The Asha Effect

[CharlesEBrown]

sounds like a loose description of some noir MC's. A noir hero need not be good looking, a nice person, they can have abundant character and personality flaws. But what they asre is within the context of their world they live in, their story... they're less bad than the bad guy(s). Think "Parker". He's a cold blooded killer. An unrepentant professional thief, too. But he's got better values than the bad guys do. The noir hero MC, is the more complex character. Not just a cardboard cutout of a comic book hero.

From my experience, noir heroes and heroines are usually good-looking, though they may have some odd physical trait that keeps them from being great-looking (the great-looking ones are usually either the villains or the victims who don't last long).
Sam Spade is supposed to be an attractive man but too abrasive for anyone to stay with long (or for him to hold a job working for others directly), for example. Mike Hammer had some odd physical trait (only saw one movie - the one where he, and everyone else, dies in the end due to radiation, and never read the stories but did read someone mentioning that most of the movies missed whatever the odd trait was).

 

[corruption]

Look at PR disasters
One that comes to mind is from WW1.
The Russian Tsar and his family wanted to drum up their public image, so they had a photoshoot showing his wife dressed in a nurse's uniform and attending to men in beds, intended to convey her helping the wounded soldiers.
They were not aware of the fact that a large number of nurses uniforms had gotten into the civilian population and was at the time the unofficial uniform of hookers.

 

[MafiaNoble]

Thanos from marvel? I'm not to aware of the lore (or marvel lore in general) so I might be spitting BS but I believe he was meant to be the bad guy in the Movies.

I don't recall why he did it exactly but believed (at the time) that his reasons were pretty solid.

 

[CharlesEBrown]

Thanos from marvel? I'm not to aware of the lore (or marvel lore in general) so I might be spitting BS but I believe he was meant to be the bad guy in the Movies.

I don't recall why he did it exactly but believed (at the time) that his reasons were pretty solid.

Original comic book Thanos was a super-powered intergalactic gangster (with a helicopter).

First (and, IMO best) retcon Thanos had him as the leader of a nihilistic cult (The Black Order), that he founded to carry out his goal. His goal was this: as a teenager he believed he had seen Death herself and that she was the most beautiful and desirable creature in all of Creation. His goal was to get her attention by killing half the universe. Eventually it worked, but she found him to controlling and dumped him for Deadpool. (As an aside, this revamp happened after Jim Steranko and Mike Starlin decided Marvel needed its own version of DC's Darkseid, and felt, with some updating and the removal of the silly helicopter, Thanos would be ideal, since he already kind of looked like him - since Jack Kirby had the rights to Darkseid, they had a meeting with him and the EiC of Marvel at the time and came out of it with this version of Thanos).

MCU Thanos was a twisted environmentalist who felt that the universe needed to be culled, to have 50% of all beings die to better manage resources.

In between was the 90s revamp, I'm not sure if it was done for the Silver Surfer cartoon or if it was done in the comics before the cartoon came out, but "Death" was replaced with "Lady Chaos," the embodiment of, well, chaos and confusion.