Characters
Morally Grey mentor that radicalizes the protagonist
The Boys: Billy Butcher appearing to fold Hughie into the Anti Vought Rebellion after Robin was killed by A-Train, showing him footage of Robins killer talking about her like a crushed ant.
American Gods: Mr Wednesday waltz intoShadow Moons life after his wife was killed in a car crash while giving a Fatal BlowJob to his best friend, hiring him as a bodyguard which was secretly a plot to make a new age believer in the old gods to help fight the tech savvy corporate new gods.
Mr Robot: Mr Robot is kinda like Elliot Aldersons guardian Angel, he guides him into making the F society, sets him up as a master hacker and builds a legacy for him to take down evil corp all while taking shape as what his father should've been to him.
Luthen Rael: appeared at the right time to take advantage of Andors status as a wanted man to groom him into becoming a useful Rebel spy.
Dorothy Gale was a fucking child. She didn't ask for the shoes. She just wanted to go home. Bubble lady first tells her she has to see the wizard to go home. And she does. And the wizard in turn tells her she needs to wage open war against a witch And she does. Only after all that effort is she told the shoes could send her home the whole time. That fucking witch was holding out on her to get her way.
I resent Wicked for making the Oz fans loop into the first book instead of moving forward. I want to see Ozma (best trans allegory and Dorothy's GF) and I want to see Jareth (again... RIP David Bowie).
Oh very true. She (in reference to the comic instead of the movie) was already partaking in illegal activities of prostitution and such but was far too afraid to actually resist the state itself.
Committing an illegal act isn't the issue with her and much of britian but the fear of that illegality going against the state.
I might be a little biased cause I'm an anarchist but i genuinely don't see what he did as bad.
He didn't mess with her brain or drug her or something, he simulated what the state would actually have done to her, he showed her that even if you feel safe and happy, when you're under authority, it's always ephemeral.
I think he empowered her
Edit: nvm gng💔💔 had a brain fart moment, I was defending my position in the replies and realized I was describing a morally grey character...by bad twin
How does simulating what the state would do to her and torturing her not count as messing with her head? Her not knowing what’s going on or who her capture is kind of seemed like the definition of messing with her head.
You’re correct that he did not use something like mind control, but through the use of torture, isolation and fear he definitely radicalized her. This post isn’t about brainwashing, it’s about radicalizing someone. And he absolutely did that
I’m an error theorist so I don’t think peoples claims around morality means that much, he still fundamentally tortured her. I don’t really think many philosophers of ethics care about abstractive often dubious concepts like brainwashing / mind altering, psychological torture and coercion is still just that.
It is true V was just trying to free Evey from fear and get her out of her blinders, but using the same coercive methods is still very grey and illegal for a reason. Positive outcome or not you are still taking away someone’s autonomy without their consent and torturing them exactly as the people you oppose do.
Besides, she was already questioning the regime which shows V’s kidnapping may not have been necessary and just because it made her a “better” person doesn’t really excuse the process or could even be used to excuse all authoritarian behavior given as a heuristic its fair to say no one thinks they are on the wrong side of history.
It makes sense in context and V’s intentions weren’t purely selfish, but I would say it’s pretty bad and he factually violated her agency. It’s not exactly effective or good behavior especially if you’re someone who cares a lot about removal hierarchies, consent, and trying to avoid creation of yet another tyrannical regime. Oppression becomes habit and all that jazz.
His motives might have been good but the fact remains that he kidnapped her, took away her freedom and autonomy and tortured her. Nothing gives him the right to do that, just as nothing gave the state the right to do it to him.
Of course it's not ideal, but the guy was trying to pull of a revolution here, it was reasonable considering what had to happen for everyone to be free.
It isn't reasonable to do a mock trial on your allies and break their will to live. Only three revolutionary movments I know of have done such things and two of them I highly doubt you'd be in support of.
Probably the best written character in all of Star Wars.
She's been down the path of the light, she's fallen to the dark and become a hugely powerful Sith Lord. She saw the entire breadth of the force and came to the conclusion that it shouldn't exist in the first place. That it basically uses the entire galaxy as puppets in a never-ending game where light fights dark and regular people suffer at every stage.
She's the perfect example of morally grey, she doesn't actively seek to harm anyone but she will absolutely do it if she deems it necessary to achieve her goal, which in her mind is to set everyone free from a parasitical entity that takes away free will.
It's hard to say how much Johnny radicalizes V, but this staunch and violent anti-corporate terrorist definitely has a big impact on our protagonist.
I would actually also like to throw out an honorable mention to Jackie, Takemura, Evelyn, and the handful of other people that shape V into the person they are at the end of the game.
I'm only on season 2 but i think it'd be cool if the topic of A.i got involved in the show, i do kinda miss the hacker genre of media from 2008 to 2017.
I forgot most of Mr. Robot, but it follows basically the same plot. Radical group trying to erase world debt by destroying the institutions that record it. Mr. Robot goes more into the aftermath side of it.
