Can a bad guy be a hero? I was recently reading a comic in "GREAT AMERICAN COMICS,2006" that made the point that many of todays HEROES are so dark, it is hard to tell them from the villian!
Now, for the most part, with Nintendo that was never a problem. Mario good, Bowser bad. Link good, Orcs bad, big centipedes bad, ghosts bad, etc....Fairy good!(uh, waitaminit...)
But here with WARIO I don't get it. He was the BAD guy , trying to get rich while OFFING poor Mario! (Yes I knew Mario was "bad" in Donkey Kong Junior, but that can be understood as a rivalry between Kong and himself)..WHY did they make this dumb looking mario clone a star of so many games? Was it just an accident or was Nintendo trying to be "cooler" by making a greedy, gassy, nose picking butthead a hero? (Okay, I'm posting this in part because I was burned on Wario: Master of Disguise, but STILL!..)
Wario: good or bad?
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chrisbid1
- Posts: 941
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Wario: good or bad?
after the end of the cold war, the culture finally started accepting the fact that there is no black and white. wario first came out as marios evil twin, but has gradually become the greedy comic relief character on the nintendo roster. i wouldnt go so far as to call him a hero or anti hero though.
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feilong801
- Posts: 2173
- Joined: December 31st, 1969, 7:00 pm
Wario: good or bad?
I think that's an oversimplification. The anti-hero was showing up in cinema by the late 1960's. There are "anti-heroes" (at least in the sense of complex characters that are not "all good" or "all bad") in older literature. Greek tragedies certainly weren't black and white stories either. So, in other words, storytelling involving complex characters without a clear "good and "bad" have always been around and always will.
In my opinion, there will always be a desire for so called "black and white" stories. People want to be inspired. I don't want Link to be "conflicted." Elendil wasn't "conflicted." I will always maintain that people, to some extent, like to know who to root for in stories. If I want shades of grey, I just read the newspaper.
In any case, the Mario universe is based in large part on comedy and wonder. Nobody really "dies" per se, so the stakes just aren't as high. So it is easy for Wario to be sort of lovable in a sense. It's much more like a sibling rivalry thing; Mario, Bowser, Wario, etc. are more like members a large, diverse family than heroes and villians in the traditional sense.
On the other hand, Zelda is based on traditional story telling archetypes, including a clearly evil villian. People do die in Zelda based on the actions of the characters. So it would feel far different for a game to be based on Ganondorf... it would almost be like a Zelda version of Manhunt!
-Rob
In my opinion, there will always be a desire for so called "black and white" stories. People want to be inspired. I don't want Link to be "conflicted." Elendil wasn't "conflicted." I will always maintain that people, to some extent, like to know who to root for in stories. If I want shades of grey, I just read the newspaper.
In any case, the Mario universe is based in large part on comedy and wonder. Nobody really "dies" per se, so the stakes just aren't as high. So it is easy for Wario to be sort of lovable in a sense. It's much more like a sibling rivalry thing; Mario, Bowser, Wario, etc. are more like members a large, diverse family than heroes and villians in the traditional sense.
On the other hand, Zelda is based on traditional story telling archetypes, including a clearly evil villian. People do die in Zelda based on the actions of the characters. So it would feel far different for a game to be based on Ganondorf... it would almost be like a Zelda version of Manhunt!
-Rob
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JustLikeHeaven1
- Posts: 2971
- Joined: December 31st, 1969, 7:00 pm
Wario: good or bad?
[QUOTE=feilong80]
On the other hand, Zelda is based on traditional story telling archetypes, including a clearly evil villian. People do die in Zelda based on the actions of the characters. So it would feel far different for a game to be based on Ganondorf... it would almost be like a Zelda version of Manhunt!
[/QUOTE]
You have to admit that a game based on Ganondorf would be sort of cool. Zelda is pretty much the only franchise that Nintendo hasn't whored out into other genres/spinoffs. I think playing a young Ganon could be interesting. They could make the character like Darth Vader...one who started off on the right path but was eventually corrupted by power. It would be far fetched, but I would buy it.
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m0zart1
- Posts: 3117
- Joined: December 31st, 1969, 7:00 pm
Wario: good or bad?
[QUOTE=chrisbid]after the end of the cold war, the culture finally started accepting the fact that there is no black and white.[/QUOTE]
Was the holocaust not considered black rather than white after the cold war ended? What about the even bigger murders by Stalin and Mao? Were those not obviously black?
