Current Events > Movie studios should stop having villains with facial disfigurement.

(+) Yeah! (+)

Its offensive to people with facial disfigurements. There are kids that grow up being bullied because of their deformities. And bullying has often led to people committing suicide. Would you be okay with studios getting rid of the trope? Does keeping it matter more to you than easing peoples suffering?

Safin's face is covered with scars, continuing a long-time trend of Bond's greatest on-screen adversaries having facial differences.

"It is a straight-up shorthand for villainy: this character has a scar and they are evil," said Adam Pearson, an actor with neurofibromatosis, which causes non-cancerous tumors on the nerve-endings in his face and other body parts.

The storytelling trend isn't limited to Bond movies think of Scar in The Lion King or Darth Vader in Star Wars. But the new Bond film is providing the opportunity for facial difference advocates to push back on what they see as a harmful and overused trope.

"Growing up, I got called things like 'Two-Face' and 'Elephant Man'...It isn't until you step back that you realize how imbalanced the representation is. There's no good guy names to throw back as a retort," Pearson said.

Pearson is an ambassador for the U.K. charity Changing Faces, which has been running a campaign called "I Am Not Your Villain" for several years. In 2018, the British Film Institute backed the campaign and vowed not to fund films where scars or other facial differences connoted villainy.

https://www.npr.org/2021/10/20/1047591067/from-scar-to-james-bond-enemy-safin-movie-villains-have-long-shared-a-harmful-tr



---

Lmao I can't tell if people are joking anymore

Yeah it's probably not good that deformity is used as a visual tell for villainy

---

Its a really lazy and outdated trope of figuring physical deformity as a representation of moral deformity

---

The_True_King posted...

Lmao I can't tell if people are joking anymore

It's a shit world.

It would be more interesting if more heroes were facially disfigured too, but studios should be able to choose for themselves what they want for their movie.

---

Not in my opinion, no.

Honestly if someone became ugly and nobody wanted to interact with them and couldn't find love they probably would want to fuck over society.
This is why Plastic Surgery is a very important field.

They try this all the time... then the villains lose & get battle damaged & come back all over again & the heroes get the Lazarus pit & are restored to perfect health & were all the way back at square one again. Oh man what really stood out was the end where he was all blown half to pieces and they make a whole movie about it.

Ugly people are bad. I know because I am one.

---

EmbraceOfDeath posted...

It would be more interesting if more heroes were facially disfigured too,

The closest example I can think of is Harry Potter's lightning scar, but that doesn't quite feel the same

---

I highly doubt doing that will magically stop the weird looks, whispers and name calling. You wouldn't have specifics like Two Face or Scarface or whatever, but I don't see it going past that.

[LFAQs-redacted-quote]


Not to mention the disfigured good guys like Darkman, Spawn and Deadpool. Though I guess they skirt the line between hero and anti hero

No more villains at all

---

Every villain should be a cis gender white male, or else the story is promoting dangerous homophobic/sexist/racist tropes about whatever victim class their villain belongs to. It is the only way for us to be safe.

---

I like Halloweens approach

Writer 1: Lets have him kill a child first.
writer 2: what?
writer 1: Yep. And then he kills a woman in a female restroom on screen after killing a whole bunch of people off screen. Then! Well, basically have him kill another kid by impaling the lad on a fence. through the face. Break into a few houses. You know.
writer 2: ok....?
Writer 1: Yep. So he kills his therapist. Then he kills the cops. And the girls dad. So they lock him in a goddamn basement.
writer 2: oh well, that wasnt so bad. You killed a child in the movie though.
Writer 1: Wait theres more. In the second movie he kills an entire team of firefighters, an interracial couple, a gay couple, another kid, and half the town. Also girls mom.
writer 1: ._.

Antifar posted...

Yeah it's probably not good that deformity is used as a visual tell for villainy

This, no need to demonize people that already get treated badly by society like this. Sure, it can have a place in a story, but it's often just a lazy trope that should die.

---

Bump

---