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I always think back to this one quote, something like
You can tell the morals of a society by the myths they tell themselves. We tell stories of heroes who save the world then quietly go back to their day job until they’re needed again
I’m curious, what’s you’re take on that then?
Liberalism in a nutshell.
We just want an insurance policy, not for anything to change. We want to protect what we’ve built, write off the horrors of the world as isolated events like a collapsing building or asteroid impact. They stop the villains from rocking the boat, even when the villains have a morally superior position because “you have to do it the right way”
But the heroes aren’t too morally superior… They can’t make us feel bad. They do something about problems in front of them, and then go back to their job. They don’t use their power to actually address root issues, they don’t try to lead, they just defend the status quo
But, then heroes started to get more complex. Batman is a billionaire who fights crime, despite having the ability to actually fix the crime problem in Gotham, he just fights. He suffered a random act of violence as a child, and so that instilled a sense of justice. He works with the police and uses his wealth… In any way except actually changing things
Spiderman learned the hard way noblesse oblige, that his power gives him the responsibility to use it well. And he does, he saves people around him while also actively working to make the world better at his day job - inside the system. He’s basically an activist
Then you have captain America, who puts his sense of justice above the system… But he mostly works inside it, but sometimes it’s infiltrated and he fights or it’s wrong and he stands against it
But when you get to more recent heroes, they start to get dark. The system is broken, so they work outside it as best they can. They don’t have day jobs anymore. They kill sometimes. They make sacrifices, they fail. They question themselves.
People scream at them “where were you when we needed you?” And they explain the answer to that question to the readers through character development, even though there’s nothing they can say to the victims
The heroes aren’t infallible, they aren’t strong or wise enough, they constantly struggle, and they fail. This isn’t a hobby for them, they don’t go back to work. But they keep trying, especially at great personal cost
And they carry every failure with them as penance for not being good enough to have saved us when we needed them
I read that and I actually think positively on it. To me, i read it as the good person doesnt stand by and do nothing, they fight evil as it crops up, even at the cost of their peaceful life they desire. Im not sure I can agree to any one type of story them we tell though. Its pretty varied.
This is my condition on lemmy 🤐🤐🤐🤐🤐
You just made a post to describe how you can’t make posts. Why not just post what you want?
Posts are not a problem. It’s when l form my communities, that’s when l get banned. Two lemmy instances banned me after l created my communities and started posting in them !!
This is why the Nolan Batman trilogy (really the first two films) resonated so well with the global audience.
It was an ordinary guy against systemic corruption, something that a majority of the global population lives in every day.
Not a superhero against an externalized villain whose motives can be boiled down to either “evil because I deserve it” (the main antagonist) or “evil because of necessity” (every thug and extra who gets beat up).
Iron Man was also basically a giant ad for the US military in Afghanistan lol. Marvel never brought back the Taliban ten rings in Shang Chi
Calling Bruce Wayne an ordinary guy is a travesty. And the whole point of the Iron Man 1st movie is that warmongering is a terrible legacy. Are you sure you watched any of these movies?
superheroes are “benign” fascists, it’s fiction that would never work. Even in the gooest, saccharine interpretations I would be the one criticizing superman lol
Also it bleeds into other media. Like the kid’s show Paw Patrol. I am obviously far too old to watch the show and while I have enjoyed watching kids stuff from time to time I just haven’t been able to spare rhe time for that one.
However based on a cursory knowledge of it and reviews from youtubers the show has some really bad ideas in the subtext.
Firstly the shows basic services in the community are fully privatized. They even have some scenes where outsiders want to call the cops or some other local service only to be reminded by locals that in that community they are done by this kid and his dogs.
Also that kid who commands paw patrol? He is like the avengers in that he lives quite apart from the community he is supposed to be serving.
This is akin to how billionaires don’t just live far away… they live REALLY far away and secluded from most people and don’t interact with them directly. This is despite the fact that they control extremely critical assets to the community, they are not just isolated from the community, they are also unaccountable to them.
So, paw patrol is a libertarian dytopia?
Pretty much.
I question how many comics you have read then since many of these characters were created as anti-fascist figures. Captain America, Superman, and The X-Men for example were all vocally against fascism, bigotry, racism, and more.
Captain America for instance has a history of being in opposition to his government on issues around civil rights. He has always been an icon of anti-fascism.
