Against cliche ideas that might be fun to see for a change

[Badger]

Just thinking about how things are done the same way over and over again in movies.  Some ideas I thought of to start off

 

1) Maybe make the Freemasons the good guys for a change  

 

2) Does the evil Greek god always have to be Hades?  I mean you do realize you are using as the bad guy, when you got a certain other god who swallowed his damn children, seems that might work better for a villain.  Hell, your "hero" god is a guy who could perpetuate a #MeToo movement that makes Harvey Weinstein looks chaste.

 

3) (maybe less common) If you are going to make one of the 4 elements the bad guy, why always fire?

 

Note: ok, the ones I thought of might new ways of looking at the traditional good vs evil matchups, but that isn't necessary for you guys.

 

 

 

[wcw43921]

1. I have no problem with the Freemasons as good guys.  George Washington was a Mason, and so was Thurgood Marshall.

 

2. As far as I know, only the Disney movie Hercules and a couple of episodes of Justice League had Hades as the bad guy.  In the Hercules and Xena TV series the main adversary was Hera, and in the Wonder Woman comics Mars was the bad guy, with Aphrodite representing peace and love.  Greek mythology has the gods and heroes doing great and terrible things in equal measure.

 

3. Haven't heard of a story where fire elementals were considered evil.  Usually the elements aren't considered good or evil--it depends on how they're used.

 

Hope that helps.

[Bazza]

Hades was the bad guy in Once Upon A Time tv series. 

[Starlord]

- A twisted Cupid might make a cool bad guy.

 

- A story told from the POV of a pyromaniac might be interesting psychological horror

 

- I think the Freemasons were the 'good guys' in National Treasure

 

- What about an animated Disney short where the kind and peaceful animals of the forest finally realize that Badgers aren't actually gruff and stubborn, yet loveable neighbors, but are actually just total bleepholes?

[Lucius]

 

We do see this occasionally, but I always like to see it: the Damsel rescues the Prince.

 

Lucius Alexander

 

The palindromedary thinks I need rescuing

[death tribble]

I would like to see a movie about the Greek legends that did not have to have a Christian ethos thrust on it i.e. Immortals and the Clash of the Titans remake.

 

Ares was the bad guy in Xena as well or a primary antagonist. We never saw Hera.

 

As regards the elements in the first Thor movie the Frost giants were baddies, no fire.

 

and for once can we head them off BEFORE the pass ?

 

[Lord Liaden]

4 minutes ago, death tribble said:

Ares was the bad guy in Xena as well or a primary antagonist. We never saw Hera.

 

But Hera was the principle nemesis of Hercules in his TV series, from which Xena was spun off. For years she was an invisible manipulator behind the scenes, but in the last couple of seasons she did manifest in the flesh, played by Meg Foster.

[Badger]

13 hours ago, Starlord said:

- A twisted Cupid might make a cool bad guy.

 

- A story told from the POV of a pyromaniac might be interesting psychological horror

 

- I think the Freemasons were the 'good guys' in National Treasure

 

- What about an animated Disney short where the kind and peaceful animals of the forest finally realize that Badgers aren't actually gruff and stubborn, yet loveable neighbors, but are actually just total bleepholes?

 

You mean, those idiot animals don't think we are already?

 

(on a realistic note, I consider stubbornness somewhat a virtue, gave me the ability to accomplish things I might not otherwise have-admittedly double-edged though)

[Badger]

14 hours ago, wcw43921 said:

1. I have no problem with the Freemasons as good guys.  George Washington was a Mason, and so was Thurgood Marshall.

 

2. As far as I know, only the Disney movie Hercules and a couple of episodes of Justice League had Hades as the bad guy.  In the Hercules and Xena TV series the main adversary was Hera, and in the Wonder Woman comics Mars was the bad guy, with Aphrodite representing peace and love.  Greek mythology has the gods and heroes doing great and terrible things in equal measure.

 

3. Haven't heard of a story where fire elementals were considered evil.  Usually the elements aren't considered good or evil--it depends on how they're used.

 

Hope that helps.

 

With 3, admittedly I was thinking a little on the Last Airbender and the Fire Nation.  

[Doc Democracy]

My friend and I ran an anti-cliche campaign.  I am trying to remember the extent.  

 

Our first element was that the main technological race were dark-skinned and from an island archipelago.  The savages in forests came from the north (where it was warm) and the raving barbarians roved in subterranean caves to the South (where it was mainly cold).

 

The magic of the world meant that when you killed someone you had a geas to return their goods to their loved ones or you suffered.  If you wanted to take (steal) from the dead, you had to take on an obligation to complete the tasks they left unfinished when they died or to replace it with something of equal or greater value.  It was possible to honour the dead and sacrifice their goods to the gods if you also placed something of value to the sacrifice.