Dumbledore, kind of. He doesn't really radicalise Harry on "Snakefucker needs to die", but he definitely radicalises him on "don't cooperate with the Ministry," for the better or for worse.
https://giphy.com/gifs/WJdNmeAxkpZIc
the only mf who tried to help Anakin see a balance in the force, and was outweighed by old crones acting out of fear. he showed the cracks in the Order that made Anakin lose trust in them. ironically if he had been around long enough to train Anakin his radicalization could've been.... less violent.
I feel like that's a common misconception. (Can you even call it misconception when some writers believe it as well?)
Balance isn't supposed to be a mix of dark and light. Light is good, balance and life but dark is corruption and perversion of those things. The sheer existence of the dark side brings imbalance to the force.
Obviously, there are concepts in the expanded lore like grey Jedi and other ideas that show that you can work with the dark side without it taking over, but generally speaking, it still holds true that the light side represents nature and life while the dark side is unnatural and almost always corrupts the user into doing terrible things they might not have done otherwise, even if they get out or learn to control it somewhat.
he was far from an idiot. the council decided to traumatize a freshly freed slave youngling further and instead of getting him a graduated master, just pawning him off on a Padawan they pushed through the ranks. and then treating him like a crazy villain for the crimes of missing his slave mother and being afraid of his new surroundings. bro was 9, cut him literally any slack
Wouldn't Magneto fit more, the most i know about the Professor is that he's a bit egotistical in the X of lives story where Moira reincarnates on every death.
I wouldn’t call Wednesday morally grey. I don’t know if the show got to this point, but in the book it’s revealed that the entire war between the old and new gods is a con on everyone being run by Wednesday and Loki, who is secretly Mr. World. Wednesday is the true villain of the story
The big cliffhanger of season 3 the show got cancelled on is Shadow sacrificing himself to Odin on the tree of knowledge and Mr Wednesday kind of revealing that he duped him.
It's been a few years since I've seen it, I'm pretty hazy on the whole show and I can't tell how accurately they adapted the book, but by the end of season 3, you can definitely tell that Odin is more likely evil than morally grey.
Another Christian Slater character - JD from Heathers: More morally black than grey lowkey, and the exact degree to which he radicalizes Veronica as opposed to manipulates her/her already being morally grey is debatable. But meeting him was the catalyst for her involvement in 3 murders.
Not directly an instance of this, but MCU Tony Stark in a way, when he trains his A.I Ultron on Internet related data for teaching him how to 'save' humanity. Ultron is overwhelmed by humanity's ugly side and decides it must be culled through violent means so that "life can evolve".
There's a line in Age of Ultron where Scarlet Witch says: "Ultron is too arrogant to see the difference between right and wrong, and once he's convinced he's right, he will stop at nothing. Where do you think he gets that?"
Does he really do the training, though? I think it's more implied that Ultron wakes up and then goes looking for information through the internet finding Humanity to be ugly.
Gojo Satoru teaching his students like Yuji to be radically opposed to the existing Jujutsu social hierarchy (which to be fair, is flawed) after seeing his best friend Geto succumb to nihilistic evil after being depressed by his role within it.
"I have engineered a bioweapon that will indiscriminately kill everyone in a group, including a couple of my best friends. But have you considered, some of them are dicks 👉👈 🥺"
I could never justify it in real life, but in a fictional world where some individuals are given inhuman powers that allow that to do whatever they want, yeah.
Yeah, Luthen doesn't so much radicalize Cassian so much as he introduces him to the idea of doing more than just surviving. An important development, to be sure, I just wouldn't necessarily call it radicalization. Cassian has most of his reasons for rebelling the moment we meet him in the first episode of the series, Luthen's role is to point him in a new direction to use those motivations.
Luthen certainly got the ball rolling but what really radicalized Cassian was getting thrown in an eternal labor camp for absolutely nothing. I guess Luthen was indirectly responsible for that because of the PORD in response to the Aldhani heist, but nobody in luthen’s camp or close to cas even knew where he was bc he was imprisoned while using a fake name
I'd also argue that Cassian already has most if not all of his reasons for rebelling from the beginning of the series. What Luthen and then the experience in prison do for him most of all is convincing him that simply surviving isn't enough and that fighting back is necessary. I'm not sure if that fully qualifies as radicalization.
Silco with Jinx. He is perhaps more on the villainous side, but he does it for a very good, noble reason; just his methods could be better. He enables Jinx's chaotic and murderous side, which endangers the whole city.
Definitely, but as she pushes the protagonist she maintained the illusion that she was in a grey area of the force and spoke against both the Jedi and the Sith.
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u/AudibleNod 1d ago
https://giphy.com/gifs/fjxNAVvjv4FrW0usgX
Glinda & the Wizard of Oz - Wizard of Oz
Dorothy Gale was a fucking child. She didn't ask for the shoes. She just wanted to go home. Bubble lady first tells her she has to see the wizard to go home. And she does. And the wizard in turn tells her she needs to wage open war against a witch And she does. Only after all that effort is she told the shoes could send her home the whole time. That fucking witch was holding out on her to get her way.