Sure is fun when superheroes punch. Nobody gets brain damaged or killed by it. Biff bam boom. This is less true when you get into edgier edges of the genre, like martial arts films where the punching goes on for hours and eventually some people get killed. But if Captain America is punching a guy? Spiderman? Batman? They just fly away and bounce, knocked out. Beddy-bye time.
This was my problem with R Batts, as much excitement as that revisit to batmannery generated. The initial trailer showed him beating on a guy to the point where IRL he’d be looking like Emmett Till, emphasizing that by having the other dudes in the gang watch the violence in mute horror.
This comes up in my dreams. Last night I dreamed I was Spiderman, and I had to beat these super-powered bad guys. But when does a beating stop? In comics and movies it stops with the KO. In my dreams, much like in real life, a person isn’t necessarily going to lose consciousness before the point where they become crippled or die. So I punch this guy until he’s at a disadvantage and he’s still tusslin’. Then I push his head against the ground hoping he’ll black out. Instead his superpower finds final expression when he phases through the ground all the way to hell. I said, damn, tell me he didn’t die! I don’t want to kill people! But his girlfriend was like, no, he’s dead.
The dream followed him into hell then, where he woke up feeling refreshed, the damage of violence falling away. But he was in hell, so more tussling ahead.
My husband never liked superheroes because he identified more with the kind of weirdos they fight against. The late Wesley Willis was not consistent about this, but it did come up a lot in his poetry. Fighting with superheroes, not thinking of yourself as the person they would save. This was not my point of view growing up. I could be a superhero in my imagination. I’m starting to feel it tho. The idea one can punch this fucked up world into making sense is absurd on its face. The face you’re punching.
Now we have Watchmen, The Boys, Damage Control, etc., looking at the other side of superheroics, with varying degrees of success and varying degrees of horror content. I’m not really into those either. I’m just pointing out a thing, not making any case for a way to address it, or saying it needs to be changed. In the vast realm of comics I haven’t read, there is almost certainly one that would make me say Yeah, that’s it, but I’m not enough of a comic fan to be all that curious about it. Feel free to drop recs anyway, or just talk about related subjects.
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I’ve felt the same way. I’m tired of movie franchises that pump up a world-ending, galaxy-threatening big bad guy that then resolves the danger in a climactic fist fight, because punching things is the only skill superheroes have.
we might have some overlap in our ideas on the subject but there are large areas of disagreement as well. i like watching punchguys punch guys.
OMG I am so tired of the whole “knocking someone unconscious and then they wake up later with no significant lasting injury” trope. Like, has that ever been a regular feature of real-life fistfights? Most “action” movies or TV series (superhero or not) have a hero/good-guy who gets “knocked out” at least once per episode — but he never suffers from even mild concussion?! Puh. Lease.
And as PZ says, superhero fistfights are even
stoopider* than Old-Star-Trek fistfights. Both the superhero and the supervillain know they’re fist-proof, so what’s the point of one knocking the other clear across town with a punch to the jaw, if everyone knows he/she’s still gonna be conscious and come right back with undiminished powers? Those scenes are nothing but a total waste of both screen-time and CGI/special-effects budget. Pardon me for getting preachy, but how many starving kids could we feed with the money we spend on superfluous superhero fight scenes?*edited by beeb per my possibly outdated and overapplied policy on ableism.
As a kid I couldn’t understand why Superman would punch non-superstrong villains like bank robbers. With his strength he could just pin their arms and there wouldn’t be anything they could do. And with villains with superstrength, like Raging Bee points out punching is just pointless.
In my longish life I have never heard “stupid” used as an ableist slur. I subscribe to the Forrest Gump definition: “Stupid is as stupid does.”
in your long life transgender people were mostly called transsexual. language moves and hopefully improves. every time i’ve considered revising this policy, on balance i decided to keep it. if the SJWs who were advocating for this several years ago come out of retirement to say oops nvm, i’ll look into it again.
nine years ago!
https://freethoughtblogs.com/gas/2016/03/20/taking-the-ableism-challenge/
way late to this…
But I think there are a lot of interesting conversations to be had about the superhero genre…
I’ve enjoyed plenty of comics, and also really enjoyed how lately some of them have been able to transfer to the screen.
