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Comment by nkrisc | Hacker News Reader

It’s why The Martian is one of my favorite movies (and book, of course). No evil, conniving, contrived antagonist designed to be hated. It’s just everyone working together against the most unforgiving antagonist of all: the universe itself.

I don’t want to watch movies or read books where people are just awful to other people, I can open the newspaper on any given day to find that.

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> I don’t want to watch movies or read books where people are just awful to other people, I can open the newspaper on any given day to find that.

I am 1000% with you on this. The success of The Sopranos, Breaking Bad, and Game of Thrones are mystifying to me. I get enough misery and awfulness from the news.

> No evil, conniving, contrived antagonist designed to be hated. It’s just everyone working together against the most unforgiving antagonist of all: the universe itself.

Can I recommend then Becky Chamber's Wayfarer Series (4 books). What a refreshing change.

> It’s why The Martian is one of my favorite movies (and book, of course)

It's funny because even though the book was so loved because it was so rational, and human's actually acted how humans would act in that situation, Hollywood STILL couldn't resist making tweaking the end slightly to make it over the top and impractical. Thus we ended up with Mark Watney flying around like Iron man in space with a hole is his space suit.

Still a great movie though. But a better book.

The martian was a fun read and undoubtedly a classic. I personally dont mind a well thought out antogonist who is very human.

Engineers with a lot of resources tend to be my favorite villains. Anyone who genuinely, earnestly believes they're going to solve a big problem and has just become laser focused on that to the exclusion of all else: that's a touchpoint I can relate to for a sympathetic villain.

For that I just have to think back to every new-CTO lead replatforming effort at any previous job. Ok, they weren’t evil, but the outcome was the same.

sure. however, i don't want to consume wholesome media where people are nice to each other but the writing or directing is absolutely terrible and uninspired, ruining the niceness - and having been exposed to christian young adult fiction, i found that it was awful low quality rubbish, in the vast majority of cases, sadly. it turns out that reality includes awful people, and well written books will tend to be written realistically and therefore end up containing these people or situations, and are generally better, due to contrasts and complexities thus created, etc...

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