TL;DR: Eat the Rich
Wednesday, 12 Mar 2025
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Ah yes my classic reddit post which is s tumblr screenshot of a twitter tweet
OOP’s username is confusing me
Is it like a pun? Ass holes in?
Is it an oddly written name? Asche whole sin?
As chew holes in!?
Anyway, my favorite way this trope plays out is that sometimes the hero might blend 1000s of mooks into red paste only to suddenly have second thoughts about vengeance and mercy when facing the villain, the guy who is deadass more culpable than the dudes the hero just killed.
I will also admit that I see this a lot less than I see people like me complaining about it
I have a pet hypothesis that the idea of heroes going “nooo if I kill him I’ll be just like him” after previously killing hundreds of faceless henchmen is a zombified remnant of aristocratic mores around warfare and therefore literally just classism.
Not trying to dissect the joke, but the entire point is justice and vengeance aren’t the same thing, emotionally driven otherising violence/ vengeance is not the answer or conducive to systematic change.
the moment we start believing our problems can be fixed by killing a specific group of people we’ve kind of lost the plot, with most things the solution is to change the system (which takes forever) and actually deal with the folk that have grown powerful on the back of said system , lest we go the way of the Jacobins.
“No. If we kill him, we’re no better than him. If we kill him, he wins.”
“Yeah, except — we are better than him and he doesn’t win. He doesn’t anything. He’s dead. That’s the point.”
This misses the point entirely.
There’s a difference between putting a rabid dog down and torturing one to death for fun.
Intent and motivation are kind of important.
It’s why justice and vengeance aren’t the same thing.
What people forget is that this moral was created to the I killed you family but I help the community have a better life not the genocidal villain.
Thats the problem with popular thropes people start to use them wrong place and now everyone forget how they are when use right.
Also People see these arguments and agree and then are surprised that conspiracy theories are being treated as truth.
Yeah, but there’s also a reason we don’t allow vigilantism.
Yeah “kill all the bad people and the world will be better, because you are obviously a good person” seems like a great lesson to teach children
Yeah, no, sorry. The entirety of human culture doesn’t neatly fit into a single political narrative with heroes and villains.
If you actually look into the cultural roots of the idea that vengeance makes you just as bad as the person you’re killing, you’ll find that it’s largely a response to family feuds and vendettas. A trope which has existed in numerous cultures across history, and still exists today in a lot of places, where families would carry bloody conflicts accross generations, with each wave of killing avenging the previous one.
This isn’t a case of an uneven power dynamic, of an oppressor seeking immunity from the oppressed. This is an instance of peers killing each-other senselessly. Not every murder carried out by humans in vengeance is righteous and justified. Humans are well known for being capable of senseless hate and endless bloodshed. The notion that vengeance is wrong is so omnipresent in our culture because the blood it spilled is so omnipresent in our past.
There absolutely is room for an analysis of how this cultural idea can then be appropriated by the powerful into a way to preserve an oppressive status-quo in the name of peace. But it’s plainly wrong to say that the ruling class created the idea in self-preservation to start with.
i mean “he wins” only really applies to joker types of villains who’s main motivation is ruining others.
Otherwise I wouldn’t say they win. at most, you lose*.
But you know who usually wins? the world, which is now a better place because someone isn’t around gassing a city for fun.
*(also debatable. I’d say getting rid of the problem causing you anguish can absolutely be a step in getting over said anguish)
**also eat the rich isn’t about vengeance in the first place. It’s about preventing further harm. The payback is at most a bonus. and the world also wins in this example.
To kind of paraphrase my dad’s commentary on Dooku’s death in RotS, some people can’t be captured alive since they are still too dangerous. In my dad’s example, it’s because guy can kill you by waving his stumps around and using Force telekinesis. In case of most villains it’s more mundane matter of their supporting power structure continuing to fight while they are still alive.
Still, half of the points about vengeance are very much from the time where the idea of vengeance was much more tangible and practical matter and where the risk of the cycle of the vengeance ending with the whole region ablaze in blood feud was still very real. In a very real way, the reason why our culture condemns vengeance so much isn’t to stop poor from killing the elites but to stop the elites from starting wars over escalating personal feuds.
I’m always surprised at how whenever anyone trys to argue this way of reasoning they always make illusions to the French revolution despite it being the main event in cultural consciousness that would disprove their point. Like if I wanted to argue that killing bad people isn’t wrong and doesn’t cultivate cycles of violence I wouldn’t mention the event where the original people who spoke my point ended up also beheaded.
