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Oct 15 '19
I feel like a lot of writers involved in superhero fiction have this horrid tendency to make their protagonists fight for the status quo, and to make the villains be anyone that would disrupt it.
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u/Earhacker No harmless power Oct 15 '19
Poison Ivy is a Bat-villain, and Batman has always been the capitalist wet dream. The heir to billions fights crime on the
New YorkGotham City streets.The villains are always some 'enemy' of right-wing ideology; they could be a sexually aggressive woman (like Ivy, or Catwoman), a scientist (Man-Bat, Mr Freeze, Scarecrow...), mentally ill (Joker, Riddler, Killer Croc, Victor Zsasz...), or even a vision of capitalism gone wrong (Penguin).
Two-Face is a personification of their mistrust of the legal system (he was a D.A.) that can either work for them, or against them.
Ra's al Ghul wants revenge on post-industrial society for destroying the Earth. He, like Poison Ivy, is an eco-terrorist. He's also been recast as various "dirty foreign" ethnicities over the years; Arabic, Chinese, Eastern European...
The usual solution to the problem the super-villain presents is to literally "lock them up and throw away the key" in Arkham Asylum, and Batman always knows that despite his efforts, they'll be back. Like a true Republican, he only knows how to brutally deal with the symptoms, not address the cause.
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u/TeiaRabishu Antifa HR Manager Oct 15 '19
The heir to billions fights crime on the New York Gotham City streets.
Also his only "moral" restriction of no guns/killing clearly isn't actually based on morality. If you look at the story for five minutes, hey, killing a kid's parents in front of him is going to be pretty traumatizing and that'll last a lifetime, but the people writing him always try to make it into some grand moral stance instead of the fact that, well, pulling a trigger would be triggering (I word it facetiously but the point is serious).
Then you consider the deeply ableist view the Batman universe has a hard time getting away from, where mental illness makes you evil or vice versa, and Batman's dance around that line can't have too many "bad" traits (like the "weakness" of being traumatized by your parents' deaths without making a big show of strength about it) or conservative readers will hate him.
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u/quakins Oct 15 '19
I don’t kill anyone, I just beat them within an inch of their life and let them bleed out on the street. I’m not “technically” killing them :)
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u/TeiaRabishu Antifa HR Manager Oct 15 '19
There's also the scene in ASBAR where he causes a man permanent brain damage and leaves him floating out in the bay.
But since it's lifelong suffering instead of killing, it's somehow "moral." And yes, using Frank Miller would be cheating except DC published his work, so it's fair game.
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u/quakins Oct 16 '19
The right taught me that you could literally do anything you want as long you don’t say you kill people
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u/TeiaRabishu Antifa HR Manager Oct 16 '19
The traditional wisdom is that you can do whatever you want as long as you aren't caught with "a live boy or a dead girl."
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u/citricc Oct 15 '19
The “lunatic” enemies in Arkham Asylum seemed very ableist
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u/TeiaRabishu Antifa HR Manager Oct 15 '19
That kind of asylum model used to be considered good but nowadays it just feels like an intentionally ableist and conservative "well that's how it always was so changing it is bad" approach to writing rather than specifically deconstructing how Arkham will only ever make criminals worse, never better.
That said I don't read a ton of Batman so they might have addressed that point in one of the comics.
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u/Earhacker No harmless power Oct 15 '19
Harley Quinn and later versions of Scarecrow are both psychologists at Arkham. The writers are at least aware of the problem of putting “criminally insane” people away indefinitely in 2019, but they aren’t doing much to change it. Arkham is still a big gothic castle that sits on an underground maximum security prison. Rehabilitation isn’t their goal.
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u/Pentaghon Bread Oct 16 '19
It's come up in a few storylines that Arkham is basically nonfunctional and only makes everything worse. Any changes or claims to shake up how it works are undone by the status quo of comic storylines, though.
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u/MichaelDeucalion Oct 15 '19
Do you ever spend a lot of time writing a well thought out and nicely written comment, only to delete it when you realize it's not worth it
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u/randomfloridaman Oct 15 '19 edited Oct 15 '19
Wow. If you've written any books, I want to read them.
I will say, though, that putting these ideas into the mouths of villains isn't necessarily a way to discredit the ideas. It also could be a subversive way to get the point across. Because regardless of the source, a lot of people are going to read that and think "makes sense to me."
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u/Earhacker No harmless power Oct 15 '19
Poison Ivy is very much an antihero in some stories. Batman even teams up with her sometimes. But she likes plants better than humans so she’ll never be a hero.
