[It may be best to think of this post as mini-essays on the following, sorted into a structure with a four paragraph opening and a two paragraph conclusion drawing likenesses between them: Shadow the Hedgehog and Mewtwo; Giygas and Porky from MOTHER; Shin Godzilla and Neon Genesis Evangelion; Wings of Fire; Nimona; The Matrix; The Hulk and Frankenstein; and Ember's Ghost Squad. Consequently, you probably don't strictly have to read all of it.]
I often think about genre and tropes, and how far these structures extend beyond the culture that Hollywood producers and marketing heads cultivate for us. I am admittedly extremely under-read and not familiar with patterns of the novel publishing industry, but I believe it has a similar makeup to a lesser degree.
There's a particular story template that is to some degree quintessential, played-out, and eye-rolling, and yet I can scarcely think of actual examples of it in pop culture. Some would call it overly emotional, woe is me, "male manipulator", and so on. But I have a hunch that many people have been exposed to this sort of narrative as someone else's pet project or via fanfiction or online art, or secretly come up with one. The Misanthropic Oppression Narrative.
The Misanthropic Oppression Narrative is an angsty expression of pain and misanthropy that wears its heart on its sleeve. The protagonist is someone who has been marginalized either from birth or a very young age, and usually a young adult or teenager. The world around them is unfeeling, cruel, and conformist, and seems to profit from their misery. They generally develop ways of fighting their situation that feature destruction in some way, either self-destruction or other-destruction. Usually the story ends with whatever situation the protagonist is immersed in in ruins around them with an uncertain future, a suicide or equivalent "cautionary tale"-esque bad resolution that proposes no agenda and is more of a lament, or mutual destruction.
I believe that the most common place you see features of an MON is actually– somewhat unsurprisingly– in villains and anti-heroes. The Phantom of The Opera, an untrained theatrical visionary, mistreated due to a physical abnormality and adopting, to say the least, very misanthropic and manipulative tendencies. Doctor Doofenshmirtz, a man with literally hundreds of unlikely-sounding extremely traumatic stories to tell about his childhood (I actually find him especially relatable; describing some of the things I have been through makes me sound unhinged or like a liar). The Joker in The Dark Knight and Bane in The Dark Knight Rises are very trope-aware examinations of the makeup of a tortured, misanthropic villain. I'm sure there are many, many more, but... I'm under-exposed.
Shadow the Hedgehog (ok stay with me), a dormant bio-weapon subject to traumatizing scientific research whose only companion, who he secretly existed for the sake of, is killed in front of his eyes, prompting a turn to misanthropic, rebellious violence and narcissistic self-hatred. Mewtwo, a dormant bio-weapon subject to traumatizing scientific research whose only companion, who he secretly existed for the sake of, is killed in front of his eyes, prompting a turn to misanthropic, rebellious violence and narcissistic self-hatred. I've always wondered if there's some more obscure original source of mutual inspiration here, but it doesn't seem like there is, other than maybe an effect of writers specializing in preteens writing themselves into their stories, or the discourse around animal testing that was happening in those years. (Or maybe Shadow just completely ripped off Mewtwo.) There's an interesting compare/contrast in their narratives; Mewtwo is denied his memories of the love and joy he shared with Ambertwo, and that absence of the knowledge of the feeling of joy fuels his decision to lash out in violence, directed at humanity but fueled as much by apathy towards the universe itself. Shadow, on the other hand, lives with the memories, and becomes convinced humanity is only capable of snuffing out everything pure.
The progression of Shigesato Itoi's MOTHER series seems to propose that Porky, a spiteful child who refuses to grow up or change, is a greater threat than Giegue/Giygas, a genocidal alien conqueror turned (the, the game tells us) supernatural Evil Power whose only knowledge of love came from his human foster mother and father, and who, in MOTHER, or EarthBound Beginnings, or EarthBound Zero, cannot bring himself to conquer Earth without becoming a force beyond time. I find the logistics of this theme fascinating. In MOTHER 2, or EarthBound, crawling into the vaginal "Devil's Machine" in a place back in time and peering in to look at Giygas's stabilized, limited mind-vessel, we see a familiar face– the face of Ness, telling us that Ness are the demons, or "he is already here", if you prefer, continuing on from Ness' character arc in Magicant where he defeats his own dark side, or Giygas's presence in him, and becomes prepared to attempt to destroy Giygas entirely, a fact of the timeline that causes Giygas to infect Porky as well in an attempt to rewrite it. The scenario leads one to the conclusion that Porky is somehow the one to plant the Evil Power inside of Ness, a not-unlikely premise if you think about what growing up next door to this kid does to a guy.
