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Superheroes: SJWs, Status Quo Warriors, or MASKED MENACES?
RatherDashing89
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Registered User regular
This topic got bandied around in the MCU thread when discussing the potential impact of mutants being introduced into the current MCU, and has come up again with regards to a more idealistic Superman and potential clashes he could have with decidedly less idealistic Powers That Be. Namely, to what extent can we accept (or should we expect) superheroes in modern fiction (especially movies) acting in defiance of the established social order?
Of course, superheroes are almost always acting outside the law, with an implication that the law is either inadequate or uninterested in providing justice. Sometimes this is a major theme, with the superhero acting as a permanent outlaw, and other times this is more breezed over. We think of Golden Age superheroes as having a red phone line direct to the Mayor, and often they did, but as is often pointed out, from his very first issues Superman himself was acting not only outside the law, but in defiance of it, with a strong theme of "what if someone had both the power and the will to help the powerless" (and this carries with it the implication that those who do have the power in reality do not have that will). The theme of a broken society being made right, in big steps or small, is present in superheroes going all the way back to The Scarlet Pimpernel and Zorro.
But the prevailing view of superheroes is as firefighters. They take a world that is fundamentally right, and set it back to right when something goes wrong. The police may not be able to stop the supervillain from launching his doomsday device, but as long as the device is destroyed, the police can handle things from here. If everything goes back to the way it was, this is a job well done for our hero.
The most established cinematic universe right now is clearly the MCU, and the MCU has…kind of handled this. Iron Man 1 was not exactly “set in the MCU” yet, it was set in the real world, with implications of a world that kinda sorta had a War on Terror going on. But from that point it diverged, and was now set in a universe of its own with its own history, governmental decisions, and social issues. FatWS touched on this a bit, even going so far as to float the suggestion of a stateless society in response to the Snap, but this was presented as what the bad guys wanted and the good guys could not allow. So what changes if the mutants are introduced? X-Men will carry with them implicit themes of governmental oppression, possibly forcing our other heroes to pick a side between their superhero friends and the governments they have previously answered to.
There’s a very valid point to be made about crossing a line when it comes to superheroes using their power to influence politics. We get the idea that superheroes can be god-kings but should not be. But on the other hand, why is it okay to break the law by breaking into someone’s house without a warrant because our hero knows they’re a bad guy, to assault someone without trial, or any of the other countless illegal things we’ve accepted even the “lawful good” heroes doing, but we cannot picture them standing in a picket line, rescuing someone wrongfully imprisoned, or delivering someone safely across a closed border?
If part of the fantasy of superheroes is imagining someone with the power to do good at a scale normal humans cannot, is it wrong to expect them to enact real change? Superman was introduced to a world that was not okay the way it was, and he made it better. We are increasingly reminded that the Way Things Are Stinks. So I think it’s natural to expect our heroes to be willing to upset the status quo. But I am very willing to admit the fine line this establishes between a hero using their power for good, and a hero abusing their power for what they think is good.
What do you think?
Of course, superheroes are almost always acting outside the law, with an implication that the law is either inadequate or uninterested in providing justice. Sometimes this is a major theme, with the superhero acting as a permanent outlaw, and other times this is more breezed over. We think of Golden Age superheroes as having a red phone line direct to the Mayor, and often they did, but as is often pointed out, from his very first issues Superman himself was acting not only outside the law, but in defiance of it, with a strong theme of "what if someone had both the power and the will to help the powerless" (and this carries with it the implication that those who do have the power in reality do not have that will). The theme of a broken society being made right, in big steps or small, is present in superheroes going all the way back to The Scarlet Pimpernel and Zorro.
But the prevailing view of superheroes is as firefighters. They take a world that is fundamentally right, and set it back to right when something goes wrong. The police may not be able to stop the supervillain from launching his doomsday device, but as long as the device is destroyed, the police can handle things from here. If everything goes back to the way it was, this is a job well done for our hero.
The most established cinematic universe right now is clearly the MCU, and the MCU has…kind of handled this. Iron Man 1 was not exactly “set in the MCU” yet, it was set in the real world, with implications of a world that kinda sorta had a War on Terror going on. But from that point it diverged, and was now set in a universe of its own with its own history, governmental decisions, and social issues. FatWS touched on this a bit, even going so far as to float the suggestion of a stateless society in response to the Snap, but this was presented as what the bad guys wanted and the good guys could not allow. So what changes if the mutants are introduced? X-Men will carry with them implicit themes of governmental oppression, possibly forcing our other heroes to pick a side between their superhero friends and the governments they have previously answered to.