 

Skeletons were the major form of undead while vampires were the ten-a-penny undead that you threw at first level characters.

 

There were lots of other little things that were simply meant to say, think of what worked in D&D and reverse it to find what would be best to do here....

 

 

Doc

[Michael Hopcroft]

There is no such thing as an "evil race". This is true in reality, of course, but is such a staple of fantasy and SF that it tends to get really annoying really quickly.

 

People who go to war against "peaceful" kingdoms would usually have a legitimate grievance. Ideally those grievances could be settled peacefully, but Iron Age peoples are rarely that fortunate.

 

Churches of Death that aren't evil conspiracies, but people who recognize the inevitability of death and try to help people deal with this unpleasant fact, or to take advantage of this inevitability for less honorable but not necessarily catastrophic purposes. After all, necromancy and healing magic are closely related in practice. If you could get reliable guidance from your ancestors, would you use it? (The scenes in Black Panther where T"Challa and later Killmonger consult their fathers come to mind unbidden.)

 

A fantasy saga where nobody, not even the "bad guys", wants the world to end. Or where the 'end of the world" is simply a transition to a way of life and ideology that might actually be better (the fall of the Western Romans comes to mind, because those guys were rat bastards).

[Cancer]

If you really study what remnants there are of the Mesoamerican religion, though ... Well, I once thought about building a game world and campaign based around that, and I gave it up because it's really, really hard for someone rooted in Western culture to see that as anything other than just evil.

[Duke Bushido]

Throwing an occasional virgin into a volcano actually _does_ prevent the earth from opening up from here to the horizon and swallowing everything.

 

That'd be an interesting and unpleasant thing to find out.

 

 

[Cancer]

Make it so it only works for male virgins, so there isn't a secure physiological inspection that can verify the virgin status.  And then double-down so throwing in a non-virgin amplifies and accelerates the destruction.  So basically you're reduced to throwing 5-year-old boys into the chasm.  And the power goes as N², so twins are four times as good, triplets nine times as effective, etc.

 

EDIT: And then really do the double-or-nothing, and the ritual sacrifice day comes only once every fifty years or more, but on that day you gotta send a thousand boys into the fire to do you any good.

[slikmar]

I mentioned this movie in the what have you viewed thread: Season of the Witch with Nicolas Cage and Ron Perlman. It is the most anti cliche movie I have seen. Neither friend betrays each other - ever. The church member sent with them to escort the witch isn't a lecherous pervert only accusing her because he desires her, the person tearing the group apart with illusions turns out to be the possessed girl, which equals witch to the church, though in this case to the devil seeking the last book that can tell how to banish it. The acting etc isn't great, but we loved that the twist was really there was no twist.

[Duke Bushido]

1 hour ago, Cancer said:

Make it so it only works for male virgins, so there isn't a secure physiological inspection that can verify the virgin status.

 

I love it! 
 

Though according to the Star Trek episode of Futurama, there _is_ a way to tell:

 

"Then all the fans were executed in the manner most befitting virgins..."

 

 

 

[DShomshak]

Michael Hopcroft's "Church of death" suggestion reminded me of Michael Reeves' fantasy duology, The Shattered World and The Burning Realm. In this setting, everyone believes that a thousand years ago (or so) the Necromancer, who became the most powerful wizard in the world by finding how to harness the power of the dead, destroyed the world when he couldn't conquer it, and all the other wizards made the runestones that keep the fragments habitable and prevent them from crashing into each other. Turns out, that was almost backwards: The breaking of the world was a natural cataclysm, and the Necromancer sacrificed his life making the runestones. Now that the runestones are wearing out, somebody needs to learn necromancy to recharge them. And the dead are happy to donate their power to this end. The dead don't hate the living, and their power isn't evil: After all, the living are their descendants, whom they want to protect.

 

The books were not great -- after 20+ years, I remember almost nothing of the plot or characters -- but I thought it was a pretty neat reversal of the usual "Death = Evil" cliche.

 

Dean Shomshak

[DShomshak]

I just saw the movie Valerian, which stands out for having nothing original at all. Here are a few cliches from it that I'd like to see reversed:

 

A utopia that is *not* the result of some magic McGuffin such as cute critters that poop energy crystals or (vide Pandora, from Avatar) a divine super-intelligence threaded through the biosphere. Nor is it some beautiful, naturally abundant environment. Instead, it's the result of people working hard to make the most of a marginal location, and following simple, sensible ideas such as, "Don't waste resources fighting each other."

 

The people whose near-annihilation is the Terrible Secret are not especially nice. At least, not notably better than other cultures. The heroes help them not because the victims are saints, but because the victims are people.