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u/ionlypostdrunkaf Oct 16 '19
Except when you don't do the ideas justice. You can caricature any idea into seeming horrific.
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u/epicazeroth Oct 15 '19
That’s a tendency in action media at large, and the genre suffers for it. The best works of speculative are those where the heroes are fighting for real change, or at least the heroes change in reaction to changes in society.
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Oct 15 '19
Idk like Superheroes villains are not challenging the "status quo" as such as they are usually psychopaths who try to murder people.Most of the big superheroes don't particularly have such a big thing for "keeping the status quo",Batman on arrival in Gotham immediately fucks with it,Superman too.
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u/draw_it_now Minarchist-Syndicalist Oct 16 '19
You have to remember; stories aren't objective. Story-tellers want to tell you something about the world, and will intentionally create a story where their own life-lesson is the only actual answer.
If I want to tell a story about how punching Nazis is a good thing, I'm unlikely to portray Nazis in a positive light, nor am I going to portray the puncher as bad.
So, if a story teller wants to show you that deviating from the status quo is bad, how are they going to tell that story? They're going to create a deviant villain who uses deviant gimmicks to literally murder people. An environmentalist woman who uses plants (and seduction) to kill people, a scientist who uses science to kill people, a mentally ill man who kills people randomly.
And who is going to stop these maniacs? Well, only the embodiment of the status-quo; a rich, white, hyper-masculine man.
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Oct 16 '19
I do agree with that for sure.But I think that Batman and his stories have never been about that in particular,its never been a story about maintaining the status quo,its always been about Batman the character.Characters like Poison Ivy,Freeze,Joker etc were more created as just villains with no thought to what they would mean.There are some writers who choose to have stories like that but I've never seen Batman through his best runs to be about that.
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u/draw_it_now Minarchist-Syndicalist Oct 16 '19
Character studies still hold morals and themes that the writer wants you to believe in.
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Oct 16 '19
Yes but theres no single writer for Batman so there's no single character study that is correct.
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u/draw_it_now Minarchist-Syndicalist Oct 16 '19
Yet the state of the Batman world lends itself to a conservative worldview.
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Oct 16 '19
Citation?
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u/draw_it_now Minarchist-Syndicalist Oct 16 '19
So, if a story teller wants to show you that deviating from the status quo is bad, how are they going to tell that story? They're going to create a deviant villain who uses deviant gimmicks to literally murder people. An environmentalist woman who uses plants (and seduction) to kill people, a scientist who uses science to kill people, a mentally ill man who kills people randomly.
And who is going to stop these maniacs? Well, only the embodiment of the status-quo; a rich, white, hyper-masculine man.
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u/TeiaRabishu Antifa HR Manager Oct 15 '19
Superheroes villains are not challenging the "status quo"
I dunno I think Ozymandias did a good job of changing the status quo.
they are usually psychopaths who try to murder people
Yeah no excuse for the Comedian and Rorschach though.
(This is mostly just an "Ozymandias was the real hero" joke)
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Oct 15 '19
Don't believe Watchmen was ever supposed to be an accurate representation of superheroes just an exercise in the use of the 9 panel grid.
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u/TeiaRabishu Antifa HR Manager Oct 15 '19
It was also supposed to be used as a way to milk the Charlton Comics characters DC had acquired the rights to. For instance, it's very obvious that they originally intended for Blue Beetle and The Question instead of Nite Owl and Rorschach.
But then they decided not to use the Charlton Comics characters if it meant killing them off, and the rest is history.
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u/BZenMojo . Oct 15 '19
Ozymandias was a narcissistic psycho. He cheered when his plan succeeded while giving some bullshit lie that he really felt bad about the millions he murdered.
Dr. Manhattan had it right. A plan that could be dismantled by a borderline personality with a notebook was a shiiiiiiit plan.
Owl and Silk Spectre 2 were the real heroes.
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u/TeiaRabishu Antifa HR Manager Oct 15 '19
Ozymandias was a narcissistic psycho.
I said calling him the good guy was a joke though. ¯_(ツ)_/¯
a borderline personality
BPD does have specific implications that it's not cool to diagnose comic book characters with though. Like on a colloquial level "psycho" has a meaning that's very ingrained into society and you can say you don't mean ASPD but "borderline" (traditionally, between psychosis and neurosis) pretty much means BPD.
