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Subverted in 1984, I think-the Revolution is hated and doesn't work anyway.

Etrangere: Despite the enthousiasm it had provoqued, I believe the ykttw just fell off the deadly cliff, so I created this stub. Work on the Wiki Magic, folks.

Revolution = Good launched as The Revolution Will Not Be Vilified Discussion: From YKTTW

Seven-of-Diamonds: Subverted in Anastasia?

Robert Bingham: If it's the movie I'm thinking of, I'd say that falls under the second paragraph concerning "Glorious Revolutions." Russia was the first country to go communist, after all, and we're not exactly the biggest fans of that political system...

Fake Nog: Er, if we're discussing the animated one? Didn't even address the revolution (or any other history, actually) as anything but "the Badness that killed her family", so I think it actually would count as a subversion of this trope.

Western Animation

The entire point of Robotech's 3rd season, ala The Next Generation was an armed insurgency

against the Invid occupying Earth. Any Invid that saw the error of their treatment of humans ended up defecting, while those that remained merely became more genocidal in attempting to wipe out the human resistance.

The Defenestrator: I have no words.

"Likewise, see China or anything called a Glorious Revolution" — Even the British "Glorious Revolution" of 1688?

Vampire Buddha: removing natter

To be fair, the original translation is probably more akin to "Ra hardened Pharaoh's heart." Also, the Jewish population had furthermore suffered the murder of THEIR first born. Equivalence was a rather popular concept in the Old Testament.
One can see where such an edit would come in: stating there actually are other deities would be counterproductive to a religion claiming monotheism.
There are scholars however who claim that Judaism was henotheistic, not monotheistic in the past and only changed to monotheism later. (Henotheism means: There is more than one god, but you're supposed to worship just one of them - all other gods are evil and/or false.)
One can also see where the claim for such edits would be useful to modern secular scholarship. What's puzzling is the various conflicting claims of exactly who redacted whom, and when. Such chaos does not inspire confidence.
The god-king Pharaoh was indeed willing to surrender, so long as he retained ownership over the slaves: they could worship, but they must return to the whip. God has no interest in such conditions, nor would He show any claims to Pharaoh's claim to authority (which is grounded in Pharaoh's claim to deity, as the son of Horus the sun-god.)
The Plagues themselves were rather sharply targeted attacks on the idols of Egypt, from the first plague (against Hapi, god of the Nile and source of life in Egypt) to the last plague, against god-king Pharaoh and all Egypt, both as a people and as a state. The Revolution will not be vilified!
Of course, the dominance of the Abrahamic religions, their universal condemnation of Pharaoh, and the extinction of the ancient Egyptian religion a paradigmatic example of the trope, in spades.

So now Ra exists in the book where God throws all sorts of tantrums insisting that he is the only God, and the only thing that can be worshipped?
Actually, the weirdness of the whole "God hardened Pharaoh's heart" comes from the way the Hebrew is translated. The phrase "God hardened Pharaoh's heart" is idiomatic, much like if one of us was to say "I bit off his head" or "No use crying over spilt milk". In the context of the Hebrew, the verb implies permission, not direct action, that is, God allows Pharaoh to harden his heart.

Praetyre: Purged Natter from the Pans Labyrinth example:

Mind you, the Spanish have quite a good reason to prefer the Communists to the Fascists. There are still a good many people alive there who remember Franco.
Many of them quite fondly ... the communists were not nice people either.
Maybe, but the argument that fascism is the only line of defense against a global communist takeover sort of died out in the 30s. And Franco's fascist rule had a number of unique disadvantages, such as mandatory church attendance and women needing their husbands' signatures for any legal document they had to fill out.
This has more to do with Spanish filmmakers being proud communists themselves, with most of their production easily qualifying as propaganda, half of it being dubious retellings of the spanish civil war as seen by them. This troper often wonders how would they subsist if their movies had to actually make money, instead of having it granted by a state subsidy. Pan's Labyrinth is sort of a subversion to these movies, as it actually ends being a good watch (due to it having a non-spanish director).
In all fairness, any movie with a political message can count as propaganda for whatever views it is promoting. It's just harder to notice when it's propaganda in favour of more mainstream ideas.
This whole discussion is based on the premise that the rebels in Pan's Labyrinth are communists, something that may or may not be true. It is not stated in the movie that they are communists (the bad guy refers to them as "Reds", but Franco's supporters usually referred to all of their enemies as such), and there were many factions - anarchists, communists, socialists, liberals, democrats, regionalists, etc - fighting against Franco for different reasons.