There’s a very valid point to be made about crossing a line when it comes to superheroes using their power to influence politics. We get the idea that superheroes can be god-kings but should not be. But on the other hand, why is it okay to break the law by breaking into someone’s house without a warrant because our hero knows they’re a bad guy, to assault someone without trial, or any of the other countless illegal things we’ve accepted even the “lawful good” heroes doing, but we cannot picture them standing in a picket line, rescuing someone wrongfully imprisoned, or delivering someone safely across a closed border?
If part of the fantasy of superheroes is imagining someone with the power to do good at a scale normal humans cannot, is it wrong to expect them to enact real change? Superman was introduced to a world that was not okay the way it was, and he made it better. We are increasingly reminded that the Way Things Are Stinks. So I think it’s natural to expect our heroes to be willing to upset the status quo. But I am very willing to admit the fine line this establishes between a hero using their power for good, and a hero abusing their power for what they think is good.
What do you think?
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Past that, it's still just Ethical debate.
I'd be fine if Superman threw every Nuke into the Sun, but I'd be mad if he also threw like 20 people into Orbit.
Just kicking it off, I dig this idea for a thread.
I believe in God(s), so I can imagine a world with a Superman, but can also imagine a world where they are evil or turn a blind eye to my causes.
*
Any action we take in an attempt to do good is using our power without being 100% sure of the consequences. This is getting into serious trolley naval gazing so I won't pull too hard on that thread.
I suppose what it comes down to for me is that in a time where we are constantly being bombarded with the message that things have to be the way they are, that any solutions are just too complicated and we just don't grasp all the nuances and the implications of making changes, that we don't have the power to make things better and even if we could, we shouldn't...
With that message being constantly shoved in our faces, I'm a little tired of feeling like superheroes are broadcasting that message too. That even if we had an ally of near limitless power and unshakable good will, that it would be wrong for that person to do anything of consequence because it's better just to leave everything the way it is, for risk of making things worse. I'm all for superhero media that depicts the complexities ("what if the people on the train you stopped sue you?"). But since superheroes begin with asking us to accept an impossible premise in the first place, I think we should be open to sometimes having part of that premise be, "what if things could be better?" If even Superman is unable to fix society, all that does is reinforce that no improvement is possible, even in our wildest dreams.
Recently in chat, Eddy posted an article from the LA Review of Books that touches upon this:
https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/no-dads-cuckolds-dead-fathers-and-capitalist-superheroes/
What the reviewer (and book author) describe here obviously aren't inexorable truisms. Some superhero comics do progress, some changes do stick. Golden age heroes retire and their mantles are taken up by silver & modern age. Harley Quinn leaves the Joker. Kitty Pryde grows into adulthood and loses her ingenue status. But the point is valid; these shifts are somewhat rare.
More substantially, the author makes a deeper point that for all of the space aliens and futuristic technology, the fundamental order of society never really changes. The existence of Iron Man's arc reactor, or even something as mundane as Reed Richards's super-fabrics, would reorder the world as fundamentally as the printing press or steam engine, but other than fueling superhero gadgets and bases we don't really see those kinds of seismic shifts. The world always resets to the status quo, and that is ultimately self-limiting.
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
They also complain when it gets reversed. And then when the writers get gun shy and the status quo isn't touched for a few years they complain that it never changes. This is the terminal end state I believe all fandoms progress towards - stagnation will not be accepted, change will not be accepted, and no correction after a change will be accepted.
We can see the precise moment that comic books hit this point because the fan reaction to the whole Hal Jordan thing in the 90's was absurdly organised and funded considering it was coordinated via snail mail and phone trees.
Though for me, I think that sort of thing is why I’ve been so drawn to Japanese heroes, particularly Rider and Ultraman.
At the core of just about every one of Ishinomori’s heroes, you had a figure who was placed not simply in a battle between good and evil, but that their very existence as a hero was intimately, inexorably tied to the evil they fought against. The 009 Cyborgs in Cyborg 009 and Ishinomori’s original Riders were people kidnapped and remodeled into living weapons for use by the evil they fought against, only to have their humanity remain and rebel against their goals; a theme that, while not holding to the exact mold in the Heisei and Reiwa eras of Rider still see that inexorable connection between Hero and Evil as a core element.
Eiji Tsubaraya, in turn, had Ultraman, a hero born out of the Kaiju Boom and specifically his previous, kind of Twilight Zone-esque, Kaiju science fiction show Ultra Q, but influenced with this Christ-like ethos that you could see arising from Tsubaraya’s feelings as a Catholic convert: a strange, alien being that seems so much greater and more powerful than these small, weak humans, yet they feel such a deep, passionate bond with humanity that they put themselves in harm’s way to protect us, lift us up and inspire us to live up to our potential, our best selves (as, indeed, so many original Ultras would end with the Ultra leaving earth as Humanity stepped up to handle their struggles with the strength they had within them but had not yet fully achieved).
