But you don’t have to commend their life.

Charlie Kirk was a thirty-one-year-old Trumpist who self-identifies as a White, Christian nationalist. He did not believe in a separation of church and state. He thought the Civil Rights Act was a ‘huge mistake’. He thought that ten-year-old girls should give birth to the babies of their rapist. He thought empathy is a term that does a lot of damage. He spent his last words on Earth insinuating that most mass shooters are transgender.

He thought that ‘some gun deaths every single year’ are worth the Second Amendment. If Charlie had survived the shooting, he would have seen it as the cost of doing business. Had someone else entirely gotten killed instead of him, he would have seen it as a necessary evil.

This is less a master list of his vulgarities as it is a vertical slice, as documenting every foul thing he’s ever said would be impossible within a human lifetime. What’s important is that these beliefs were spread to millions of Americans year in, year out, and he had enough influence to have the President of America personally release a video regarding their death. I would not go as far as to call him a primary architect of the current American Nightmare, but he is without a doubt among it’s fiercest acolytes.

All of this is to say that TIME Magazine’s (front-page) Kirk eulogy having their harshest insult for him being provocateur, the Times of Israel’s Kirk eulogy having no mention of Kirk’s belief that Jewish people control Hollywood and a Democratic Governor’s eulogy encouraging people to ‘continue his work’ is reverential to the point of lunacy.

It is not difficult to condemn a murder without exonerating the life of the murdered, yet a concerning number of both journalists and politicians refuse to do one without the other, to the point of straight-up endorsing his behavior. There are exactly two ways to interpret a post like this:

1. That Gavin is a liar
2. That Gavin and Charlie’s politics couldn’t have been that far part

The uninformed reader will not assume that their Governor would lie so boldly, and as a result, they will reasonably assume that Kirk couldn’t have been that bad! To give advice as to honoring his memory requires their memory being worth honoring; to omit any and all of his beliefs suggests that those beliefs were milquetoast!

This dynamic holds true for many of the liberal eulogies various news outlets espouse. When TIME Magazine describes Kirk as a tireless tribune for Trump’s young army, who would assume that tribune was used to denounce the existence of Islam in NYC? When the New York Times says that he and Kirk were on different sides of most political arguments, who could intuit that those two sides were ‘gays should be stoned’ versus ‘no they shouldn’t’? When the Wall Street Journal says that his assassination was everything he always warned about, who would know that this is the opposite of the truth — that senseless killings caused by lax gun laws is something he embraced with a smile?

To eulogize the wicked is to commemorate their wickedness. If one truly wants killings like his to stop, one must denounce the ideologies that lead to those killings. If you hate that Charlie Kirk died, stop commending how he lived.

Prologue

What is intentional has meaning, and every single element of a given fiction is intentional.

Some think this is self-evidently true, but if there is anything to take away from discourse about Frieren, a striking amount of people do not believe this — at least, not consciously. When not critically thinking about a story, audiences tend to take most of the things within said story for granted, too busy enjoying the work on a surface level. They can recount what happens just fine, and if they’re attentive they’ll remember the in-universe reasons for them happening, but if polled on why, the answers get shoddy, either drawing blanks or just repeating in-universe justifications to out-of-universe questions. Why did this happen? Well, it just did, duh. Nothing more to it.

This isn’t an unreasonable way of thinking — after all, most people don’t have the time to critically analyze everything they watch. Yet, it is still completely bullshit. Nothing, nothing simply is: they are there due to the will of the author. Every blade of grass in a painting is a choice. Every exclamation mark in a sentence is a decision. Every single line of logic in a setting, no matter how self-justified it seems to be, is true only because the author willed it so. Consequently, since they are intentional choices, they have meaning — because if they didn’t, they wouldn’t be there in the first place.

This is the bedrock of media literacy: examining the meaning behind a given fiction’s choices and forming opinions on a work based off those. Sometimes, we say that their choices were inspired. Other times, we say it was lazy. Sometimes, we say those choices were stupid. Other times, it seems fascist — intentionally or otherwise.

Beginning of the End

Frieren: Beyond Journey’s End (or just Frieren: BJE) is a fantasy shōnen (a Japanese comic book aimed at boys aged twelve-to-twenty-one) that came out in April 2020. As the series title implies, it takes place after our protagonist — a female, nigh-ageless elf magician named Frieren— saves the world alongside her merry bands of friends, and explores Frieren’s adventures fifty years after the fact. For the most part, I think Frieren: BJE is…okay? The art is well-drawn and the premise is relatively novel but I find the dialogue to be astonishingly wooden, especially for a shōnen. What stands out to me about the series, though, are its demons — the main antagonists of the series and the generator for what is by far the series’ biggest controversy.

Of course, we need to narrow down what demons are, though. It comes down to these four attributes:

• Demons are descendants of some species of monsters that are very long-lived, possess powerful magic and superhuman physicality, are pretty intelligent (‘articulate monsters’, as the manga calls it) and, save for their horns, most look identical to humans.
• As the term demon would imply, they’re stated and shown to be universally destructive. The Demon King waged a war against all other sapient races with the help of the entire species, and demons are shown to eat humans for sustenance. Some demons, like Solitar, state that it is in their instinct to harm and kill humans.
• Atop that, it is stressed to a frankly obnoxious degree that demons are completely devoid of most human emotion, and are stated to lack any capacity for empathy or kindness. They outwardly seem to portray a wide range of human emotions, but according to Frieren and from what we see, these all ring hollow for the demons, no matter how long they commit to the act or how sincere they seem. This is made brutally clear by a scene where a childlike demon cries for their mother to draw the attention of humans before eating them.
• All of these traits are inherent. Demons are not made, but born.
• Lastly, they are treated as inhuman vermin and it’s treated as sensible to kill them on sight.

While some of this may sound typical of fictional evil races, the combination of the five — with the third and fourth traits being particular offenders — have made demons a lightning rod for controversy. A non-insignificant number of people have accused the series of being racist, insuinating that the series supports biological determinism or outright fascism due to the fact that Frieren (who is depicted as being very wise) treats the demons as absolute bugs and is constantly validated for it. The emphasis on how coexistence with the demons is impossible and how people wishing for such are foolish does not help.

On the opposite end of the aisle, defenders of Frieren: BJE denounce these criticisms and the people who make the critiques with all sorts of counters:

• That thinking it’s about racism means ‘you fell for it’.

• That the demons aren’t racist, but are supposed to represent what makes us human.

• That the only people who see demons this way are stupid liberals/progressives/leftists/’libtards’ (this one is by far the most popular rebuttal).

There are more responses to the prompt than these but this is the lion’s share of responses, at least to my measure. The Frieren: BJE Defenders number significantly higher than the Frieren: BJE criticizers; any post touching on the demons gets fried to hell and back. At least for now, the court of public opinion is on Frieren’s side.

Which is a shame, because I am infinitely more aligned with the side that thinks the series is problematic than the side that thinks it doesn’t — and if its not problematic, then its just sloppily written in regards to it’s main antagonists

A Hellish Analysis

To understand my point, we’ve got to go a lot deeper into the portrayal of demons.

• The first thing worth mentioning is that Demons very explicitly don’t have to consume humans. Not only are they stated to be omnivores, but also shown to be as well: a servant of the Demon King, Macht, lived in the very-human city of Weise for three decades without so much as mention of a hunger pang. Demons are never portrayed as being desperate or even particularly necessary on humankind for food, either.
• Multiple Demons are shown to be capable of curiosity and even introspection. The aforementioned Macht showed immense curiousity as to whether he could feel malice or guilt, which is what led to him befriending the citizens of Weise before turning them to gold. This act, though extremely cruel, was not shown to be compelled or done out of urge. On top of that, the Demon King himself was said to be a curious, intelligent fellow: he did extensive research into humanity and even came up with the theory of convergent evolution.
• Demons are shown to not just inherently hate humanity, but even sometimes desire coexistence: Macht and the Demon King both sought this out, while Solitar was willing to help them see this goal through. While Solitar does say that demons instinctively want to harm and kill humans and most everyone agrees, she is very obviously wrong.
• Solitar is shown to show concern for her demonic brethren, sadness at their deaths and even describing them as friends — all emotions that Frieren is certain demons don’t possess and is validated for saying so. Frieren does state that Solitar understands human emotions and psychology the most…but all of the aforementioned emotions are expressed without humans being present. Unless Solitar lies when no one is around, her feelings are certainly genuine!
• Demons have a wide range of personalities even with their consistent amorality. Aura is cautious in battle; Solitar is hospitable even when it’s not to her benefit; Macht is conflict-averse; Grausam is distinctly loyal to the Demon King; so on and so forth. Demons have a range of personalities every bit as wide-reaching as regular humans do.

Having read this, someone unacquainted with Frieren: BJE may suggest that the contradictions between what Frieren and others say about demons and how demons actually are is intentional: ‘Frieren is supposed to be wrong’. The problem with this is that every single time she talks about demons, she’s proven right.

• Frieren says that coexistence is impossible. This view is validated by a demon (Solitar) and when Macht tries to disprove it by seeing if he can feel guilt or malice, he ultimately ends up agreeing with her.
• Frieren says many times that demons cannot conceive of most human emotions and are simply faking it all the way down. Every single time a demon treats her nicely, its either revealed to be a ruse or (in the case of Solitar) waved away by stating that they’re simply that good at pretending to be. Cases where the demons almost surely wouldn’t be faking it just don’t come up.
• Pretty much everyone who tries to advocate for coexistence between demons and humans dies for it. Additionally, Frieren is never portrayed as being unreasonable or irrational regarding her stance on demons: the people who disagree very much are shown that way.
• If, somehow, Frieren really is supposed to be just wrong, then she goes from a lovable, well-meaning and understanding mage to a genocidal bigot, and I reckon this is not what the story is going for.