Porky tells us he "cannot think rationally any more, and he isn't even aware of what he is doing now. His own mind was destroyed by his incredible power. What an almighty idiot!" At some point in the transition between being an evil person and becoming the Evil Power, Giegue was so terrified of what he was becoming that he could no longer exist as an agent, but as a tool or Power to be exploited by some pathetic lowlife such as Porky. Itoi boldly implies, arguably from a culturally Buddhist perspective, that a mind, an ego, is antithetical to unlimited evil. Porky is not this. In the unholy glory of Giygas' true form, Itoi is sure to have Porky gleefully tell us he is "terrified, too." He sardonically says he "can't help but shed a tear" for the situation he has put the world in by unleashing Giygas, and as soon as he notices his own state of panic, he taunts Ness about his fear, and tells him to cry out for his human mother and father– Porky not emotionally having parents of his own.
In a surprising writing choice that fans still debate the meaning of, this primordial brainless evil that struggles to even speak immediately feels the need to tell us that "It hurts". That it's "not right." That he wants to "go back". That he's "so sad... (name)..." and yet "feel[s] good" to be defeated. All while trying to kill his "friends", whose names he seems to delight in being able to say. (Been there, little bro.) What isn't right, Giygas does not say. Giegue might have a more specific answer, but Giygas seems to represent evil itself, all of it, everywhere, even Porky's. Itoi equates ultimate evil with ultimate pain.
Porky, on the other hand, rather than being a conflicted conqueror or an Evil Power, is a boy raised seemingly without any love at all. Itoi takes care to place his trajectory in his own hands while still including the through line of his pain. After Porky offers an insincere apology to Ness for trying to have him killed while participating in a cult he found belonging in, Ness does not believe him, and says nothing. Porky runs away, and now that his "only friend" has "turned" on him, gives up on any vestigial self-motivated interest in self-reflection he may have had. He becomes the perfect sort of amoral and unprincipled blank slate to fall under the power of Giygas' Mani-Mani (money-money, or manipulate-manipulate, or "under the power of" in Japanese) statue, a Mammon-esque golden horned figure, like the golden calf of the Bible, which drives people towards avarice and manipulation.
In MOTHER 3, Porky goes on to plot the destruction of all of existence, just because nobody really likes him or loves him. At the end of the game, he retreats once more into his Absolutely Safe Capsule, perfectly content with the knowledge that nothing will ever challenge his immaturity or make him uncomfortable again.
Itoi indicates that Porky's original sin is entitlement. Even when he knows that he has done something wrong, he doesn't really feel bad for people he has harmed, motivated only by his desire to be accepted. He understands that his actions hurt others; he just doesn't care, and yet he demands others like him and give him company anyway. When they don't, he throws his life away on a quest to somehow overpower and humiliate them. That makes him worse than Giygas; Giygas may be unfathomably more cruel and hateful, but without someone immature and selfish like Porky to influence, Giygas is nothing.
Godzilla could even be mentioned, especially in Shin Godzilla where his appearance seems to be fueled by the frustrations of a suicidal scientist, and the soundtrack asks us in his greatest villainous triumph, his hardest-fought and most violent outburst, "if I die in this world, who will know something of me?"
An ex of mine, who was majorly into kaijus, once sent me Shin Godzilla's Who Will Know to explain their anguish to me. "I am lost, no one knows, there's no trace of my yearning." "But I must carry on, nothing worse can befall." "All my fears, all my tears, tell my heart there's a hole." "A shaft of light is all I need to cease the darkness killing me." Not coincidentally, a shaft of light is what erupts from Godzilla's mouth as his extremely successful limit-breaking retaliation– or perhaps his cry for help. (Godzilla is also transgender in this movie, but we don't have time for that.)