I mean on the one hand the rich and powerful need to be knocked off their high horses and most of them will probably only go down kicking and screaming, so violence will be necessary.
On the other hand, historical cases of ‘eating the rich’ have often ended up as mass-murder sprees of anyone who could plausibly or implausibly threaten the revolution (including the time with the guillotines).
I really hope that if there’s another revolutionary movement to make society actually egalitarian and sustainable, the elites who get deposed get actual justice enacted against them and the revolutionaries don’t just summarily murder them and anyone close to them, before making the survivors the new second-class citizens.
The problem I have with this argument is that it is basically saying “It’s okay to be a horrible person as long as you target horrible people.”
Because the people you consider horrible have very different viewpoints on what constitutes a horrible person.
Spoiler alert: everybody thinks the other one is evil and they’re the good side
Villian: Can you live with your self killing me hero?
Me[Every single time]: I could
If you’ve only seen the “if I do it Ill be just as bad as him” tropes used with regards to literally killing the bad guy, I question what media you’ve been consuming?
Right, I don’t agree with this. Sure, killing the bad guy does not for certain make you as bad as him, depending on what he was doing, but vengeance, even against evil, is always an immoral urge. When I say this, I don’t mean that it’s wrong to use lethal force to deal with someone who can’t be reached with diplomacy and whose actions present a threat to people’s lives, I’m talking about the urge to hurt someone who has wronged you for no better reason than the pleasure or satisfaction it makes you feel to inflict hurt back on them. That’s an understandable desire but there’s a reason we distinguish the concept of revenge from justice. The former doesn’t tangibly right any wrong as the latter does, it’s just self-righteous sadism.
They say if you kill a murderer, the number of murderers in the world stays the same. Now if you kill multiple…
it’s the intention. doing it for the same reasons the evil person would is a corrupting force, ur just replacing one evil w the same evil.
like when leftists decry dehumanization but then dehumanize the right, ye i get it it feels good, it tickles ur ooga booga mode. but picking and choosing who’s human is what got us the right in the first place. it’s still poison whether it’s watermelon or apple flavoured. i know u think ur the good guy and will use it for good. but ur not immune to corruption of ideology. u will find urself on the wrong end of history down this road.
Deadpool had the best response to this kind of thinking. “I got bored of your high horse and shot the bad guy in the face while you were droning on.”
The Princess Bride had the best execution of the opposite line of thinking. “There’s nothing you can do to help ease my pain, so there’s no reason for me to let you live.”
In the telly show The Great, Peter III of Russia and his childhood friends murder a man who sexually abused them as children.
The idea that revenge will darken their souls is floated at various points -notably by Catherine the Great-, but when they actually do murder the fuck out of him, they are all quite relieved and in good spirits.
Quite refreshing to see actually.
this is a twitter screenshot posted on tumblr posted on reddit
Drake: to serve man
Other Drake: to serve rich man
The rule isn’t “no revenge” it’s “don’t do what they do” like you don’t just kill ALL the rich people, that would kill a lot of good people. Pretty basic nuance. When Luigi killed the CEO he wasn’t slaughtering all the people in the company that have nothing to do with their policies, he just killed the one in charge.
People will say this and then call the death penalty inhumane lol.
This post has same vibe of “My name is Inigo Montoya. You killed my father. Prepare to die”
It’s interesting that some lefties (including me) are strongly opposed to the death penalty, but not opposed to hanging Nazis and chopping the heads off kings.
I suppose it’s just because the cost-benefit is different. Mercy is extremely important, but if our attempt at rehabilitation fails (or even if we just fail to create a strong enough deterrent for the next Nazi bastard), millions could suffer or die.
But then, stories are supposed to give us lessons we can use in our day-to-day life, and “mercilessly destroy your enemies” is a very bad lesson. If stories about Batman and the Joker manage to nudge Joe Bloggs to break out of a revenge spiral with his coworker John Smith, that sounds like a good thing.
I think it depends on what the vengeance consists of. It could end up showing that you’re not actually against torture, murder or abuse, you’re in favour of it as long as you don’t like the victim, which is the way villains think and feel.
Although none of that means the villain should face no consequences.
vengence is bad =/= you shouldn’t stop evil
These are two different things
Same goes for “snitches get stitches”.
“It’s wrong to kill someone who’s trying to kill you”
It’s biblical,cause vengeance is mine sayeth the Lord