Of course non-media literate people and just people who only know the character from posters and t shirts see the stars and stripes and think he’s simply a “patriotic” hero.
As far as whether it would “work” in reality, well I think that is beside the point. These are about fantasy, myth making and legends. They are not supposed to be real. They explore ideas around what makes a hero with layers of fantasy and unreality that make the stories unpractical for our real world and to dismiss the idea they explore because of that misses the point of the art. But…
The moral questions that would arise if they were to exist the real world have also been handled really well by the comic book medium, books like The Watchmen, Rising Stars, V for Vendetta, Miracleman (pretty much anything by Alan Moore tbh), and more.
Comics and superheroes are modern day myth making, and the value of that shouldn’t be dismissed. Captain America, Spider-Man, The X-Men and more have inspired generations to view altruistic acts and things to be admired and aspired to. And the value of that should not be underestimated.
I agree. When the heroes are vigilantes, they’re only acting as vigilantes because either the police are corrupt, or the police are overwhelmed.
I am not a Batman fan, and love to joke that if he and the other Gotham billionaires paid a reasonable tax, Gotham wouldn’t be such a hellscape. But, the Batman theme is that the police are frequently corrupt and always overwhelmed, so a civilian needs to step up and protect the people.
Spiderman’s whole deal is “with great power comes great responsibility.” He puts his life on the line to protect people, and mostly from small-scale disasters like a run-away train.
What this comic gets absolutely wrong is that comic book heroes never try to stop someone from changing the status quo if they’re doing it peacefully. The only ones they try to stop are the ones trying to do it by force.
Ironically Superman is one of the least fascy superheroes, at least when written by anyone who understands the character.
Tbh they’re just misrepresenting the argument. Most (famous) superheros aren’t fascists. They spend a lot of time punching imperialists in the face at a minimum.
What they represent is a social desire for the hero-figure, the strong-man, to fix society’s problems instead of collective and democratic action. That’s the dilemma people like Alan Moore are pointing out when they talk about how comics can enable fascism.
Fair enough, but watchmen is cool
It’s cool because it deconstructs the whole thing, down to having a quasi god as one of the heroes
And having Captain America be The Comedian, because American exceptionalism is a joke.
The Comedian was based on Peacemaker. The initial pitch was that all of the Watchmen would be DC’s (at the time) recently-acquired Charlton characters. DC nixed the idea, so Moore just tweaked them and renamed them.
Just like how Nite Owl is based on a Blue Beetle with absolutely no other influences.
Some versions do try to tell a more complex story, like The Boys and Invincible. My Hero Academia is also there as an anime
I like One Punch Man. While he is a hero. The fact that he does it for fun and is frustrated at being so powerful makes it really stand out.
I love OPM, however I think it’s more about shonen anime stereotypes rather than western superhero stereotypes
Saitama is hilarious in the driest way possible, which is a humor that not everyone can appreciate
The pilot episode where he meets a crazed villain who loses his shit when Saitama tells him ‘I am a hero for fun’, and goes on a rant on what a stupid backstory that is… before he gets blown to bits with one single punch.
The running joke of him always losing at video games because he just does the same move again and again.
His entire relationship with Genos
Umbrella academy?
Loving invincible currently
Doesn’t Invincible literally work with and for a secret government military organization?
TBF, Cecil is like the gold standard for shadowy government operation heads - he’s not corrupt, he listens to experts, he has no hidden agenda besides a full commitment to the Earth’s defense from near-constant alien invasion, and the worst thing he does is not fully trust Mark (with pretty good reason, let’s not lie) and rehabilitate villains by forcing them to use their abilities to protect the Earth. That and teleporter abuse, but he’s earned that.
Season 3 spoilers:
Tap for spoiler
Mark realizes Cecil is using them and nearly kills him, leaving Pentagon. There’s an epic episode showing Cecil’s past
Only at first, when he was naive.
then
The shadowy organization betrayed him because hes not fully has many, and invincible basically starts fighting them while still fighting the impotent bad guys.
Ironically and not, that’s exactly what Iron Man brought Nu-Spiderman to do in the CW movie. Government is crying about control, so a war profiteer recruits, illegally extricates from the country, arms and indoctrinates a kid to collaborate in a paramilitary action to oppress the following groups represented: war veterans, the elderly, women, foreigners, scientists, disabled, performance athletes, amputees and people seeking asylum.
