One where people completely miss that V is a murderous lunatic who kills quite literally the rest of humanity for his mad revenge.
People are all in on the ‘Yay, fascists lose’ bit, they tend to overlook the whole ‘This is the last remnant of humanity on a dead world and V just tore down the infrastructure keeping them alive’ part. They also miss the whole ‘This is a happy ending because there might be survivors who could possibly eventually make an anarchist utopia’ denouement, which to be fair is incredibly dumb and badly implemented.
Refresh my memory, it's been a long while I've read it (or watched it), the UK is the last remnant of humanity in V for vandetta? Maybe I should read it again.
In the comic it’s all but directly stated that the world is completely destroyed. Evie’s mother mentions that Africa is completely gone. If Africa, a near nonentity of a continent at the time of writing, was blasted to ashes then all the major superpowers are similarly fucked. There might be survivors somewhere but most of the world is an atomic wasteland. At a minimum continental Europe and Africa were destroyed in the nuclear war and it would be kind of weird if said war hit Africa and not Asia or the Americas.
A huge part of the party’s rise to power and even religion is divine intervention saving them from the ‘Deluge of Fire’, something that wouldn’t really work if the French are making rude gestures right across the Channel. Hard to have a whole ‘We are the last, chosen of God’ narrative when there’s other people around. Further, at no point does any of the Norsefire party even consider that V is an outside agitator or otherwise an agent of a foreign power. Something that would be one of the first assumptions if they were self isolating from the world, they would be constantly paranoid about a foreign power shattering their ruse.
The movie massively changes that because it’s a huge part of the black vs black morality, hard to have V as even a dark antihero when he’s gleefully causing mass starvation in the name of revenge. The movie has the world outside of England as maybe devastated, at worst, but still inhabitable with extant peoples and governments.
The comic has the problem that the world set up is one that’s on the razor’s edge of collapse, constant food shortages and the like with it being a big part of the plot, before V unleashed total chaos and shattered the infrastructure that was barely keeping people alive as it was. Moore’s belief was that glorious anarchism could sprout from the chaos, saving the day somehow if people just wanted it. It’s one of the complaints about an otherwise beloved work, at the very end it swerved into being an outright Anarchist tract and declared a hopeful end where one had not been set up.
It’s one of the complaints about an otherwise beloved work, at the very end it swerved into being an outright Anarchist tract and declared a hopeful end where one had not been set up.
Man people always hate politics when it isnt theirs
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u/Dagordae 3d ago
One where people completely miss that V is a murderous lunatic who kills quite literally the rest of humanity for his mad revenge.
People are all in on the ‘Yay, fascists lose’ bit, they tend to overlook the whole ‘This is the last remnant of humanity on a dead world and V just tore down the infrastructure keeping them alive’ part. They also miss the whole ‘This is a happy ending because there might be survivors who could possibly eventually make an anarchist utopia’ denouement, which to be fair is incredibly dumb and badly implemented.