Put all together, Frieren: BJE is incredibly inconsistent and straight up incorrect about the mechanics of it’s own world, which most of us would agree is pretty damn stupid. These can’t be explained away by saying this was just the series being weird in its earlier chapters: not only is Frieren not that old, but some of these contradictions happen as late as Chapter 120 in a story with 140 Chapters!

More troubling, though, is the question of the demons narrative purpose (or at least, what they ultimately represent). Remember: choices are intentional, and choices have meaning, and the demons in Frieren: BJE are mentioned from the very first chapter. They’re here for a reason.

And the reason is looking pretty bad!

Beyond Frieren

This is as good a time as ever to mention a topic I’ve seen broached when discussing Frieren: BJE demons: what about other fictional, evil races? Frieren is by no means unique when it comes to this: in fact, one could argue that it’s a staple of the fantasy genre! The demons in DOOM (2016), the Orcs in Lord of the Rings, almost half of the creatures in older versions of Dungeons and Dragons; the list goes on and on. Surely, Frieren: BJE shouldn’t be singled out for being racist?

In regards to those specific examples (because they’re invoked a lot):

• The Orcs in Lord of the Rings are very specifically not a regular race, being perversions by Morgoth than actual, normal races. Tolkien went out of his way to state this because, funny enough, he thought the idea of an inherently evil race repulsive.
• The older Dungeons and Dragons creatures are widely considered to be obvious racial caricatures in their earliest incarnations. Which is why Hasbro has bent over backwards retconning the shit out of their lore: nowadays, nearly no races are inherently evil. Even the inter-dimensional brain-sucking aliens have some good guys in the lot!
• DOOM (2016) is a shooter-focused videogame that needs hoards of disposable, morally-okay-to-slaughter creatures, or else the game wouldn’t exist. More importantly, DOOM does not dedicate several hours to emphasizing how no matter how human-like the demons are, they’re actually all Secretly Evil Inside.

That last part in particular is what makes the demons in Frieren: BJE stick out to me. Though a good number of fiction has evil races, how many of those emphasize how humanlike they are, and then double down on how they’re all inherently evil anyways? How many of them propose total extermination as preferable to even attempting to coexist? To my record, practically no contemporary fiction follows this trend…but amongst propaganda designed to encourage war, imperialism and genocide? It was routine.

Don’t take my word for it, though!

• “I wouldn’t have accepted that they [Tutsis] were human beings. You would see an infant who’s just learning to smile, and it smiles at you, but you still kill it.” [Source]
• “Our linguistic analysis suggests that Jews were progressively denied the capacity for fundamentally human mental experiences leading up to the Holocaust... However, after the onset of the Holocaust, our results suggest that Jews were attributed a greater capacity for agentic mental states. We speculate this may reflect a process of demonization in which Nazi propagandists portrayed the Jews as highly capable of planning and intentionality while nonetheless possessing a subhuman moral character.” [Source]

• “Depicting Japanese as apes was common in American war propaganda in the effort to dehumanize the enemy and portray them as blood-thirsty savages worthy of extermination…After early Japanese successes, Americans began to depict the Japanese as vicious supermen…” [Source]
• “These beasts must be killed,” an anti-Bengali poster from the Bangladesh Genocide [Source]
• “[Tigrayan’s are] a malignant cancer that has been eating away at [Ethiopia’s] vital parts...hyenas that must be baptized with fire…”
  Religious leaders describing Tigrayans during and before the Tigray genocide [Source]

• “The Pioneer has before declared that our only safety depends upon the total extermination [sic] of the Indians. Having wronged them for centuries we had better, in order to protect our civilization, follow it up by one more wrong and wipe these untamed and untamable creatures from the face of the earth.” [Source]
• “They keep pumping it into your brain that you have to disconnect. That they’re [Arabs] not people. That they’re not human beings.” [Source]

Ten different examples, all from different wars, colonialist conquests and/or genocides: given that these events stretch from 1914 to the present day, this is proof that for at least one hundred and ten years, this very specific propaganda tactic has been in wide use. I made sure to not include vaguely negative statements: I want to make clear that the specific rhetoric and justifications used for the extermination of demons has a very ugly and very consistent historical background (some to the point of being uncanny).

Then again, I’m being unfair: the demons in Frieren: BJE are literally demons! They are a bloodthirsty, existential threat that can only be met with extermination. They may look, and act, and feel like people, but none of that matters: they’re actually beasts. Even if they’ve done nothing wrong, even if they’re a child, you should slaughter them all the same. You have to disconnect — no matter what they do or how they act, they are not human beings.

I am hoping beyond all hope that, if you’ve made it this far, it’s obvious why this sentiment struck some people at at least a little racist.

bUt thEY’rE lITerALLy dEmONs

As mentioned in the Introduction, a common counter-argument to this interpretation of Frieren: BJE is that the series is actually trying to be anti-fascist; the series does not inadvertently sponsor racism, but actually denounces it!

I love this argument because anybody smart enough to make it is smart enough to know it’s insanely untrue.

• Fascism and sociopathy are two completely different things: the vast majority of fascists aren’t sociopaths.
• Fascism is a belief and not a species, and the actions of demons are very explicitly stated to be not only inherent, but inevitable. There is literally no corollary here.
• Fascists are incredibly nationalistic, but a defining trait of demons is asociality to the point of not caring whether the entire rest of the race dies or not. I do not think demons even have the capacity to be proud of a country.
• One of the few crimes against humanity that fascists don’t do is eat people.
• Fascism is not innate and, importantly, not unchangeable; there are many people who have gotten out of the alt-right. I have my misgivings with the Frieren: BJE author, but I do not think they’re so stupid as to think people who are alt-right are forever alt-right.
• Fascists do not seek coexistence with the people they oppress. I am not a Holocaust historian but I can say with confidence Hitler did not dream of secretly living alongside Jewish people.

I see this argument exclusively from leftists, which leads me to believe its a form of cope people use when they’re emotionally attached to a show with problematic elements. I kind of get it, but we should be serious, and a serious person cannot make this argument with a straight face.

Another counter-argument is that Frieren: BJE isn’t fascist because the demons are actually…animals!

Alright, ignoring the fact that would still make the show rather mean-spirited — we don’t slaughter sharks wholesale just because they kill a lot of people— this is also STUPENDOUSLY untrue. Are you really telling me that the Demon KING, WHO KNOWS THE THEORY OF CONVERGENT EVOLUTION, is only as intelligent as an seagull? How about Macht going on a thirty-year experiment to uncover the depths of his sentimentality: is he somehow only as smart as a dog? How do you suppose they were able to band together and start an honest to goodness war if they were just human-looking lions? The demons in Frieren: BJE are indisputably just as intelligent as humans, and anyone saying otherwise is either a bold-faced liar or has not read the manga very well.

The last major argument is the most annoying one: they’re just demons. This was what triggered the creation of this article and its what the opening monologue was for. “They’re just demons” is a thought-terminating cliche: a catchphrase that substitutes thinking for snappiness. What’s three thousand words explaining why Frieren: BJE demons are extremely reminiscent of historical (and contemporary) dehumanization compared to just plugging in your ears and pretending it doesn’t mean anything? In this light, anybody criticizing the story this way is just taking things too seriously, and any attempt to explain why people do so would be too serious, too. The only way to win in this framing is to acquiescence that critically examining art is a silly endeavor — but at that point, why give a shit about Frieren: BJE at all? What makes this series even worth defending if it doesn’t mean anything?

Post-Mortem

The last thing worth discussing would be what implications this analysis of Frieren would have for the author, Kanehito Yamada. I’ve saved mention of them up until now because going over them wouldn’t add much to my analysis, but having decried his work as having lots of allusions to fascist apologia, that raises the question of whether the author themselves is an apologetic fascist.

Having given this a lot of thought, it comes down to how much plausible deniability you think Kanehito possesses; at what point does Frieren become too racist to be accidental? The primary reason why the demons are so polarizing is because, as mentioned beforehand, evil races are an incredibly common trope in fantasy, especially in western-fantasy-adjacent stories like Frieren; there is a lot of credence to the idea that the author was just copying what ‘worked’. At the same time, the emphasis that Frieren places on the futility of coexistence — dedicating multiple, important chapters solely to debunking the idea — is extremely hard to ignore and atypical even by fantasy standards. This doesn’t strike me as merely a lazy attempt at justifying a lazy trope: the inherent evilness of the demons has a significant amount of thematic focus in the story.

From another angle, a common theme across genres is the question of what makes us human; Frieren: BJE could be reasonably seen as a poorly-executed attempt to answer this question. Unfortunately, even this interpretation has severe problems: not only is Frieren and a good amount of the cast non-human anyways (the titular character is as human as the demons), the series simply doesn’t frame the conflict between demons and sentient races in this light. The focus is always placed on how demons are inherently evil just because, even when they exhibit undeniably intelligent and even ‘human’ behavior. Even if this was the case, surely the series would have characters like Macht and the Demon King succeed in their attempts to rehabilitate themselves: what is more human than trying to do good despite the limits of the world around you? Perhaps the message is that to be a good person, you need to be capable of empathizing with others — but then why have all the demons who attempt to do this fail?

The line between “this author meant to be racist” and “this author’s story ended up being racist” is a matter of opinion, especially since Frieren isn’t over. While the odds of Frieren being revealed to be intentionally genocidal are slim to none, it isn’t strictly impossible for the story to have some sort of saving throw that redeems it somewhat. It’s also worth noting that Japanese shōnen are not free from executive interference and editorial meddling, even for well-accomplished manga authors; assuming Frieren: BJE is exactly as Kanehito imagined would be grossly unfair.

