this post was submitted on 04 Jan 2024
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Obligatory David Graeber reference via Pop Culture Detective: https://youtu.be/LpitmEnaYeU
The super hero genre is, by definition, reactionary. All Marvel movies are anti-woke, even the "woke" ones.
So you're saying the genre of media created by Jewish people circa WWII, in which the paragons of virtue in each major property are an illegal immigrant, and a golem who punches Nazis, is reactionary?
I think your question is answered word for word in the video, but tl;dr: yes, I think that a genre where those who wish to disrupt the social order are automatically cast as villains can only be constructed as progressive when the villain is literally Hitler. Obviously there's a lot more nuance in the video, but that's the gist of it.
Superman is an investigative journalist who exposes corporate corruption, and his nemesis was for a time the literal fucking POTUS. Superheroes don't have to defend the status quo, it's not a trait inherent to the genre.
More examples: Spider-Man is always in trouble with the media and the cops. Daredevil became a superhero because he thought the criminal justice system wasn't effective enough. Ms Marvel protects the Pakistani community because the government won't. All of Worm.
I'll throw in Oliver Queen (Green Arrow), who literally threw his fortune and company down the drain because he couldn't square being a good person and a billionaire. Oh, and he also went and fought drug dealers, corrupt landlords, and racists in the 80s with Green Lantern specifically because the government wasn't doing anything substantial to stop those things.
Writers are to blame for superheroes supporting the status quo, not the genre.
Yeah, so this is all covered in that video. Spiderman is probably the closest to progressive listed. He's working class, he has trouble with cops, his family is poor. He's reactionary in the literal sense, because he takes action in response to super villains. He doesn't ever do anything proactively to make the world more just, he just responds to people trying to make it worse. Imagine if he robbed a bank and gave it to the poor or broke in to an ICE vehicle depot and disabled all their vehicles so they couldn't raid immigrants. By the standard construction of the genre, he'd automatically become a villain... And that's the point.
Subversions of the genre aside, It can be no better than liberalism. It's like Obama, being a black president who probably did more than any previous president to address mass incarceration while simultaneously ordering drone strikes against civilians, crushing Standing Rock and Occupy, and presiding over the largest transfer of wealth from the poor to the rich in all the history leading up to it. In a lot of ways Obama was the most progressive US president... But liberalism limits the frame of operation. Just like the genre, the best you can do is virtue signaling without ever really challenging the status quo.
The Overton window for the super hero genre goes from (perhaps slightly left of) center to fascist. No matter how many identity labels or progressive situational elements you add, it's still a genre that's literally reactionary and therefore trends politically reactionary.
Again, this is all covered in the video. If you want to challenge your understanding of the world, great. If not, I'm not really going to keep paraphrasing a video that presents these ideas more effectively than I do.
That's what happens in Spider-Man PS4. The mayor brings in a mercenary group to restore order to the streets, and they're harassing innocent people, so Spider-Man beats them up and smashes their APCs.
So like, as a reaction to a new situation not proactively? Cool. I'm not trying to win an argument with some rando on the internet. I don't care. Watch the video or don't.
You sound like you find the very idea of reactionary immigrants or anti-nazis preposterous.
"Reactionary immigrants" would describe every white Republican in the US.
That was good.
Yeah hard to picture a multi billion dollar studio greenlighting a movie where Spiderman kills the 300 richest and redistributes their wealth, or Iron Man leads a worker revolution.