So I’m starting to realize that my personal perspective on characters like Snape, Kylo Ren, and (sorry) Darth Vader and their ‘redemption’ is basically based in the fact that I grew up watching Xena: Warrior Princess. (And if I get anything I’m about to say wrong, @meso-mijali , let me know.)
For anyone who doesn’t know, Xena spent like ten years as an evil murdering warlord. (Though – and this is important – she always had a Don’t Kill Women and Children policy. No baby deaths. An almost-baby death is one of the things that eventually started her on the path to Good.)
And she wears her infamy like a cloak – it follows her. She didn’t choose a new name when she started killing innocent people – she was Xena. The same Xena as the well-intentioned farm girl she used to be. And after she turned Good, she was still Xena. It was all part of her legacy. Throughout the series, many people hate her, spit on her, and try to exact their revenge for the things she’d done. She spends much of the series walking an interesting line – someone who knows she deserves whatever they want to dish out, but doesn’t want to die. Someone who’s come close to letting herself be executed more than once. There’s an episode – a terrible episode, but it had an interesting ending – that culminated in some of the other characters being cleansed/forgiven of their sins at some temple or another. Xena walked away because she didn’t think she deserved it.
And the thing is, she spends the series living. Because she might as well. Because no one thing – not her trial and death, not her saving someone’s life, or a thousand people’s lives, could ever make up for what she had done. Saving one life doesn’t cancel out taking another – and even if it had, she’d have had to toil for decades to even come close to evening the score. What she has to do, the only thing she can do, is spend the rest of her time on this earth doing Good. Helping people. Making things right.
Even while she has friends who would absolve her of her wrongdoings, the main narrative supports her perspective, not theirs. It reminds us that the scales will never balance.
One life saved, or one person loved, does not redemption make. Not for someone who has committed – or is complicit in – mass murder.
And that’s why for me – and I’m not saying it has to hold true for anyone else, but in the way I personally perceive these types of media – Severus Snape saving the Wizarding World and sacrificing himself for the love of Lily? Or Vader deciding EVENTUALLY that he didn’t want to watch his son get tortured to death? Or Kylo Ren doing LITERALLY ANYTHING THEY MAKE HIM DO IN THE NEXT MOVIES (THAT I CAN CURRENTLY FORSEE), it doesn’t even matter what?
It doesn’t actually matter to me. I am so, so sorry. I see how it could, personally and subjectively, matter to a person like Harry Potter or Luke Skywalker, when they see that sacrifice. But not to me, because at that point they’ve DONE TOO MUCH AWFUL SHIT for it to be overshadowed by one act.
Because it is VERY. EASY. to care about someone who is DIRECTLY RELATED TO YOU. Some of the worst people in history have been loving friends and family men. How Snape wanted to save Lily Evans or Darth Vader wanted to save Luke Skywalker (and I realize that Snape’s crimes were nowhere near as bad as Vader’s, but it’s a similar situation) DOESN’T MEAN ANYTHING TO ME unless there is a massive, objective, ideological shift that comes with it. Every Muggleborn girl deserved to live unterrorized as much as Lily; every boy deserved to be saved from the Empire’s murderous oppression just as much as Luke.
And Kylo Ren? Kylo Ren stood there while billions of people died and an entire planetary system got destroyed. I have, hilariously, heard some people say that he ‘hadn’t wanted that to happen.’ Aww. Cute.
He’s the only powerful Force-sensitive on the freaking Deathstar 3.0. He could sabotage it. He could force the person in charge to make a different decision. He could defect and warn the planets to at least try to evacuate. He could have done A THOUSAND THINGS and because he didn’t and because ‘following orders’ is a BULLSHIT REASON FOR GENOCIDE AND ALWAYS HAS BEEN he is just as much to blame for the GODDAMN PLANETS BLOWING UP as Snoke or Hux (just like Vader was complicit in Alderaan).
So personally, they can GTFO with their fake redemption.
BIG DISCLAIMER: i was 9 when 9/11 happened, so this might be more about my own crystalizing tastes than anything else. i think it’s a pretty darn good theory tho and other people have validated it.
BIGGER DISCLAIMER: i am not saying that country music prior to 9/11 was free from nationalist, racist, misogynist undertones – i just think that these themes became more the norm!