I guess we both learned different lessons from the end of the cold war. If anything, the end of the cold war reinforced my view that some things are in fact white, and some things are very VERY black.
If someone wants to say that Russia was both black and white, I'll accept that, if only because not everyone in Russia backed the blackness of Soviet Communism. I'll also accept that the US was not always white, if only because many of the actions of our Government weren't so good. But that kind of conclusion is only possible because the decision to call totally black or white was a collectivist one, and didn't take the exceptions into account. That the ideas behind communism are evil only has to be judged by their result, but they can be traced back to the root of the ideas -- the notion that the individual doesn't matter, only the collective. You can't help but have a very black result from that.
The origins of Wario and Waluigi are not really Western. Wario and Waluigi are both based on the Japanese "Warui", which means "bad", "evil", "wicked", "foul", etc. The Japanese had long had anti-hero counterparts for their heroic characters. "Wario" is a reforming of the word "Warui" so that it could appear to be like Mario, and it played right into that tradition. Waluigi also was just a rearranging of "Warui", to give Luigi a similar anti-hero.
Was the holocaust not considered black rather than white after the cold war ended? What about the even bigger murders by Stalin and Mao? Were those not obviously black?
I guess we both learned different lessons from the end of the cold war. If anything, the end of the cold war reinforced my view that some things are in fact white, and some things are very VERY black.
If someone wants to say that Russia was both black and white, I'll accept that, if only because not everyone in Russia backed the blackness of Soviet Communism. I'll also accept that the US was not always white, if only because many of the actions of our Government weren't so good. But that kind of conclusion is only possible because the decision to call totally black or white was a collectivist one, and didn't take the exceptions into account. That the ideas behind communism are evil only has to be judged by their result, but they can be traced back to the root of the ideas -- the notion that the individual doesn't matter, only the collective. You can't help but have a very black result from that.
The origins of Wario and Waluigi are not really Western. Wario and Waluigi are both based on the Japanese "Warui", which means "bad", "evil", "wicked", "foul", etc. The Japanese had long had anti-hero counterparts for their heroic characters. "Wario" is a reforming of the word "Warui" so that it could appear to be like Mario, and it played right into that tradition. Waluigi also was just a rearranging of "Warui", to give Luigi a similar anti-hero.
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Alienblue
Wario: good or bad?
I think Waluigi was really taking it too far. What's next,
War-yoshi? (I hope I didn't just give Nintendo an idea!)
The whole of life (the universe, and everything, or "42").... is a complex of shades of grey. You can't really call anything 100% good or evil in all senses of those concepts. Yes, Hitler came pretty close but like all villians he BELIEVED , himself, that he was right, that his ideas were correct(because he was insane, and dumb or insane people can be used as a stepping stone to power by other corrupt people)... Even if someone kills and steals for him or herself, they must think it is "right", that they deserve it or they would not do it. I'm not religious, but I do know that "the devil", Satan, is a "Fallen Angel", indicating that he felt his way was better. And Life is all about birth and death, sick and healthy, strong and weak...there must be BOTH to define the other. We could never have pure "Good" , for what would it's definition be if there was no "bad"? I could go on forever, but I shall stop, for this question of why Wario is a "good guy" has been answered. In the game YOU are Wario, and "GREED is GOOOOOD!" as he says. Whatever the protaginist believes is right. Mario is the weak, silly, never-be-rich guy to Wario. But all this doesn't answer my real question, which was, WHY didn't Nintendo create a new character for the "...-ware" and "...-woods" games or use a "good" character like Toad? They could've created a third mario brother! Oh well, I guess the world may never know. Too bad. Which is good.
War-yoshi? (I hope I didn't just give Nintendo an idea!)
The whole of life (the universe, and everything, or "42").... is a complex of shades of grey. You can't really call anything 100% good or evil in all senses of those concepts. Yes, Hitler came pretty close but like all villians he BELIEVED , himself, that he was right, that his ideas were correct(because he was insane, and dumb or insane people can be used as a stepping stone to power by other corrupt people)... Even if someone kills and steals for him or herself, they must think it is "right", that they deserve it or they would not do it. I'm not religious, but I do know that "the devil", Satan, is a "Fallen Angel", indicating that he felt his way was better. And Life is all about birth and death, sick and healthy, strong and weak...there must be BOTH to define the other. We could never have pure "Good" , for what would it's definition be if there was no "bad"? I could go on forever, but I shall stop, for this question of why Wario is a "good guy" has been answered. In the game YOU are Wario, and "GREED is GOOOOOD!" as he says. Whatever the protaginist believes is right. Mario is the weak, silly, never-be-rich guy to Wario. But all this doesn't answer my real question, which was, WHY didn't Nintendo create a new character for the "...-ware" and "...-woods" games or use a "good" character like Toad? They could've created a third mario brother! Oh well, I guess the world may never know. Too bad. Which is good.