Ultimately, I’m willing to wait and see how Frieren: BJE plays out before casting judgement on the author — but the story itself earns no doubt. It is almost undeniably steeped in vile biological determinism that soaks the entire narrative with paranoid fascism. Intentionally or otherwise, Frieren: BJE not only echoes but outright justifies some of the most horrific rhetoric of the past one hundred years, and ignoring this in favor of having fun does a disservice not only to the story, but to you. You don’t have to have less fun: you just have to pay attention.

These tweets are not only endless in nature but reflect a growing attitude stretching far beyond the bounds of twitter; the complete adjudication of responsibility for one’s own dating habits in favor of ranting about women.

The worst part is that none of these tweets were originally about women: they’re all edited pictures where the original post was complaining incessantly about men!

It is important to clarify a few things before delving deeper into the issue at hand here:

• Men complain about women just as much if not more, and oftentimes more violently: this is not an article exonerating men of anything
• The red-pill / Andrew Tate is a disease

With that being said, I’d imagine that your reaction to these images was to instinctively cringe and shake your head — rightfully so, because the content in them was insufferable. The reason why I made this article, though, is because there seems to be a growing number of people online that, upon realizing that the images were complaining about the other group, would immediately decide that they were not whining, but instead making Profound Progressive Statements of some sort. A growing legion of dating pessimism that spreads to not just misogynistic men, but leftist women. And it is driving me fucking insane.

I am not the first to notice this phenomenon; the titular term, Heteropessimism, was coined in a feminist essay by writer Asa Seresin in 2019, and it has caught on like wildfire since. A quick glance from googling the term heteropessimism generates at least a dozen different think pieces on the subject, with several more YouTube videos in case you still didn’t get it. It is not a new topic, and the people that wrote on it before me have, by and large, done a pretty good job.

What I feel like I’m the first to do, though, is offer a different solution from what the vast majority of heteropessimist thinkpieces give. The usual conclusions I read are:

• Discover less heteronormative relationships and more queer relationships
• Be blindly optimistic and hope that cishet men get their act together sometime in the future

While these are not bad solutions — the first one in particular would help a lot of people — they don’t address the root of the issue and even seem to tacitly co-sign it. The problem with heteropessimism isn’t just that people are being too heteronormative, it’s that too many people are talking like fucking incels instead of acting like adults and making better choices.

It’s understandable why so many articles on heteropessimism focus on how it undermines queer liberation and is ultimately performative feminism; these websites are overwhelmingly queer ones, so of course it’d talk about queer things. However, I think it is important to talk about the non-queer problem behind it all: people having shit experiences with dating and coping with it by bitterly assuming everyone else is the problem.

This is something that the leftist side of the internet seemed to have broadly computed as the domain of incels: men ranting about how women are whores or are lazy fucks or have overly high standards or whatever the fuck the new coping mechanism is. We have (correctly) diagnosed that these opinions are ultimately pathetic, bitter attempts to rationalize their lack of success with the opposite sex, turning common and sometimes even sympathetic frustrations into hateful nonsense. The common denominator isn’t me, it’s them. They’re the problem.

The issue now is that now this attitude is endemic within leftist, female spaces themselves! The four twitter posts above are a drop in a salty ocean, with tidal waves worth of moaning about how everyone I date is an asshole but it has nothing to do with my choices. What makes them even more infuriating is that many of the posts I see (including half of the posts above) are from queer and/or leftist people that complain specifically about cishet men! Never mind failing to recognize that they’re just projecting unto the people they yearn for: they don’t even choose to simply date other people! Instead of flexing those queer muscles to date the scores of non-binary or genderfluid or gay or bisexual or trans men, they’re going out of their way to pick the people they hate, then make posts on twitter about how much the men are punishing them! And tens, if not hundreds of thousands of people shower them with likes! The common denominator isn’t me, it’s them. They’re the problem.

Let’s say I was actively in the dating market. Let’s also say that I was specifically seeking out white, American women (note that I am a Nigerian immigrant). If I went up to you and complained about how all thirty-five of white women I’ve dated were horrible, racist pieces of shit and how all white women ain’t shit, would you respond by:

• affirming how white women ain’t shit but at least we can have a terrible time as a collective?
• telling me to grow the fuck up by either not dating white women or asking myself why the numerous people I picked all suck?

Most people (hopefully you included) would pick the latter, because I am an adult who is responsible for what happens to them, especially if it happens thirty-five times. Yet on social media, posts like this only seem to be showered in adoration, legions of people old enough to vote bragging about how terrible all of their choices are.

Additionally, it’s not just that these types of posts and the reactions to them are annoying, they actively make me sad. These are deeply frustrated sentiments indicating a person who wants to be in a relationship but can’t seem to get in a good one. And instead of telling these people the truth, we coddle them to the point of cruelty. We tell them that yes, everyone does suck! You’re going to be alone forever because everyone you like is a monster, and all the people that like the same people you do are just lucky, every single one of them. But at least we can complain about how we’re all passerby in our own fucking lives together. All with some feminist language, just in case our misery didn’t seem righteous.

It makes me so goddamn mad. In regard to relationships, one of the most fundamental parts of being human, so many people have elected to be passengers in their own life. They are so frustrated with how things have gone — whether it was out of their control or not — that they give up any control entirely. Introspection is a lot harder than projection. Everyone sucking is a lot easier than my choices sucking. Pessimism is a lot sexier than Optimism.

It’s so simple. Declare that everyone you want to date is unfixable, then wait for them to fix themselves — and since you already said that was impossible, then all you have to do is mope and cry! You don’t need to make better choices! You don’t need to choose different people! You don’t need to do anything at all but whine about how little everyone else does.

Fuck that noise. See if some of your preferences are leading to bad outcomes. Check if your partners actually suck or if you’re the one at fault. Become more comfortable with being single and find joy in your friendships. Do something, something about it, because it’s your goddamn life, and for the most part, you’re the one in control of it.

Heteropessimism is for babies. It’s time to grow up.

An Introduction to Wokeness

There are precious few words that bear an exact, pinpoint meaning; short of scientific terms and numerical evaluations, everything’s going to have a certain level of inexactness; it’s one of the nice things about human language. Some words, however, are more ephemeral than others — and some of them are so vague that they can basically be whatever they want with only the vaguest consensus on meaning.

Where the trouble starts is when words this terrifically unspecific become incredibly important.

The term wokeness was first used in the mid-20th century by African-Americans to describe an alertness to racial prejudice and discrimination; you don’t ignore the injustice, you don’t ignore the problems, you’re awake. During the mid-2010s, the term underwent a shift in its usage; aside from becoming a lot more popular, it became a calling card of not just racial awareness, but progressive outlooks overall; being woke meant that you were in-vogue about all types of bigotry, not just race. It was a pretty useful summation of progressive/leftist ideology as a whole, especially in an age where ideas had to be shared in 140-character tweets.

Then 2019 struck. The online right began to mock the term, using it in sarcastic, ironic ways. What it specifically meant to them didn’t matter; everyone understood it was generally leftist, and so conservatives thought of it as generally lame. However, they began to do this a lot — far more than the leftists actually used the term themselves. If wokeness was convenient for progressive dialect, it was outright miraculous for right-wing lexicon; a one-size-fits-all insult for virtually any tenet of leftism that any fellow conservative could agree with. They never bothered to narrow it down to a specific definition because the lack of specifics was its strength; even if several of them had wildly different ideas of what constituted wokeness, they all disliked leftists, and wokeness was left, so it worked wonders. Additionally, the right needed a new catch-all term for the supposed evils of leftism; ‘political correctness’ hadn’t been relevant since the ’90s and ‘cultural marxism’ wasn’t quite as well known; thus, wokeness stuck.

Flash-forward to 2024: wokeness is so omnipresent in conservative dialogue that it’s being regularly used by the highest political powers in America, yet has only grown even vaguer since then! Vivek Ramaswamy, Republican Presidential Candidate, published an entire book on ‘Woke Inc: Inside Corporate America’s Social Justice Scam’. Donald Trump regularly complains about wokeness on his social media platform Truth Social .Florida Governor Ron DeSantis — yet another Republican Presidential Candidate — is years into his ‘War on Woke’, with aptly named legislative proposals such as the ‘Stop the Wrongs to Our Kids and Employees act’. DeSantis in particular has made his crusades against wokeness more or less his entire platform; the term is so powerful that more or less every single prominent Republican politician uses it.

It’s even got a lot of usage outside America. Hungrian politician Balázs Orbán promises to not give up fighting against ‘Woke ideology’. Both Scott Morrinson and Anthony Albanese — the former and current Prime Ministers of Australia — promised they weren’t woke (and Anthony is center-left!). French conservatives coined the term le wokeism (Wokeism) to use in their own culture wars, ironically to describe their resistance to American cultural imports.

By all accounts, the conservatives were victorious; the term woke is so poisoned that even centrists consider it pejorative and only the most stubborn progressives use it anymore (and certainly not outside their private circles). Nothing else comes close to it — not ‘Critical Race Theory’, not ‘Social Justice’, not even Anti-Racism’. Wokeness reigns supreme! But years into it’s popular usage, the question remains: what the fuck does it actually mean?