But, yeah, there’s a lot of problematic stuff with the genre in general… I think in some ways it’s sorta the current mythology of our era
Counterpoint, I think there is a history of progressive ideas in comics – I remember when I was young (80s?), when I heard “happy holidays” I thought it was because we were all out of school for both Christmas and newyears, and it was just a way to cover the bases(I grew up in a very rural, very conservative, very homogeneous, very white area). got older, learned Hanukkah(sp?) and Kwanzaa were a thing, mostly through comics, before I went off to college and got some much needed exposure to the world…
And then I’ve run across the idea that a lot of superhero stuff is somewhat fascist at it’s core, and, I can’t really disagree with that…
real stuff there. i espesh think it’s cool more comics got gay dudes in em now, like, that might fly under some radar and be available in kansas. it’s gonna be real important to fly under some radar for a while soon.
Superhero comics have often pushed progressive surface messages, but there’s a single rather seriously problematic thread that invariably runs through their very core, and that is the following:
The “Great Man” theory of history.
In such comics, momentous events and potentially catastrophic (or, conversely, miraculous) outcomes invariably hinge on the decisions of a handful of übermensch and very often on the outcome of a duel between two of them, or, somewhat less commonly, a somewhat larger but still small-enough-to-fit-in-a-normal-house-at-the-same-time group. Even when there’s a huge pitched battle shown (e.g. Avengers: Endgame), in the end it always seems to come down to a tiny number of people to decide the outcome (e.g. Thanos and Iron Man, with even the über-powerful Captain Marvel flung aside rather easily).
However, superhero comics are most certainly not the only place this crops up. “Great Man” theory is an undercurrent running through practically the whole of the western entertainment industry. Independence Day has whole armies of aliens and all of the world’s air forces fight, but it comes down to President Whitmer, Russel Casse, David Levinson, and Steven Hiller to actually beat the bad guys. Very often the bad guys just give up if their leader loses a duel (Independence Day: Resurgence, The Fifth Element, The Postman, huge numbers more) or the bulk of the bad guy forces are a “keystone army” that can be defeated with One Weird Trick (the first Independence Day film, The Mummy Returns, Hellboy II: The Golden Army, Star Wars Epiode I). Occasionally the bad guys are banished to another dimension en masse (the women-Ghostbusters film for one; also Man of Steel) or get clustered in one zero-collateral-damage spot and nuked (Aliens). Or there simply is no bad guy army, just a single bad guy. They might be defeated by exotic means (original Ghostbusters) or conventional (Broken Arrow ends with a fistfight, with cities-getting-nuked-or-not as the stakes — nukes being very handy if you need a super-powered bad guy in a non-scifi non-fantasy setting).
So, it’s not just comic books. But the Independence Day films in particular intersect fictional “Great Man theory of history” with the real-life version, by giving one of the roles to the (fictional) US President. The entertainment-industrial complex is merely mirroring a propaganda shibboleth from the actual school textbooks, that the momentous events and outcomes of history, both wonderful and awful, ultimately flow from a tiny elite, the Churchills and the Hitlers, the Caesars and the Romanovs, the Kruschchevs and the Reagans of the world. Usually heads of state; failing that invariably military generals (Grant and Lee), save for a smattering of great inventors and discoverers (Einstein, Newton, Columbus).
It’s fundamentally elitist, and therefore conservative: there are People who Make a Difference and there are people shit just happens to who can but pray that the Good People who Make a Difference will prevail over the Bad People who Make a Difference. And, of course, our People who Make a Difference are Good People who Make a Difference by default whereas the funny-talking brown ones across yon ocean who don’t religion like we do are Bad People who Make a Difference by default, with exceptions granted on a case-by-case basis, usually grudgingly and at a huge retrospect (in another century or so, if we survive the current setback, they might finally declare General Lee to have been Bad, despite being Ours rather than Theirs).
It also has strong cross-connections to other problematic shibboleths, particularly misogyny (it’s notable how many of the Great Men of History were, well, men: over 99%, in most reasonably-lengthy listings; it’s even right there in the name) and racism, as well as religious and other bigotries.
