[Spoilers] Why Zenos is the most important character moving forward

[Edax]

Having two women talk to each other about something other than a man is a flawed principle for evaluation, inherently unequal in its criteria, and eliminates the possibility of treating women as default with as much respect, attention to quality, attention to detail, and focus on individual identity compared to men. It misses the forest for the trees and diminishes potentially brilliant works and characters for something ultimately insignificant. Men are not subjected to any version of this test and would not have their quality called into question if they failed to meet such criteria.

Like I said, the Bechdel test is not a hardline test of quality, it does highlight a specific problems. Understanding why A New Hope fails the Bechdel test highlights that A New Hope has a gender ratio difference of over a 99%. You talk about reverse the Bechdel test, well in the opening scene of A New Hope, a male Stormtrooper tells Vader that the plans are not in the main computer. So you have 2 men talking about something other then a woman, so it passes the reverse Bechdel Test in the first minutes of the movie.

Having a quota for representation and potentially lowering the bar for representation because meeting that quota takes priority over telling the story effectively hurts representation.

Which is why you shouldn't use quotas. The fact that A New Hope only has 2 women can be traced back to the script and the writing of George Lucas. A sacrilegious as it sounds, Star Wars could have had a better script.

Having a quota for representation and potentially lowering the bar for representation because meeting that quota takes priority over telling the story effectively hurts representation. This is because a flood of forced, lower quality stories teaches audiences to associate representation with low quality. It's good to include a wide variety of characters across demographics because they offer a broader range in life experiences and perspectives, but they should fit the work and they should have some purpose within the work beyond existing as representation. Anything less is dehumanizing and ultimately hurts representation because the audiences WILL notice what you're doing. The path to success comes from sincere enthusiasm and being treated as normal or nothing. Because there are people capable of delivering that enthusiasm and the depth that comes with normalcy. The more they get drowned out by token characters, the more stigma goes to the represented group.

There is room for stories about just men. There is room for stories about just women. There is room for stories about men and women together. So on and so forth. The arena for sharing stories is open to anyone who chooses to tell them and can tell them well enough. It must remain that way rather than fall to identitarian censorship. That censorship just breeds resentment and further division while limiting options instead of expanding them.

Here you are objectively wrong. Passing the Bechdel Test does not require quotas, censorship or forced diversity. A well written story should be capable of passing that test on it's own merits without "forcing" anything. As you say, there is room for stories about men and women so why even mention "identitarian censsorship"? It's a huge leap to even link the idea that 2 women talking to each other in a movie about something other than a man is tantamount to censorship. The two concepts don't correlate at all.

You do not cook. You can understand basic things like there shouldn't be a cockroach on top of your food. You know you like the taste of some things but not others. If you go into a high end restaurant, order something prepared in a way you're not used to and don't like, then tell the chef they did it wrong and don't know what they're doing--you are in the wrong there. You don't have to like the food prepared. It isn't the fault of the chef and doesn't mean something was wrong with the food. If you want to evaluate the technical quality of an unusual food in a high end restaurant, you better know damn well what you're talking about.

The problem with your scenario here is that I am not talking to the chef. We are both consumers of product in this forum. I am not talking directly with the creator. As you say, I can point out if there's a cockroach on my plate. You can defend the chef but when you demand my résumé, you've overstepped your bounds. I do not need professional credential to critique a product. A critic only needs to be capable of criticizing something. We don't need to encourage the Brie Larson school of gatekeeping where critics need to be a specific race, gender or profession to "count".

Writing is not all about your feelings and how much you do or don't like something. There are different forms of writing between genres and according to whether a work draws from empathy with its characters or wish-fulfillment using stand-ins for the reader. It is ignorant to use the same criteria you would use on I don't know, Paradise Lost, for a bodice ripper.

Then your not being objective. If a bodice ripper cannot match the standard of Paradise Lost, then it is not as well written. To abandon the objective standard to say otherwise would be an appeal to emotion.

Zenos killing the Warrior of Light doesn't mean anything more than he needs a new rival and the Warrior of Light no longer meets his needs. It's just that simple. He does not care one bit about the Warrior of Light as an individual person, as I've said repeatedly in this and other threads. He cares about someone being strong enough to beat him. It could be literally anyone and he would be just as excited. Right now, the person he found is the Warrior of Light. If the Warrior of Light is dead, he needs to resume his search. He won't mourn us as a person. He'll mourn that the role is empty again. He is driven by very few, very simple desires but he will pursue them ruthlessly and remorselessly. There are people like that. Part of how empathy-based fiction operates involves reflecting the human experience in some way, shape, or form. This is a type of human experience. It operates with clear and understandable cause and effect motives. It is shaped by the environment it interacted with from birth and a series of experiences, all effected in-turn by born personality. It is nature and nurture both, consistently and cohesively.

What you just described isn't a story. As you say, if Zenos wins, he stops caring. If he stops caring, there's no story. How is Zenos any different then Grynewaht, both in personality or function in the story? You can technically tell a story about a human that does nothing, but most would objectively agree that would be a bad story. If Zenos wins, the plot ends because he has no plot.