Nobody knows! Steven Poole says it mocks ‘overrighteous liberalism’. Hindu nationalists use it to describe secularists and ‘anti-Hindu’. It’s not all leftism, it’s the insincere leftists! It’s not all leftism, it’s the annoying progressives! It’s not all progressives, it’s the insincere progressives! Cultural Marxism (whatever that means)! Anti-racism (which is just as vague)! Trans people, period! Donald Trump himself thinks that half the people using it can’t define it! Wokeness/Wokeism/Woke is a ridiculously nebulous term, and the fact that it’s gotten so much traction amongst virtually all conservatism is a damning testament to how reactionary conservatives are.

However, it doesn’t stop there; like many a word before it, wokeness has become a starting point for all sorts of spinoff terms, and one of them is anti-woke.

‘Worth it or Woke’ is a website dedicated to analyzing movies, tv shows and (as of late) video-games through an anti-woke lenses, formed due to ‘the growing disparity between what audiences think about a program and that of the “professionals”’. It’s only a year old but has a respectable amount of reviews, though a large amount of them are locked behind a membership that I am absolutely not going to pay for.

Several things stand out about the site from their ‘About Us’ page. For one, they explicitly describe themselves as ‘religious conservatives’; this saves us a lot of guessing later. For two, they have at least bothered to give a definition of the word woke:

Put simply wokeness is progressivism that throws away objective truth and ‘tried and tested traditions and societal mores’; woke art is when film, tv shows and the likes have forced woke messaging. To their credit, they give us several examples of what they mean:

Alright! Their site may revolve around a single word but they have at least rigorously defined it. It also gives us things to tear apart before we look at the actual reviews!

The link they provided to ‘roads are racist’ is not, in fact, about roads being racist. What it is about is how cities and states in Pennsylvania can apply for federal aid to help reconnect neighborhoods that were intentionally racially segregated due to highways. America’s Interstate Highway System made their roads run right through primarily low-income, black neighborhoods, and you better believe it wasn’t by accident. Pete Buttigieg — the Transportation Secretary that launched the program — doesn’t state that roads are discriminatory, and neither does the program. Rather, it states the rather plain fact that lots of highway infrastructure are developed in ways that end up cutting off or even segregating communities en masse. It’s not even exclusively about race — and no one, no one, is saying that the roads themselves are racist. Worth it or Woke (abbreviated WioW from now on) considering this ‘woke’ and giving the worst paraphrasing of it possible is a very bad sign.

Their examples of what are woke are also not great either.

• “The forced celebration of behavior…” is pretty vague but, having gone through many of their reviews, I’m 110% sure they’re referring to any and all gender-affirming care for trans people. Putting aside that there’s nothing immoral or unethical about it, its acceptance didn’t happen ‘thirty minutes ago’ — the history of trans acceptance is pretty well-documented. It’s certainly increased more now, but this is in no way new.
• Women being written as ‘snarky prats’ and men being ‘caricatures’ or ‘evil’ are not things that are inherently woke, leftist, or even political, yet the author writes as if the presence of these things combined is enough to assume the writers are radical progressives. This is a pattern you’ll see in basically all of their reviews of ‘woke’ properties; they assume the intentions of the writers to ridiculous degrees without ever thinking that maybe it’s something done because it works for the plot at hand.
• Putting aside how this is very much just “I dislike The Last Jedi”, protagonists showing up as washed-up versions of themselves to be replaced by a new protege is an extremely old and well-used trope. The washed-up person tends to be male because (a) most famous characters are male and (b) the vast majority of action heroes — common recipients of this trope — are male. The proteges are sometimes females because, tragically, we allowed women to write things more often and it turns out they’ll make their female characters non-moms/damsels-in-distresses.
• “Manufactured diversity quotas for the sake of diversity over narrative” is an even worse version of the second bullet point because it’s basically nothing but bad-faith assumptions. In the vast majority of cases, you can’t prove that diversity was ‘manufactured’ for the sake of ‘diversity’ because the writers may well have just thought it was cool and put it in, the same writers put literally anything they think is cool into their works and put it in.
• The ‘not-so-secret gay agenda’ in question is a black woman jokingly talking about how accepting the studio environment was. Radical Progressivism, eh?

In relation to the last point, a lot of the diatribes about ‘forced diversity’ (a common term in discussions about wokeness in media) inherently rely on the assumption that media can’t be diverse just because. The Rule of Cool apparently does not apply to diversity; your story can have the dumbest, most batshit insane things imaginable, but anything less than rigorous justification for diversity is unbeatable evidence of wokery. Authors insert themselves into their characters and stories constantly in every way imaginable, whether it makes ‘sense’ or not — god forbid they insert any part of their identity that’s not a vague personality trait though! It’s extremely fucking stupid and it will come up multiple times.

Additionally, WioW’s Store Page also gives a good look into their political ideology: Ceramic mugs bragging loudly about being a ‘TradWife’, multiple shirts about gun rights (“Come and Take It”), “My pronouns are Ob/vious” T-shirt, a ‘Make Movies Great Again’ hat and — incredibly — Donald Trump pillows, magnets and blankets. Yes, I’m serious.

Combined, it paints a pretty clear picture of the website: very patriotic, overtly religious, terminally online and likely alt-right (only a dedicated Trumper is buying a fucking Trump blanket). Not a lot of encouragement to read their reviews, but I went through the trouble of reading a lot of them…

(Spoilers for Puss in Boots: The Last Wish, The Last of Us (TV Show), The Super Mario Bros. Movie and Spider-Man 2 (videogame)).

PUSS IN BOOTS: THE LAST WISH

WioW reviews work as follows: they have numerical rating breakdowns of a film’s various attributes — Direction, Plot, Cinematography and, for children’s media, Child Suitability/Parent Appeal — and have a ‘Woke-O-Meter’ (god help me) that measured how ‘based’ a film is, with zero being the most disgustingly woke films and one hundred being perfectly anti-woke. Every piece of media they review has a few parts: the ‘normal’ review (which we’re not going over in this article because they’re pretty uninteresting-ly fine), ‘Inappropriate Elements’ for kid stuff, and a breakdown of ‘Woke Elements’ (which is overwhelmingly often the longest part of the review, especially for the really neurotic breakdowns).

The first review we’ll look at is of the children’s movie Puss in Boots: The Last Wish; pretty good film with a bad review.

Inappropriate Elements:

• The author (white cis guy named James Carrick) seems to be utterly disgusted by the film’s…bleeped out swearing? Truly, the most horrifying of jokes! No, seriously, James finds it ‘dreadfully inappropriate’; the author clarifies that they’re not a prude, but getting twisted over characters implying they’re swearing is as prudish as it gets. I’d be a bit sympathetic if they’re actually swearing, but it’s not going to make a difference unless your children know the words already — in which case, here’s some advice: they already say it a lot.
• More amusing is that the Filmmaker considers the violence of this movie one step too far for children due to a single drop of blood trickling down Puss’s face and Puss’s “palpable level of fear” — this was so bad that it made it impossible for his daughters to watch the film ‘unedited’. Putting aside that the movie falls apart without that scene, most children are not going to be traumatized by a single drop of blood! They scrape knees and get scratched by stones and get injections; they know what that kind of pain is. The visceral protection of James’ children is annoyingly puritan; your kids are going to react worse to when these things inevitably happen in real life because they have no frame of reference for it. Children’s stories shouldn’t be so rote that the bare minimum amount of blood is unacceptable; this isn’t Mortal Kombat.

Next up is the film’s “Woke Elements”, where James makes some absolutely baffling points:

• Seeing as his own movies take precedent over crossover appearances, wouldn’t this imply that the crossovers are what err?
• The author uses vague language here to obscure that the ‘female counterpart’ is just one person, Kitty Softpaws — who, we might add, is explicitly Puss’s rival in the first film. She’s his superior for a lot of the second but that is only due to Puss’s own negligence — and he gets his mojo back for about 40% of it anyhow.
• Why is this ‘woke’? Is it not possible that Puss is being overshadowed because it’s funny and engaging to see such a massively arrogant person get cut down to size a bit? ‘Arrogant, powerful man loses power; hi-jinks ensue’ is a very well-worn trope. Why does it change because Kitty is female?
• Speaking of, Kitty is female because both Puss in Boots films emphasize their romantic relationships. Kitty being male would make Puss gay, which I suspect would run far, far more afoul of wokeness than what the film is currently like (if their other reviews are any indication).

• How is any of this woke or related to ‘radical progressivism’?
• This is an absolutely abominable reading of the film; quite possibly the worst take on it I’ve ever heard. The moral of the film is to stop and smell the roses — a moral so obvious that there is a scene where the characters make it through the plot by stopping and smelling the roses! It literally could not be more obvious! The film doesn’t praise Perrito for being dumb and oblivious, it praises him for being optimistic and content.
• Whether the films’ message of friendship is banal is their opinion (it’s not, but whatever), but why is ‘bravery’ and ‘self-sacrifice’ inherently better?
• Plus, the film does promote bravery. Puss spends his first encounter with Death running and spends the last encounter fighting valiantly. Seems pretty brave to me!

So let’s get this straight: in a realm with a walking, talking, backflipping, sword-fighting cat, whose friends with a ogre whose archnemesis is a dude named Lord Fuckwad, who is an acquaintance of the Gingerbread Man, in a series that is based off Shrek, an American character, with the same series being famous for it’s modern tone in a traditional fantasy setting — the single black side-character is such a jarring presence that it is a sign of radical progressivism on the writers part.

Putting aside that Europe in the Middle Ages was — factually — not empty of black people, this is also hilariously racist. The world of Puss in Boots is not remotely realistic enough to warrant being strict about the existence of a single black person, James! Who fucking cares if there’s a single black woman; what type of person is so offended by that as to go on a paragraph-long tangent about it? Why are minorities more outlandish than being literally chased by death? Why is the only reason this is here because of some hypothetical diversity quota and not because, say, they felt like it, or because the designers felt like it? This is one of the most frustratingly repeated points in media culture wars; that representation has to be strictly justified else it’s “forced diversity”, even in works where they could only stand out to a racist.