Even quintessentially-democratic events get this treatment. If some legislature 100 years ago was chronically deadlocked, you can bet your asteroids most history texts in that country will regale you with some tale of how one particular Prime Minister, Chancellor, Chairman (seemingly never Chairwoman), or suchlike won an election and then sorted those unruly representatives out right then and there. Unsaid is that in most such systems the same election will also have replaced many of the squabbling representatives, and it’s quite likely the logjam was ended by the people electing a more lopsided majority from one political faction, not by one particular individual in that lopsided majority.
And plenty of world-historical events were caused by impersonal forces, from plagues and ill-timed geological hiccups to Turchin’s structural-demographic cycles.
Skepticism of “Great Man theory” is eminently warranted, and leads to questioning some commonplace ideas about both why past events unfolded as they did and what would have happened differently if some change were made to the timeline. Most commonly, that change is the assassination of one of the Bad Great Men, and very often it is specifically Adolf Hitler. What if, though, going back in time and assassinating Hitler just caused Goering or Himmler or someone to assume his role in the history books? There was a popular wave of nationalist, antiSemitic, and xenophobic sentiment at the time. If one guy who surfed the crest of that wave had wiped out instead would someone else simply have moved into that position? How much hinges on the whims of even a dictator with, legally, near-absolute power? There are surely orders that, had Hitler given them, his minions would have rejected, or that would have simply failed to have his intended effect. In fact there were many such. Hitler was a failure, for all the damage he did, reigning for a mere 12 years before suffering an ignominious death, with the final geopolitical consequence of Nazism not being Nazism but half of eastern Europe being conquered by the “godless commies” and the rest of Europe restored as closely as possible to the status quo ante, an outcome he would certainly have hated. Aside from forking over a quarter of Europe to the Soviet Union the only other substantial “accomplishment” he managed was to get a lot of people dead along the way, many of them on his own side.
There are no Great Men. There are just people, and a rare few end up surfing particularly big waves … or getting particularly big tigers by the tail.
The Great Men theory is, of course, not the only wrongheaded shibboleth that subtly hobbles understanding of the world in ways that turn out to be ever-so-convenient for would-be and actual oligarchs. Another exceptionally major one is: zero-sum thinking. This one is, if anything, equally pervasive. Once again the entertainment media are rife with it: most stories center on a zero-sum conflict between protagonist and villain, for starters. If the plot is resolved by beating the bad guy, showing mercy, and then actually offering a win-win deal rather than locking him up or him getting his own fool ass conveniently killed right after, that’s sufficiently unusual as to be considered a plot twist, when it actually ought to be normal. But it runs far deeper than that.
Almost every single game is zero-sum. Board games? Typically there’s a winner and a loser; or in some cases a winner and (typically) up to three losers. Multiplayer video games? Same, or potentially one winner and even more losers. Team games (video and non-)? One team wins and yep, the other team loses.
Everyone in at least half of the world is being steeped in the message that you’re either a winner or a loser. It’s as ubiquitous in our environment as tetraethyl fucking lead used to be, and far more damaging to developing young brains. It’s quite possibly the most successful propaganda campaign in world history.
And, of course, it’s utter bullshit. But it happens to be the bullshit that capitalism runs on, and any other kind of allegedly-meritocratic elitism too. And Great Man theory has a nexus to it: most of the Great Men either won something spectacularly or lost something spectacularly. Even ones who are great because they brokered a massive, positive-sum deal are not Great because they did so but because they made someone else into The Loser. FDR isn’t simply listed as having enacted the New Deal; invariably, the story in the history book is how he defeated a hostile Supreme Court along with a whole bunch of rich oligarchs. The passing of the New Deal is framed as “these guys lost, this guy won”, not as “these few guys lost, EVERYONE ELSE won”. Even the inventors and discoverers are not immune. Yeager didn’t break the sound barrier. He broke it in the faces of some bunch of people who were adamant that it couldn’t be done. Einstein didn’t just discover relativity; he unseated Newton from his throne and claimed the Best Physicist Ever trophy in an historic upset. Columbus didn’t just find a major new landmass (while misidentifying it!), he overcame skepticism, won funding, bested bad weather, and survived attacks by natives (which he provoked!) to do so. Apparently it only counts if it can be framed as defeating some kind of opponent, be it human or the forces of the weather, and preferably a whole string of successively tougher opponents.