And, while I’m thinking about it, just some thematic screencaps from various Rider and Ultraman entries, as well as from the last television project Shotaro Ishinomori worked on, the late night hero show Voicelugger, which despite coming out shortly after his death in the late 90s feels like a fantastic thematic capstone to just… what does all this superhero shit really mean
Rider:
Ultraman:
Voicelugger:
Reading all of those, yet again, what, ultimately, is a hero?
A hero is a person, a person who lifts the burdens of others, and gives them inspiration to become a hero in turn to lift the burdens of others, and onward and onward and onward yet again.
Justice, though, is so much a harder thing, because so often Justice is a Truth that so often differs from person to person, but one that can be so easily abused to justify terrible ends, so we cannot say there really is some one, true justice to adhere to and that is capable of protecting everyone when enforced, which brings to mind another superhero movie: the 1995 film Hakaider, a reimagining of the eponymous rival villain/antihero from the 70s hero show and Ishinomori manga Jinzo Ningen Kikaider, directed by Keita Amemiya (the Zeiram films, Kamen Rider ZO and [/i]Kamen Rider J[/i], the Garo franchise) and written by longtime Toei alumn Toshiki Inoue (Choujin Sentai Jetman, Kamen Rider 555, Avataro Sentai DonBrothers[/i]). The film reimagines Hakaider in a context seemingly far outside either the TV or Comic versions of Kikaider, instead in a post-apocalyptic, sci-fi world where Hakaider the abandoned, rebellious creation of the Totalitarian ruler Gurjev, whose seeming utopia of “Jesus Town” is founded on the literal mind control he enforces on the populace to keep them kind, loving and peaceful to one another. For Gurjev and his servant Michael, this world is Just: it has no poverty within the walls of the city, there is no violence, no hatred; surely despite the cost, people are happy, they enjoy their lives once they have been made proper citizens.
But a world where such things are “Justice,” what does that mean for individuality and free will? What does it mean to exist as one who disrupts the chaos of perfect peace and order with the chaos of choice?
“If you are Justice… I am Evil.”
I think the fact that superhero comics are an infinitely ongoing concern plays a greater role than most of the other points. Superhero stories that aren't an ongoing concern have satisfying endings, tell discrete stories and are free to reshape the world in which they take place. Watchmen, Zenith, Sandman, Invincible, even ongoing superhero stories separated from mainstream continuity like All-Star Superman, The Dark Knight Returns, Punisher: Max and stuff like Batman: Year One all work in ways that most creative runs that are a part of the ongoing concern don't. Form is maybe the primary driver of superhero comics long-term conservative choices (even when the comics themselves are unmistakeably leftwing in their politics - i.e. the X-Men).
That macro-level conservatism doesn't mean that progressive ideas can't be communicated by superhero comics. The X-Men are a plea for an end to bigotry (pick your flavour - they've made the title a stand-in for racism, religious prejudice, created a thinly-veiled Apartheid nation, had an AIDs analogue storyline, etc), Cap quit as a reaction to growing disillusionment with corrupt and jingoistic US politics, etc.
But very few ongoing stories convince you that change will stick. About the only one I can think of is Judge Dredd (not really a superhero but the strip has been running for 47 years), whose world is reshaped on a regular basis, characters die and are (with about three exceptions) never bought back, and the status quo is not a comfortable, recognisable return to the middle but a bleak dystopia where positive change is impossible and the world a prison from which no one can ever really escape.
The story that's just finished was about an idealistic Judge proving that the biggest impediment to growth, change and happiness was the system of government and control the Judges presided over. It did not end well for them. The story was also one of the best of the last ten years, with some truly superb art.
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You've also got many comic lines that are pretty pro-authority. The Avengers are essentially unlicensed supercops, Spiderman works as a direct extension of the NYPD more often than not.
Iron Man has both sought out and destroyed weapons sold by his company in his weapons dealer days and also ran a Negative Zone prison for heroes who wouldn’t sign up to his registration drive.
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Celeste [Switch] - She'll be wrestling with inner demons when she comes...
Final Fantasy XII: The Zodiac Age [Switch] - Sit down and watch our game play itself
And I want pictures!
