You Ever Had It With Good Defeating Evil?

Look, this isn't hard to understand. Good guys are usually satisfied with the status quo. A win for them is to keep the aliens from conquering the Earth or keeping Lex Luthor from getting the phlebotinum. Bad guys always want to win utterly, kill or get rid of the heroes and enslave/destroy the earth. A show where the good guys win can go for several seasons. A show where the bad guys win lasts one episode.
 
There was a video game a while back that was based off the short story "I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream". There were two possible endings. One was the good guy beats bad guy, and the other... well let's just say it wasn't so rosy. Would that count as a video game that usurps the status quo a bit?
 
Exactly. There can be episodes where the villain gets ahead or gains something as part of his plan (V.V. Argost in Secret Saturdays, Xanatos in Gargoyles) but they must ultimately be defeated in the end. There'd be no show otherwise.
 
I remember with the old 80's cartoons sometimes rooting for the bad guys. I just got so tired of watching He-Man pound on Skeletor everyday, or watch the old Ninja Turtles beat up on Shredder. Granted, you did see the bad guys have some success in the old 80's cartoons. Watch either of the G.I.Joe or Transformers animated movies from the 80's and you'll see the bad guys having some success. But for the most part, it used to be that the good guys always had no problem moping the floor with the bad guys.

Fortunately, in the 90's things started to change. In the 90's you started to see the bad guys put up more of a fight than they did in the older cartoons. Heck, the Beast Machines series was all about the villan having succeeded in defeating the good guys. It's a lot easier to root for the good guys when you feel like they're having to work for the victory. What can I say, almost everyone prefers rooting for the underdog.
 
IIRC, there was some episode of the 80s TMNT toon where they showed what would happen if Shredder actually took over the world... and he was overwhelmed by the administrative duties it entailed.:anime:
 
If you think about it, that's practically how all three act stories seem to go.


Act 1: Heroes win a small victory against the villains, usually because the villains underestimated the heroes. The villains are still fine, but now they're pissed off.

Act 2: Villains whoop the heroes, to the point where the heroes appear to be on the brink of destruction.

Act 3: Heroes somehow manage to pull through anyway, utterly defeating the villains.
 
Someone else already mentioned this but I'll go into depth a little more on it.

Good always (ultimately) defeating evil is actually outright censoring stories and then later continued because of tradition.

It goes back to comics in the 40s and 50s before the mainstays like X-Men and Justice League. Back then, it wasn't untypical to have a situation where a bad guy totally racked havoc or no good guy strong enough ever surfaced to oppose said evil. This was the era where things like Dracula, Werewolves and Frankstein ravaged towns almost completely unopposed.

I forgot what US Agency did this (I wanna say FCC, but that doesn't sound right) started laying down rules to publishers of comics that they couldn't market things to children and teens that had a theme of Good not winning.

Although this was mainly focused at comics, when animated material came about, it followed suit. Weather it was because their stories weren't designed based on a bad guy winning, they liked the new direction of regulation or they were afraid of similar recourse, I don't know, but they did follow suit with the industry.

The whole idea of good always winning was further iterated under the first Bush Administration when programs were implemented to help encourage "Children friendly program". In short, provided companies were making and marketing cartoons aimed at children and Good always won (ultimately) over evil, they got a ton of funding, subsidies and tax breaks.

Weather other areas like Europe or Japan ever passed laws or not to reinforce this concept inside their borders, I don't know for sure. What I tend to think is we know animation in Europe and Japan (in particular) were based upon the US's lead and may have simply emulated the practice.
 
People prefer happy endings as a rule. That's not always true, and there are certainly exceptions, but stories that end on a down note tend to not do well. Stories are told for many reasons, and escaping from reality and its unfairness often tends to be one of these reasons. People dont LIKE it when the bad guy wins.

As is, what would the bad guys winning do to improve the story?
 
Oddly enough, I tended to prefer many of the villains over the heroes, character-wise. They were more fun and charismatic and some of them were a bit more complicated than the heroes. Like Jack Spicer (Xiaolin Showdown), Syndrome (The Incredibles), Dr. Drakken (Kim Possible), Team Rocket (Pokemon), The Monarch (Venture Brothers), most of them are on the comedic side which is probably why I like them so much.

Of course, there's no way they could win because that would be the end of the story. I don't mind it when a villain loses, I mind it more when they're a rather "innocent" villain and they get treated a punching bag, sometimes just for the sake of it (Like Team Rocket and Jack Spicer). I like it when those "Not So Great" villains get their rewards now and then, like Jack Spicer in the first season of Xiaolin Showdown actually winning various showdowns and even stealing many of the Shen Gong Wu. It affected the story, but not in a "WORLD IS TAKEN OVER, THE END" kind of way.

