Specific movies would probably be too narrow to be useful, although tropes and plot structure probably have more to do with this than genre. Some genres are worse than others, of course.
I’ve got a variety of issues with the way heroism tends to be constructed in escapist fiction, but I reserve a particular loathing for stories that’re built around a message of “you should accept being special”, when “special” is defined in terms of a unique role or destiny and realizing its potential doesn’t take any onscreen effort on the protagonist’s part. Epistemic irrationality is easy to find in stories, but that sort of plot’s actively corrosive to instrumental rationality, especially for people that’re more than a couple of sigmas out on some relevant real-life metric: the implication is that no matter how much you slack off, you’re fine as long as you recognize your Gandalf or Hagrid when he shows up. Worse, you’re expected to feel a sort of faint ennui while you’re waiting, which neatly explains any natural feelings of boredom or dissatisfaction. Doing your own thing might even constitute a refusal of the call.
There’s an especially pernicious version of this where any suffering the protagonist runs into before embarking on their adventure is counted as a noble sacrifice, one that’ll be doubly rewarded—morally, if not temporally—once the dragon’s slain. I’ll leave spotting that in recent media as an exercise to the reader.
Specific movies would probably be too narrow to be useful, although tropes and plot structure probably have more to do with this than genre. Some genres are worse than others, of course.
I’ve got a variety of issues with the way heroism tends to be constructed in escapist fiction, but I reserve a particular loathing for stories that’re built around a message of “you should accept being special”, when “special” is defined in terms of a unique role or destiny and realizing its potential doesn’t take any onscreen effort on the protagonist’s part. Epistemic irrationality is easy to find in stories, but that sort of plot’s actively corrosive to instrumental rationality, especially for people that’re more than a couple of sigmas out on some relevant real-life metric: the implication is that no matter how much you slack off, you’re fine as long as you recognize your Gandalf or Hagrid when he shows up. Worse, you’re expected to feel a sort of faint ennui while you’re waiting, which neatly explains any natural feelings of boredom or dissatisfaction. Doing your own thing might even constitute a refusal of the call.
There’s an especially pernicious version of this where any suffering the protagonist runs into before embarking on their adventure is counted as a noble sacrifice, one that’ll be doubly rewarded—morally, if not temporally—once the dragon’s slain. I’ll leave spotting that in recent media as an exercise to the reader.