Antagonist: If my ideology is enacted, everything will be better!
Liberal Protagonists: oh fuck how will we deal with this, I have no arguments to defend the status quo
Antagonist: just kidding, all that ideology was a trick, I’m Just Evil™
And then they can kill him without thinking about anything at all. Happens all the time.
Off the top of my head is legend of korra (I know im 2 weeks late for that discourse) the Black Panther movie, and even Pokemon Black/White have the same themes
The Dark Knight Rises (2012)
Imagine thinking Killmonger did something wrong. Guy wanted arm black revolutionaries around the world with scifi weapons to spur them to revolution; sounds pretty based to me.
Anarchism in Mission impossible:
“The world is ruled by evil powerful people, so we are going to murder millions of innocent poor people in India”
Did the Incredibles ever ideologically combat that kid who wanted everyone to have super powers so no one would be super? Did they just beat the breaks off of him instead?
They just killed him because objectivism good, egalitarian (technocracy tho) bad
And in the sequel, it’s the same thing but also confronting public reliance on supers is not worth addressing because the person bringing up the argument is secretly evil dun dun dunnnnnn
There’s a particularly annoying strain of this in Japanese fiction (not just animanga/games, I consume a lot of detective fiction), where it’s like
Antagonist: I and others have suffered grave injustices under the system
Protagonist: I’m so sorry. I see you and hear you. I promise to do better as an individual. changes absolutely nothing about the system
I think a lot of the time it goes like
Antagonist: If my ideology is enacted, everything will be better!
Protagonist: oh fuck how will we deal with this, I have no arguments to defend the status quo
Antagonist: And also, for some reason, I’m going to murder a bunch of innocent people in a way that doesn’t even really further my objectives
Protagonist: Killing people is bad! I will strike you down
