I can't quite get my thoughts in order, but I feel like there's a deep seated discomfort with activists that a lot of writers have which manifests a few ways.
I'm not wedded to this analysis but off the top of my head:
Zeroth approach: There are no activists everything is fine shh.
First approach: An internally consistent but unpleasant all activists are bad, and social change is also bad. No matter how bad it is the status quo is better than the alternative, at most we feel a little sad for the Tragically Villainous Activist but since nothing can actually ever change for the better their whole approach was always doomed. This is really common in cop shows and murder mysteries.
Second approach a la Korra: All activists are bad, if often in a tragically sympathetic way. On the other hand, social change is good, so it just... happens, somehow. Or it's the result of the activists, and the result is overall good, but the activists are still overall bad. Like a larger scale version of anti-hero villain who Makes Hard Choices and murders the Even Worse Villain the Good protagonist won't kill, before dying themselves. Oh look the problem went away but our heroes didn't have to do Bad things, hooray!
Third approach a la X-men/Black Panther: social change is good, and there are Good activists and Bad Activists. The Bad ones are the radicals, and still sympathetic but doomed, and the Good ones are often very ineffective and connected to the status quo. There's still often a "nothing really changes, then Activist Villain causes problems and is rightfully defeated, and oh look everything is better now yay" arc.
I personally tend to prefer the third, for all it's flaws, because I find the implication that there's no reasonable way to push for social change really frustrating, versus a story where the 'reasonable' approach is pretty toothless but at least exists and gets to have some positive effect. But yeah the second approach still beats the first by far, and I generally prefer it to the zeroth.
Dragon Age has a frustrating combination where there ARE moderate Good activists the story likes and approves of... but they all either die tragically or turn into Bad Activists. Though because of the Edgy Choice Based Narrative you can sometimes just ignore the framing and side with the Bad Activists anyway haha. What's that, the epilogue acts like it's a tragedy? Hmm, no, unreliable narrator, they lived happily ever after and saved the world, the end.
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I'm not wedded to this analysis but off the top of my head:
Zeroth approach: There are no activists everything is fine shh.
First approach: An internally consistent but unpleasant all activists are bad, and social change is also bad. No matter how bad it is the status quo is better than the alternative, at most we feel a little sad for the Tragically Villainous Activist but since nothing can actually ever change for the better their whole approach was always doomed. This is really common in cop shows and murder mysteries.
Second approach a la Korra: All activists are bad, if often in a tragically sympathetic way. On the other hand, social change is good, so it just... happens, somehow. Or it's the result of the activists, and the result is overall good, but the activists are still overall bad. Like a larger scale version of anti-hero villain who Makes Hard Choices and murders the Even Worse Villain the Good protagonist won't kill, before dying themselves. Oh look the problem went away but our heroes didn't have to do Bad things, hooray!
Third approach a la X-men/Black Panther: social change is good, and there are Good activists and Bad Activists. The Bad ones are the radicals, and still sympathetic but doomed, and the Good ones are often very ineffective and connected to the status quo. There's still often a "nothing really changes, then Activist Villain causes problems and is rightfully defeated, and oh look everything is better now yay" arc.
I personally tend to prefer the third, for all it's flaws, because I find the implication that there's no reasonable way to push for social change really frustrating, versus a story where the 'reasonable' approach is pretty toothless but at least exists and gets to have some positive effect. But yeah the second approach still beats the first by far, and I generally prefer it to the zeroth.
Dragon Age has a frustrating combination where there ARE moderate Good activists the story likes and approves of... but they all either die tragically or turn into Bad Activists. Though because of the Edgy Choice Based Narrative you can sometimes just ignore the framing and side with the Bad Activists anyway haha. What's that, the epilogue acts like it's a tragedy? Hmm, no, unreliable narrator, they lived happily ever after and saved the world, the end.