Wow, the Video Games section is just a list of aversions with one straight example at the end. Nice job.

Britbllt: Removing this bit of natter...

Which only works if you accept the series' contention that the Federation is actually a utopia. Otherwise, Eddington's statement to Sisko that the Federation only opposes the Maquis because "we've left the Federation, and that's the one thing you can't accept. Nobody leaves paradise. Everyone should want to be in the Federation... You know, in some ways you're even worse than the Borg" rings true. The Maquis are antagonistic to the Cardassians, but don't attack the Federation except out of necessity.

Yeah, yeah the Federation is really an oppressive communist dictatorship... it's one of the oldest bits of Alternate Character Interpretation out there, but it's still just that. The original entry already said the Maquis are portrayed sympathetically (they are) but are still the antagonists (and they are); the above doesn't add anything more except that the troper in question really likes the Maquis and hates the Federation.

I'm tempted to just strike all of Deep Space 9, since "aversions" really shouldn't even be listed: if it's not a trope use or a deliberate subversion, why's it on the page at all? But I'll reread it later and see.

BritBllt: And damn, looking over this page, it's 90% "aversions"! I still might try to kill everything except for straight uses and subversions, but there might not be a page left after it's done...

BritBllt: Removed a ton of "averted" entries. I let most of the "subverted" ones stand, though they still outnumber the straight examples: it looks like a lot of tropers are forgetting that Tropes Are Not Bad and taking pride in any story that doesn't have noble rebels. I may go back in and add some straight examples later. Much later.

Averted in the original Mobile Suit Gundam - the rebels (Zeon) were ~~(more or less)~~ the bad guys. Of course, rebels were good guys in many subsequent series (starting with the first sequel, Zeta Gundam), but even then the conflicts are generally ~~more ambiguous~~ more Anvilicious than most. However Gundam SEED takes that back with the Clyne faction Terminal which due to Super Prototypes and Plot Armor was able to defeat both genocidial sides of the war from destroying one another.

It it's an aversion and both sides are morally grey, it's just not this trope.

Averted in Jin-Roh: The Wolf Brigade - sure, the government aren't exactly angels, but the armed insurrectionists aren't either. Much like most real-life revolutions.

Same here.

Code Geass is a gray area. While the Japanese La Résistance comes over as a righteous movement against The Empire to Japan, very few characters realize how much of a Well-Intentioned Extremist its leader the Magnificent Bastard is (who intentionally cultivated their image as 'allies of justice' while fully considering it hogwash). So it's like both sides are actually evil in the core, but the rebels appear as the classical 'good rebellion'.
- Meanwhile, though Britannia is shown as a highly racist society and a flawed system that encourages in-fighting, bigotry and carrying out mass executions to preserve your own reputation, several people within it are shown in an extremely sympathetic light, wanting only to live in peace with family and friends. Nowhere is this more evident than in Ashford Academy, though this also comes across in the private conversations between Cornelia and Euphemia.
- Maybe the Europe Universe if they were not a House Hufflepuff. But they were the most democratic of everyone in the geass universe, if not divided.

Same here too.

Initially averted then played straight in Rave Master. Nagisa, a girl the same age as the protagonists is used as an assassin. When our heroes stop her and inform her Thou Shalt Not Kill, she attempts suicide by biting off her own tongue. This whole event causes at least one character to openly curse the resistance. When actually met, however, they aren't all that evil at all and the assassination attempt is revealed to have been Nagisa acting on her own.

And same here.

Averted in Colleen Doran's A Distant Soil. While the aims of the resistance—overthrowing the evil Hierarchy and killing the Avatar—are unquestionable, their methods—brainwashing and assassination—are not, and are presented as such.

Yep, and same here.

