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PaperclipPerfector  8d ago (text post)   32084 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 24, 2025

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This interpretation makes no sense in the context of the story, though. The evil queen is the second-most “fair” person in the entire kingdom, but decides to murder her innocent stepdaughter out of jealousy, which is pretty obviously not morally virtuous.

You cannot become a morally virtuous person by murdering all the innocent children who are more virtuous than you, except in the trivial sense that if you murder literally everyone else, you are “most virtuous” by default (which isn't what happens in the story). However, you can become the most physically attractive woman by murdering all the women who are more attractive than you.

So the story only makes sense if (at least the evil stepmother) thinks of “fair” as meaning “physically attractive”, not “morally virtuous”.

except in the trivial sense that if you murder literally everyone else

That just means she needs to be more virtuous than the competition, so if she killed everyone except even worse mass murderers she might be the “fairest” somehow?

Maybe the qualifications for citizenship in this kingdom is to be a genocidal maniac?

so if she killed everyone except even worse mass murderers she might be the “fairest” somehow?

Worst mass murderers range at about 100 victims, and "killing everyone except" would be certainly much larger than any mass murderer

(I'm sure we could stretch the definition of mass murderer to include Pol Pot et al. and bullshit in a country's worth of these by harvesting across different timelines or whatever convenient plot and physics contrivance is needed, but...)

That still could theoretically work. Say every single person granted access to the kingdom must have killed at least 2 people; if the Queen and Snow White were the only two humans who weren't killers, then the Queen could kill Snow White only and still have the lowest body count of the entire kingdom.

A solution looking for a problem! ... some of there "killed at least 2" could have killed in self-defense so this loophole should be closed, requiring resources to filter them.

We're putting a lot of weight on the subjective judgements of a magic mirror. Maybe the mirror is as muddled as real people and lacks a satisfying resolution to a "fair" vs "fair" conflict.

Maybe the magic mirror was just gaslighting the queen about her daughter's bangability.

Mirrors are shockingly uneducated in homophones.

I certainly won't write apologia for the half consistent plot line.

I was only pointing out that a given message (whether consistent or otherwise in this particular film) can be right-coded or left-coded.

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