Movies & TV

This is one of my major criticisms of Star Wars: Lucas relied way more on aesthetics and narrative tension to simply designate the Empire as cartoon antagonists for his fluffy space opera samurai western about the Vietnam war. The whole tone is outlandish and unreal, and the Empire you see is just a sort of sinister and mustache twirling threat to the protagonists while all their arbitrary violence happens offscreen to characters that generally don't even have screentime.

And I mean media doesn't have to be deep and thorough or contain harrowing explorations of just why the villains should in fact be considered ontologically evil, but Star Wars is this cultural juggernaut yet is almost entirely just this shallow, light and fluffy slop where aesthetics are everything and the villains' evil is just implied or kept somewhere in the background. Then this intersects with a broader sort of "villains are cool and have agency while heroes are just dumb nerds fighting to preserve someone else's status quo" zeitgeist that finds fertile ground in the brain dirt of American treat lads because of how it's the natural conclusion to draw when looking at how in slop media antagonists are the primary agents of change while heroes must be reluctant and selfless agents of the status quo, not to mention how the powerful and self-actualized villain is an ideal power fantasy for some amoral libertine treat lad.