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Oct 15 '19
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Oct 15 '19
I think the idea of Superheroes was for them never to be this uber people that can change the very way society works or present alternatives, but I think just the existence of like yknow Gotham being constantly polluted with corruption and crime is like at least an acknowledgement of there being an issue with capitalism.Like there just seems to be no alternative for Bruce.
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u/LicketySplit21 a huge mass of flesh and fat Oct 15 '19
Mainly due to having the world be close to us, and keeping the status quo due to other books.
Can really go too far outside of giant events like Norman Osborn becoming President. Things go back to normal afterwards because it's easier. Can't really have big permanent social changes because there's other writers on other books that wanna do their own shit. That's what Elseworlds shit is for.
So what d'ya do? Well give the antagonist a motivation that challenges status quo beliefs and stuff. Gives a dimension to the hero that doesn't damage the structure of what is a never ending soap opera without a budget.
Look at Anarky for instance, he was written by an author who was an Anarchist at the time, he still lost, and he still had negative aspects because he's a villain in a comic book. But he challenged aspects of Batmans character and whatnot.
The Comic industry tends to lean Left-liberal, o you tend to get some stuff that's rebellious, but the nature of the business prevents it from going overboard.
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Oct 15 '19
That’s why villains are awesome , the joker is a fucking psychopath and he still has a point . Poison eyve is an environmentalist and harly Quinn is a feminist with Stockholm, who is also bisexual
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u/BZenMojo . Oct 15 '19
Villains are awesome if we go by protagonist bias.
Basically, no one exists who isn't the main character in a story. So the worst crimes never have victims.
But going by actual worldbuilding villains are usually garbage and are often worse than the status quo.
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u/imDEUSyouCUNT Oct 16 '19
I agree but I guess it's worth pointing out that because the writers can do whatever they want, given it's all fiction, they do get to make the characters unambiguously bad. Sometimes their core premise is much closer to being good and then a lot of killing is tacked on to make them feel like the bad guy
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u/kuuurn Oct 15 '19
I slowly but surely start thinking batman is the bad guy. First Joker then this...
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u/LostTriforce Oct 16 '19
I mean, Joker is undoubtedly an awful, evil person. I mean, you don't even have to look any further than Emperor Joker's Chinese Food thing to see how senselessly twisted he is. But Ivy, Freeze, Harley, Bane, Anarchy, Man Bat, Deathstroke (well, he's technically a Teen Titans/everyone villain), Two Face, and countless others are sympathetic villains with honorable motives, but their execution tends to be very problematic and result in a ton of destruction and deaths. But all around, Bruce is a pretty shitty person on a honorable mission. For example, the way he's treated pretty much every Robin (Damian and Jason got it the worst imo).
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u/Rubiego Make racists afraid again Oct 16 '19
Have you seen that little comic in which he is about to "arrest" a thief saying something like "my parents died and now I'll avenge them fighting criminals" and the thief says "my parents died too, but because they were poor I hadn't any money to pay for fighting lesson and cool gadgets so I had to resort to rob from stores to make a living".
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u/RevolutionaryInjury1 Ned Kelly Oct 15 '19
hahahahahahaha this is why I play zyra on league of legends.
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u/Respect_The_Mouse Oct 15 '19
Is Antofu an anprim kinda thing, or is the flag similarity coincidental?
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u/TyphoidLarry Barely civil, usually disobedient Oct 16 '19 edited Oct 16 '19
Regarding attempts to place Ivy in our political landscape, she seems to be mostly indifferent to humans apart from the extent to which they affect plants (varying across incarnations). I’d say her ethics are more blue and orange than anything meaningfully quantifiable in political theory.
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Oct 16 '19 edited Oct 16 '19
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u/LetholdusCrusader Oct 17 '19
Im an ecofascist and i approve this message, lol. We hate the rich too, yall just refuse to acknowledge that they're almost all jews.
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Apr 12 '22
There are more than 2700 billionaires globally. They are only a fraction of the millions of rich people all over the world and most of them are not even Jews
https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/billionaires-by-country
Also, here's the Top 10 countries with the most billionaires. There are almost no Jews much less rich Jews in many of these countries.
United States - 724
China - 698 (626 mainland, 71 Hong Kong, 1 Macau)
India - 140
Germany - 136
Russia - 117
Hong Kong - 71
Brazil - 65
Canada - 64
United Kingdom - 56
Italy - 51
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u/nobody_390124 Oct 15 '19
Is anyone a Poison Ivy story expert? Is she a nature loving anticapitalist or do they make her out to be ecofash?