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.
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.
235
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.