I find it very interesting that Hideaki Anno made Neon Genesis Evangelion, three Rebuilds, encountered writer's block, made Shin Gojira, a movie that revels in misanthropy perhaps moreso than End of Evangelion did, and then found the inspiration to write a less misanthropic ending to Evangelion that he found convincing. Evangelion is about a lonely boy with deep-seated abandonment issues and an inferiority complex assigned a task he cannot live up to, and how that changes him. In End of Evangelion, Shinji becomes even more hopeless than Shin Godzilla, and rather than lashing out in confusion and fear and anger, deliberately chooses to bring an end to humanity, full of hate for what is divided from him. "Nobody cares whether I live or die," Shin-ji cries. "Nothing will change... so they can all just die..."
It continues:
Rei Ayanami: Then what is your heart for?
Shinji Ikari: It would be better if I never existed. I should just die too.
Rei Ayanami: Then why are you here?
Shinji Ikari: Is it OK for me to be here?
[the word "Silence" flashes on the screen and fades away]
Shinji Ikari: NOOOOOOOOOOOOoooooo!
There's also:
Misato Katsuragi: You hate yourself, don't you? That's why you hurt others. Deep down you know you suffer more when you cause someone else pain... than if you just let yourself get hurt. But Shinji, that was your decision, so it makes it a valid choice. That's what you wanted. So, that makes it worthwhile. Stop lying to yourself and realize that you do have options. Then... accept the choices you've made.
Shinji Ikari: But you're not me! You don't know what I have to go through! You don't understand!
Misato Katsuragi: [enraged] So fucking what if I'm not you! That doesn't mean it's okay for you to give up! If you do, I'll never forgive you as long as I live!
And (note the disjointed phrasing here at the beginning, and with Shinji's last plea and how Asuka replies, pointing out the difference in between Asuka's inaction and Shinji's insistence she, personally, his latest favorite person, is killing him):
Shinji Ikari: I wanna stay with you, Asuka... and I want to help you, but I don't know what to do.
Asuka Langly Soryu: Then don't do anything. Don't come near me. All you ever do is hurt me.
Shinji Ikari: Asuka, help me! Please! Asuka, you're the only person that can help me!
Asuka Langly Soryu: Liar.
Shinji Ikari: Asuka...
Asuka Langly Soryu: Anyone will do. You don't care who it is! You're afraid of Misato, and the First Child... you're afraid of your mother and father, too! So now you come running to me...
Shinji Ikari: No, I need you to help me...
Asuka Langly Soryu: [talking over Shinji] - because that's the easiest way to keep from getting hurt! You never even loved yourself! You're all you have and you never even learned to like yourself!
[pushes Shinji down]
Asuka Langly Soryu: Pathetic.
Shinji Ikari: [getting back up] Help me. Somebody... please, help me. Help me. Help me... somebody... please help me. Somebody, HELP ME! Don't leave me alone! Don't abandon me! PLEASE DON'T KILL ME!
Asuka Langly Soryu: No.
[Shinji doesn't respond. Then, he suddenly reaches out and strangles Asuka]
Knowing their troubled childhood and tastes in fiction, it's no surprise to me that my ex found Wings of Fire and latched onto it, and is still a megafan. Wings of Fire, a juvenile Warriors-esque series about dragons in a society of dragons, immediately immerses you into the shockingly intense and deprived shared childhood of its first-arc protagonists, and plays with notions of lives lived and suffered for "the greater good" engineered at the hands of not-so-great and not-so-good individuals. Each of the five main characters has a different relationship with their guardians and "purpose", and adopts a different coping strategy, and they're all equally poorly adjusted to emerge into a society that has been waiting for them and expecting them to have all these social skills they weren't given. I don't know how to tell you that it is shockingly well-written. Just go read it if you like dragons or monsters or neurodivergent found families that are physically affectionate and cuddly.
Nimona absolutely revels in being a MON and knowing it. Nimona is, I think, a bit of a gesamtkunstwerk in the way that it understands exactly what themes it wants to explore, and uses what is essentially just one allegory to do so, looking at it from every angle, using every metaphor, to realize its premise as fully as possible. In Nimona, humanity demonizes gay punk monsters because the ruling class materially benefits from exploiting their own fear and perpetuating it onto the citizens to keep their fascist, elitist, maximum-security police state agenda in power. Seriously. I'm almost upset I don't have more to say about Nimona because it's so on the nose and confident and totally against what a company like Disney wants to preach in what it's doing that when I finally saw it on Netflix I thought "DeviantArt has hit the big leagues". All I can put on top of what is in the text is to encourage you to let it lead you through its takes on how being queer, a nuisance, counterculture, a monster, or just unabashedly yourself are all the same thing. Watch it. Read it. Do both.