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Correct me if I'm wrong, I haven't touched a physical comic in YEARS, but Spiderman is "working as an extension of the NYPD" in the prevention of violent crime/theft and apprehension of the folks who commit those crimes, but doesn't participate in some of the ... less ideal parts of the department? I addressed this a little in the DCU thread about Superman, but Spiderman fits well as well as he's an idealized view of things where he only really participates in the actions we can largely agree are "bad" (there might be some wiggle room on theft). Homecoming even kind of touched on this though that he screwed up when he went after the guy breaking into his own car, that even heroes are fallible. Now he suffered no repurcussions from it because it was a quick gag in an upbeat segment. Spiderman is one of the few Marvel characters who I really think embodies the idea of a symbol over a character necessarily like DC characters tend to.
This is basically the crux of it.
Red Son tackles this passably well, I thought.
Naika video did a good analysis on it’s political themes a year back as well that I thought was spot on and gave me a few more bits I hadn’t picked up on (like the way, say, certain kaijin families we see in the series have traditional Korean clothing in their homes, further cementing the metaphor of the oppression of Kaijin with the way Japanese society and the state treat Zainichi Koreans, no matter how many generations they’ve lived in Japan)
It still amazes me how Toei actually let it out the door not just in Japan, but internationally in 2022, given an industry so cautious about depicting fictional events in the wake of similar national events; as you may remember, Abe was assassinated earlier that year, months before release, and the Prime Minister within the series, Dounami, is an extremely unflattering stand in for Abe, not simply with laying his politics and cruelties bare but going so far as that his own grandfather, like Abe’s was a former prime minister and war criminal during the Japanese expansion and occupation of Asia.
Especially shocking is the idea it leaves with:
Even more than that is the last image the series leaves us with of the series heroine Aoi Izumi. Izumi begins the story as a young civil rights activist whose depiction at the start of the series evokes the image and place in the public consciousness occupied by real life youth activists like Greta Thunberg or MalalaYousafzai. Over the course of the story, Izumi struggles with the powerlessness she feels trying to secure civil rights for Kaijin, is deliberately targeted for assassination given her growing popularity, loses both family and dear friends to the machinations of the state and then, against her will, being painfully converted into a Kaijin against her will. Having now experienced these traumas first hand, and inheriting the cause left to her by the man who would become her mentor and learning from the failure of their movement in the 70s, recruits members of the younger generations who fight against the prejudices of the day to prepare for the day they may need to raise revolution against the state.
And all that without getting to its themes about the Japanese Leftist student movements of the 70s, the fallout from the movement’s collapse and the way many of its members wound up throwing away those ideals and assimilated to the dominant right wing politics that would define much of hte Japanese post-war period.
I was gonna come in and post something and then you went and said everything I was gonna say already and better. (and also I'm lazy)
Reading some kind of status quo conservatism into comics is imo like reading a gay romance into Top Gun. It's a cute trick, it's fun but it's really just missing the actual thing everyone is trying to do here.
Your big long running comics look like they do because they can never end and the world can't be allowed to change too much because then it stops being recognizable as Our World. Even the MCU, a setting that can accommodate actual changes and endings because of it's format and ultimately limited releases, still adheres to that second point. It's always Our World + some cool shit. It's a format-based decision because of how they've chosen to tell their stories.
It's funny seeing this come up in conversation because as some light fluff reading I've been going through a series by Brandon Sanderson about superheroes just showing up one day. And one of the key points of the setting is that when faced with superpowered individuals who can defy the law of physics and take basically any conventional weapon to the chin without blinking Superman-style, the governments of the world eventually just surrender. What else can you do?
...like what?
Apart from the obvious stuff, like man it would be cool to be able to fly/teleport/have cool tech/explore fantastic worlds, isn't the whole point of superhero comics basically to give evil a face so it can be beaten with a sufficiently hard punch?
The only other reason that comes to mind is to hurt the people who have wronged you (as represented by a supervillain, of course), and that's just revenge. Usually a villain's motivation, or so I assume.
...I don't read a lot of comics.
In a more realistic world, the less ideal parts are impossible to completely avoid. What would Spiderman do if he happened to stumble across a group of police officers who are in the process of murdering someone? Or if the police decide to murder someone who he tied up and left for them to find (which is absolutely the sort of thing that the real police would do)?
1. Superheroes rise to fight supervillains or other direct, immediate threats.
2. Superheroes beat the supervillains and save the day, begin to start trying to address other issues.
3. Superheroes begin to run into the fact that a lot of the things causing major issues in the world are either legal or close enough that you can't 'fix' the problem with punches and still be a hero.
4. Superheroes either divide into camps and have a civil war over whose politics are correct, and the winning faction begins to implement their own ethics as law, or a single Superman-tier hero just skips straight to it.
