#on the flipside i also really enjoy taking characters who are supposed to be Mindless Eldritch Single-Minded Incarnations of Pure Evil

[angorwhosebabyisthis]

on the one hand i'm like, i know there are some pretty obvious reasons Powerful Cosmic Big Good Beings(tm) in fiction tend to in fact be some of the worst bastards in a series, and my sentiment toward them ends up being I'm Going to Fucking Fight You Actually.

namely: they usually have enough power to do some absolutely horrific stuff--through action, inaction, or both--on a massive scale. like full-on 'pokemon villain you have to stop from causing the apocalypse at the climax of the game, because they've decided they have the right to make that call and have gotten their hands on the means to do it.' and often the call that the Big Good makes is portrayed as the right, justified, well-informed thing, which inevitably ends up revealing some pretty disturbing beliefs on the part of the creators.

often they mean well and just haven't thought it through, but a lot of people are operating on some real pokemon villain shit that they haven't questioned yet because it hasn't come up in a context extreme enough to follow to its logical conclusion. 'if you could press a button to kill every trauma survivor in the world to end their suffering, would you?' is not a situation most people will ever be in, and put in those terms they might realize how monstrous that would be and say no. but they might have the philosophy in the back of their head somewhere, influencing their beliefs and interactions with the world, that survivors would be better off dead than traumatized but alive, and that someone else could ever have the right to make that decision for them.

speaking of which. a major reason i have mixed feelings about the ending of sdmi is that the new 'happy' timeline is portrayed with a deep, creeping sense of loss and unease, which seems intentional; otherwise it would just be incredibly upsetting and i would straight up hate it with a passion. whereas i am REALLY bothered by the fact that the nova entity is treated as a kind, benevolent guiding force to lead the heroes where they need to go, and not the single most evil motherfucker in the show surpassed only by the nibiru entity.

she directly, intentionally orchestrated the genocide of an entire timeline, up to and including literally erasing them from existence. she manipulated a bunch of children into doing this without telling them what would happen. the gang are the sole survivors of the murder of every single person they ever knew, and they will have to live the rest of their lives knowing the nova entity used their hands to do it. the only real way she was 'better' than the nibiru entity here was that she decided to cleanse the world with fire so she could make some new people to be happy, instead of ending the possibility for happy people to exist ever again.

like. the nova entity would actually make a fantastic villain played as a foil to the nibiru entity. god damn.

eldritch cosmic Big Good characters are usually treated as some kind of, like, force of nature that arbitrates what the ideal world would look like, and maybe just needs some help from the heroes to make it happen. at worst, they're treated as being too eldritch and above the understanding of mortals, mutual or otherwise, to be held accountable for the decisions that they make. at worst in that case, the heroes are frustrated with them for not being much help, but then things just move along and that stops being considered a Relevant Issue to Address. maybe, maybe the results of those actions are treated as a bad thing, but the person actually responsible gets off squeaky clean.

the consequences of the noventity ending the world are unnerving and bittersweet at best, and the uncomfortable question is left in the air of whether the gang might have done things differently knowing this would be the outcome. the noventity herself is a benevolent hero who saved them all in the end.

and like. that's not how it works. if you're a person making decisions, you are a person making decisions. you are accountable for those decisions. there are a lot of really, really interesting stories to be told exploring the nature of that dynamic with '''higher''' beings who really are working on a different scale than us--with maybe a genuinely deeper understanding of a lot that's going on in the world, just from time, experience, and capacity to hold and process information--and still don't get to decide what's best for us.

i am both fascinated by the potential for stories like that and really frustrated by the way they're handled in fiction, and the way that plays out tends to treat them as Not Actually People and therefore Not Actually Characters, which means it's easy for them and the bullshit they do to blend into the narrative unless you deliberately stop and turn the spotlight on them. so i do.

on the other hand, it is really funny to me that in practice this means my response to Big Good Entity characters is consistently just