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Comments
Did I ever tell you ho...wait, I actually haven't praised Kiddy Grade for a while now. Though I have praised The iDOLM@STER.
let me tell you about PaniPoniDash
Hey, if we're going to start doing personal stuff I wanna be the first one to say something about Alex and his love of swords.
I think SHODAN is a different sort of animal than already said. Sure, it is true that she's "nigh-omnipotent entity who has complete control over the environment you are residing in, and she hates you", but that's not what makes this character great. This is not some randomly-gone-rogue AI. SHODAN has a massive God complex that's not only caused directly by human unscrupulousness, but as well, scarily justified. At the point when SHODAN's had her ethical restrictions removed for very base reasons (to aid in white-collar crime), she wasn't even a "she". Only then, it turned out she likes her new state better, and is now going to use her massive intellect for her own exclusive benefit, starting with making her tool of the man who wanted to make her, his tool.
Alex should love this one, really. There's a whole realm of philosophical interpretations one could turn into novel-length posts. It's the monster of human creation, a superior enemy brought into existence by humans' own fault. It was most pronounced in the first System Shock, where you played as the hacker who did that thing to her. Moreover, SHODAN is referred to as "her", which gives this whole ordeal rape-tastic overtones. Humans (notably, male humans) hurt her. Now they get to face what it made of her. I'd wager this is the sort of "woman scorned" archetype that goes back to ancient mythologies.
So, to sum it up. It's not just a rogue AI. SHODAN's a hyperintelligent entity bent on exercising what she sees as her inherent right, constantly denigrating the player as "insect" and "irritant" even when odds are against her, because in her own eyes, human species is but a footnote in the history of her magnificence.
Plus, she's got the sexiest voice of all evil AIs I know of.
raeg
The 20th century is where most films come from. You'd be ranking Alien up there with... well, everything that is nowadays considered a classic, from Casablanca to Goodfellas. Unless you're being very broad when you say "one of the best" (say, 100+), that's definitely a bold statement.
If we're going by measurable critical reception, it's not a very bold statement, really. Alien is highly-rated pretty much across the board, by a broad range of critics. I think its current Metacritic score sits at or above 90 (but don't quote me on that), for instance. Blah blah metacritic sucks ect ect, but that score is still a good indication of its critical reception. For a film to score that highly over thirty years after its release is no small feat, especially given how many Alien reviews there'd have to be floating out there.
It's not the absolute best film of the century, of course, but it's easily within the top one-hundred. Many strong cinematic minds would place it much higher than that. After all, it's pretty much the definitive horror film. Well, it and Eraserhead.
> For a film to score that highly over thirty years after its release is no small feat, especially given how many Alien reviews there'd have to be floating out there.
Actually, the sheer volume of reviews woiuld suggest that average rating tends toward a neutral between haters and likers.
Uh... no? For instance, the fact that not everything has a 50 on Metacritic suggests that you're wrong. Good things tend to get more positive reviews than negative ones and bad things tend to get more negative reviews than positive ones. Not to mention, these are actual critics' assessments of the movie and not just like... asking random people on the street or something.
Then again, I don't know jack about Metacritic other than it being a critique aggregator; I don't even know what sources it draws from.
I guess I should just state this plainly: I think calling Ganondorf a stereotypical evil overlord cheapens him. He's more of a force of raw evil itself, as I have stated before.
Those sentences don't really match.
How so?
and
are pretty much the same thing.
He's saying that being a "force of raw evil itself" is a pretty stereotypical overlord trait.
Although, I do see what you're trying to say.
So there's basically no conflict whatsoever between our definitions.
I think "force of raw evil" means something like a not-very-personified manifestation of something, rather than a personified agent with free will.
For the record, the original Alien rates at 83 with 22 reviews. Granted, this is related to the Director's Cut, but still.
Honestly, I was raging more because I think Alien is overrated rather than anything else.
Man, is it OK to admit that I was looking through nostalgia goggles for this one?
