The bible
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Alex in A Clockwork Orange? 🤔
I haven’t seen the movie, but in the book, absolutely fucking not. At one point he abuses two 10 year-olds and from that point there was precisely 0 empathy from me. Bad shit happened to him while incarcerated which is unfortunate, but a lot of other things that happened to him before the incarceration and after he was released were completely deserved.
Edit: To be clear, he did plenty of other bad shit, and I’m not comparing the things he did between themselves, that was just the tipping point for him becoming irredeemable to me. His age doesn’t make a difference to me.
Expanding a little on your point, I feel like a lot of people miss one of the themes of the book being “does forcing someone to be a good person by stripping them of their free will actually make them a good person?” I don’t think Alex ever really regretted what he did, it’s just for a short time he couldn’t do it anymore. Even after they reverse his treatment, he goes and forms another gang. iirc The only reason he even thinks about stopping is because the violence isn’t “fun” anymore. So yeah, not really a good guy.
Osama bin Laden
Reviewing his career and accomplishments - the guy was a real life Michael Douglas in Falling Down… but followed through on a larger scale. And deaths, a whole lot more deaths.
Adrian Veidt, Watchmen.
Absolutely not, unless you adhere to pure utilitarianism. Veidt kills untold numbers of innocent people on a self-imposed quest to do what he believes will save humanity. He was a straight up megalomaniac and the only upside is that his murderous actions eventually lead to peace.
But he made himself feel every death, and he saved the entire world from (holds lighter under map)…
Can’t believe it’s not mentioned yet, but Alan Moore’s Watchmen
I cant see Ozymandias as a good guy. At all. None of the “heroes” are, but Oz was the worst of them.
In the movie the only one I would’ve considered good was Rorschach. He was the only one who only made personal sacrifices to save people.
I mean dude legit let himself be killed because he couldn’t live with not telling the world what Ozymandius actually did.
Rorschach being good is debatable, he’s a Batman like vigilante who hasn’t the ‘no killing’ rule, which is dubious.
But the reason he chose death was (in my humble opinion) that he realized Veidt had found the solution, that would bring peace and create a world he would be useless in.
This point is made by the ultra nationalist frontiersman publication he sent his diary to. They complain that they have nothing to write about as the world was united in boring peace, this is when the burger munching intern gets the assignment to pull something out of the loonie pile.
I should re-read it, but the impression I got was that Oz was the epitome of this thread’s topic. A real “ends justify the means” villain, where his end goal is to save the world from itself by giving it a common enemy to vanquish. And he does it. In terms of the classical trolley problem, he pulled the lever to kill 1 instead of doing nothing and allowing 5 to die. Am I misremembering?
Veidt asked the precognitive being if his plans for utopia would come to be, and if it was all worth it in the end. Osterman cryptically responded by saying “Nothing ever ends”, and teleported away leaving Veidt once again in doubt as to whether or not his plan was successful.
From what I understood, he spent the whole story acting super-sure about what would happen if he did nothing, and how he alone could fix it. But in the end of the comic, this showed he had doubts. Veidt didnt have precognition, just very good prediction. But also an over-inflated ego. He killed a lot of people for a “maybe”.
Nah ozymandies was kind of an ass regardless . Did he solve a big problem ? Yes . Was he a good guy ? Far from it.
I bought the book just this weekend. Until now I only watched the movie. Looking forward to reading it!