The Super Mario Bros. Movie

Possibly the least offensive, political and (in my opinion) blandest animated film a human could make, but even this manages to offend somehow.

• I cannot recall any scene having anything close to seriousness, unless the mere existence of stakes is considered serious.
• The dark humor in the film would go over most kids’ heads, at least the kids young enough to find the line “…when he watches me kill his brother” intense. Speaking of which, that’s not an inappropriate line! Kids can handle the word kill. Generations of children watched Avatar: The Last Airbender and Batman: The Animated Series and came out fine! Who cares about the usage of a word hellhound — it’s so minor that even James can’t remember who said it!

His diatribes about the film’s supposed wokeness, however, are why I singled this film out. If the Puss in Boots review displayed racism, this is rather sexist (and also profoundly lacking in knowledge of the Mario games).

There are several canon, developed-by-Nintendo Mario games where Princess Peach is a much more active and equal participant; the Super Mario RPGs, the Mario Sports, Super Princess Peach, Super Mario 3D World (which is a main title), Super Mario Bros. 2 (also a main title), Paper Mario, Super Mario Bros. Wonder (the third main title) and the list goes on. So the claim that every game is her being powerlessly kidnapped ignores the canonical side-games and is wrong even if you stick to the main ones. This movie did not invent the notion of an active Princess Peach, you simply ignored all the times the game did.

• What James say here is mostly correct: Princess Peach learns nothing and is by all accounts, very blandly ‘all-around-good-guy’. Never making a mistake isn’t quite right, though: if she was as perfect as James made her out to be, then the film’s plot wouldn’t be her needing Mario and Luigi for help due to their superior prowess. Plus, characters not having flaws doesn’t make them Mary Sues. Putting aside how Mary Sue is also a horribly vague term, mentor characters — like Peach in this film — tend to be ones that the protagonist/audience are supposed to look up to; it makes sense that a lot of them lack negative attributes. Would James consider Obi-Wan Kenobi in the first Star Wars film a Mary Sue?
• Luigi did not get ‘castrated’; he has been characterized in every single piece of official Mario media as a nervous, easily scared, un-confident counter to Mario, and the movie’s depiction of him is perfectly accurate to the games. I agree with James that his epiphany is out of the blue, but that isn’t a sign of wokeness, it’s just poor writing.

• Toad does jackshit in pretty much every single Mario game; he’s certainly not some ‘loyal aid’ (in fact, the most famous meme about Toad has them being remarkably unhelpful). They aren’t even a unique character in of themselves; Toad is the descriptor for their entire race because the Toads are completely interchangeable!
• This analysis is also just silly. First off, James goes on a completely nonsensical rant here about woke producers forcing the writers to make Princess Peach a non-savior; aside from having no proof or source whatsoever, Nintendo is well-known for having a lot of control over representations of Mario; rest-assured that Peach’s portrayal is intentional.
• More importantly, Princess Peach is a much more fleshed out character than Toad (who is again, a generic race than an actual person) so it makes sense that she takes center-stage. Who gives a fuck about Toad?
• He’s introduced as a friend to guide Mario through the mushroom kingdom and nothing else because he’s simply not important. Toad is also comedic relief from the first frame of the movie and is comedic relief til the end; it’s pretty consistent.

• That’s what happens at the end of the movie!
• You could very easily argue Mario and Luigi’s relationship was under-cooked, but it isn’t necessarily due to ‘wokeness’; the brothers split apart was done to make it more meaningful when they come together at the end.

• This is a horrifically shallow analysis of the film. On it’s face, what he said is true…because the scenes where they’re together are training montages near the beginning and the scenes where they’re apart are later and later in the movie! It is astonishing to leverage this as actual criticism; you have to virtually block the actual movie to reach this conclusion!
• Once again, a mentor character being good at the skill they are training the heroes in is not them being perfect, much less them being a ‘Mary Sue’.

The main reason why I deem this analysis sexist is because of the constant insinuation that female characters lacking flaws and being perfect (which Princess Peach is objectively not) is not only inherently bad, but a sign of wokeness — it’s not! Not every character needs to be flawed. Some characters are forces of natures that wouldn’t have flaws, some characters are paragon heroes meant to inspire the audience, and some characters are mentors who are supposed to have overcome their flaws already. That in combination with him ranting about Luigi’s “emasculation” paints a rather ugly picture: Women are meant to be damsels and men are meant to be saviors, accuracy to the games be damned.

This is not a site that reviews only animated kids movies, though; they also go through more mature TV Shows!

The Last of Us (TV Show)

The Last of Us is a widely-acclaimed television adaptation of an incredibly beloved game of the same name: having gone through both, they’re both very good! Like the other two, this is reviewed by James Carrick and has it’s helping of social ills: hysterically funny homophobia with even more sexism than before!

(Note: While I usually refrain from commenting on their regular opinions, they are ridiculously harsh on this show — how is the plot a four out of ten? Keep in mind, The Super Mario Bros. movie had a plot score of six and an overall score 20 points higher.)

Episode 1:

What’s wrong with mentioning Global Warming as a catalyst for the fungus? It’s scientifically sound (at least enough for a zombie tv show). The line isn’t meant to say “haha she’s Christian”, it’s just a tiny bit of character-building. As for the third point…

• Women are not ‘equal’ today and are disadvantaged in every country in countless different ways.
• ‘Guys born after the outbreak’ is using guys to refer to society writ-large; it’s a gender-neutral term.
• There have been plenty of disasters that various countries have gone through, many of which effectively turn off regular government in the area — and we don’t see the massive gender split that James is claiming is guaranteed to happen. Women hold their own just fine in these scenarios, just as much as the men do!
• James makes no mention of the fact that the historical dominance of men in leadership positions is overwhelmingly due to institutional and interpersonal misogyny, both present but especially from the past. I don’t think all discrimination would disappear in the apocalypse but a very significant amount of it would cease to be due to the systems not existing anymore; why wouldn’t women show up? A lot of the roles traditionally held by men are held by men because we literally wouldn’t allow women in them, and we did we would — and still do — make it as hard and hostile as possible to force them into typical gender roles.
• The over-glamorization of alpha males is funny but pretty sad; most of these supposedly alpha men would just die out like the rest of us. Funny enough, don’t a lot of alpha male/fitness diets include grain? They’d die out even quicker. Even if I bought into alpha bullshit, plenty of women display stereotypical ‘alpha male’ traits; they don’t hold the same jobs and positions men do due to the bullet point above.

The most damning criticism of this remark is a fairly simple one: Who the fuck cares? Who watches a tv show and gets mad that there’s a handful of women doing things — multiple times, might I add, because he brings this criticism up on quite a few other episodes! It’s unabashedly pathetic and a very, very shallow understanding of gender roles; in short, it’s sexist.

Episode 3:

Okay, but assisted suicide isn’t murder — especially not Frank’s. Frank straight up dies of his own volition; what’s romantic and beautiful isn’t Bill helping him die, but Bill choosing to go with him. Now for the long part.

• The episode is not ‘teaching a lesson about gay love’; them being gay is incidental. The episode is very obviously about finding love even in the worst of scenarios; a tale of how even the most jaded people can find bloody, determined purpose in the apocalypse. Once again, this isn’t subtle — Bill says this verbatim in his letter to Joel!
• James asinine diatribe about the likelihoods of them being gay fails on several different levels. First off, Bill is gay in the games and since your other reviews harp on about (what you perceive as) accuracy to the source material, he should be gay here too.
• Second, that stat relies on those who openly identify as gay — which, in a world where toxic gender norms would’ve burnt a way, would be a lot higher (to speak nothing of the ‘situational gay’ phenomenon where supposedly straight men discover their bi-curiosity in surroundings surrounded only by men and not women).
• Third, though the series is not about gay people or romantic relationships, it is very much about relationships as a whole — that’s the foundation of the entire show, and the relationship between Bill and Frank is an extremely blunt parallel to Joel and Ellie’s!
• Fourth, who fucking cares if it’s unlikely? The fungi mutating is incredibly unlikely (as the show itself says). Joel even surviving is sheer luck. Ellie is a girl who is immune to the virus due to her mother being bit during birth and cutting off her umbilical cord mid-transformation; it doesn’t get unlikelier than that! You might say ‘those are plot-relevant’, but something being so unlikely and plot-relevant makes it worse, not better! As James himself notes, Bill being homosexual is incidental — so it shouldn’t matter that it’s supposedly “unlikely”. The only reason you’d care this much about them being gay, ignoring literally everything about the episode in the process, is if you’re a massive homophobe who needs gay characters to be rigorously justified in order to accept them! Why should characters be straight unless justified? Who cares about this stuff apart from a person with deep prejudices against gay people? If someone got mad that there was an Asian couple in a zombie show due to it ‘being unrealistic’, one would undoubtedly call them a massive racist — so what’s the difference here?
• Fifth, it does further the narrative — and more importantly, what’s wrong with pushing an agenda? James Puss in Boots review has them confidently stating that the film should’ve promoted “bravery and self-sacrifice”, i.e. push the agenda that people should be brave. Everything pushes an agenda, it’s called themes and morals! Is the argument here that ‘love-is-love’ is a bad agenda to push?