 

Male and female partners who have no sexual tension between them at all. They are smart, competent, dedicated to their jobs, respect each other, and the writer has to come up with some other basis for drama and character development.

 

Dean Shomshak

[archer]

I had fun in one campaign with half-elves...but they were half elf and half black human.

 

Caused some confusion when describing them,

 

"No, they aren't dark elves. They are half elves who are black."

 

"So their skin is black?"

 

"Yes."

 

"So they are dark elves."

 

At that point I caught on to their confusion and tried to stretch out the conversation as much as possible, trying to amuse myself at their expense.

 

I guess I could have described them as "African-American half-elves" but since the campaign wasn't set in the Americas....

[slikmar]

3 hours ago, DShomshak said:

Male and female partners who have no sexual tension between them at all. They are smart, competent, dedicated to their jobs, respect each other, and the writer has to come up with some other basis for drama and character development

On Blue Bloods tv show, Danny (Donnie Wahlberg) and his partner (Marisa Ramirez) are exactly what you describe. It is actually very refreshing, and the shows writers do just enough to make them annoy each other for you to not get the impression they are romantically interested. Course, for the most part I really like the writing on this show^.

The parts I don't are when they take the sister played by Bridget Moynahan, who is DA, and have her go overboard to be "cold", especially with her chief inspector. Sometimes she does dumb things, despite being really smart and savvy. Funnily, I commented that she does dumb things not because she is portraying a woman, but because she is portraying the non police officer in the show, and the show is very pro-police (though they show the negative parts a lot too).

[tkdguy]

On 9/9/2018 at 2:05 AM, Badger said:

2) Does the evil Greek god always have to be Hades?  I mean you do realize you are using as the bad guy, when you got a certain other god who swallowed his damn children, seems that might work better for a villain.  Hell, your "hero" god is a guy who could perpetuate a #MeToo movement that makes Harvey Weinstein looks chaste.

 

Despite abducting her, Hades actually stayed faithful to his wife, unlike his brothers.

[Duke Bushido]

5 hours ago, DShomshak said:

 

The people whose near-annihilation is the Terrible Secret are not especially nice. At least, not notably better than other cultures.

 

 

Man I wish this board still did Rep; I'd bury you in it, just for that.  I swear, we're about two more months from such a thing being illegal to even say....

 

 

[Badger]

On ‎9‎/‎10‎/‎2018 at 4:44 PM, Michael Hopcroft said:

There is no such thing as an "evil race". This is true in reality, of course, but is such a staple of fantasy and SF that it tends to get really annoying really quickly.

 

People who go to war against "peaceful" kingdoms would usually have a legitimate grievance. Ideally those grievances could be settled peacefully, but Iron Age peoples are rarely that fortunate.

 

Churches of Death that aren't evil conspiracies, but people who recognize the inevitability of death and try to help people deal with this unpleasant fact, or to take advantage of this inevitability for less honorable but not necessarily catastrophic purposes. After all, necromancy and healing magic are closely related in practice. If you could get reliable guidance from your ancestors, would you use it? (The scenes in Black Panther where T"Challa and later Killmonger consult their fathers come to mind unbidden.)

 

A fantasy saga where nobody, not even the "bad guys", wants the world to end. Or where the 'end of the world" is simply a transition to a way of life and ideology that might actually be better (the fall of the Western Romans comes to mind, because those guys were rat bastards).

 

Yeah, another one I should have mentioned.  Make the orcs good guys more often.

 

Or make the "ugly" alien/fantasy races the good guys more often.

[Badger]

On ‎9‎/‎10‎/‎2018 at 5:53 PM, Cancer said:

If you really study what remnants there are of the Mesoamerican religion, though ... Well, I once thought about building a game world and campaign based around that, and I gave it up because it's really, really hard for someone rooted in Western culture to see that as anything other than just evil.

 

Yeah, the Aztecs especially have always made it hard for me to like them.  By all accounts they seem pretty brutal in comparison, to even other Mesoamerican religions/cultures. 

[Badger]

5 hours ago, slikmar said:

On Blue Bloods tv show, Danny (Donnie Wahlberg) and his partner (Marisa Ramirez) are exactly what you describe. It is actually very refreshing, and the shows writers do just enough to make them annoy each other for you to not get the impression they are romantically interested. Course, for the most part I really like the writing on this show^.

The parts I don't are when they take the sister played by Bridget Moynahan, who is DA, and have her go overboard to be "cold", especially with her chief inspector. Sometimes she does dumb things, despite being really smart and savvy. Funnily, I commented that she does dumb things not because she is portraying a woman, but because she is portraying the non police officer in the show, and the show is very pro-police (though they show the negative parts a lot too).

 

Woh, that's my mother's favorite TV show.