In this view of history, everything is pro wrestling with a veneer of physicist paint, politician paint, navigator paint, or what-have-you slapped onto it for flavoring. What happens is a consequence of a match between a face and a heel, or a whole tournament in which the face, with initial betting usually heavily against him, trounces heel after heel after heel, to emerge victorious and claim the grand prize at the end.
Applying these two views fails even when it’s real, actual pro wrestling though: the games are rigged, and there’s a huge invisible supporting cast making the whole thing possible. Same everywhere else. Einstein didn’t spring fully formed from the brow of Zeus and proclaim “E=MC^2!”, he emerged from a society with educational opportunities the envy of most neoliberal-era ones, and from a very well-educated group of nerds within that wider society who bounced ideas off one another like uranium nuclei did neutrons in Szilard’s lab. None of these guys “won” by a pistols-at-dawn duel with a singular foe. Without massive armies backing them both, the most Lee could have managed was to lose an inconsequential chess game to Grant, not fail to prevent the abolition of slavery. Replace one of the armies with a bunch of untrained yahoos waving guns and the other side wins. Hell, even the armies would have been nothing without an even larger “supporting” cast behind them. Wars are fought by soldiers but they’re won by logistics, by and large. (A lesson Russia looks set to learn the hard way, soon.) It wasn’t for nothing that the US Government did a lot of stumping to raise war bonds and fill factories with workers making munitions. The efforts it put into things like “planning the D-Day invasion” and “breaking the Enigma code” are rounding errors on top of that sum.
Both myths are pernicious, but the zero-sum one is especially so. People default to turning everything into a contest, and to seeing everyone as an opponent. Their partners (especially men‘s partners) in sex are even called “conquests” much of the time, and even this quintessentially positive-sum thing is seen through a heavily distorting lens. First, because misogyny, if the man gets what he wants (i.e., sex) then the man won. And second, because zero-sum myth, if the man won, the woman (heteronormativity goes with sexism like peanut butter and jelly!) must necessarily have lost. Therefore, if a woman has sex that counts in the loss column for her, even if she wanted it and enjoyed it! Women are seen as losers unless they are seen as having traded sex for some non-sex advantage of some kind. And, of course, women are seen as wh*res if they are, and as frigid if they render the whole issue moot by not having sex at all. It’s a testament to how much sexual orientation is not a choice that they aren’t all lesbians, especially when you add in how freaking dangerous dating men is for women. Of course, being a lesbian is stigmatized, too, so even they can’t “win” in the game of patriarchy.
Zero-sum thinking distorts everything from our love lives to our family game nights, encourages competitive thinking over cooperative (and therefore sabotaging “rivals” over helping friends), and is ultimately highly corrosive to the solidarity that the oligarchs fear the most. While “Great Man” thinking legitimates these oligarchs, by normalizing a fundamentally elitist view of the world in which there are movers and shakers, whose decisions actually matter, and then there’s the ants who can just scurry out of the way to avoid being stepped on (and good luck with that).
Is it any wonder voter turnouts are so dismal everywhere where voting isn’t mandatory? Why cast a ballot? You’re not either Trump or Harris, therefore your actions affect nothing. The outcome, unknown as it might be, is preordained. The gods favor Harris, or they favor Trump. See? The stars have aligned. We might as well still be taking our cues from court astrologers, so long as we hew to a Great Man view of history. And of course, Great Man theory being what it is, women (e.g. Harris) get an automatic handicap at the start of every round.
