I also dislike when the underdog genuinly starts off as an underdog and is just given a cheat code which is played off as “hard work and determination”.
Like the main character of My Hero Academia. A person born without super powers in a world full of super heroes. You get excited at how he will overcome his limitations… and the answer to that is be given the strongest power in that world and get even more super powers on top of that.
It is especially annoying how the surrounding characters act like it isn’t a cheat code.
Funny thing is in that universe there is a character called Lemillion who had powers with drawbacks and had to learn to take advantage of them. A true underdog making the most of the cards he was dealth with. He should have been the MC of the show.
Mind you I am not saying Lemillion should have been given one for all. Just see that he should have been the main character. One for all could be a mcguffin for the heroes to keep out of the hands of the villains instead of using it like a cheat code.
The tail end of a selective breeding program, but yes. The Bene Gesserit were (according to some internal hypotheses) belived to have been manipulated to expect the outcome later down the line, featuring an Atraides–Harkonnen child. But they were wrong.
I mean, that’s the point of Dune? The ‘prophesies’ aren’t real, they’re seeded by the Bene Gesserit, the same group that spent millennia breeding the ‘savior’. And, he’s not meant to really be a savior, but their catspaw.
But also, he’s definitely not actually a savior, on account of all the death he brings. It’s complicated, but overall a deconstruction of white savior narratives and similar stories.
Have you ever actually read it? The prophecies were deliberately spread over the universe by the Bene Gesserit. The department that does that is called the Missionaria Protectiva, they do that all over the universe so their members can manipulate the locals to be safe wherever they end up. This isn’t supposed to glorify those prophecies, it’s demystifying them to the point where religion as a whole is showcased as a mere tool to control the masses in later books. It’s supposed to criticise the thing you’re criticising.
OP is why we can’t have nice things. Because people will ignore things that should be obvious. So we’re left with everything softball pitched to the lowest common denominator
In the fanfic sequel the poo people are kept addicted on magic-suppressing opioids and mind-dulling cigarettes provided by the Special owned industrial pharmaceutical companies. It’s been this way so long
Eveyone knows people who don’t smoke can’t be trusted. The temple priests say so every Sunday service.
No, no, you see, because she grew up as a Poo Person she now understand the world from their point and realizes how much they’ve been abused, so she pledges to lead and create a new society because it all turns out to have been a big misunderstanding. Then Poo People learn magitek and we get a sequel with the spin that now they are the oppressors, followed by a movie adaptation that completely ends up killing a cult classic.
I genuinely think the main ideological function isn’t even as much to promote that, as it is to focus personal dreams and fantasies towards wanting to become a part of the “winners”. Not that it isn’t part of it, just by normalising it as status quo even within fantasies, but I think even more powerful is to have people fantasise about being one of the chosen ones eventually.
Quick reminder that stuff like this is not planned like in some conspiracy, but just a result of dynamics happening (almost exclusively, rare exceptions) unconsciously the way ideology springs from the material base.
Skull-with-sunglasses Shaun did a whole thing about Harry Potter as neoliberal high fantasy - arguably arguing that it stems from the tribalist worldview that hierarchies are inevitable and all we can do is shuffle around who goes where. Harry becomes a wizard-cop because he’s the right kind of person to wield power. Things are good because he does them. To people in that conservative mindset, asking why he didn’t question that power structure is like asking an apple why it didn’t fall up.
and nothing has gone wrong in the rest of the world either, definitely do not look at the quality of life in america, ignore the fact that a significant amount of americans are illiterate.
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