MY HOT TAKE:
with very few exceptions, including goodbye earl, before he cheats, and daddy Iessons (side note – all women!) 9/11 ruined country music. around 2014 onward we’ve got margo price, sturgill simpson, jason isbell etc., who are making country music great again (wink), but those folks are mostly considered “alternative” country. the mainstream country music for well over a decade now is a glut of trash performative patriotic / working-class-but-not-really lab-crafted budweiser-sponsored nonsense that has managed to sound rebellious (or has convinced its fans that it sounds rebellious) without ever actually questioning any power structure. so much so that artists who ACTUALLY criticized the government were literally blacklisted for nearly a decade (the dixie chicks)
pre-9/11 country music, though not perfect or ideologically pure by any stretch, did not have the raging american flag painted truck boner that comes to mind for a lot of people who say “i like everything except rap and country”
SPECIFICALLY, toby keith’s “courtesy of the red, white, and blue (the angry american)” (2002) literally destroyed country music. it was a direct answer to the 9/11 attacks and war song in support of the invasion of afghanistan. the lyrics read like a disjointed feverish email chain letter forwarded from your great uncle sprinkled with glittering american flag gifs and heavily saturated pictures of bald eagles. the entire song is lifted from an estimated 248 peeling bumper stickers collected from rusted trucks on cinder blocks in overgrown yards, cut up and arranged to fit a catchy, formulaic tune that is almost certainly the background music playing in george w. bush’s head at all times.
“we’ll put a boot in your ass, it’s the american way
and uncle sam put your name at the top of his list
and the statue of liberty started shakin’ her fist
and the eagle will fly, and it’s gonna be hell, when you hear mother freedom start a’ringin’ her bell”
country music and the new country musicians that toby keith paved the way for became so pro establishment and so unquestioningly nationalistic that, again, the dixie chicks who went against this grain were blacklisted by the industry and received death threats from country music fans. hell, there are folks who STILL froth at the mouth at the mere mention of the dixie chicks.
9/11 killed outlaw country – how can you sing the praises of law breakers when your main circuit consists of singing to troops? there are some great classic country songs critiquing the police state – especially from johnny cash and merle haggard – now country music artists hold fundraisers for FOPs. new country music is basically in-law country music.
you don’t have to write a pro-bush patriotic anthem to be part of this post-9/11 ruination. playing meaningless songs about living in the heart of (read: white) america, eschewing the city (read: not white), and cracking open a cold one with the boys for “authentic” country music is also important to the war effort.
there’s a progression of themes here:
post 9/11 top tier: war anthem, vocally patriotic, directly used as pro war propaganda;
which paved the way for: “things used to be so much better” thinly veiled racist laments, good for campaign ads;
which paved the way for meaningless party anthems – attempts to make things “like they used to be” and craft a reality that neither the artist nor listener likely ever experience.
that brings us to what most people think of today when they say they hate country music: the country party anthem – “tiny hot gal in tight jean shorts who can drink beer like the guys, she doesn’t like beyoncé Like Other Girls, oh she’s so into me and my truck, i’m gonna take her fishing after i finish sowing my corn – sung by a guy who’s never touched a tractor” – has overtaken the tragic, done me wrong, despairing country ballads of tammy wynette, george jones, and even up into pre-9/11 contemporaries like reba mcentire and george strait. you didn’t necessarily have to be country to relate to their pain. now you have to perform suburban redneckness to enjoy luke bryan.
when was the last time you heard a sad country song?
after 9/11, cowboys (whether or not they had ever been near a cow) weren’t allowed to be sad anymore (no more done me wrong country), and they certainly weren’t allowed to question authority (no more outlaw country). partying hardy became the most important American Thing and if you don’t sing about that, our Enemies Will Win.
so – understanding that country music has always had bad stuff, and that like any genre it suffers from commercialization, 9/11 DESTROYED COUNTRY MUSIC. and toby keith gleefully helped destroy it.
for some further evidence of the decline of country music, please listen to the dixie chicks’ “long time gone” which is an indictment of the industry (i believe it was written before 9/11 but my point still stands – the genre was on the decline and 9/11 was the major cultural event that hastened the decline).
maybe i am a curmudgeon – almost every generation of country music has had its own “country music is not what it used to be” anthem, but i really think something distinct happened with 9/11.