Putting aside a ghoulishly bad understanding of this episode’s themes, there is no explanation for James’s derision of the mere existence of a gay couple other than plain old homophobia. It’s the same pattern as his criticism of the black lady in Puss in Boots or the female leaders in The Last of Us; minorities and women doing things on screen has to be justified, and even when it is he’ll ignore it in order to complain about how it’s forced. It’s an extremely thinly-veiled cover for James true beliefs; these people have their places and they should stick to those boxes. He makes much the same complaints in Episode 7, saying that the episode only exists to ‘further a gay agenda’ and that the writers only care about those episodes.

Episode 4:

The comment about her being used as a broodmare is fucking nasty. Jesus Christ. The commentary on her appearance is also disgusting; who fucking cares? Who would give a shit about appearances in a world where survival is all that matters? Sure, she’s making bad leadership choices, but Kathleen is obviously not like this — the show proves this by showing that her decisions are motivated by the death of the group’s co-leader and her brother, and the reason why she’s being followed is because her followers are just as emotional about it. He complains again, multiple times, about her being dumpy in the next episode (and also links to a Jordan Peterson video in case you’re still in doubt over their political affiliation).

A significant amount of James problems with the series is with him having absolutely zero understanding of the show’s very obvious messages and morals, and I am simply too tired to go over all of them, but there’s still highlights:

Episode 6:

• Them being multi-faith is mentioned in the briefest of lines. Also how is it woke? It’s a very basic consideration.
• How on earth did you say that you don’t denigrate her accomplishments then say that she’s only Ellie’s favorite because she took “a vagina into space”?
• Ellie, the American girl, thinks that the first American Woman is a really cool astronaut. Kids like to see people like themselves doing things — everyone does! This isn’t ‘woke’ at all.

Episode 8:

Who told you that Ellie was taught ‘nothing of value’? We see her literally going to a school; it’s very reasonable to assume that she would learn decent survival skills there — what else would they even be doing? Additionally, she is in no way a ‘crack shot’; we simply see her being decent a handful of times. It’s also been more than a week, as we clearly see a lot of time pass between episodes. Who cares if these are the only devout Christians? Most of the Christians in the cult aren’t even evil, just being manipulated; if you’re really bothered by a devout christian priest being a psychopathic rapist, I have very bad news for you.

Trolls Band Together

If you’ve been keeping track, the reviews so far have been grossly homophobic, racist and/or sexist; you may be wondering if WioW completes the quadrifecta with transphobia. Great/Terrible news: not only do the reviews do just that, but they are far more mask off about it, abandoning any pretense of being concerned about the plot to simply rant endlessly about trans existing.

Trolls Band Together is, by all accounts, a very bland, forgettable kids movie. But that didn’t stop James before, and it won’t stop this current review!

Skipping past the usual puritanism about bleeped swear words, saying ‘God’ and ‘Hell’, there’s this:

What the flying fuck is James talking about with the title and the introductory paragraph? Not a single one of the points being brought up features children. Where is he even getting the filmmaker’s political affiliation from: does he have even the slightest proof that they want ‘grade schoolers reading books on how to be power bottoms’??

Putting that aside, these are all harmless gags (the priest one being pretty fucking funny, no less). More puritanism — it’s getting stale. Note that the section on ‘Woke Elements’ refers back to this, meaning he considers this woke (remember how I said this word is ill-defined?). Interestingly, their next comment is probably the shortest on the entire website, but manages to be the most bigoted comment yet.

Yup.

That’s it.

That’s all there is to it.

Ru Paul, a drag queen who isn’t a trans person, who has appeared in several different films and tv shows before, voice-acted a minor character with no reference to them being a drag queen whatsoever. There is no “it doesn’t make sense for the character”, because it’s not about them. There is no “it’s unlikely” because it has nothing to do with the plot. That doesn’t matter. None of that matters. The problem is that the author thinks drag queens are equivalent to trans people and that he hates trans people. So the mere presence of a drag queen in the cast is worthy of derision, is branded woke and is considered a part of the trans agenda.

There’s not much one can say about this apart from unilaterally declaring James Carrick to be an awful transphobe and a deeply hateful person. You can come up with all sorts of bullshit to defend the takes listed above, but the sentiment here is too simple for even that. There is a trans-adjacent person involved in something, and to James Carrick, that is not okay.

And James does this multiple times.

One Piece (Live Action)

In his review of the One Piece live action TV Show, James has only two woke elements to note. The first one is complaining that Fishmen subjugation is ‘preachy’ and ‘self-righteous’. Unsurprisingly, it is a ridiculous criticism; it’s brought up perhaps two times, in brief lines of dialogue, by a character that has every single right to bring it up — who’s a villain! But shitty media analysis is par for the course.

No, the much more damning part is their description of poor old Morgan Davies.

I can’t really explain why this is transphobic. If you’ve read this far in and really believe that James’ unbelievably cruel comments, erroneous designation of gender-affirming care as ‘mutilation’ and constant misgendering isn’t transphobic, then I have nothing to tell you. Morgan Davies performance is not bad whatsoever — James saying Morgan had ‘no emotional range’ is absolutely bizarre, and his attempts to prove it by showing that he makes the same expression twice is utterly pathetic; keep in mind, I say this as a person that didn’t know they were trans while watching the show. But it doesn’t really matter, does it? The problem isn’t their performance, it’s Morgan.

And where on earth does he get the idea that Netflix goes out of their way to cast trans actors from? The vast majority of Netflix shows, originals or otherwise, have absolutely zero. The amount of animosity transgender people face in any and every job is astonishing, and the reason why they face it is because their mere existence in a role is deemed inappropriate, agenda-pushing villainy. I can’t help but find it funny; James praises the show for it’s accuracy to the manga, but that same manga features multiple trans characters who are treated with infinitely more dignity than James himself offers.

I’d start writing the conclusion here, but unfortunately there’s one more review to get through — and it is by far the most insane of the bunch.

Spider-Man 2

This is one of the few reviews on the website that’s not authored by James, with Simon Western (white, male, christian, libertarian, you get the idea) taking over in James’ absence. This review is pretty interesting, because in spite of the game’s horrible ‘Based’ score, he gives the story a 9/10 — more than quite a number of regular video game critics! Even more interesting than that is that this is probably the longest screed about wokeness on the entire website — except it’s catalogue is a little different.

You see, James is rather basic. Most of his grievances about leftism are in simple, plain terms with obvious, elementary observations; his bigotry is rather mundane. Simon, however, takes a completely different angle, delving into an unbelievably verbose and downright conspiratorial analysis of Spider-Man 2's contents, to the point where I’m pretty sure he was on actual crack while writing this. Even other conservatives would be weirded out by the lengths that Simon goes to — he’s so dedicated to the game’s supposedly anti-white narrative that, ironically enough, the article could be mistaken for an uber-progressive postmodern analysis. It’s pretty much summed up by the thesis statement on the game’s wokeness:

People don’t like to say “this makes literally no sense” as a criticism, but there’s no other reasonable response to this statement. What on earth is he talking about? No wonder he’s writing for a site that’s pro-Trump: he probably believes the election was stolen by Hillary Clinton’s lizardspawn! Yet again, this will be a highlight reel, because the boring bigotry is overplayed by this point, but there’s plenty to go over!

…or maybe it’s to set him apart from Peter? In addition to these being attributes from the comic books?

Not wanting easy-to-access guns smack-dab in the middle of the city means you think people can’t bear arms, I guess.

By open-sourcing the genome, it makes the plants mass-reproducible, and assuming the plants are very cheap (they probably are for Peter to say this), the homeless can be fed. This isn’t a difficult concept to understand. I also have to chuckle at “people’s basic amenities should be something they can always access” is deemed anti-capitalist; Simon accidentally walked into a progressive talking point! Philanthropy being a Marxist concept is laughable given that philanthropists are overwhelmingly extremely rich capitalists. And again, is ‘use the means of production for good is Marxist’ really want you want to say? Perhaps Simon is a secret socialist.

D.E.I:

“With the exceptions of the white males, there are no white males” is funny in it’s own right, but what’s funnier is that he’s effectively arguing in favor of a white male quota. Does a game’s business have a lot of diversity? That could only be anti-white propaganda!

(Supposed) Misandry:

Peter was fired because he abandoned his first day as a physics teacher with no explanation! No, we would not be reading about the game being problematic in the New York Times if it happened to a black woman! The author not mentioning the infraction reads like a purposeful attempt at misrepresenting the game as opposed to just genuine bigotry — why? Why this?

Felicia is a very experienced fighter. Miles is not. Miles panicking and briefly forgetting something is funny and relatable. Felicia being cool is just her character. But no, it’s because the developers hate men.

This game’s opening sequence is a man with the proportional strength of a spider fighting a Sand Elemental, but a single scene of a woman overpowering a man is just too unrealistic. Nevermind that she doesn’t just “use brute strength” — many people in real life have gotten the better of heavier, brawnier opponents, especially in real life, and his weight estimate here’s a guess..but also, who cares? What reasonable person cares?

Simon reports on himself in spectacular fashion here: despite he himself noting that Kraven is using the term inclusively, he assumes that failure and intimacy could only be referring to masculine fears! Peter isn’t implying that these are exclusively masculine fears — you are! Nothing in that dialogue is gender-specific, unless you believe intimacy and fucking failure are things women don’t fear.

But the author has already exposed the problem with this line of thinking?

By his own words, Peter’s words are his own, so Peter’s bad behavior (both in and out of the suit) probably warrants a big explanation!

(The Supposed) Gay Agenda:

Apparently simply using the term girlfriend multiple times is the writer’s shoving in an agenda. No, it couldn’t possibly be because Black Cat’s girlfriend is important to her and the plot — lines she’s mentioned in. It couldn’t be because that’s how people refer to the girls they date. No, it’s…fucking…wokeness. As for Miles even using the term? Virtue-signaling! There is no rational explanation for this paragraph other than rampant, furious homophobia!