We could easily have a story about the Scions struggling to deal with Zenos as he searches for new quarry while trying to fill the void left behind the Warrior of Light.

But they wouldn't. Zenos does not care about the Scions. Zenos would have no reason to ever get out of his chair.

Now lets try a hypothetical villain who fails your Edax test. Lets say that the arc of this villain involves them deteriorating over time. Like Macbeth. Lets say that the villain begins as a person of decent or middling morality, but extremely low self-worth coupled with isolation. The villain is treated to a small kindness by our hero. They latch onto that and spiral deeper and deeper into obsession. Eventually they can no longer imagine life without the hero. They stalk the hero, kill competition for the hero's attention, kidnap the hero and keep them in a basement.

The hero tries to escape and, in the scuffle that follows, the villain kills them by mistake.

The absolute lack of self-worth remains, but now added to this the villain also realizes that this one person who did them a kindness, who let them feel for a while like maybe they were worth kindness, is dead. And it's their fault.

Villain commits suicide. Or villain goes on to try and find a substitute because they can no longer exist alone and becomes a serial kidnapper.

If the antagonist commits suicide, then the story is over. Destroying the protagonist meant the antagonist could not progress the story. Becoming a Serial Kidnapper would likely not have anything to do with the story leading up to that point. Unless it was a villain protagonist from the very start, then the story has been broken.

Either you are describing a scenario in which the story has ended and a completely new one has taken its place...or the Antagonist has successfully progressed the story after they destroyed the protagonist because they are well written. Edax Law upheld.

Also your scenario is quite reminiscent of the Amazing Spiderman. Electro's motivations completely revolved around Spiderman. If Electro succeeded and killed Spiderman, the story could no longer progress because Electro would no longer have any purpose. This is a film famed for its poor writing. Electro is not the objective standard for a well written villain.

Boom. Technically fine character and variations off of this concept have been around for centuries. Character is tragic, has a clear arc, has motivations throughout. You can switch to focus on a sibling of the villain, or a new victim, or a police officer looking into the crime. Good stories can shift focus to even a background character and make them feel like the protagonist.

Game of Thrones story survived the death of it's protagonist by the antagonist because it was well written. The Lannisters did not exist purely to oppose Ned Stark, they had their own motivations that continued after the protagonist was executed.

Characters do not become ineffective because they are personally weak. This is part of the human experience too, and knowing that it is a possibility furthers suspense across the board because it lets audiences know that it is possible for heroes to fail. This lends weight to every victory. It's why it's important that we as the Warrior of Light lose to characters like Zenos and Ran'jit as the Warrior of Light. It's why it matters that the Fuath nearly drowned us and Emet-Selch nearly turned us into an unstoppable sin eater. When you never fall and never experience vulnerability or weakness, you not only lose perspective and dramatic tension--you lose the sense of humanity that allows audiences to relate and invest. Because human beings are sometimes weak and sometimes fail. It's part of why heroes who manage to succeed despite this threat are so inspiring. They're willing to face those stakes.

I don't know what this is a reply to. I made no criticisms of physical weakness. Red herring?

This is a measurable craft and it does have objective elements not related to mechanics like spelling or grammar. Your feelings and individual preferences will not make you more right about technique.

I agree we should hold this story to an objective standard. It is a shame that you have taken my objective statements and examples about the story and implied they were subjective.

The issue with the "Edax Test" is that it operates under the assumption that the villain has a plan.

Villains like Zenos do not have plans. Zenos is like the Joker - a dog chasing cars, who wouldn't know what to do if he caught one. He doesn't have a plan or plot beyond getting a satisfying fight. He can't "progress the story if he wins" because he has no stake in the overarching mythos driving everyone else.

As a character, Zenos is very boring; as a plot element, decidedly less so. (Pointing out which was the reason this thread was made.)

But in the Dark Knight, the Joker did have a plan and he was most certainly the main antagonist. The bank heist was planned, hostage situation, letting himself get captured was planned and the boat bombs were all planned. And all the plans were tied together so that the Joker could push his ideology onto Gotham. It was all in a bid to show Gotham that they were all as ugly as himself. When the Joker said he was a dog chasing cars, he was lying to Harvey Dent. If the Joker killed Batman, then the Joker would continue to erode society of Gotham. Enough of the Joker's motivations have been established that the story could continue to run until Gotham had tore itself apart like as Bane intended. We could potentially see that the Joker was right and Batman was wrong because he had an affect on all the characters around him. If a less well written character like say the Scarecrow had killed Batman, then yes the story no longer progress because Scarecrow doesn't have any motivation beyond making people scared. What would Scarecrow do if he killed Batman? Spray someone with fear gas and then go home? -shrug-

BTW, can I borrow that question in other forums Edax? It's a great one to ask about a lot of unsatisfactory villains to see how it is answered and why they are so unsatisfactory...

Go ahead.