Abstract
Villainy as a performance or as a deviant moral ontology only holds currency in contrast with a notion of heroism. Whatever the villain’s shape, villainy is recognizable only as distortion of virtue. The bad guy is a moral waste by-product of the audience’s assumed virtues, powerful enough to be genuinely threatening but necessarily subordinate to the heroic ideal. This chapter views the urban space-habitat trope in contemporary science fiction media as an effort to process the contentious, often villainized, nature between a city’s “legitimate” citizens and its Others.
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Notes
- 1.
See Woltmann, this collection.
- 2.
See McCambridge, this collection.
- 3.
The city’s name is a gaudy portmanteau of “anachronism” and “noxious.” Several times the game explains in dialogue or in flavor text found throughout the world that this name translates to “poison from the past”.
- 4.
In dialogue money is referred to as loons or loonies, after the Canadian one-dollar coin.
- 5.
Shepard’s gender, appearance, given name and, to a limited extent, personality, are all customizable by the player but throughout I will refer to Shepard with feminine pronouns to reflect my own experience with the game.
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Filipowich, M. (2021). Host of Otherness: The Trope of the Urban Space Habitat and the Concept of Evil in Contemporary Science Fiction Media. In: Zouidi, N. (eds) Performativity of Villainy and Evil in Anglophone Literature and Media. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-76055-7_23
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