackle such an interesting concept.
It really shows you that there are no bad ideas, only bad execution.
This is something I loved about Hitman. Theres a bit of set dressing appeal around violent infiltration, but by and large, 47 uses social manipulation, knocks out only a few people, and only kills his targets, who are terrible people that make the world worse.
It also has a nice quote in a cutscene. (Paraphrased)
“We don’t take sides. ICA always remains neutral.”
“I hate to break it to you, but neutrality is a side. It’s the side of the status quo.”because they want us to kill each other, the low ranking riffraff and feel nothing over that, but not the big badd bbillionaires and friends
Fallout 3. Slaughter the vault of police officers (who you grew up knowing), but grow a conscience when you meet the overseer. Take out armies of enclave soldiers, but let the weirdo Colonel Autumn walk away.
Fucking Moon Knight. That dude’s whole thing is killing mother fuckers at the top, he prides himself on being a murderer of murderers and crime bosses and he’s not going to give a fuck what you think of his moral stance, yet at the end of the Disney+ series he decides he’s a fucking universalist or some shit? Fuck that! Moon Knight is a straight up murderer, he would be the first person to tell you that he is a murderer and that he don’t give a fuck how anyone feels about it.
Also, they didn't use the song Dead Moon Night by Dead Moon when there was a dead Moon Knight. Fuck that show.
I have no idea why Jedi Survivor decided to do that with one random empire guy.
Everybody else got their fucking arms and legs cut off.
This reminds me of the death penalty. Killing someone because that person killed is still killing someone.
However society choses to do it, it's still killing someone. Because killing is bad so if you kill, someone will kill you. Oh no, it's not a murder. It's a state employee that works in the correction department. Killers are not okay. The executioner is only applying the lethal will of society towards killers by unaliving them. It's not murder, it's justice!
Three Cheers For Sweet Revenge? That you?
Another reason for me to hate Spectre.
Did Elon make this meme? Needs not cringe
I hated that when it happened in Titan A.E.
Moment in question - late in the film
The fate of all humanity is at stake, and this guy took bribes to kill all humans - but this kid spares him.
Movie Conclusion / Moral of the story
And then the guy he spared makes the sacrifie play, saving all of humanity, so maybe don't trust me with those kinds of judgement calls, I guess.
Kinda like how we get people like trump for president, or any wealthy powerful person for that matter. Like the serialized fictional bad guy, they get away with it and keep getting to do shitty things because the hero can never just end the antagonist. All this fighting and legal consequences for the rabble, but when comes to actually punishing the rich or powerful person? Nah…they’re (job creators, too big to fail, might hurt their future, etc.) They go low, we go high…and do nothing.