Can confirm. Alan Jackson and Toby Keith, the blacklisting of Dixie Chicks, literally the only singer I can think of that ever spoke out against anything from 2001-2010 was Johnny Cash. I’d also say that the uber-patriotic stance lead to the shiny, vapid County Boy® nonsense that lead to so many of the solo artists all sounding and looking the same.
Thomas Nightingale: ‘100 year old nuclear weapon in a 3 piece suit’ (quoth @thebaconsandwichofregret)
Beverley Brook: Literal Goddess
Tyburn and all the other Rivers: also literal gods and goddesses, but older and scarier
Molly: exiled Queen of the Fairies
Martin Chorley: actual real live supervillain
Lesley May: supervillain-in-training, magic face-changing powers, possessed by the ghost of a god????
Varvara Tamonina: professional henchwoman and immortal Russian witch
Peter Grant: goes toe-to-toe with all of the above as friends/colleagues/mortal enemies mostly by virtue of his intelligence, detective skills, and inventive use of technology, has acquired/semi-adopted a teenage sidekick, absolutely hates guns, would rather talk people down than get into fights with them
QED, thank you for coming to my TED talk.
*But, like, approximately a million times less angsty. And rich. And we’re definitely talking 90s TV show Batman here not any of the Frank-Miller-esque versions.
okay, so everyone has set up the main rivalry in Black Panther as Killmonger vs T’Challa. And obviously that’s the main narrative structure of the story, not arguing with that. But I feel like from a purely character arc standpoint, the actual battle is Killmonger vs Nakia, and she obliterates him.
Erik Stevens is a CIA covert operative; basically, he’s a spy. So is Nakia. And when you look at their various actions through the lens of “who accomplished their mission better?”, it becomes pretty clear that Erik spent 20-some years preparing to destabilize T’Challa’s reign, including having inside knowledge and a birthright on his side…and Nakia spent roughly 36 hours successfully destabilizing his reign, in turn, with nothing but her incredible ability to network disparate resources.
Let’s just review her actions over those 36 hours okay:
– Gets the surviving members of the royal family successfully out of danger within seconds of the coup (aka the only living people with a competing blood claim to the throne aka the greatest threat to his regime)
– Sows enough doubt in the “greatest warrior in the country” about Killmonger’s ability to lead that when the time comes, Okoye and the entire Dora Milaje all defect (eventually saving hundreds of lives)
– Steals a heart-shaped herb from under his nose as he’s identifying it as the most important power resource in the country and trying to prevent it falling into anyone else’s hands, lol too late buddy
– Immediately identifies the person in the country with the best platform to mount a counter-insurgency (M’Baku), identifies what it will take to get him on their side, and casually resolves a centuries-long division in their country while she’s at it
– Correctly predicts Killmonger’s opening move of distributing vibranium to the war dogs, and assists in a comprehensive strategy that shuts it down cold–a strategy they wouldn’t have been able to use if she hadn’t gotten Shuri, Ross, and T’Challa all in one place with the right information at the right time
As soon as T’Challa is back she takes an immediate backseat again (she said it herself, she’s a spy, not the leader of an army), but, seriously, if you have to pinpoint the one person who took down Killmonger, it’s undeniably her. And she did it by clearly demonstrating that her skills as a war dog are miles ahead of his as a CIA agent (due in part, I’m sure, to being trained in a superior country, but also she’s Just That Good).
Yes! Erik’s real misfortune was coming up against a much better and smarter intelligence operative. She also gives the lie to the stereotypical spy narrative (embodied by Erik) that you have to be heartless and violent to achieve your ends. She is the moral center and touchstone of film, so filled with goodness it comes off her like a glow, but she kicks the ruthless Erik’s ass from Wakanda to Kinshasa.
Another thing Nakia was good at was identifying where the necessary resources weren’t, namely in herself. That was why she argued Ramonda out of the idea of taking it herself. It wasn’t self-effacement or modesty, it was a clear-eyed calculation of what it would take to win and the best chance was with M’Baku, not her.
And she did much of this while she thought the man she still loved was dead. She admits as much to Okoye, too. Think of how much sheer fortitude that took, to work through a grief like that to save your country. She is a hero and her heroism is no less amazing for not being flashy or center stage.
tora42's nonsensne 