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Epic High Five posted:I can't speak for most any Marvel or superhero movie because usually I'll see one that seems promising, say "it's HOW long?!", and then be done with it, but it appears the two big factors in why they're so consistently ideologically incoherent is that 1) they get a lot asset access from the DoD on the condition that they don't cut against the grain of American Exceptionalism as personified in our armed forces and 2) it's just fundamental to the genre at this point. The whole thing kicked off with a movie, Watchmen, that almost everybody missed the point on and it's now spread even into writing rooms as you can see with stuff like Batman movie with Bane where they threw in a weird nuclear side plot because he was too popular with focus groups to be a villain even tho one of the best things about the franchise is having really interesting Dick Tracey villains Even the original comics themselves were often pretty pro-military. After all, the comics industry as we know it really took root in the Cold War. Portrayals of the big heroes have shifted over time, generally mirroring mainstream popular opinion, but several of them started out very pro-military and heavily influenced by the popular conception of the Red Menace. A number of early Iron Man stories were about Tony Stark needing to hunt down supervillain communist saboteurs in his weapons factories because they were slowing production enough that Congress was threatening to terminate his military contracts. Bruce Banner was a nuclear scientist dedicated to building a bigger and better nuke to use against the Soviets. Hawkeye started as a good-hearted circus performer who was seduced into evil by a Soviet secret agent. Even Thor's cosmic god adventures sent him to Vietnam for a few issues to clash with the villainous Viet Cong.
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Nov 3, 2021 21:54
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fool of sound posted:I'm not super into either comic books or the MCU so I might be missing some context but I think the basic structure of Civil War is pretty interesting, the movie makes a bunch of noise about Cap's dedication to freedom and non-intrusion and whatever, but I think the more interesting reading is that the former weapons contractor of course has no issue throwing the power of Avengers behind a national interest, while the former soldier does. Despite his origin story, Stark is and has always been insulated from the effects of the American foreign policy apparatus and war machine, while Captain America deliberately bore the brunt of it out of nationalistic pride and is cost him everything, and that directly informs their worldviews. I dunno much about the MCU, but in the comics, Stark seemed to have a hint of an anti-revolutionary sentiment. His stance as I remember it was basically that anti-superpower hawks would inevitably get their way in the end and conduct a brutal crackdown or outright purge against superpowered folks, so rather than wait for the US to outright go to war against them, he would rather turn collaborationist and hope to head off the most hateful and prejudiced aspects by taking control of the anti-superpowers squads himself. While there was also a strand of "I know better than you because I'm a supergenius" authoritarianism to Stark and Reed's support of the government, I felt like there was something deeper: he was convinced that the US government would go to all-out war against people with powers, and while he was afraid that the government would win and purge the powered folks, he was even more afraid of the possibility that the powered folks might win that war. He hoped that by allying with the government, he could avert both possibilities by using the resources of the state combined with ruthless authoritarianism to impose a compromise peace deal of his own design. He would do his utmost to eliminate any chance that the superpowered folks might be able to win against state oppression, and in return he would use the influence that garnered him to convince the government to allow the superpowered folks to live under the state's iron yoke. I'm not sure how much of that was intentionally written in as something Stark actively considered vs how much is a natural outcome of the limits set on Marvel fiction as a whole, though. The commitment to the status quo and generally anti-revolutionary tone of the writing means that superhumans overthrowing the government is only possible in alt-history tales like Squadron Supreme. And an anti-superhuman war run by the most prejudiced and bigoted elements of Marvel America would be too bloody and brutal to reasonably set up the "heroes fighting each other in a morally gray clash" setting comic writers love so much. Sanguinia posted:Yeah, but the issue in X-Men isn't the guy who doesn't want to do a business deal with a mind-reading mutant, its the guy who doesn't want to do a business deal with ANY mutant because hey, he might be able to read my mind, that's a thing mutants can do. That's the reason I specifically used the example of the "He might have a gun!" racist trope. The stereotypical person saying they wouldn't want to be near the black man in a dark alley because he might be armed and dangerous is implying that if the person had been white, they wouldn't have needed the worry. The problem is that even though the Marvel universe is supposed to have plenty of these mutants who don't really have any meaningful powers at all, X-Men as a whole is about people who do have these world-shaking powers getting into fights over the fate of the world. The stories are never about the people who don't really have powers. They're background characters to give a selfless heroic cause to the adventures of a squad of people who could fight tanks and win.
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Nov 5, 2021 04:44
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fool of sound posted:Nah that's text. Well sort of. A major plot point is that hero society is hosed up: a lot of the heroes are more interested in playing rock star than they are doing their jobs, the nature of heritable quirks leads to dynasric wealth and eugenics, people with highly visible or creepy-looking quirks are discriminated against, and the mentally ill are badly demonized. I stopped reading a long time ago, but IIRC, the underlying subtext was that All Might himself doesn't have faith in humanity. Faced with the concept that people had all sorts of amazing superpowers and could choose to use them for good or evil, he felt that the only way to maintain peace was basically to terrify evil into submission. He basically played the role of a Krampus: people wouldn't want to turn evil because no matter how strong or clever they were, the invincible and unstoppable All Might would certainly get them and punish them for their misdeeds. In order to cultivate that image as the strongest being on Earth, a superhuman beyond all superhumans, he couldn't rely on the help of others or even make it seem like there was any way they could help him. He believed that this role at the top of society, an inspirational figure that all good people admired and all evil people feared, was key to maintaining the stability of society. But of course it came crashing down eventually: no matter how powerful his superpower was, he was still a human like everyone else. While there's naturally elements of larger social commentary there, it feels like it's more of a fiction metacommentary, a snipe at hero stories where the fight for the fate of the world so often rests in the hands of a single person with extra special powers and more feelings than anyone else, while every other person with powers is relegated to cheering helplessly on the sidelines. All Might sought to be the ultimate protagonist and impose that simplistic black-and-white view of good and evil onto the world, but when his mortality caught up to him, the former background characters were forced into center stage to face the complicated and messy real world where people have all sorts of reasons for what they're doing.
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Nov 6, 2021 06:43
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I haven't seen the movies, but honestly, it sounds like quite a departure from the comic version of Thanos. Originally in the comics (at least when the original Infinity Gauntlet stories were written), he would occasionally use Malthusian arguments about the necessity of death and population reduction when he was seeking to justify his position to other people, but he rarely consistently stuck to it. Once the need to fake a sympathetic explanation was past, he'd quickly revert to his real position on killing: that the death of other creatures was something beautiful and amazing, which was exemplified by his romantic attraction to the divine avatar of death. And even then, after obtaining massive power with which to commit cosmic-scale genocides, he would typically lose interest in actually carrying out those genocides. No matter how much he talked about his lofty goals and his love of death, he would always ultimately give in to his ego and his lust for power. He talked all kinds of ethics and philosophy and pseudo-religion in order to justify his quest for power. But once he gained that power, the smart-talking strongman would always forget his supposed motives and become preoccupied with enjoying the feeling of playing God.
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Nov 30, 2021 21:17
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