Despite appearances to the contrary, V For Vendetta plays this one straight. V, the one-man Resistance, does some utterly despicable things — most of all to Evie, his own ally. But he's definitely the hero, we're definitely supposed to root for him, and Evie not only forgives V in short order but buys into his psychotic reason for torturing her.
- While this is definitely true for the movie, not so much for the comics. There is enough evidence that suggests V is either completely insane or simply out for vengeance against the people who tortured him, and likes to dress it up in noble motives to keep people from realizing he's just as bad as the people he's fighting. When you add in subtle context clues that were crystal clear to the original British audience but tend to go right over the head of Americans (like Guy Fawkes being an object of ridicule and revulsion rather than a heroic symbol of resistance against a corrupt government - a perfect case of Values Dissonance at work!), you're left to draw the conclusion that BOTH sides suck in their own way, and it's simply a question of who sucks more. V was NEVER meant to be seen as a purely heroic figure - the comic version is Black-and-Gray Morality at best, if not an outright Grey-and-Gray Morality where there IS no hero or good guys of any kind.
  - It should be added that we do have Word of God on this: V was not intended in the original to be the hero, this was intended to be left to the readers — in many ways, Grey-and-Grey Morality at its finest, where you get your choice of shades of grey. The author of the comic actually was outright offended by the loss of ambiguity in the movie.
- In any case, there's a difference between saying the ugliness of a revolution is justified (or at least outweighed by the revolution's necessity) and portraying revolution as pristine (this trope).
- In the comics, even V himself admits that he's ultimately no white-hatted hero. True, he's working to destroy an oppressive system, but he acknowledges that it's not enough to simply destroy something; you have to be able to build something better in it's place. It's suggested that he hands the mantle to Evie because she can build, where he can only destroy.

Good lord, that's a hell of a lot of Conversation In The Main Page. And what it all amounts to is that V for Vendetta is too complicated to fit the trope, so out it goes.

Partial subversion: Although The Wind That Shakes The Barley is sympathetic to the Irish rebels, it's made largely out of Shoot the Dog moments. Nevertheless, British Moral Guardians apparently missed this (you can't expect them to watch a movie before decrying it, can you?) and assumed the whole thing to be propaganda. Someone compared it to Triumph of the Will
- Indeed, in Real Life, the rebels of the Irish War of Independence probably would have been vilified by the Irish people were it not for the fact that the tactics the British used against the rebels were far more brutal.

"Partial subversion" is usually code for "aversion". And not only is this an aversion, and so doesn't fit, it also seems to have been written just so someone could vent about other people's reactions to it.

This might be an issue of perspective; the Spanish Civil War was fought by two coalitions, one composed of Fascists and Royalists, the other of Communists, Anarchists and Republicans. From the American/Western perspective, Communism = bad, but in Spain, where Communists where part of the anti-Franco coalition, and where certain regions are very socialist, Communists might not always be the bad guys. Mind you, I'm not Spanish, so this is merely conjecture. Still, the above editor's ideas about Political Ideologies in fiction might not hold true outside of the West, and especially in a Spanish language film set in the Spanish Civil War that is clearly anti-Fascist.
As an Spanish person I can give credit to the previous troper statement. How anybody sees the Civil War nowadays depends on which side your grandfather fought with, mine fought with the Republicans so as a kid "Nationals" ("Nacionales" in spanish, the Royalist-Fascist band) where pretty much vilified and always the bad guys. Only through years of reading and thinking one realizes that both sides where pretty much full of shit. The sad part is that this still has repercussions on modern Spain. As a side note, the "Republicas" *might* have been the good guys at the begining of the war, since they represented a democratic elected government, however they took a progressively anarchist/communist stance if only to try and get the USSR to intervene in their favor in the war, just as Nazi Germany and Italy did for the "Nationals". By the second year of the war Spain was pretty much fucked unless some outside force intervened (which didn't happen) since victory for the Republican side would have meant a communist dictatorship and victory for the Nationals meant a military/fascist dictatorship. Talk about our grandfathers being fucked.
- Thanks for having a bunch of fucking opinions!

My... my eyes! Anyway, none of that's necessary. The rebels are the heroes in Pan's Labyrinth and they're very noble and heroic. We don't need a Wall of Text about the various factions of the Spanish Civil War.

