Yes. Bad guys are always presented as active, that is, actively trying to achieve their goal. Plus, they're shown as geeky, desperate, hungry, a kind that you can have compassion for.Keffria wrote:I couldn't stand those cartoons as a little kid -- I hated Tweety and the roadrunner and all those other stupid characters. The bad guys were far more interesting.
On the other hand, good guys are always static, never actually doing anything to save themselves but waiting for rescue to fall from the sky. They have a god-like calmness and ambivalence, as if they're observing something, and there is never a note that they show their life is threatened. Therefore, they give impression of self-centered, snobbish kind.
I think that was pretty much intentional. Authors of those cartoons were fishing for our sympathy and emphasizing that sympathy by making a sympathetic character hurt. And the fact that bad guys never fear for their life is maybe due to the fact that those cartoons were at least partly aimed at children. That way, authors banished the presence of the death, made it certain that no character will really be killed for good.