Geez. Considering the previous movie was about a nazi takeover of the US, seems like someone shoud have seen things coming!
Wow, now I understand why I hated all those movies.
there are plenty of reasons to hate those movies. this is just another.
They made Spiderman rich in the movies because the writers a rich and think writing about a poor beneath them.
Other assholes include: Thor who is a dumb over privlaged fratboy who causes interndimentonal wars by acting like a dumb frat boy.
Ironman who was not only a war profiter who gave one the most powerful weapons platforms in the world to some teenager without any kind of oversight whose main story arc involves him fucking over poor people
Captain marvel is a brutal space pig who uses their powers to intimidate indigenous people on whatever planet she is on. Uses a weapon that can level city blocks and her character progression is that she needs to be more emotional. Plus she was fine committing genocide on the skrulls until she found out they had women.
Wakanda is a monarchist enthnostate presented as a utopia that tortures and murders outsiders and is presented in such a way that if it was the US the movie would be labeled as propaganda. Plus using ‘colonizer’ as a slur to call the people helping them even though they were never colonized
The eternals are boring
Wonda is everything that justifies the hate of mutants. But it’s not her fault so she gets an pass. But it highlights everything stupid about the gay and minority parallel. No hates black or lbgtq people because they can think a hundred peope to death.
Almost all of these people are sone kind of aristocrat.
Black Widow spends all of her movie rescuing like 12 people while letting and entire gulag of men die in an avalanche without even flinching. Not to mention the fact that her and Hawkeye worked for the CIA and probably overthrow countless democracies.
The guardians of the galaxy employ a dangerous psychopathic racoon who thinks nothing of murder.
The least aggregous is Captain America, a living propaganda poster. Antman, one of the only poor person appearing in End Game is treated like a joke even though he should be the most dangerous one among them.
USAgent was treated like crap before he did anything wrong to the point I kind of felt bad for him
Getting rid of Zemos direct Nazi ties makes him almost a hero. And those ties are less then SHIELD’s and less then that of most countries
Also, do not forget the beef between Disney and DeSantis only started when people saw they were working together. And only do scenes involving any kind of homosexuality in such away as to edit them out for whatever dictatorship they want to impress.
Also the original MCU Quicksilver was a thousand times better then yet another quipy hero that we don’t need. Plus asshole Quicksilver is closer source material.
eternals wasn’t just boring, it was built on the idea of “ancient aliens”, which is horribly racist conspiracy theory that effectively claims that brown people cannot build cool shit. Pyramids? Aliens. Nazca Lines? Aliens. Nobody questions the Colosseum though.
That’s the problem with superhero stories. The story needs to begin and end with the world in a state similar to our own (for relatabilitiy and sequel potential) despite the vast power of its protagonist, so the hero must ultimately be concerned with preserving the status quo.
It’s one of the reasons why superhero movies are in decline now that all the most famous storylines have already been adapted, and why comic book sales have been going downhill ever since they started taking themselves seriously.
Also, often, the status quo they’re trying to preserve is “Earth is not being invaded by aliens”, or “this supervillain is not currently on a rampage”.
As for movies about changing the status quo, that’s really what the whole X-Men comic has been about since it came out in the 1960s. The whole theme there is “mutants aren’t accepted by society, but they want to be, so they put their lives on the line to try to prove mutants are good”. Over the years mutants have stood in for jews, racial minorities, LGBTQ+ people, people with disabilities, etc.
Sometimes the X-Men are fighting off supervillains or aliens. But, often they’re fighting off an oppressive government that is trying to wipe them out. So, the status quo they’re trying to change is “the people hate mutants and the government wants to wipe them out”.
You just reminded me of one of the Life is Strange fanfics I read once. Where Max and Chloe have these time and space warping powers and just go the opposite way, they determine the status quo is fucked and needs to be rectified globally and then start doing it in an actually thoughtful sensible way. (There was some shadowy confusing adversity but I can’t recall its nature)
What movie is this even referencing? Almost every depiction of spiderman has him as a man of and for the people. Admittedly I haven’t watched more recent marvel movies. Has that changed, somehow?
No, nothing has changed. You could make the argument in the comic about Spider-Man’s appearance in Captain America: Civil War, but nothing else.