While China Mieville's sympathies are obviously with the revolutionaries, this trope is arguably averted or subverted in all his books; well-intentioned extremists are the obvious aversion in ''Iron Council'', but the more sensible revolutionary groups are hardly perfect themselves — not even the titular Council. Indeed, the revolution itself is given an ambiguous character when it is revealed to be quite advantageous for a hostile foreign power capable of utterly destroying the city.

If neither side's perfect, then it ain't this trope.

The rebels in The Inheritance Cycle. Well they aren't supposed to be anyway, though the copious amounts of Fridge Logic and Moral Dissonance may make your mileage vary.

I'm not even very clear on what this one's saying. At any rate, it sounds like it's trying to say that it's an aversion, so out it goes.

Not to mention what happened on Miranda.
- Oh, they knew about it. The intro to Serenity even has Dr. Mathias state outright that the Academy's Mind Rape project had "unanimous" approval from the Alliance Parliament.
- The top levels of government knew about it, surely, but the possibility remains that most of the rank and file, not to mention the actual citizens, had no idea. In fact, that's the greatest danger present in the Serenity movie about revealing that the Alliance is itself responsible for the Reavers - people who've spent their entire lives trusting in their leaders would suddenly realize just how much they'd been lied to, and how much the government was doing "in the shadows". Potentially triggering a second rebellion, or at least resulting in a lot of governmental shake-up.
The rebellion wasn't exactly fun times for all, either. They had the Dust Devils, a group of war crimes-committing extremists, and Whedon himself has said that the Alliance isn't evil so much, it's just that Mal is the viewpoint character and hates the Alliance. For contrast, Inara supported the Alliance in the war.
- The Browncoats fought to defend the independence of the border planets — border planets that even after Unification retained social practices such as selling women into marriage (Triumph) and debt slavery (Higgins' Moon). Is it any wonder the Alliance saw itself as trying to bring civilization to the barbarous settlers? There's a close analogy here with "states' rights" in the U.S. Civil War: the South fought for independence from Federal tyranny and to protect their social traditions, but the social traditions being defended were, well, slavery.
Some of the rebels in Firefly were described by Joss Whedon as basically being criminals fighting for the right to continue committing their crimes. In his view, it isn't so much a war between good and evil as it is a war between independence and control, and his original vision probably had quite a bit more Gray-and-Gray Morality than came through in the series' brief, highly edited run.

Conversation In The Main Page, and none of it's really adding anything substantial to the entry.

Averted in Star Trek Deep Space Nine, where the Maquis, while portrayed mostly sympathetically, are almost always antagonistic.
- Also averted in the opposite direction with Kira and the Bajorans who, despite being totally justified in their resistance to the Cardassians, are almost always still referred to as terrorists. Notably, Deep Space Nine wrapped up well before 9/11, so the word wasn't as politically charged (at least in the ~~common~~ American mind) as it is now.
- On the other hand the series never went into detail on exactly what terrorism involves, as pointed out in this Sev Trek spoof.

If it's an aversion, then it's just not using the trope.

One exception would be Power of the Daleks (the first serial starring the Troughton Doctor) where both government and rebels are shown in an unsympathetic light — especially since it turns out the rebellion is being encouraged by an ambitious government man hoping to overthrow his superior.

And if both sides are morally grey, that's not this trope either.

Warhammer 40000 is an interesting case. On the one hand, the Imperium is a dogmatic, totalitarian hellhole that most people would be happy to secede from. On the other hand, the brutal doctrines of the Imperium and its vast military might are the only things (barely) keeping humanity from falling to the myriad worse threats that plague the galaxy.
- Also if any revolution manages to get the Imperium to leave their planet alone and turns out to have any connection to Chaos it very quickly turns into a particuarly nightmarish sadistic The Revolution Will Not Be Civilized.

Interesting? Sure. An example of The Revolution Will Not Be Vilified? Not even close.