The Matrix, while it definitely is not an archetypal MON, particularly in the way it argues for all of humanity and places us in the same boat, still carries a streak of misanthropic or antisocial ideology, distilled in the way it separates the humanity of its enlightened few from society. It casts society, the titular Matrix, as a place where too much visible nonconformity will cause conformist government goons with identical haircuts to possess the bodies of random suburbans and violently crack down on them. This, of course, is not far from the truth! Zooming outward, the setting sticks to the natalism-skeptical patterns archetypal of an MON, suggesting that we are born and live not for our own sake, but to fuel dark exploitation of our ancestors' design far beyond what we can fathom. The sequels expand on the "big revelation" of the original, throwing around ideas that circle back around to the subliminal assumptions we build our world upon, but seem even more provocative from our new point of view. Perhaps humanity cannot live without the Matrix; or perhaps there is an evil greater than it still. Perhaps peace can be forged with the dark forces that live under our skin. Perhaps the way to save humanity is to let it die.
The Hulk seems like a particularly autism-coded take on the MON. The comparison between him and an autistic meltdown is very easy to make. When I was very young, I would have autistic meltdowns where I would hit other people, especially my little sister. My mother would mock me and compare me to The Hulk, making it harder for me to acknowledge the pain I was causing others. After the incident that transformed him, Bruce began to have a more complicated relationship with his triggers. He begins having to do more to avoid them, like moving into remote areas with less people around, less stimulus.
The Hulk's most interesting stories are not the ones where he gets so angry that he smashes the other guy harder than the other guy smashes him. (He gets angry for a lot of interesting reasons, though, and has an interesting relationship with his anger.) The most interesting Hulk stories are the ones where he or Bruce are placed in an uncomfortable situation that they can't get out of, and gets more and more triggered. From very early on, Hulk was always portrayed as emotionally sensitive, leaving the original incarnation of The Avengers almost immediately after their foundation due to a slight against him, feeling that they see him as a big dumb scary monster whose emotions don't really matter. My mother does not understand a nuanced point about The Hulk, psychology, or me. That point is that anger is a secondary emotion. Correspondingly, it has been indicated in the comics that Hulk's trigger emotion isn't anger. It's fear.
It's no secret that the gothic angst he carries does not come from nowhere, because The Hulk is directly based on another MON, Frankenstein, transposed into a Jekyll and Hyde dynamic, down to the Universal-inspired green color. Frankenstein's monster, too, is misunderstood and feared for his tendencies and punished for the good he tries to do, after being disowned at "conception" by his "father", which plants a seed of self-hatred in him that blooms into what can only be described as Toxic Daddy Yaoi when he becomes aware of his own appearance and swears murderous revenge against his creator, his only pain marking the only blemish in his otherwise kind and good-hearted, "natural" demeanor. (Frankenstein is even more transgender than Shin Godzilla. Either the monster or the scientist.) Here, the misanthropic/anti-social analysis is squared mostly on the dialectic between progenitor and child, Self and Other, that produces a society at scale. Frankenstein differs from many other MONs in that it frames humans as coming into this world explicitly pure, corrupted only by their conflicts with their social needs at the hands of society. Frankenstein's monster is only evil because he was created in circumstances that lock him almost completely out from being loved, and he hates his creator for making him perhaps even more than he hates himself.
Content warning for spree shooters below.
Here's what I think is the interesting part. You probably have met people who would scoff at all of the characters and works above; you have probably met people who have ten or twelve favorites among the works I mentioned. All of these works have struck deep chords with people in very similar ways– yet the similarities, even just between Shadow and Mewtwo, are rather unacknowledged, and we have a unique stigma against telling this type of story, especially from a sympathetic standpoint, and endings that favor the person in them seem unthinkable, so much so that the two best resolutions seem to be either long renaturalization arcs where the character spends a long time away from their trauma and around people much better for them, or if that's not possible, revolution. Perhaps these stories too viscerally attack and criticize things about society that it takes for granted for most people to really take in and digest what they have to say. Perhaps people subconsciously choose not to reflect on why they relate to these characters. Maybe it's too painful. But we need stories like this, more stories like this, to look at these issues from every angle, see them as important social commentary, and use them to help us find real resolutions, to look inwards and learn about ourselves, and to study the true makeup of a human being.
If you can think of other characters like this, let me know. I am very eager on this subject.