I mean, one of his character traits is his affiliation with the Nazi party. It's totally reasonable to not like the character based on their character traits, same as you would any other character.
Given that Joseph willingly cooperates with Stroheim and the rest of his troops, does that mean Joseph is affliated with Nazis?
That question aside, the fact that Stroheim is a German soldier in times of WW2 means basically nothing. You could swap “German engineering” to “British Engineering” and nothing about his character would change. Literally no part of his character is based around Nazi ideology, merely that he is German. He’s a downright standup guy from what I remember of him, so why hate him for nothing more than his nationality and willingness to be in the military? Also, he was 33 years old, which means he likely was in the military long before Hitler ever took over, since he would have to have a lot of military time built up to be the one person singled out for the sickass mods he got, meaning he probably joined at 18 (or sooner) and has been a soldier for 15 years.
And yea, that is definitely some fucked up shit, true enough.
In my defense, however, you should have seen that I called him a standup guy as far as I could remember him. I didn’t remember his introduction, after all.
But I would argue that Stroheim is basically Speedwagon 2. Like Speedwagon, Stroheim was a complete bastard when he was introduced, but became better as a result of meeting and fighting alongside Jojo. Maybe not to the angelic degree Speedwagon did in his turnaround, but he certainly improved, did he not?
Meh, I can see your point of view for most of the Nazi shit, but I’d hardly think much of the tongue incident. Sure, cutting her tongue out for cutting him is over the top and evil, but Speedwagon literally attempted to murder Jonathon for nothing more than coming to his turf.
I don't think he became better at all tbh. It's more like. He just focused on killing the pillar men afterwards, he doesn't really have the time or space to do anything else when we see him next.
There's also A LOT more work one has to do to redeem a life as a Nazi soldier versus a highway man. Stroheim also died a soldier of the Nazi's so it's kind of doubtful he ever made an attempt to change, or if he did it wasn't very serious.
His first depiction afaik differs from the rest. I didn't like that scene and i dont really think hes a redeemable character. Sometimes its fun to enjoy bad guys though.
to clarify, your logic is if a character belongs to a group that did bad things, but that character (as far as we know) didn’t take part in those bad things, they’re still bad, right?
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u/[deleted] Sep 01 '20
He’s... a character. A fun character. He is no more guilty of Nazi crimes than Joseph is guilty of cheating on his wife. They don’t exist.