Some links may be affiliate links. I may earn money if you buy something or take an action after clicking one of these links on this site.
Rob Knowlan is a participant in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program, an affiliate advertising program designed to provide a means for sites to earn advertising fees by advertising and linking to Amazon.com. As an Amazon Associate, I earn from qualifying purchases.
Relaxing Bleakend
It’s a gloriously bleak weekend full of rain, wind and gloom. Every raindrop that falls is nourishment for the greenery that is already budding and blooming around my cozy little house.
Problems
Idealism increases in direct proportion to one’s distance from the problem. ~John Galsworthy
As much as I’m enjoying the colder days of this transition to 💐Spring🌷, I’m not enjoying the current administration’s mishandling of basically everything.
The weakness and conspicuous idiocy of Admin46 has led directly to the situation unfolding in Ukraine.
The sanctions that Sleepy Joe claims that he never said would prevent the war aren’t doing very much to end the war. They are, however, having devastating effects on pretty much everybody but Russia.
Why the hell can’t we impeach this clown? Well, because the second-stringer may actually be worse.
Ol’ Handsy has the excuse of being conspicuously senile and having never been the sharpest knife in the drawer to begin with.
What’s the VP’s excuse?
Worse besides is the fallback if both of them went. The Speaker of the House is as incoherent as the President and VP combined.
Is there no air in DC? Can’t any of them get any oxygen flowing to their brains?
What the actual fuck, people?
They’re absolutely nuts and they’re dragging us all down to their personal hell with them.
It’s intolerable.
The Green New Deal is a bad idea in broad strokes as well as in detail.
It’s fine to want to transition to cleaner forms of energy production, but you can’t go off of what works cold turkey without having something else that works better available. We don’t have that.
It’s fine not to try to drag us into WWIII by leaping directly and personally into Ukraine’s trouble with Russia, but you can’t lean on the gutless tactics that have emboldened the Russians in the first place and you cannot do things that will worsen things for the world at large.
Sanctions are supposed to hurt the target, not everybody but the target.
The Senile One stands there mugging for the camera, saying that there will be food shortages and higher fuel prices but it’s all Putin’s fault.
The fuck it is. It’s your fault for being an incompetent pussy.
His policies claim to Build Back Better but we’re headed for The Great Depression 2.0, WWIII and possibly a second American Civil War.
Assuming we survive any of it, we seriously need to rethink a lot of things about how our country runs.
We need term limits for Congress to keep entrenched barnacles like Joe and Nancy from reaching the levels of power and ill-gotten wealth that they currently have.
I’m concerned about the signals coming from the Oval Office. They’re mixed signals at best and don’t offer much hope for the continued wellbeing of this country.
To anyone reading this who actually voted for this fool, are you happy with your choice? Really?
#StopVotingForDemocrats
💐Springtime🌷
Rokiczanka – W moim ogródecku (Official HD Video)
Thought I’d bring this cheerful little song to your attention while Poland still exists. The title translates as “In My Garden”.
Enjoy the goats, flowers and charming singers while the world around us descends into chaos and ruin.
The Villain’s Character Arc
Lead us not into temptation. Just tell us where it is; we’ll find it. ~Sam Levenson
This seems to be the primary fork in the road for whether a character turns into a villain or a hero.
By conventional standards, not giving in to temptation seems to be the hero’s choice.
Is it really as simple as all that?
It’s been said that the road to hell is paved with good intentions.
One well-meaning choice after another would seem to be a net gain, but well-meaning and good are not always the same thing.
In the animated feature, Injustice, Superman is driven to extreme actions in response to a staggering loss. In his place, any of us might choose to do what he did. Given that he is completely unstoppable, he decides to become the world’s policeman.
The more that other members of the Justice League try to reason with him and point out the obvious downfalls of his absolutist approach to enforcing worldwide peace, the more he doubles down and becomes even more dictatorial.
The road to hell, in this story, is paved with the good intentions of preventing war, crime and unhappiness.
Unfortunately, while he is largely able to end war and crime, he’s a major contributor to unhappiness.
It’s interesting to see how writers handle the What If of Superman going bad.
It’s also interesting to see that the tipping point for Injustice is based on The Joker‘s oft-stated notion that we’re all one bad day away from being like him.
Heath Ledger’s Joker states this in his chat with Batman in The Dark Knight and it serves as the central thesis of The Killing Joke.
That’s not the only source of villainy. While The Joker may hold that madness is like gravity, not all villains are mad.
Some are stone cold sober. They do what they do from a sense of avarice, entitlement or even family tradition.
La Cosa Nostra is literally “This Thing Of Ours”, as mafiosi in the movies often say. From The Godfather to The Sopranos, you see families whose personal histories go all the way back to the unruly banditry in Sicily and throughout the Italian Peninsula back in the day.
When your family’s wealth is built around a particular line of business, it’s hard for that not to get passed on to at least one of the next generation.
To Tony Soprano’s credit, he never wanted that life for his kids. He didn’t particularly want it for himself, but he was in deep and in for life.
Other members of their circle had no doubts about that life. It was a given that if dad was a mobster, the kids would be brought up, brought in and earn their buttons in due time.
On the other hand, some villains come from ostensibly “normal” backgrounds. We’re all too familiar with stories featuring the spoiled kids of self-made zillionaires or from aristocratic lines.
Some consider themselves untouchable because of the privilege of their upbringing or because mommy and daddy always bail them out.
Sometimes, it doesn’t take a generation for wealth to corrupt. The aforementioned self-made zillionaires sometimes make a devil’s deal in their rise to the top.
Whether they take dirty money to shortcut a difficult situation or cut corners on their own, they make morally dubious decisions, hoping they won’t come back to haunt them.
This is grist for detective stories and political thrillers. Can you find the dirt on the too-powerful politician, the shady dealings of an oligarch or the illicit ties to unsavory sources and expose them? Can they buy you off or kill you off in the process?
That’s one possible angle. Another typical angle is that poverty, abuse or neglect lead to criminal behavior.
From Fagin‘s gang of child thieves in Oliver Twist to the street corner hoppers in The Wire, economic hardship can lead to the exploitation of children. Being brought up this way, such kids only see the world through the lens of this dystopian view.
It’s all in the game.
To them, this is normal. Like the mafiosi, these people live to get one over on somebody. Raking in a dishonest buck by running some kind of hustle is considered heroic in these circles.
There are so many reasons why people turn to crime, leading to a variety of ways to characterize our villains in fiction.
Was it one bad day, a family thing, a maladjusted upbringing or is it all just “all in the game“?
Which villain is in your story? I’ve got quite a few in mine.
Guess it’s time I started writing again so you can have a chance to meet them.
That’s it for today. I’ve got other chores to attend to. I hope you’re having a lovely weekend. I need to go back to bed…