There. That is what is wrong with comic books (and most of the rest of modern western storytelling): outcomes are determined by a tiny elite, usually by a zero-sum competition among that elite, and very often by a zero-sum competition between exactly two factions of it. This not only reinforces a solidarity-corroding and apathy-inducing combination of competitiveness and learned helplessness among the proletariat, it also provides a foundation for whatever further propaganda is used to legitimate the currently ascendant elites, *and* cracks open the gates so misogyny, racism, and other bigotries can slip in, while whitewashing history and lending an allegedly-meritocratic cover to the bigotries by supporting a narrative whereby marginalized groups do poorly not because of collective, systematic cheating against them but because they simply do not generate very many elites or, quite simply, measure up. White men dominate not because of structural racism, combined with unstable equilibrium (where being a past winner makes winning the next round easier), but because the gods just happen to have anointed way more white men Great than any other portion of the population.
And of course that unstable equilibrium bit is only a major factor because of, you guessed it, zero sum thinking. Winning now only makes future wins easier if there even is such a thing as winning, after all.
The zero-sum myth gains support from another, a meritocratic one: that winners deserved to win and losers deserved to lose. A more wholesume society might see the existence of even a single loser as a bug, not a feature; and view the problem as not originating from said loser’s lack of merit, or of the gods’ favor, or sheer suckitude, or some similar thing that ultimately boils down to an appeal to intangible and immutable metaphysical traits (hence fundamentally elitist and even, more specifically, Calvinist) but to the game being played having bad rules. Good games would be ones where everyone benefits in some way from having played; only bad games would have someone (or even every participant save one) get nothing out of it but humiliation and reputational harms (at best, up to a reduced standard of living or even loss of freedom or loss of life). One hint that a game is bad would be that it’s hard to have the game at all unless people are arm-twisted into playing. Another would be if the game relies heavily on being massively hyped and promoted in a manner reminiscent of the advertising of lotteries and other forms of gambling. Most pro sports are this way: much ado is made about the winners’ fame and salaries, as an enticement to gamble that you too might emerge a winner.
That leads into one more, truly breathtaking insight: All zero-sum competitions are lotteries in disguise. And therefore “a tax on being bad at math”. Wait, what? Surely you’re joking, Mr. Bound!
I’m not. In the end, we are each some random chain of memory-coherency-linked observer-moments experiencing qualia … however the fuck that ends up happening, physics-wise. If you are, say, a football star, you probably have superior strength and stamina, good hand-eye coordination, and a background that afforded you both sports-playing and educational opportunities that militated in favor of getting noticed by big-league recruiters. Such as going to a school well-funded enough to have hired a good coach and purchased quality equipment.
You win because you had good genes, and your ancestors won various socio-economic contests (more unstable equilibrium!), and your school won its own socio-economic contests. Everything but “you had good genes” in that hinges on the outcomes of prior contests, so inductively all of these are lotteries if “you had good genes” is a lottery. Which it is. Your genes and socioeconomic status at birth resulted from having come from the right egg meeting the right sperm inside a high-society fallopian tube, or conversely the wrong egg meeting the wrong sperm inside a destitute one. This event happened shortly before you were even a zygote. It in no way hinged upon your choices, so from your point of view it was decided by fate instead. Aka, you won (or lost) a lottery.
One last thing: in the end, the pervasiveness of the zero-sum mode of thinking is precisely because it tries to force the Great Man view to be true. By biasing everything toward being a contest, it biases outcomes to being determined by contest. This has two simultaneous effects: outcomes end up actually determined by lottery, an obviously inferior method than determining outcomes by deliberation, careful research, and informed judgments; and simultaneously, bad outcomes are blamed on screwing up and thereby proving oneself to be a loser, while good outcomes are credited to never screwing up, i.e. being supernaturally accurate, i.e., being one of the few, the elite, the Great.
The two myths thus become mutually-reinforcing: Great Man theory suggests that we should solve problems by accurately identifying the Greats among us and elevating them to positions of decisionmaking authority, and how better to separate the Greats from the chaff than by holding a Greatness contest of some kind and seeing who wins it? At the same time, zero-sum thinking says “Trump has a lot of power; he has lots that people desire to have, while so many lack those things. That’s the mark of a winner. How can he not be a winner when we can all see him carting around this huge trophy called the Presidency?”, and therefore he must be Great, the last man standing after the championship round, having defeated a string of successively less-loserly losers, culminating in Harris.
