Inspired by the thread on the Republican convention, and in particular by Driver8’s post that alludes to Stephen King’s The Stand.
Do you all know anyone, either groups or individuals, who view the villains in a work of fiction as the heroes or the heroes as the villains, due to their political leanings? It wouldn’t surprise me, for example, if there are some extremists who upon reading The Stand could end up viewing the main villain of the book as some sort of hero, or maybe viewing the heroes as being naive or in some other way wrong in their views. I don’t know any such people personally, but it wouldn’t surprise me if they exist. Let’s not limit this to The Stand, though. What works of fiction do you know of where people might have a warped view of who the good guys and bad guys are based on their own political leanings?
I don’t think it’s a common phenomena. Fictional political leaders exist in a world that their authors create for them. In a world created by Aaron Sorkin, the Democrats will always have the correct answers for the problems they face. In a Tom Clancy world, the Republicans will be the ones who always have the correct answers. Most people are going to agree with the protagonist because that’s where the author is steering them and the protagonist is right in his world. If your own views are too much at odds with the author’s to follow their lead, you’re going to reject the entire work as unrealistic rather than simply disagree with the protagonist’s views.
Back in grad school, I had a friend who was teaching Eugene Ionesco’s Rhinoceros in her Intro to Drama class. (If you don’t feel like reading the whole Wikipedia entry, basically, it’s an absurdist play where everyone in town starts turning into rhinoceroses. At first the people who haven’t turned into rhinos yet are like, “WTF, this is weird, I would certainly never become a rhinoceros!” and then they’re like, “Well, everyone ELSE is doing it, so why don’t we?” and at the end of it the protagonist, the lone guy who refuses to become a rhinoceros, is doubting his own sanity.)
Ionesco meant this as a metaphor for what it’s like when your whole country decides to go fascist. My friend’s entire class of undergraduates decided that the protagonist was the bad guy because he was so rigid, and he just needed to become less prejudiced against rhinoceroses :smack:
Inherit the Wind - it seems clear to me that Drummond is the intended hero and Brady (or possible Rev. Brown) is the intended villain. I would be shocked if a substantial part of the population would consider the Creationist side as the heroes.
Likewise I would not be surprised if a significant part of the population would consider Bob Ewell as defender of the natural order in To Kill A Mockingbird and were cheered by the happy ending of Tom Robinson being shot while “escaping”…
I think Verhoeven did (although I’m not convinced he remembered all the way through what he was satirizing). The movie is a vicious satire of the novel, which is a big part of why a lot of Heinlein fans hate it so much.
Stormfront. I once googled the lyrics to *Tomorrow Belongs To Me *from Cabaret. One of the links took me to their filthy website, where they were praising the song as a heroic anthem.
For the musical rent, who is the good guy and who is the bad guy can depend on your age and your political views.
I’ve always considered the humans in X men to more or less be the good guys. Even the ‘good’ mutants like wolverine are mass murderers and lifelong felons. The bad mutants are even worse mass murderers and felons. However I don’t know if there is any political breakdown based on that, I doubt it.
His argument was that questionable training methods should be used, even though they were explicitly forbidden by his commander, order his subordinates to break laws and regulations, hang those subordinates out to dry, lie to official investigators and forge documents simply because somehow, somewhere, it might “save lives”
I don’t think anyone thought he made a good argument.
He has been a comic-book villain for half a century, and he has real-world “Magneto was right” T-shirts. And current events in the US is not exactly weakening his argument…
Sorry, typo in the quoted post. Meant to say, “I would not be shocked if a substantial part of the population would consider the Creationist side as the heroes.” Based on the number of people who still believe in Creationism.