Homecoming: Spider-Man is fighting criminals trying to steal hyper advanced technology to weaponize it and sell to other criminals.
Far From Home: Spider-Man is fighting a guy who is using advanced tech to stage destructive attacks with elaborate illusions in order to set himself up as a hero, despite the large amount of destruction and harm he’s causing without care.
No Way Home: Spider-Man is trying to redeem and prevent from dying some inter-dimensional villains he inadvertently caused to be dragged into his universe.
Infinity War/Endgame: Spider-Man joins other heroes to fight a galactic tyrant with Malthusian ideas of population control, hell-bent on eliminating half of all life in the universe.
In none of these movies was he fighting for the government to maintain the status quo.
He’s always been my favorite since 6th grade, relatable and really just trying to protect his city from shitbags. Sometimes he’s literally just patrolling looking for crime.
Tbh they only really swerved into it that hard with this Falcon movie.
You know, the movie with themes of black empowerment where they engage in relentless apologia for General President Ross turning a man he did medical experiments on into a slave.
Relentless? He ends up in jail.
The actual current President of the United States is unjustly imprisoning thousands of innocent people right now, and he will never see a moment of jail time.
Brave New World is unrealistically optimistic on the subject of Presidents paying for their crimes.
Marvel is copaganda.
YES
What did I just click. … thank you,
Metal Gear Solid 2 plays out like this. Spoilers below but it came out is 2001 so whatever
The bad guy is a former President that knew his job was just as a figurehead, nothing more. He found out the hard way that even his orders came from a cutout.
He recruited “terrorists” to take the sitting President “hostage” so they could be “force him” to detonate an EMP over the east coast. The plan is to dismantle the AI actually running the government/censoring public opinion and hopefully free the country
You play as the wide eyed special forces infiltrator, trained heavily through VR and sent to “rescue” the sitting President from the “terrorist leader” and learn that everything you know is wrong and you were given orders by the AI all along
This is tangential to the main point you are making, but:
… I also always interpreted Raiden as basically Kojima more or less openly mocking or taunting the western player base of… well, mostly white male, naive/emo/astoundingly insecure children.
I remember there being absolutely massive backlash when MGS2 came out with tons of ‘gamers’ just calling Raiden a ‘gay little effeminate f@ggot boy’ and shit like that.
… Which I found quite funny in a meta-ironic sense.
And then of course, if you…actually do play through the game… well, from Raiden’s POV, … it basically is a shonen, a coming of age arc, making mistakes, struggling, being confused… but ultimately getting his shit together just enough to … well maybe not " “save the day” ", but avert utter catastrophe…
… as well as Raiden develops maturity as a character, reveals that… he actually has a lot of extremely serious trauma in his past, and he genuienly becomes a hero as he comes to terms with, and overcomes much of it.
…
MGS2, where Hideo Kojima dared to ask: What if an action hero wasn’t an absolute badass with a gruff voice?
(took western culture almost 20 years to even come up with the phrase ‘subversion of expectations’…)
Spoilers below but it came out is 2001 so whatever
I had someone get mad at me b/c I described a plot from a book written 70 years ago. I declined to edit my post to hide the “spoilers”. I guess I am the asshole.
I beat that game once and this is the first time I had any idea what it was about, thanks for a solid explanation
The most shocking revelation was that Jack didn’t have any posters in his room!
I haven’t watched those films in a while but isn’t one of spiderman’s things “fuck the police, help the poor”? I know he runs a food bank in the new games
It’s inconsistent, to put it mildly. Spider-Man is generally a working class hero and is also an impressionable kid constantly struggling under the pressure to do good. Sometimes that puts him at odds with NYPD, sometimes he comes out in favor of the Super Registration Act (he flip-flopped later)
That’s what happens when a thousand writers contrivute to one canon.
Sadly the only way for an American to get a new thought is to be spoon-fed it through a screen.
The argument in the cartoon is almost exactly the same problem Harry Potter has. The protagonists, save one who is ridiculed, don’t try or even want to stop slavery or make their capitalist nobility make things more fair. Not an American phenomenon.
Remember, its not Americans vs the citizens of the world. It’s the capitalist against you.
So these cartoons basically emerge from the Cabal psyche ???🤔🤔