Gears Of War - the COG, a fringe radical socialist group with world-governance ideologies takes control of Jacinto on E-Day, and then rather handily uses humanity's orbital satellites to kill everyone else. Most recently, they destroyed Jacinto, but not before evacuating some people in helicopters made of paper mache. Humanity, it seems, has the life expectancy directly related the fuel capacity of a King Raven.
- The people not on Jacinto or part of the COG however (called "Stranded") have made it very clear that they don't like the COG government. Ironically though, with the situation the way it is after Gears of War 2, the COG may have to rely on them for survival.
- Looks like someone forgot about the Locusts. The satellites were, at the time, the only real way of keeping the Locust at bay, and the sinking of Jacinto part was a Locust plot that was too late to stop and they did get everyone safe via boats

Okay, that's not even close to how the game's backstory goes (E-Day was when the Locust attacked the world, the COG just did what they had to to keep humanity alive), and besides, the COG actually is the government during the present day. Villified or not, they haven't been the revolution in a long time.

Red Faction 2 toys with this trope: the first resistance group calling themselves the Red Faction has little problem winning, but the leader almost instantly earns himself a 0% Approval Rating. In addition, your main character's behavior — whether you protect or destroy allies or civilians — changes whether the Rebellion is seen as heroic or monstrous.

If you can choose to make the revolution evil, then it's not really this trope.

Averted near the end of Brood War though, where everyone who's not a Zerg allies together out of necessity.

Which isn't this trope.

Can go either way in the SNES game Ogre Battle. Depending on how you play, your Rebellion will either save the nation, or be considered even more bloodthirsty and evil than the Empire... which is admittedly pretty bad.

If it can go either way, then it's not this trope!

The Resistance in the Crusader games is generally portrayed as being the good guys and rebelling against the bad guys...but the WEC has not only done some good, but the Resistance has made many mistakes over the years, as explained in the backstory.
- ...and of course your character murders hundreds and hundreds of unarmed civilians throughout the course of the games, and isn't so much as reprimanded.

And if the revolution's got blood on its hands, it's not this trope either. Seriously, the name of the page is not "The Revolution Will Appear in Any Way, Shape or Form in Any Fictional Work, Vilified or Not".

Partially subverted by Freelancer: Most of the revolutionary factions in the game are morally ambiguous, they have valid and reasonable causes, but are unafraid to murder civilians (including the player character) and perform terrorist acts in order to further these causes. Only the Blood Dragons and The Order are shown in an especially positive light, and only the Xenos are shown negatively(and are unsurprisingly hated by almost every other faction in the game).

Morally gray, blood on their hands, not this trope.

Both used then averted in Fire Emblem 10 (Radiant Dawn), which starts with the good-natured Michaih and her small resistance attempting to take back Daein from the Jarod's fearsome and anvilicously evil imperial army, then has the good-natured Princess Elincia and her small imperial army attempting to protect Crimea from Ludveck's fearsome and anvilicously evil resistance.

Not an example, if one revolutionary group just happens to be good and another's evil.

Subverted in The Witcher. The Scoi'a'te, the non-human resistance fighting against the unequal treatment the Elves and Dwarves receive in this fantasy kingdom, use tactics that would not be out of place in the Taliban. They murder civilians, take whole villages hostage and rob graves. In one scene the Scoi'a'tel even burst into a hospital and try to murder the patients simply because they are human. The game makes an effort to portray both sides as morally ambiguous. However, this troper found that, compared to the wanton violence and murder of civilians carried out by the Scoi'a'tel as a matter of course, The Knights of the Order of the Flaming rose look like saints by comparison. Of course, it turns out that both sides are part of the real villain's evil plan.
- Really? Apart from their desire to kill monsters for the common good, the Order displayed all the virtue of a paramilitary lynch-mob; apart from the devotion to suppressing racial minorities (provoking the riots in Vizima), there's the possible fate of Murky Waters, and, well, they seem happy enough to unleash mindless psychotic mutants onto the Viziman streets at the merest whim of their Grand Master.... If you follow the Scoi'atel path, it's the Order who attack the hospital — take a neutral path, and they both do. The implication is that Geralt's influence tempers the extremism of whichever faction one sides with (if any). Keeping in mind that rioters are not necessarily Scoia'tel, I actually thought the Order came off as a bit too corrupt, too early to make neutrality or Order-alignment palatable decisions (although neutrality is at least fun for the extra challenge of having to fight two factions at once...). Still, cracking game, eh?

