Current Events > Why are American studios afraid of villain protagonists?

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This reminded me that Blizzard's analytics on the Mass Effect series revealed that Americans had a high preference to play Paragon on their first play through. The rest of the world it's more mixed between Paragon and Renegade.

Wondering if it's related to the whole villain-protagonist thing.

nocturnal_traveler posted...

I'm sure a sequel could've answered that, but alas, the DC cinematic universe is getting a reset.

Yeah, fair enough. A continuation instead of a reset certainly would've helped. Unfortunately, the DC cinematic universe is currently owned by somebody who wants to kill it in favor of a "90 Day Fiance Universe."

BB_mofo posted...

This reminded me that Blizzard's analytics on the Mass Effect series revealed that Americans had a high preference to play Paragon on their first play through. The rest of the world it's more mixed between Paragon and Renegade.

Wondering if it's related to the whole villain-protagonist thing.

Since you brought this up, I feel like mentioning that during my college years I actually did some research on this for a paper, and I found that it's an extremely common preference for us Americlaps to play good guy on the first playthrough. Infamous 2 had over 70% of the people who beat the game go good karma looking at the trophy data for instance, so Sucker Punch based Second Son on that ending despite the director's original intent being for the evil karma ending to be canon. It's also why you have so many subscribers for New Vegas mods where you can finagle a way to not destroy the Brotherhood of Steel in a House playthrough, because blowing up the bunker is deemed as the bad thing for many people even though the brotherhood themselves are hardly saints.

PiOverlord posted...

Carmen actually made me mad. Her being a villain is a part of what makes her memorable. They turned her into a generic spy on the side of the good guy.

Didn't the old Carmen Sandiego stuff usually focus on the people who were trying to stop/catch her?

As opposed to say, Lupin 3 or Magic Kaito, which actually focused on the thieves? At least until Kaito got semi-shelved and they wrote Detective Conan, where Kaito now actually makes Carmen Sandiego-like guest appearances every now and then.

Dark heroes or anti-heroes seem to work WAY better on prestige Television series...

The Sopranos
Breaking Bad
Dexter
Better Caul Saul
Loki
Wednesday

I don't know exactly why that is, probably the ability to tell long form stories with more character development than a 2 hour movie I guess. You have time to learn to love and hate the character.