5. Reigning heroes eventually become tyrants because no one can oppose them, and even if they started off doing the right thing either they become corrupt, socially outdated (ie a Golden Age hero helps fight the Nazis but also thinks segregation is just swell), start developing mental issues or senility, etc etc.
6. A new generation of superheroes rise to throw off the yoke of the old ones, repeat.
I think Mark Millar had a thing like this, but it was a single family? Jupiter something or other? It honestly tickles my brain, and if it had come out now, it would be described as Superman plus Succession or some shit.
The Reckoners series by Sanderson is one of my favourite superhero stories and my favourite thing Sanderson has written. It doesn’t even bother with superheroes for the vast majority of the story. If you get powers, and you use your powers, you become a supervillain. It’s fun in how it plays with comic book tropes. Like the tragic origin story: I think that all but maybe one character has a tragic origin story. And it tells the story of “whelp, I guess the only way we get our world back is to murder the super powered people” in a way that doesn’t really ever go grindark.
On the flip side of things, Naomi Novik’s Scholomance trilogy is the best “but what if Superman was just a really good person who happened to have incredible power” story that I’ve come across in a long time. The main character, El (short for Galadriel, but uh, come on) has to deal with both entrenched power structures, the 1% elites hoarding power and resources and generally acting like shits, and also powerful direct threats that only she has the power to deal with.
Historically for the first question, stop it by beating the cops. It's been a thing that happened a few times, in fact.
It's just Marvel's New York police, unlike the real world NYPD, is a sort of functional organization, so when it happens those cops get jailed or fired, typically.
Admittedly, there's an argument to be made that in an universe like Marvel's, police would probably be better than in the real world simply because in the real world the police is where you go if you want to be able to stomp on people with no repercussions and very low risk, while in the Marvel universe you have like actual villains hiring for much more potential boot stomping with a lot less risk and stuff, while the police in Marvel New York have to regularly stand up to shit like Rhino and are frequently seen leaping in to help Spiderman or Daredevil or whatever instead of hanging back in the van and letting people get murdered. Probably a lot less of an attractive proposition to the kind of bullies modern policing usually attracts.
So what you’re saying is it’s less we need super heroes to influence the police to be better, we just need a guy who can fling his cybernetic tail and spray liters of cop car melting acid their way like every third Tuesday of the month to drive off the fash heads?
A lot of it is perception, which is important when you're writing a story like this. If you tell a what-if about Superman landing several hundred years ago and single-handedly bringing slavery to an end by force, it hits differently for a lot of people from Superman doing...anything touching on society, really, outside of charity work and fighting other supers in modern day.
The most fun comes from figuring out a handful of justifiable approaches a well-intentioned individual might take and then having them clash because 'do what is right within your capabilities like anyone else' and 'don't interfere with anything but other supers' are both positions a reasonable person with outrageous personal power could hold. A lot of comics pretend they're going to do a story like this, then immediately fold and say 'actually this side is unambiguously evil now' and then restore the status quo asap.
This not scientific by any stretch of the imagination, but based on my anecdotal experience with cops, absolutely, yes, this woud do a LOT to help things. The ibes that are wiling to take on threats to their lives that they can't realistically mitigate tend to also be the ones not fascy.
You could always hurt people he cares about, or treat his presence as an act of war. Superman (ostensibly there to negotiate) walks into the Kremlin? Putin treats it as a first strike and launches retaliatory nukes (barely matters at whom for the inevitable end result).
Invulnerability seems like a useless power for a diplomat. They're very rarely killed in the line of duty. Even if war breaks out they'd be arrested or deported or allowed to leave.
Forget Superman for a second. What do you think Putin's response would be if SEAL Team Six broke into Putin's office armed to the teeth, claiming they were there to "negotiate"?
Superman's presence (with all his powers, not merely invulnerability) in a hostile country would be treated as an invasion or an assassination attempt. How could it not? You're not allowed to send armed troops into a foreign country uninvited. And if the US' places a superweapon in Putin's office, how could he not launch a retaliatory strike? That's the whole basis of MAD.
I don't really see nuclear MAD working all that well against a Superman. If Superman says he's going to throw Putin into the sun, much less just show up for a chat or whatever, and Putin says to launch a nuclear strike in response, what exactly does anyone following Putin's orders get from doing so? They're not at risk like they would be from a nuke headed their way.
They still have something to lose and little to no reason to believe standing aside is going to cost them anything on a personal level.
I think one of the key limitations on a Superman, even if their values (or lack thereof) drive them to greater levels of intervention than you see in most superhero fiction, is that they don't want to create a world so overwhelmingly hostile to their existence that they can't function as humans at all, a world where nations will lob nukes and bioweapons at their vicinity just in case maybe it works.