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m0zart1
- Posts: 3117
- Joined: December 31st, 1969, 7:00 pm
Wario: good or bad?
[QUOTE=Alienblue]The whole of life (the universe, and everything, or "42").... is a complex of shades of grey.[/QUOTE]
Grey is made up of black and white. That means there has to be black and white in there somewhere. Let's say there are 21 black and 21 white, leaving us with 42 shades of grey. (That's just my version of the Hitchhiker's Guide joke).
[QUOTE=Alienblue]You can't really call anything 100% good or evil in all senses of those concepts.[/QUOTE]
I really have to disagree with that. I consider the idea that you can genocide a whole human population in your country in savage and brutal matter to be all black. There is no "white" in that.
[QUOTE=Alienblue]Yes, Hitler came pretty close but like all villians he BELIEVED , himself, that he was right, that his ideas were correct(because he was insane, and dumb or insane people can be used as a stepping stone to power by other corrupt people)...[/QUOTE]
But doesn't that mean that he had ideas and concepts that were all bad? I mean, like I said, if you can sympathize with some aspect of Hitler, that says nothing for the actions he took part in which were all bad, like for instance the Holocaust.
[QUOTE=Alienblue]Even if someone kills and steals for him or herself, they must think it is "right", that they deserve it or they would not do it. I'm not religious, but I do know that "the devil", Satan, is a "Fallen Angel", indicating that he felt his way was better.[/QUOTE]
I hope I am not making you think that I am against you all the sudden. But I don't think this argument is adequate for declaring all things as a shade of grey. What you are trying to say is that because something is done with good intentions that an activity can't be all bad. But that's not really possible to say unless you think the action inherits characteristics from the motives of its perpetrator. If that were the case, then why not also inherit properties from their victims -- the victims for which those good intentions paved a nice road to hell? Does it matter, for instance, to those Jews who perished in Nazi Concentration Camps whether Hitler might have believed he was right? Was their right to life any less violated?
Does it matter to the victims of Stalin's purge, Mao's "Great Society" reorganization into working (death) camps, or the whole country of people that was almost wiped out in Cambodia's Killing Fields?
I realize those are extreme examples, but when someone says "There is no good or bad, only grey", they are excluding even the extreme examples. And I think that's the danger of treating ethics as epistemological (i.e. all in someone's mind) rather than metaphysical (part of our greater reality).
[QUOTE=Alienblue]And Life is all about birth and death, sick and healthy, strong and weak...there must be BOTH to define the other. We could never have pure "Good" , for what would it's definition be if there was no "bad"?[/QUOTE]
That's too easy to reverse. What would "grey" be if there was no such thing as good or bad?
Grey is made up of black and white. That means there has to be black and white in there somewhere. Let's say there are 21 black and 21 white, leaving us with 42 shades of grey. (That's just my version of the Hitchhiker's Guide joke).
[QUOTE=Alienblue]You can't really call anything 100% good or evil in all senses of those concepts.[/QUOTE]
I really have to disagree with that. I consider the idea that you can genocide a whole human population in your country in savage and brutal matter to be all black. There is no "white" in that.
[QUOTE=Alienblue]Yes, Hitler came pretty close but like all villians he BELIEVED , himself, that he was right, that his ideas were correct(because he was insane, and dumb or insane people can be used as a stepping stone to power by other corrupt people)...[/QUOTE]
But doesn't that mean that he had ideas and concepts that were all bad? I mean, like I said, if you can sympathize with some aspect of Hitler, that says nothing for the actions he took part in which were all bad, like for instance the Holocaust.