I don't think there's a rule that Good Must Win by any company or regulation, I mean, look at Invader ZIM. ZIM never won, but neither did Dib, and Dib was on the "good" side. In fact, if either of the characters won, the show would have been over (which I find a bit interesting).
 
You've got things a little muddied, here. There was never government censorship of comic books. There were Congressional hearings about violent and sexy comics and concerns they were causing juvenile delinquency. In response the comics industry created its own self-governing agency in 1954, the Comics Code Authority, which did set strict rules that most of the comics companies followed, including the idea that good always won in the end. A lot of these rules were relaxed by 1971, though.

I don't see a link between the comics code and TV, though. TV channels already had their own broadcast standards and practices divisions to censor content and make sure what the kids, and the adults, were getting was wholesome. That didn't come about because of comic books, they'd had them for decades and there had been non-government, self-enforced censorship codes for film, too.

When there was more focus on child development in the 1970s educators, child psychologists and parent groups were brought in to remove some of the violence and make programs more educational, giving us things like the Super Friends, a superhero cartoon with none of the standard superhero violence. Even the advertising disguised as programs in the 1980s followed these guidelines and recommendations, leading to things like those hilarious "Knowing is half the battle" spots at the end of G.I. Joe.

I don't know anything about the Bush administration offering subsidies to animation studios if they always had good win in their cartoons. The Children's Television Act of 1990 required that a good portion of educational material, which a lot of toy cartoons wouldn't qualify as, air on broadcast networks. But I don't think the rules were that specific. And they didn't apply to cable at all because they were enforced by the FCC.
 
Infusions mentioned this:we care about villians more character-wise.
That is the main issue here.Villians are faar better developted than the heroes.Most heroes are boring becouse they have no real personality.And thats becouse writers refuse to give them any natural human trait.Well,good and evil are just made up terms for obeying/disobeying ethical standards of western society yadda,yadda,yadda...
The point is that writers who can?t think outside of the box come up with this Good vs. Evil plots.
So when they create a perfect goody two shoes character,they have to make them as less real as possible.And you can add an "Insignificant Flaw" to make them more relate to the nerd kid viewers.
Most Villians,ranging from comic releif ones,to really dangerous ones,are given flaws and quirks,thus making them more fun and easier to relate too.

Solution is to make heroes humanity and character,not a robot programmed to follow society?s rules
 
This is one reason I liked Invader Zim. It had a handful of episodes where the bad guy got his way in the end.

Of course, it probably helped that it was a show with a villain protagonist.
 
No.

Evil shouldn't win because evil doesn't deserve to win. It's selfish, petty, cruel, and immature. It wants more than it deserves and gives nothing back. How anybody could think evil succeeding is entertaining or appropriate on any front baffles me.
 
Ehhh, the good always wins thing doesn't bother me so much as pitting really dumb (but well meaning) "good" guys against very intelligent bad guys who have more interesting backstories and actual reasons behind their actions than the heros.



Eh... not always. I guess it falls into that gray area where the bad guy's being bad for pretty good reasons. Evil wining sometimes is a mature concept that's supposed to make you mull over the nature of good and evil. Was character A really evil, was character B really good? Was it a no win situation? Was anyone really in the right? That sort of stuff.

For example, lets take a real world issue into account. Say a hiker strays into the vicinity of a mountain lion and her cubs, and for whatever reason the cougar feels threatened by the hiker and kills him or her. Once the body is found, the first action taken by the authorities is to track down and kill the mountain lion.

So... the cat killed the hiker out of fear... humans killed the cat out of fear. Who's the bad guy here?
 
Likewise. Not only what was stated above, but having a series in which evil triumphs over good would also be counter productive. Once the villain's evil plans come to fruition and the world is conquered/destroyed and humanity is enslaved, where would you go from there? The only way to prevent a potential series from becoming a one-time-only special is for the villain to fail and for his/her evil plans to come to naught.
 
Actually, there is one interesting angle on it possible. The villain still has to work to retain power against threats from within and without, and of course there will be rebellions. Mark Waid created a comic book series, Empire, which is basically about what happened after his Dr. Doom analogue conquered the earth.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Empire_(comics)

And Wanted from Mark Millar is about what happens after, basically, the Legion of Doom kills the Justice League.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wanted_(comics)

But these only work as starting points and only in limited cases. It's still correct to say you can't have a story which starts with good guys vs. bad guys and bad guys win, because bad guys have different goals than the good guys. If the bad guys get what they want it would undo the heroes, while heroes are content to simply stop the bad guys or, if they're freedom fighters under oppressive regimes, keep themselves alive and stay one step ahead of the authorities while working on their rebellions.
 
We aren't talking about the real world. We're talking about cartoons and/or other forms of entertainment. In the real world, stuff's ambiguous as all get-out and evil wins sometimes. That's precisely *why* I prefer 'good wins, evil loses' in my entertainment. If I wanted moral ambiguity, I'd watch the news.
 
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