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"Syndrome" Syndrome: or the Fallacy of "Special"

mmu1

First Post
Cadfan said:
The movie is very clear. The villian's nefarious plan is to sell the inventions that make him super so that everyone can have them. This will make everyone super, which, he reasons, is the same as no one being super. This is clearly presented as 1) logical, and 2) a scary idea. We can't have everyone being super! The viewer is supposed to hear this and feel resentful on behalf of the Incredibles family, because they're REAL superheroes, and they're SPECIAL, and now this guy is going to take that away by making everyone else just as good as them!

You could easily argue it's supposed to be "scary" because:

1. It's being done for all the wrong reasons - to hurt a small group of people instead of helping the population at large

2. It'd mean Syndrome won, and is fat, happy and in charge

3. Syndrome is an insane super-weapons dealer with poor impulse control

The movie has all kinds of issues if you look too closely, but that whole scne, IMO, was the writers going "Being a spiteful asshat is bad, ok?"
 

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wayne62682

First Post
IMO the quote was originally being used to condemn 4E because, basically, the Fighter doesn't get overshadowed and outperformed by the Cleric/Druid/Wizard/anyone else. "When everyone is special, nobody is special" seems to only refer to the perceived "dumbing down" of 4E, in that now everyone does the same thing with some minor flourishes; there's no more Wizard using some broken twink spell to shatter all semblance of a fair and balanced game and do so legally and within the rules.

In my opinion, the use of that quote and making analogies to the movie are fallacies in themselves - the movie represents what made 3.5 suck so much; the fact that some people ARE better than others because they're more special. In 3.5 the Wizard was Superman, and the Fighter was your average beat cop on the street. When some hood robs a bank, the beat cop can stop him just fine, unless Superman gets there first (and he usually did), but when there's another supervillain (or even an above-average normal villain like Batman faces), the beat cop is well out of his league -- no matter how hard he tries or how determined he is to stop the bad guy, he physically CAN'T. And, while that might be a realistic interpreation in the 3.5 context, it wasn't fun in the context of "Me and my buddies want to spend a couple hours playing a game for our enjoyment"
 

Set

First Post
Edena_of_Neith said:
I haven't seen the film. Don't need to.

Don't let the philosophy majors spoil it with the various hair-brained marxist/nietzchean/cheech&chong agendas they are attaching to it. It's a freaking *awesome* movie; hilarious, exciting and fun, and dragging it into this quagmire is like calling Finding Nemo nazi propoganda.**

I'm pretty sure the writers would choke on a biscuit if they knew people were calling it a 'noblesse oblige' supremacist manifesto!

** Edit to add; If anyone *does* consider Finding Nemo to be nazi propoganda, for the love of Pelor, don't tell me...
 

wayne62682 said:
In 3.5 the Wizard was Superman, and the Fighter was your average beat cop on the street. When some hood robs a bank, the beat cop can stop him just fine, unless Superman gets there first (and he usually did), but when there's another supervillain (or even an above-average normal villain like Batman faces), the beat cop is well out of his league -- no matter how hard he tries or how determined he is to stop the bad guy, he physically CAN'T. And, while that might be a realistic interpreation in the 3.5 context, it wasn't fun in the context of "Me and my buddies want to spend a couple hours playing a game for our enjoyment"

I find that considering the "beat cop" as level 1 and the "hero" to be level 11 is a better assumption.

The fact that Beat Cops never level and that your Level 1s never get hit with lvl 11 challenges is one of those Handwaved-for-playability crutches.

Further, The Incredables was one of the 4 roles (plus Frozone!) player character groups, in what I conceive it as, while the cops were NPC gaurds, unstatted
 



TwinBahamut

First Post
Wow, I was just complaining about that quote in another thread a few days ago...

I don't really want to get into a lot of the ideas of the movie as a whole (since it has just been too long since I have seen the movie), but I certainly agree that, in context, that line is not meant to be something the viewer should agree with.

Mostly, we are meant to believe that the line is flawed simply because it comes out of a psychotic villain's mouth, and the voice actor and animators put such a wonderful evil tone and wicked expression into the the second half of the line (the important half).

As far as I am concerned, I think that line exists solely to reveal Syndrome's ultimate motivation: he wants no one to be "super", meaning he wants superheros to cease to exist. The first half of the line ("if everyone is super") is a just a brief explanation of how (in his twisted mind) his current actions will lead to his end goal stated in the second half ("then no one will be"). Honestly, if you take the line by itself, even in context, it is pretty logically flawed... Of course, Syndrome is not one for logic, since his entire motivation for his rampant hatred of Mr. Incredible and evil deeds is the fact that Mr. Incredible didn't want a young brat tagging along on superhero work (which is a more reasonable stance than Batman ever took!).

Anyways, the movie itself challenges the very assumption behind the line (that all "supers" are equal). As I mentioned in another thread, look at the scene where Syndrome tries to pass himself off as a superhero/defender of justice in the final battle sequence of the film. Syndrome has all of the powers, all of the "super"-ness, thanks to his gadgets, but he fails to even stop a disaster of his own creation (that he rigged to stop when he told it to!). His obsession with power, massive ego, and disregard for society all mean that he will never be a superhero, even if he has powers (which is the very point of his big quote!).

Meanwhile, look at how Mr. Incredible changes across the course of the movie... He is truly heroic when he works behind the scenes to help an old woman with an insurance claim, but he only uses his powers to severely injure a defenseless (if petty) man. His powers and his heroic nature are seperate, not the same thing (like Syndrome implies in his line). In fact, the movie goes to pretty impressive lengths to show that Mr. Incredible is a far greater individual when he is acting like a normal father who happens to have super-powers, than when he is a superhero who happens to be a father. Some of my favorite scenes from the movie involve that distinction, really.

Besides, even ignoring all of that, you still have a guy trying to claim that just because everyone has superpowers, it would somehow make a man with super-strength, a stretchy woman, an invisible girl, and a speedster all "mundane". Even if that were all true within the context of that world somehow, it would not be applicable to D&D because that level of variation would still be incredibly interesting and diverse enough for anyone.



On a side note, I really think labels like "marxist", "fascist", "freudian", or whatever are terrible tools for trying to pick apart stories and ideas... I think it is something of a failing of academia (including my own college education, really), that it teaches people to interpret texts entirely through that kind of flawed lens.
 

pemerton

Legend
eyebeams said:
4e is remarkably vague about what powers represent in the story. This is good for some people and bad for others. But really, if people envision them as superpower-like and don't care for it, their reaction is essentially to their own attitudes. This includes saying they don't have narrative impact because everybody has them. Powers are rules for dramatic adventure events. If not everyone can have them, then this is basically denying that the players should have equal access to that excitement.
This is an excellent few sentences.
 


pawsplay

Hero
Intense_Interest said:
If you have a disagreement with what someone has to say about the film, and it requires you to respond in a way that is absolutely off topic, you are being off-topic.

On-Topic being that "Everyone is Special, therefore No One Is", is an applied quote stolen from a source that then dismantles that position, and people who use it as a criticism are far off base.

You have close to a third of the replies in the thread. I invite you to a create a take-on-all-comers OP in the Off-Topic forum concerning the Message of The Incredables.

If your post requires an off-topic response, isn't it off-topic, too? I'll concede that the line, from an unreliable voice, is misused by some people on message boards, just like "To thine own self be true" is used witlessly by people in general, but your summation of the Incredibles specifically seems to me off-target. I'm not sure what content you expected to the discussion if it was not that analogy. You are specifically attacking what the phrase means, but I don't share your formulation.

Anyway, I'm out.
 

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