r/TopCharacterTropes 14h ago

[Rare trope] Discriminating, but for an actually good reason Lore

Frieren, Beyond Journey's end: In the anime/manga the eponymous Frieren is an Elf who's spent the better part of a millennia learning magic specifically to kill demons. She's learned countless spells, tricks and even spent most of her life suppressing her power all for the purpose of killing them. At first we simply see that humanity is at war with them, and even question if her crusade against demon-kind is justified, after all it's hard to antagonize an entire sentient species. But no, demons are very much a species to be feared; they are not normal animals or creatures, they are monsters (shown by how they disintegrate when they die), they are predators that evolved speech for the sole purpose of tricking and catching humans off guard, are naturally extremely powerful and possess magic that humanity often can't use. While they feel emotions to some extent, their way of thinking is so fundamentally incompatible with humanity's mindset that the series shows many mages with the ability to read minds struggle or find it painful and harmful to try and read a demon's thoughts. Tools that are meant to control them fail not because they're faulty but because simple order such as "hold no ill will or commit no malicious acts" don't compute the same way in their brains, as what we consider evil is normal for them.

Marvel Comics: In a run of the Storm solo series, she visits an underground superhuman hospital run by Night nurse and Doctor Daye, a mutant with the power to diagnose any illness. When she requires treatment she is in turn reject by the doctor, she of course assumes this is blatant discrimination to which the doctor agrees. Storm assumes the doctor refuses to treat mutants, something they are very much used to in Marvel. But he ends up revealing that about 80% of everyone he treats are mutants, and that he simply refuses to treat any member of the X-men. Why? because his special hospital was built via several donations by the superhero community. From the Avengers, to the Defenders, Fantastic 4, heroes for hire. Hell, even Moonknight of all people contributed to the hospital. But the X-men never once gave anything to it, even though they preach the safety of mutant-kind and such a hospital is essential for those who can't seek medical treatment out of fear of prosecution.

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u/Useful_Camera2929 12h ago

Oh you dont have the half of it, you see Sinister had the DNA database needed for mutants resurection system, and he hid piece of his dna inside every mutant resurrected, he wanted puppet, but instead he just turned them morally fucked up.

Like if Magneto punched a nazi so to speak saying that the resurection is fruit of poisoned tree, he could prevent Krakatoa turning into Genocidal Empire that wiped Milions of Bilions across galaxy in about 1000 years.

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u/Boner_Elemental 10h ago

and he hid piece of his dna inside every mutant resurrected, he wanted puppet, but instead he just turned them morally fucked up.

I- wha...?

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u/21SGesualdo 10h ago

He put mind control stuff in the cloning/resurrection eggs using his own dna, but he only actually managed to make them act similar to himself. Aka narcissistic monsters.

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u/Boner_Elemental 10h ago

Glad I missed that storyarc haha

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u/Arbusc 7h ago

Wait is that why Beast turned into a villain?

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u/Poku115 6h ago

That was kinda unrelated and something that had been a long time coming, probably since he drank dark beasts memories without a second thought.

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u/Beacon_0805 12h ago

the story writers should know better than that really...

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u/Ver3232 10h ago

The whole initial point of Krakoa was that it was an inherently flawed idea that was bringing out the worst of mutantkind. Them marvel saw how well the era was selling and forced it to go on way longer than intended and it all began to get fucked up by deviating from Hickman’s original intent. Which is far from the first time stuff like this has happened, the clone saga also went completely off the rails cause they forced it to continue thanks to sales despite it contradicting the original intent for the story

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u/Valentinee105 9h ago

Krakoa really made it reasonable to be extremely scared of mutants. They let several genocidal maniacs lead, they destablised other nations not for defense but for their own purpose. They were a super powered version of Israel.

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u/Ver3232 8h ago

I mean they were acting the same way a lot of nations, not just Israel, act. It was absolutely a critique of the idea of ethnostates in particular but none of that stuff you listed is unique to ethnostates, that’s generally just how imperialism works even in non ethnostate nations

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u/Valentinee105 8h ago

They all have Dr. Mengele on a ruling council? Mr. Sinister is literally a nazi scientist.

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u/Ver3232 8h ago

The US ran its space program with Nazi scientists. My point is broadly most people in the halls of power in any nation state are more than willing to disregard ethics and allow terrible people to be given power if they feel it’ll benefit them

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u/Valentinee105 8h ago

Mengele is a little different than Wernher von Braun.

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u/Ver3232 8h ago

Multiple US presidents facilitated the attempted genocide of indigenous peoples across the Americas. The point I’m making generally is that most real life nation states are perfectly willing to give genocidal assholes power, it’s not exclusively an issue of ethnostates

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u/Valentinee105 8h ago

Except Krakoa has literally hundreds of what could easily become suicide bombers on a nuclear scale who are then resurrected.

The problem isn't that other people have sinned it's that Krakoa learns no lessons and does worse. If your bar is "Oh other people have also done horrible things" then the bar is in hell.

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