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Comment by eric4smith | Hacker News Reader

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Who would have thought that Tom Hiddleston's Loki would have gotten so popular?

We just had an article on the front page about the power of PR.

It's so powerful that you should basically doubt any Disney products grass roots popularity as it's likely the results of PR.

Are you suggesting PR has convinced people that they like a character? Bizarre take. Like people can't form their own opinion or something? Disney now has the power to PR me into liking anything basically?

Are you familiar with the pioneering early 20th century work of Edward Bernays?[1]. He founded the PR industry.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_Bernays

Yeah, that's (unfortunately) exactly what I'm saying.

I mean, that's the definition of PR. It's their job. And the longer you think that your opinion is your own, the better it works. Confidence tricks work the same way. But I'm not just defying you, you also have a point. PR can't make people like anything. The target audience is already in some state, they came from somewhere, want something, already have some preferences, can be described to being on some trends. What effective PR can do is take what they have, and align it to these states, trends, preferences. Like how it's said in the movies, hypnotics can't make you do something you don't want to do, or something that makes no sense to you. The "seeds" have to already be there for it to work. Now I'm not sure about hypnosis, but PR, propaganda, advertisement works this way.

And this is in no way exclusive to Disney, or PR. It's natural to want others to do something for you. PR is just the current legal way to describe this effort.

Those seeds though, who planted them?

Maybe not literally every person, but yes, enough for this to be a viable and successful strategy for making "successful" products.

I think it's a whole genre that was finally allowed into mainstream. For a long time we had very black/white view on the superheroes in movies. Only relatively recently Batman got a bit interesting, Star Wars had someone turn "bad", Ironman was a good jerk, Starlord... was a good jerk, Loki and Deadpool are pretty chaotic, now Sandman is soon coming out. We have a number of "that bad character had reasons" movies like Cruella.

Those existed for ages in comic books, but I don't think mainstream / Disney would touch them.

The term is anti-hero.

I didn't want to say anti hero. It's true for many cases, but Batman has never been an anti-hero as such. (Neither has the Sandman character I guess?)

TVTropes uses "Cape" and "Cowl" to distinguish those kinds of heroes: Capes fly in for the photo op like Superman, while Cowls like a Zorro or Batman slink around with limited official support.

It's just a faceted character.

After the first Thor movie, myself and many more. After Thor: Ragnarok, it really seemed about right for him to break out. Very interesting character when played right, could have been another actor but Hiddleston has really made him his own.

The character is dangerously adorable.

Hahaha yes. That describes it quite nicely. Hiddleston did a good job portraying him. He's such a fine actor.

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