Ah yes, a single subtitle using lower-case god is the hallmark of a zealot! No, it couldn’t be that this game (by his own admission) has a huge amount of voicelines and they missed it. It couldn’t be that they think their religion is beyond petty bullshit like making sure every g is capitalized. No, it’s because of…zealotry? Wouldn’t this be a mark of unfaithfulness or something?

Also. I dunno if Simon forgot this, but he doesn’t think his religion is a religion, either. No, seriously:

What the fuck is going on?

This paragraph sums up Simon’s Spider-Man 2 review quite nicely: he takes writing tropes that have existed for several thousands of years, ignores every single possible good reason they might exist, and then creates an insane conspiracy theory in their place. Cindy Moon, a popular Spider-person, being introduced to spice-up a third game? She’s only there for the sake of diversity! Miles taking up the torch of Spider-Man after Peter’s gone? A natural conclusion to both of their character arcs? What Miles did in the very comic he debuted in? Done solely to subvert the white savior trope!

How does one review media like this? At least James’s observations are mostly banal: Simon’s schizophrenic ranting about Spider-Man 2’s storyline seems to defy any possible logic in favor of screaming about how gay people existing is a devious agenda, or how black woman firing people is woke misandry. There isn’t a single shred of evidence for literally any of these ramblings, no clear line from Point A to B. It is a positively neurotic form of bigotry, one grasping at thin air for literally any potential proof of radical progressivism, occasionally striking their own body under the delusion of beating demons. It is everything WioW strives to be, and it is vile.

The most insane part of all this is that Worth it or Woke is not at all an outlier in the anti-woke sphere. Basically everything on their website is standard fare for these online conservatives, and though the site may be small, their equally-bigoted contemporaries are Youtubers with hundreds of thousands, if not millions of subscribers, shitting out garbage like this at a pace that’s impossible to keep up with. Ultimately, their cries of radical leftism, gay agendas and man-hating are reflections of a bigger cultural battle: they may not be the only soldier in the wokeness culture war, but they are a model one.

To this end, they serve as a good way to show what the term ‘wokeness’ is really all about. When these people prattle and scream about the woke mind virus infesting Hollywood, this is what they’re talking about. Wokeness, like Cultural Marxism and Political Correctness, is a term whose popularity revolves around it’s vagueness. It’s exact definition will never be pinned down, but even those that know this use it anyways, because everyone in the room gets it. When they say something is woke, every conservative that’s listening knows what they mean. And now we do too. Wokeness is a smokescreen for bigotry, a way to signal to yourselves that this show has gays, maybe even transgenders; that the blacks do just too much to be comfortable; that it dares to not be the most hyper-conservative, hyper-religious bullshit imaginable. The left has made enough progress for these sentiments to no longer be publicly acceptable, so they resort to smokescreens. But the shadow of bigotry is too large to be hidden.

I suppose that makes me a bit of a liar then. Wokeness does have a solid definition after all! They just don’t say it out loud.

Sam Harris’s latest guest on the Waking Up podcast is Coleman Hughes, a rather well-celebrated black thinker who advocates for colorblindness in legal policy and is broadly a leftist who dislikes progressiveness. Before heading unto the podcast I wanted to read more about him so I came across a relatively popular Quilette article they wrote, “The Racism Treadmill”. The article revolves around criticizing progressives for what Steven Pinker called “progressophobia”; a broad denial of racial progress. As Coleman puts it: “Why can’t progressives admit that we’ve made progress?” Having read the article I think it’s pretty poor.

For starters, the article’s entire thesis statement — that the prevailing opinion amongst progressives is a refusal to acknowledge racial progress — is a claim made without any proofs or examples whatsoever. Coleman is willing to bring up lots of statistics and examples for literally every other claim he makes but the most important one of the bunch is treated as self-evident. Having hung around a lot of Progressive spaces, I don’t know a single person who thinks that America has not made a lot of racial progress; at very worst, they consider America racist but not nearly as racist as before.

• He cites a reduction in lynchings and increased acceptance of interracial marriages as proof society’s improved and he’s correct but — can you find me a progressive who doesn’t believe in either of these things?

Considering how he brings up this strawman several times throughout the article, this already places it’s viability in jeopardy, but there’s other problems.

After his initial statement, he examines a belief that he thinks contributes to progressophobia: the progressive belief that disparities between blacks and whites are caused by systemic racism. Coleman starts off this section with an incredibly shallow analysis of Ta-Nehisi Coates and Ibram X Kendi’s works: he says that the premise built into thinking these disparities is caused by racism is false, but…doesn’t analyze their premise? Or look into their proof? He claims their premise is unfounded but does not seem to acknowledge or critique their attempts to prove it whatsoever.

This leads to Coleman stating that their belief that the disparities are caused by racial inequality is due to them inherently believing in the “Disparity Fallacy”; that any disparity between groups is caused by discrimination. He then critiques the disparity fallacy by showing that progressives apply it far too narrowly, citing discrimination for blacks falling behind whites but not white men falling behind black women and so on and so forth.

To summarize: he creates a massive strawman and then tears it down to show how their arguments are incorrect.

People do not cite these inequalities as been created by discrimination without proof: they have been writing about it for decades with reasons far more in-depth than “well any disparity is caused by discrimination”. It’s pretty telling that he doesn’t actually go into why they think these disparities are caused by discrimination; he just assumes it’s because of a stupid fallacy then critiques the fallacy instead of any actual academic research. Coleman unfortunately dedicates several paragraphs to this strawman and there isn’t much you can say about them other than “No, progressives do not think like this and you have no proof they do”.

He finishes this segment by saying “Rather than defaulting to systemic bias to explain disparities, we should understand that, even in the absence of discrimination, groups still differ in innumerable ways that affect their respective outcomes”. I would really like Coleman to show that the majority of progressives don’t believe this…although they would probably not agree on how he came to this conclusion.

The second section of the article is dedicated to analyzing the role of Black Culture in racial disparities, and Coleman does a lot of the exact same tactics. He claims that progressives writ large, despite emphasizing the importance of culture, deny culture as an explanation for disparities amongst different race groups due to the disparity fallacy.

To prove this, he brings up two out-of-context quotes from Michael Eric Dyson and Ta-Nehisi Coates — and by quotes I mean a five-word phrase (“…heroic battles against black deficiency”) from Dyson and one single word from Coates (“…lazy…”). And unsurprisingly, he does not analyze the arguments actually present in their books or articles whatsoever, and a good number of the claims he makes later in this article have zero proof as well. On it’s own, this is already a dreadful manner to analyze opinions — much less proving an opinion is popular — but it’s get worse when you analyze Dyson and Coates’s arguments.

To start with Dyson, his quote is horrifically taken out of context. In the broader scope of that chapter (“The Audacity of Nope”), Dyson was commenting on how Obama struggled to talk about race in the wake of the Henry Louis Gates Jr. controversy, where Gates had to enter in his house another way due to a jammed door and ended up being arrested by white passerby and white policemen. Dyson says that this event make Barack Obama hesitant to speak about race and lead Obama to three conclusions about race: one of which was that “…although they read it quite differently, both white and black communities are eager for Obama excoriate perceived black error — for instance, in his warning to Morehouse College graduates to not use racism as an excuse for failure — and to damn black pathology, such as absentee fathers. In black life such gestures are often read as tough love; in white America they are seen as heroic battles against black deficiency.” Then for the third conclusion, he says “Third, when structural features of black suffering cannot be ignored, it is best to soften the blow with ample features of black criminality or black moral failure.”

In no way, shape or form is Dyson trying to argue that culture is not important, or that culture does not explain some differences, or advocate for the disparity fallacy; none of these have anything to do with this excerpt! The quote Coleman chooses — “…heroic battles against black deficiency,” — is Dyson describing how different communities talk about black error and black pathology in of themselves, not even these cultural differences in relation to black outcomes. Put bluntly, this is a bizarre quote to use as proof that progressives “deny the importance of culture” and it makes me wonder how closely Coleman read this book.

At the very least, Coates was talking about cultural differences in relation to outcomes, but his argument, too, is taking wildly out of context. In the excerpt Coleman takes the word “lazy” from, Coates was talking about the ‘Rising Tides’ social theory that attributed the vast majority of black disenfranchisement to culture rather than racism: the reason why Coates calls this ‘lazy’ is because

1. Coates personally observed that black pathology did not match the sweeping criticisms of culture that the white New Democrats were claiming
2. Some of the specific data-points being used were very poor, and these specific arguments are what he was calling lazy, not every argument made for culture as a factor en masse
3. The New Democrats were claiming this in the 1980s, and I hopefully do not have to explain why discrimination did not suddenly disappear in the 80s.

Most importantly, Coates says rather bluntly that he does not have inherent objection to the theory that culture might be important; he thinks that the theories used to prove it are poor! “But what ultimately made me question the “rising tide” idea was not the theory itself but all the attendant theories that so often went with it”. In general, Coates doesn’t seem to show any inherent opposition to the idea that culture is important; rather, he was criticizing how New Democrats used the idea to quash any discussion on racism even when overt discrimination was abundantly common. So to quote Coates here is to outright claim the opposite of what he was saying. It is getting seriously difficult to believe that Coleman read these books.

One thing that is hilarious about this entire section is that Coleman Hughes is very keenly aware of the fact that progressives do understand the importance of culture, citing several examples of him doing exactly that. The problem here is that he concludes that the focus on culture for some topics and not others could only be born out of the disparity fallacy and leftists simply ignore this, but the issue here is that this is a massive strawman that does not have a lick of proof.

