Agreed and the prequels and The Clone Wars make it even clearer just how much better Alderaan is as a demonstration since it is the cradle and hotbed of anti-Palpatine sentiment.
It would be like Emperor Nixon blasting San Francisco or Berkley with his Deathstar.
No, it would just be being naked in general. And we do legally forbid that in many places.
But, actually, you analogy is completely inapt. Mystique isn’t hiding herself to be decent or because people don’t like to look at her form. Her argument is not that she shouldn’t have to change her looks. Her argument is that she shouldn’t have to hide the fact that she’s a mutant.
It’s closer to arguing that she should have hide the fact that she is gay than any aesthetic preference. Or having to hide her ethnicity in a place where that ethnicity is poorly treated.
As for the mutant prejudice–while there is some utility in knowing what the more dangerous people can do, that’s not the same thing as prejudice. The prejudice in that universe is everyone assuming that all mutants are dangerous. Sure, be on a bit of high alert if you are a law enforcement officer. But not systematic prejudice.
As for registration: just make you have to register dangerous powers, like you would dangerous weapons. Don’t make it about the mutants as a whole, and it isn’t prejudice.
Baron Klaus Wulfenbach from Girl Genius. Someone did have to impose order and stop the constant war.
Klaus isn’t really a villain by any reasonably metric, though, nor does the comic treat him as one. He’s frequently (but not always) in the antagonist role, but that’s because Agatha does tend to genuinely be a chaos magnet, and even when Klaus is genuinely wrong in his actions, it’s usually due to inaccurate of incomplete information above anything else, and the comic takes great pains to show that his motivations are never selfish and malicious, and pretty much always understandable in the context. What’s more, the comic is filled with a number of very real, unrepentant villains, which Klaus is pretty much invariably fighting against.
Gary Oldman’s character in Air Force One (according to this site)
I remember thinking at the time, “huh, good point.”
Non-consensual experimental brain surgery on people is pretty villainous.
No, actually it wasn’t.
What, like Doc Savage?
The Mad Monk in then Doctor Who episode, “The Time Meddler.” He was trying to change history to advance civilization; one of his goals was to have the original production of Shakespeare’s plays on TV. The Doctor’s reason for stopping him was “you don’t meddle with time.”
As Count Scarloni said many years later, “Isn’t that what you do?”
Roy Batty from Blade Runner. All he wanted was to be treated like a person, live a full life, and not die at four years old. The replicants do some awful things in that movie, but people are capable of pretty awful things when their back is against the wall. Even more so when they’re born with their back against the wall.
That said, I can certainly see an argument for Batty and the other replicants being the antagonists and Tyrell Corporation being the villain.
I don’t think that simple greed constitutes a “valid point” for villains whose agenda is to enrich themselves without regard for ethical constraints. By this logic, the desire to placate their insane compulsions would constitute a “valid point” for villains who are just nucking futz, which you expressly reject:
That said, one famous example where the twain meet, Fritz Lang’s “M”, has Hans Beckert raise a valid point when put on trial by criminals who have captured him (because the police manhunt for Beckert is bad for business and because even they are outraged by his actions) – he does what he does because of unwanted irresistible compulsions; they do what they do because they freely chose crime instead of honest work, so where do they get off posing as his moral superiors?
The Cabin In The Woods-All the supposed “bad guys”, whose sole purpose is to save the world, are killed off horribly by the bumbling actions of our “heroes”, and all Marty has to do to save the world is kill Dana…and even if he doesn’t kill her everybody dies anyway.
The final act of our “heroes” is to toke out and decide to let the world be destroyed.
Tell me what human - as an individual - is the kind of threat that Magneto is. An evil person on his own may kill a couple of dozen people and is a problem for the local police. Humans only get really dangerous and become national security problems when they organize into groups.
Being blue and scaley is her natural appearance. As was explained in First Class, she’s capable of looking like a normal human but it requires constant effort. Think of it as the equivalent of a social convention that wanted you to always hold your hand up above your head. You could do it but you’d probably question why you have to. At some point, you’d most likely say “Screw it. I’m putting my arm down and the rest of you can just deal with that.”
That’s a good example. It makes me think there could be a rather interesting sequel depicting the consequences of that decision. I’d like to see the humans valiantly attempt to fight off the gods, which proves to be futile and ruinous. At the eleventh hour, the humans come up with a new ritual that involves sacrifice and suffering on a whole other scale, but succeeds in distracting the gods.
So the analogy is with the new generation of torture porn movies and it parallels the point made in the Saw series regarding the lengths people are willing to go to survive.
As someone once said, perhaps they could slug it out in the PACIFIC RIM.
In the original ***Night of the Living Dead ***by George Romero, the ostensible hero is Ben, the brave, resourceful black man, and the ostensible villain is the buffoonish, loud, Archie Bunkerish middle-aged white guy, Harry. For the entire movie, we’re obviously supposed to be siding with Ben, and to regard Harry with scorn.
And yet…
Harry is the one who insists all along that everyone should lock themselves down in the basement. Ben says “NO! We must try to fuel up the pickup truck and escape from here!” Ben’s plan gets the young couple burned alive.
Does Ben then see Harry’s wisdom? NO! He decides they must stay upstairs and barricade the windows. Ben’s barricades break, and Barbara gets eaten as a result.
So, how does Ben himself survive the night? Why, by locking himself in the basement… just like the fat, dumb, bigoted white guy HAD BEEN TELLING HIM TO DO ALL ALONG!
Actually…the General and the “kill all” order was only “right” in the end because another character (the father) screwed everything up. If he hadn’t broken the quarantine on his wife and got himself infected, everything would have been fine.
The mother WAS immune and the scientist needed her alive. The containment and eradication plan clearly needed to be re-evaluated once a new revelation like that came up.
In fairness to Ben, i don’t think you can pin “unlocking the pump via shotgun” on him. Even the best laid plans will come up short when executed by idiots.
Now for a complete change of genres and a totally different type of villain.
Now, a LOT of SDMB regulars seemed to despise the Anthony character in Lynn Johnston’s ***For Better or Worse ***comic strip. I never hated Anthony. But Lynn Johnston clearly expected us to loathe Anthony’s cold, bitchy wife Therese. Why? Because Therese was always rude to and jealous of ELizabeth, Anthony’s former girlfriend.
Well… as it turned out, wasn’t Therese 100% RIGHT to be hostile to Elizabeth? If she regarded Elizabeth as a threat to her marriage, wasn’t she 100% CORRECT? Anthony NEVER stopped pining away for Lizard Breath, and eventually divorced Therese to be with her. But Johnston couldn’t seem to see ANY reason at all why Therese might be suspicious or jealous of a woman her husband obviously still loved.
DUH! She had damn good reasons to hate Elizabeth!!!