[QUOTE=Alienblue]Even if someone kills and steals for him or herself, they must think it is "right", that they deserve it or they would not do it. I'm not religious, but I do know that "the devil", Satan, is a "Fallen Angel", indicating that he felt his way was better.[/QUOTE]
I hope I am not making you think that I am against you all the sudden. But I don't think this argument is adequate for declaring all things as a shade of grey. What you are trying to say is that because something is done with good intentions that an activity can't be all bad. But that's not really possible to say unless you think the action inherits characteristics from the motives of its perpetrator. If that were the case, then why not also inherit properties from their victims -- the victims for which those good intentions paved a nice road to hell? Does it matter, for instance, to those Jews who perished in Nazi Concentration Camps whether Hitler might have believed he was right? Was their right to life any less violated?
Does it matter to the victims of Stalin's purge, Mao's "Great Society" reorganization into working (death) camps, or the whole country of people that was almost wiped out in Cambodia's Killing Fields?
I realize those are extreme examples, but when someone says "There is no good or bad, only grey", they are excluding even the extreme examples. And I think that's the danger of treating ethics as epistemological (i.e. all in someone's mind) rather than metaphysical (part of our greater reality).
[QUOTE=Alienblue]And Life is all about birth and death, sick and healthy, strong and weak...there must be BOTH to define the other. We could never have pure "Good" , for what would it's definition be if there was no "bad"?[/QUOTE]
That's too easy to reverse. What would "grey" be if there was no such thing as good or bad?
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feilong801
- Posts: 2173
- Joined: December 31st, 1969, 7:00 pm
Wario: good or bad?
I think you nailed the hammer right on the head, m0zart. And I think the refusal to acknowledge evil in the world is a real and present danger to Western society. Sometimes you have to call a spade a spade.
It's easy to see how people can make errors in judgement regarding what is "black and white," but that's why one has to have some kind of method to decide what is what. m0zart and I have differing methods (I apologize, m0zart, if I accidentally put words in your mouth here, as I'm only going on what I've observed in these boards and in our limited email correspondance) of doing this, as for me it is my Christian faith (the intellectual application of it) that helps decide, and for m0zart it is his (to the best of my knowledge) application of his philisophical studies (specifically Objectivism, from what I've observed).
While we might have disagreements because of our differences of world view, we both agree that we can, simply put, call a spade a spade.
Oh, and by the way, let me just say that you seem like a really cool guy Alien, so I hope that our different points of view aren't interpreted as an attack.
-Rob
It's easy to see how people can make errors in judgement regarding what is "black and white," but that's why one has to have some kind of method to decide what is what. m0zart and I have differing methods (I apologize, m0zart, if I accidentally put words in your mouth here, as I'm only going on what I've observed in these boards and in our limited email correspondance) of doing this, as for me it is my Christian faith (the intellectual application of it) that helps decide, and for m0zart it is his (to the best of my knowledge) application of his philisophical studies (specifically Objectivism, from what I've observed).
While we might have disagreements because of our differences of world view, we both agree that we can, simply put, call a spade a spade.
Oh, and by the way, let me just say that you seem like a really cool guy Alien, so I hope that our different points of view aren't interpreted as an attack.
-Rob
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Alienblue
Wario: good or bad?
Who says you two disagree with me? 
...That stuff I said about good and bad was from a collge english paper I had to do, "proving" there was no bad in the world (half the class had to "prove" there was no good)...I always thought it was a silly project but at last it seemed there was a chance to put it to some use. (I got an A+ by the way).
Seriously, I agree with what you two said. Not that I ALWAYS agree with ol' mOzart, but this time I do. There is bad in the world. And there is certainly black and white, I'm an artist and know that black=abscence of color, white=all colors mixed together. Bad is nothing, good is everything! I always thought that was kind of poetic...have a good day!
...That stuff I said about good and bad was from a collge english paper I had to do, "proving" there was no bad in the world (half the class had to "prove" there was no good)...I always thought it was a silly project but at last it seemed there was a chance to put it to some use. (I got an A+ by the way).
Seriously, I agree with what you two said. Not that I ALWAYS agree with ol' mOzart, but this time I do. There is bad in the world. And there is certainly black and white, I'm an artist and know that black=abscence of color, white=all colors mixed together. Bad is nothing, good is everything! I always thought that was kind of poetic...have a good day!
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a1
- Posts: 3032
- Joined: December 31st, 1969, 7:00 pm
Wario: good or bad?
[QUOTE=Alienblue] I'm an artist and know that black=abscence of color, white=all colors mixed together. [/QUOTE]
Did you mean the opposite?
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