Additionally, for all of his complaints about Black Culture, one would think he has an abundance of proof of it’s failures, yet he only has two: one where Barack Obama says that the epithet of ‘acting white’ must end, and an interview where Jay-Z says it needs to end as well. Neither of these men are sociologists and neither of them provide any proof that the epithet is widespread or that it causes a significant amount of disparity for black people — Jay-Z is a rapper but Coleman cites him like he’s an intellectual.

Most bizarrely, though, is that Coleman criticizes an article from Vox that calls the acting white phenomenon a myth for having no evidence. And there are three problems with this statement:

• Coleman does not cite this article or a quote from it so right off the bat it’s hard to know what they’re talking about specifically.
• The article does cite evidence for its claims, bringing up several articles that it uses as proof that the phenomenon is a myth. Coleman criticizes the article for having no basis or proof for its claims, which would suggest outright lying on Coleman’s part
• Jay-Z and Barack Obama don’t have any evidence of the acting white phenomenon — none whatsoever! Their evidence is stating it’s a thing that exists and saying Black people should stop doing it, and to Coleman that’s more than good enough to not question their assertions whatsoever. Yet the Vox article that has several citations from sociologists and academic research papers? “Asserted without evidence”.

Not one single sentence in The Racism Treadmill analyzes why leftists actually talk about culture in different contexts, continually settling for lazy, oversimplified, banal strawmans of their ideas — if not just lies outright. This is summarized pretty aptly in his criticism of the Ibram X Kendi quote:

• “Either there is something wrong with our policies, or there is something wrong with black boys (or black people). Either the United States is riddled with racist policies or inferior black boys.”

And Coleman responds:

• “But those aren’t the only options. Among other things, there is culture. Indeed, cultural explanations of disparity are the exact opposite of racial-supremacist explanations for the same reason that nurture is the opposite of nature.”

There are some maddeningly obvious problems here:

1. Coleman seems completely foreign to the thought that the United States racist policies in the place have had effects that aren’t completely undone by simply removing the policies
2. Coleman seems foreign to the thought that the disparities might be caused by past racial policies in the first place despite the U.S. discriminating against Blacks far longer than it’s not done so
3. Coleman refuses to acknowledge that many of the people citing culture as a problem genuinely do act in bad-faith and refuse to acknowledge real racism. He is more than happy to say that progressives spout the disparity fallacy due to convenience but it never strikes him that many spout the Rising Tides theory due to the very same convenience.
4. Coleman seems to ignore something that pretty much all of the authors he cites clarify: that black culture is shaped by racism in the United States.

The fourth one in particular is what stands out to me in his quibbles about Black Culture: even if culture were the problem, culture is shaped almost entirely by the society you are born in and the legacy of those born before you…the legacy in question being racism and slavery! Even if you took all of his assertions about culture to be true, Coleman would still be strawmanning progressives because he ignores the point that they so bluntly make in their books — books such as the ones he was citing from. Every single aspect of every single culture is molded by their conditions they are in, but the way Coleman talks about black culture, one would think that black people simply decide to oppress themselves out of their own free will — the exact type of analysis that Coates was calling ‘lazy’. And that’s because it is lazy. It is astonishingly lazy to say that progressives simply ignore the role of culture in black underachievement. It is incredibly lazy to have your only proof of bad black culture being an un-cited speech from the President and Jay-Z. It’s extremely lazy to take quotes so wildly out of context that they no longer made sense.

This article is indicative of how a substantial number of intellectuals who espouse “I’m a leftist but I hate the progressives” simply do not read or outright lie about the beliefs that they claim to hate, making bizarre claims about things being prevalent with no proof of their prevalence and strawmanning arguments as if there’s no tomorrow. Progressives are far from perfect and there are many valid critiques you could make of Progressive thought, but doing so requires at least a modicum of intellectual honesty, and the Racism Treadmill has none.

The first scene is an interaction between a pretty formidable group of superheroes (The Flash, Batman and Orion — son of Darkseid of all people) and the D-list “super”-villain known as the Trickster, from the episode “Flash and Substance”. The trio are in search of a collection of Flashes’ more dangerous enemies (fittingly titled the Rogues) and Trickster’s the best lead they have.

As touching as this scene might be for Flash, the scene paints Batman as being rather cruel and excessively violent; the Trickster is neither strong nor evil enough to make this treatment feel warranted and the threat at the end seems outright barbaric. Keep in mind that Orion is an extremely seasoned warrior: it’s unlikely he was bluffing. Ouch.

Compare and contrast the above with this scene from the season-two finale “Epilogue”. A reality-warping, telepathic young girl named Ace will soon perish from a fatal brain aneurysm, triggering psychic backlash that would kill within her range of powers (“A distance measured in miles,”). Amanda Waller, government agent and head of the anti-metahuman force CADMUS (the group that created Ace!) has a device that can safely kill her, and Batman chooses to be her executioner, being the only superhero present who knew Ace.

A lovely scene, no doubt; perhaps better-written than the first…but looking at them side by side (a fair comparison since not much time has passed in-universe between these scenes), one has to ask where all that compassion went towards the Trickster, a severely mentally ill and mostly harmless individual. It becomes even stranger in the broader context of this Batman’s rogues gallery: individuals whose villainy is primarily motivated by psychosis and other unfortunate circumstances make up a very large part of the list. An obviously-loony dork like the Trickster should be new territory, nor one that deserves a broken jaw!

I’m using these two specific scenes as examples because the fact that they’re from the same continuity, tv show and aired only a year apart (July 2005 and May 2006, respectively) is a good showcase of Batman’s inconsistent compassion. But it is far from the only one I’ve got.

Consider a staple of several different Batman adaptations: his interrogation methods! A notably good number of which are…torture.

To cap it off, here’s torture sequences from canon Batman comics:

Compassion indeed, eh? Across two of his most popular animated adaptations, the most notable DC video-game, the most popular Batman movie and several different (entirely canon!) comic books, Batman is an unambiguous torturer. None of these examples have context that would redeem Batman beyond him feeling very angry, and Batman himself doesn’t accept that as an excuse.

It’s also worth noting that these are not ‘old’ or now-reviled adaptations of the character either: for this analysis I tried picking from relatively recent examples lest I be unfair to the Crusader. Torturing people for information is a notoriously unreliable tactic that violates all forms of international law, including the Geneva Convention. More often the not, it’s something one does out of raw fury or sheer sadism— which, funnily enough, is represented in quite a few of these examples.

Of course, it would be unfair to give so many examples of Batman being so vicious without showing the opposite. His penchant for compassion is not entirely unfounded.

Putting aside these individual bouts of kindness for his fellow man, Batman’s entire code of ethics is founded upon profound compassion. To declare that he would never, ever take a life, with almost no exceptions whatsoever, and to stick with this throughout his entire career is a herculean feat of sympathy. It took Darkseid (the God of Tyranny) being on the precipice of enslaving the infinite multiverse for Batman to break this rule — and given how Darkseid’s various avatars work, it’s arguable he might not have killed even him!

However, this leaves us at a rather troubling precipice — where exactly does Batman stand? Reconciling refusing to attack Mr.Freeze due to the Christmas spirit with nearly killing Mr.Freeze due to a bad breakup is pretty much impossible; yes, these are different continuities, but they both highly contribute and draw from and to the shared Batman mythos.

Is Batman just that neurotic? I don’t think so. One thing that’s pretty consistent across all versions of the Caped Crusader is his freakish discipline. This is a man who breaks bones, shatters spines and knocks out criminals weekly but through will alone manages to consistently not kill any of them. The human body is very damn fragile, so pushing it to its limits without breaking it for decades requires almost sage-like control. Sure, he flies off the handle sometimes in pretty damning ways, but how many nights does he not do this? How many years does he keep it up for, one after the other, no matter how evil his opponent?

Perhaps Batman is just one of those characters that swings wildly in one direction or the author depending on the writer; maybe some think he’s a relentlessly cruel anti-hero, and others a warrior of kindness…except many of these examples are from the same continuities, comics and/or series. This fundamental contradiction in Batman’s character seems to be something that writers tap into across adaptations whilst rarely acknowledging it, which, though fascinating, only means that the question spreads across continuities.

But…what now? If it’s not just adaptations being wacky, and he’s not bipolar, what do we make of the Caped Crusader? Is Batman compassionate or cruel?

The Doylist response is that fiction writ large has a problem with glossing or even glorifying torture whenever the main characters do it (remember the torture scene in Zootopia of all places?) and this has seeped into Batman. Additionally, a lot of casual interest in Batman is dictated by his edgy aesthetics rather than his soft interior; him torturing bad guys is, every once in a while, Very Damn Cool, so the torture says and the narrative just treats it like any ol’ beatdown. But the Watsonian response?

I think Batman is extremely compassionate — so much so that it makes him furious. Think about it for a moment: if you believed in humanity so much that you would never, ever take a life, not even in self-defense, how angry would you feel at a murder? Serial murderers? Mass murderers? The average person is obviously disgusted, if not even horrified, by such action, but for the Worlds Greatest Detective, I think it cuts a little deeper. Every time he sees a life taken, threaten or even disturbed, it brings him back to when he was eight-years-old. His love for mankind is an extension of his love for his parents, and the only thing he thinks of when witnessing death is their demise. To Batman, the very concepts of life and death can never be untangled from the murder at Crime Alley. So when he comes across the vicious, petty thugs, he beats them in the way that little Bruce desperately wanted to do.

But he’ll always hold back. The only thing greater than how much he hates them is how much he loves them.

Pretty damn compassionate if you ask me.