I hold such high respect for Ganon because he was the first character who made me understand what real evil was like. I was nurtured on stories of the Devil and Saturday morning cartoon villains as a kid, but their threats seemed distant and incorporeal. Ganon was the first villain who made me understand that:
I'd like to highlight that last point. Originally, it was just a product of my own incompetence at Zelda. As time went on, I discovered how right I was. Every branch of the Zelda timeline has one constant: Ganon never stays down. Seal him? He'll come back. Kill him? He'll resurrect or reincarnate. Hyrule is never ever ever ever rid of Ganondorf, because he possesses the Triforce of Power and can never be separated from it.
I know now that Ganon's probably just another stereotypical evil overlord, and if I were introduced to Exdeath or Sauron at a similarly early stage instead I'd probably have the same regard for them too. I guess I was just being a nostalgic fanboy.
If there's even such a thing as complete evil. It's probably fair to say that the Devil is the most prevalent villain in Western culture, be it religious or secular, and his story begins with not an overt act of evil on his own part, but an act of manipulation that uses the agency of another person. Alternatively, the act of temptation can be interpreted as being made with good intentions -- the fruit of knowledge might be associated with a more complete, informed kind of free will than what humankind was initially given access to.
Added to that, Hell is not, strictly speaking, an opposing realm to Heaven that greedily aims to steal the souls of sinners. It's a subsidiary of Heaven, meant to punish those that don't reconcile for particularly bad deeds. The Devil is very literally doing God's work. At least, that is the most literal interpretation of Biblical contents; various other interpretations and the cultures that spawned them have eventually twisted this story into one of divine conflict rather than a singular divine plan.
In any case, most people who do awful things try to validate their actions intellectually or by jumping moral hoops. Think of something like the US meddling on South American conflicts during the Cold War; no doubt some politicians who partook of that sincerely thought systems that were too heavily socialist had to be put down in order to safeguard what they saw as a more egalitarian capitalist system. That didn't make funding civilian-slaughtering paramilitaries right in any sensible frame of mind, but destabilising the rise of regimes that might have been (or certainly would have been) sympathetic to the USSR would be an objective of critical importance to someone whose job it is to uphold the Reagan-era system of capitalist policy.
It's true that there are occasionally people are are awful, are aware of that and exult in it. They're rare and the exception, though, and for the most part don't possess the subtlety to deal true, widespread damage. It's when acts are committed under the assumption that they are permissible for the sake of a greater good that some of the worst abuses rear their head. Ganon works well in the context of Zelda because Zelda games are fairy tales, and they don't really have room for complex notions of evil or perspective. A self-aware villain like that is just fine.
So I don't think Ganon represents the truest forms of evil, because he mostly spends his time blowing stuff up and playing sweet organ. What would be truly evil is implementing a system designed to impose hostile social and economic conditions on a population for his own benefit. Consider a simple case like taxing food and medicine highly, but keeping weapons tax-free, while only drip-feeding money into the hands of townsfolk. That's a fantastic way to ensure that the poor don't have enough food or medicine, but a wide sample of the population is armed, leading to a social context dominated by fear and violence. Rather than having to impose martial law officially, martial law would essentially impose itself as a result of standard living conditions.
Similarly, most RPGs don't have evil options that reflect self-interested evil or self-misleading evil -- just blow-stuff-up evil, which is probably why playing as a villain in most WRPGs is critically lacking in nuance or interest.
Only if you forget about the Fall. And even then, the act that lead to the Fall was even less of an overt act of evil.
is there a story that does this
because this would be really interesting to read/watch
Where the devil becomes president?
There's some argument over whether Isaiah 14:12 actually refers to the Devil or not.
I'm not sure how any of that's worse than multiple counts of regicide, at least one count of attempted genocide and hostile takeover of a country and the replacement of its entire populace with zombies, though.
Lucifer isn't even in the Bible except as a title used to refer to a Babylonian king.