this post was submitted on 05 Jan 2025
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Any superhero movie is problematic. They all say that only a few special people can save the country and the world. The rest of the population just has to hold tight and let the important people do their thing. It's just a small step by replacing powers with wealth to give the rich carte blanche to do as they please.
Not those scenes in Spider-Man where New York throws random objects at the villain until they relent. Hell yeah solidarity.
Ghostbusters II the Ghostbusters would have failed if it wasn't for New Yorkers spreading positive vibes.
Your love, keeps lifting me higher!
Not to mention that a lot of those special people are born better
Thanks for putting this into words. I've had a vague discontent and disgruntlement with superhero crap for a long time. While this isn't the only reason I dislike superhero movies, this is a big part of it.
I do still like The Punisher movie with Jain, Dredd, The Crow, and a few others. Antiheros in general. They're also more human and not as one dimensional.
I wonder if that's a limit of storytelling. Grand social change is hard to film. Even team effort cohesion requires a lot of actors and writing to pull off.
No matter how sound the morals and story, if it's not entertaining, it might fail as mass media.
A little bit of that, a little bit of plain ol power fantasy.
One of the hallmarks of early Spielberg was the ability to have a group all talking at once and it sounding natural. Like the City Council Meeting in Jaws is a great example of fictional social change in a film setting that includes a lot of townsfolk in the story.
Oh I agree completely. There is a fascist aspect inherent to Superheroes. Cap is just one lf the less egregious ones.
He's still playing world police.
I mean, I've definitely seen Cap used to represent the Ugly American in comics, especially during that period post-9/11.
He's definitely not fully anti-fascist coded, because he represents the US, and the US while ostensibly being democratic, is in many ways deeply fascist and always has been. Hitler was inspired by our Jim Crow laws.
There's some smart people who understand that America never actually stood for any of that stuff and they write Cap to be the same.
Is that Ultimate Cap or 616 Cap? Ultimate Cap was an asshole -- even that universe's Aunt May called him out on his BS after Peter died.
I'm not a big Marvel fan, I just know I've seen lots of examples. Makes sense that they would be alternate universe Caps, tho. That's a great way to be able to write the character and show the dark side of US politics without necessarily marring the original character himself. However, to outsiders, there's not really a difference between the two, because they're not deep in nerd lore.
It's deeper than that. It's about defense of the Status Quo. No superhero looks around at the parts of society that we just accept without thinking about and says this needs to change.
Are ther shows and movies about regular people banding together to do good? Fiction or non-fiction
And much of the crime fighting is blue collar crime. On general the superheroes don't touch white collar criminals.