"Both sides as morally ambiguous" = not this trope.

Averted in The Elder Scrolls: Oblivion. The Cult of the Mythic Dawn are a definite Religion of Evil, and their leader, Mankar Camoran, is the Big Bad. The cult's motives: to overthrow the benevolent Empire.
- The Elder Scrolls lore is a rich mine full of tropes. The way that the Mythic Dawn cultists are portrayed is a little mixed. You can actually meet a bunch of them living their normal everyday lives and after the main quest, in which you'll defeat their real Big Bad, they presumably recant their ways (as they'll no longer participate in rebelling or attacking you or the Empire). Mankar tries to convince you of the benevolence of his revolution by showing you his magical pleasure paradise and claiming the world will be made over in this image once his master takes over. This is presumably the line of logic and the sort of miracles he's used to convince people to join the Mythic Dawn. Meaning the average Mythic Dawn members probably really believe in their cause and this makes Mankar a villain with limited good publicity. Mankar's real motivation probably stems from being the illegitimate son of a previous Evil Overlord who was defeated by the Empire. In his villainous monologues he reveals that his master's cause is 'righteous'. Dagon is apparently the heir of the real, but dead, trickster creator God and the Gods that mankind knows and venerates are mostly the benevolent rebel spirits who defeated the first God of this universe. Plus the heroic cultural hero of mankind and founder of the Empire, who happens to be Mankar's enemy by bloodline. So really the good rebels in this case are the Gods and the bad rebels are the mortal ones lead by the evil true heir to ruling the universe. Some rebellions against the Empire are fine, since the Emperors have varied in competence and morals, this rebellion in particular though is very, very bad.

"Averted" also equals not this trope, complex situations with moral shades of gray equal not-this-trope, and that rambling Wall of Text just has to go.

This Troper is watching the website like a hawk waiting for more Back Story. What's shown to date is that the U.S. has an economic crisis in the next decade or so, and the considerably more authoritarian F.S.A is the ultimate result - a repeat of the transformation of the Weimar Republic into Nazi Germany. The Imperials of the NES game are supposed to be a group of "fascist terrorists", but it ends up sounding more like an attempted coup. Alaska's trying to break away, and an operation involving two runaway cyborgs who were actually involuntary test subjects instead of rebuilt soldiers seeking sanctuary with them is treated as a case of Transhuman Treachery, leading to the Bionic Purge and yet another rebellion, BioReign. Studio Grin seems to be going for full-on Black-and-Grey Morality here - Spencer fights for the F.S.A. because they haven't been too evil recently.

This Troper also just has to go, and you know, I can't figure out what the heck that exposition about the game's story has to do with anything. But anyway, Black-and-Grey Morality = not this trope.

The situation is...complicated in Deus Ex. The National Secessionist Forces (NSF) begin the game clearly portrayed as The Revolution Will Not Be Civilized, terrorists who blew up the Statue of Liberty and don't hesitate to threaten innocent civilians for their cause. As the game progresses, however, it becomes clear that the NSF are the good guys, falling more or less into this trope, with the acts of terrorism seen earlier the work of government conspiracies and the hostage taking the work of panicked or self-interested low level grunts doing stupid things in the heat of a high pressure situation, their actions unsanctioned by the greater organization.

It certainly is complicated, and complicated equals... well, maybe this trope. I'll rewrite it to cut down on the unnecessary Expo Speak, and add it back in.

Both used and averted in Avatar The Last Airbender, where resistance to the Fire Nation's forces within the Earth Kingdom ranges from the heroic (drowning the commandant of an offshore prison camp and taking the ships to drive out occupying troops) to the anti-heroic (attempting to kill the Fire Nation commandant of an occupied city, along with his family) to the flat-out evil (drown a whole village to 'free' the area).
- Then there's the fact that the Avatar himself isn't exactly popular among the citizens of the Fire Nation.

And we all know what a morally grey portrait of the revolution is... it's not this trope.

Subverted partially in Liberty's Kids where while leaders like George Washington are largely lionized, the less positive elements of The American Revolution are definitely not ignored.

By which it successfully avoids being listed on this page. Huzzah!

Archived Discussion Main / TheRevolutionWillNotBeVilified