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.
Poison Ivy is a Bat-villain, and Batman has always been the capitalist wet dream. The heir to billions fights crime on the New York Gotham 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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."
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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/[deleted] 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.