Obviously, this clashes with one key piece of observational data: Trump lost to Biden. If Trump beat everyone else he had a contest with, but lost to Biden, doesn’t that make Trump second-best, aka the loser who lost by the least, and Biden the real champ? Hence the discomfort conservatives had with the outcome of the 2020 election, and their need to believe that Biden somehow cheated. But even nonconservatives are badly impacted by the two myths at issue here. Most of them attribute Trump’s victories to voter suppression, vote splitting, the Electoral College, and other things (aka, in essence, Trump cheated) and Biden’s to being the actual, meritorious Winner. Or they (especially centrists) see it in more neutral terms, the champ got unseated but later staged a comeback, maybe after skilling up or something. They may not see things in as absolute terms (Trump = champ, everyone else = loooooozer!) but they still divide the world into a few elites (including Trump, Harris, Biden, Clinton, and anyone else who rose to that kind of level) versus everyone else.
Lastly, the myths combine to produce a crucial distraction: as we watch the knock-down drag-out fight, rooting for whichever wrestler we see as the face rather than the heel, we pay no attention to the men behind the curtain (and a handful of women) busily rigging the fucking contest. The spotlight that’s on Trump or Harris is a spotlight that is not on Harlan Crow or Elon Musk or any of the other zillionaires bankrolling candidates and bribing judges, nor is it on Cambridge Analytica and its sequels, nor is it on the machinery of the factory where the opinion polling sausage is made, nor the vested interests of the principal shareholders of the giant media corporations shaping 90% of views of the candidates (aka which is the face and which the heel), nor is it on the dissonance between the zero-sum and Great Man myths themselves and reality. The myths give cover for the sleight of hand by which the pickpockets in three-piece suits rob us blind, even while reducing us even in our own heads to the passive role of “the audience” as said pickpockets work the crowd, so we will acquiesce to the outcome of the contest and to our wallets becoming mysteriously lighter. Look behind the curtain, and rather thanlseeing Team Democrat winning sometimes, Team Republican winning sometimes, you will see Team Plutocrat winning every single time; look at your own bank balance and you’ll see Team We The People losing every time. And when we do notice either of those things, out comes the excuse of meritocracy again: filthy Crow is a “job creator” with mutant level skill at job creating, plus, well, obviously he’s a winner and winners by definition deserve the rewards they got for winning (circular! Whatever you got, that’s exactly what you deserved: the just world fallacy), and if your pocket got picked? Well, that’s on you for not guarding it carefully enough. Caveat emptor next time, loser. And it was probably some brown immigrant who picked it. Winners like Crow have no need of picking pockets, after all, because they are winners. They got what they did by winning, not by thievery. If you’re looking for a thief look among your fellow losers, one of them is trying to climb out of your mutual crab bucket meritlessly, you must identify this miscreant and drag him back down and don’t even think about developing some solidarity, making a human ladder, and everyone then being able to escape. If one of you escapes, that one won (even if illicitly) and therefore the rest of you lost. If you don’t want to lose you have to drag him down and then make your own, individual, unassisted escape attempt … and everyone else of course will be greatly encouraged to drag you back down, lest they all be branded with that scarlet L. So good frigging luck.
TL;DR: We’re all being played, and two key myths, embedded very deeply and pervasively as propaganda virtually everywhere, the “Great Man” myth and zero-sum/meritocratic thinking, are key parts of how. All those stories of outcomes stemming from zero-sum competitions among Great Men, from the bulk of popular fiction (including the superhero stories of the original topic) to the framing of news reporting and history textbooks, are the world that has been pulled over our eyes to blind us to the truth. The Matrix has us.
good lord i forgot to respond to this one, gonna hafta read it after i wake up in the morning
naw, nothin’ useful to add. a comprehensive thesis there. good jorb.
Thanks.
wow, that’s a big wall of text…
admittedly, I mostly skimmed it.
But didn’t see anything I disagree with, and I think it’s an interesting and important observation.
I get rather upset at how so many people subscribe to zero-sum thinking (except when it comes to the growth of capitalism, for some reason…), especially to concepts that aren’t even really quantifiable (like, say, human rights…)