Things I Don't Get

[forsyth]

Okay, so, The Incredibles. Really good movie. So, Syndrome, the villain. He's obviously a villain, what with the killing supers to perfect each generation of his bot he was gonna send to attack the city. Right, got that.

So, his secondary motivation, though, was to sell off his inventions after he used them, and then "when everyone is special, no one is."

That's quite frankly one of the stupidest lines I've ever heard. Okay, yeah, when everyone can fly, being able to fly isn't unique, but it's still special. And damn useful. That's not really a villain motivation. For all that it'd overthrow the current status-quo, something most heroes don't do. Or maybe I'm just weird and reading too much into it.

Comments

[megpie71.livejournal.com]

The motivation isn't a new one (I can think of a previous version of it being used in "The Gondoliers" by Gilbert & Sullivan). I can see how it could be regarded as a villainous thing to do - in the same way that, for example, removing world poverty is regarded. When you remove the tools that other people have to make themselves feel superior to others, you deal a crushing blow to them personally.

How it makes sense as a motivation for Syndrome is through the individual psychology of the character, I think. Syndrome started as a kid who wanted to tag along with his favourite superhero, but wasn't allowed to because "he wasn't special enough" (his perception of the matter - a more realistic one would be that the superhero in question didn't want him getting injured or hurt). The kid who became Syndrome saw this as a rejection of who he was based on the "superiority" of the superhero in question, rather than as an effort to avoid harming him, so his eventual aim is to quash that perceived "superiority" one way or another. It's a way of getting back at the person who hurt him, and it's a very personal motivation - "you won't ever be able to tell someone else that they're not special enough, so there!"