"Shou Tucker is the most evil anime villain ever created" is an asinine take. Shou Tucker is a comment on an increasingly fascist regime and an industry defined by "publish positive results or perish". He is the crack the system created in itself and unleashed on an innocent population. He is where unrelenting pressure creates desperation creates perverse incentives and devastating results. Could he have made different choices? Absolutely. But the game was rigged from the start, and creates Shou Tuckers on purpose.
Shou Tucker is not that horrible individual menace. He is the endpoint of the system, and a direct comment on perverse incentives that increasingly exist in real academia. The real-life scientist is often asked, paid, implicitly threatened (with job loss, poverty, etc.) to compromise any and all morals in order to produce A Result. Shou Tucker is the man who complies.
