1. Esther Wallace says:

    Thank you. Only good can overpower evil. Very true.

  2. That’s why we Christians must pursue personal holiness or it will just be evil vs evil. Without our saltiness we are nothing.

  3. One area where people fall short is presenting an alternative to things they don’t want to happen. Authors can’t always express alternatives in stories, but as it is now, alternatives aren’t being expressed often enough. In the case of not picking the lesser of two evils, show alternatives that aren’t evil.

    And I don’t mean just throwing something convenient in there without thinking about the negative repurcussions that solution can bring, I’m talking about a realistic alternative that feels like it could work and actually be reached in that scenario. With Venom…I haven’t seen this movie, so I don’t know what the char tried or didn’t try, but one aspect could be a matter of what behavior the char considers ‘ok’ for Venom.

    The main char sounds like he was struggling very hard to control Venom in the first place, so getting Venom to ‘only eat bad people’ is definitely a lot of progress in the right direction. The primary problem would be if the char stopped there. The story could instead show the char plotting how to make the situation with Venom even better, and hoping that Venom could be taught compassion for human life so that he doesn’t kill anyone unless necessary. This shouldn’t be done in a preachy way, but in a way that shows the char realistically working through the problem.

    Another place I’ve seen this issue was in the movie What Happened To Monday? The story deals with issues like overpopulation, and denounced the way the government controlled it, but didn’t really have the chars think enough about solutions, and instead subtly had this thing where they showed the protagonists as superior to the antagonist. In a lot of ways, they were, but the lack of solutions presented in the movie risks undermining its point.

    • mc says:

      I give the full disclaimer that I haven’t seen the film yet and am only going on spoilers and other news of upcoming stuff. But I do believe I read that Sony(?) (or whoever has the rights) wants to do a whole spate of movies set in the universe Venom introduces. They want to borrow Spider-Man and merge it (or at least have the current Spider-Man there) with the MCU, but if not, it’s a Spider-Man verse without Spider-Man. So there might be more films. We might over time get the symbiote getting more morally good just as the Scarab does with Jaimie over in DC and like Lasciel’s shadow did with Harry Dresden in the Dresden Files.

    • princesselwen says:

      I haven’t seen Venom, so I can’t make a call on it.
      But the failure to provide a good third option in ‘lesser-of-two-evils’ scenarios can lead to either valorizing apathy or deus ex machina.

  4. Dude. Mark. Great post.

  5. THANK YOU. Evil is always evil. End of story.

What do you think?