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[-] Jomega@lemmy.world 101 points 1 month ago

Trying to change the status quo

Super villains are usually trying to take over the world or rob banks and shit. That's like saying Jeffery Dahmer was just trying to have a snack.

[-] phar@lemmy.ml 9 points 1 month ago

I went through all the comments here and I can't find where someone said an example of the super villain just trying to change the status quo. Yet lots of arguing back and forth.

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[-] FiskFisk33@startrek.website 9 points 1 month ago

Moonraker is about a guy who just wanted to save the trees

[-] Semjaza@lemmynsfw.com 7 points 1 month ago

Off the top of my head the villain in one of the Iron Man films was opposed to US war crimes and imperialism, New New Spider Man 1 had the Vulture as a villain whose deal was Stark and the wealthy were screwing people over.

In Batman Begins 3 Bane is a pastiche of anarchism/anti-capital ideas until revealed that that's a play by Talia.

Well intentioned extremist is a pretty common villain trope in general.

[-] stephen01king@lemmy.zip 11 points 1 month ago

Vulture was a victim, but he responded by selling alien tech weapons to criminals. His response has nothing to do with changing the status quo.

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[-] Kowowow@lemmy.ca 36 points 1 month ago

Is this a normal thing in comic book movies?

[-] rowrowrowyourboat@sh.itjust.works 161 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago)

No, it's not at all. This is total nonsense. If anything, superheroes are usually persecuted by the government.

Spider-Man specifically is literally an outlaw.

And look at the X-Men. Half the time the gov wants to wipe mutants out.

Maybe you can say that about Captain America, but he was created to defeat the Nazis. So yeah, who the fuck is not on the government side in this situation?

And when the gov became corrupt, Captain America became an outlaw.

So whoever is upvoting this and whoever created this doesn't know much about Marvel or comics.

I mean I don't know that much, but I know the bare minimum to know this is nonsense.

[-] ninjabard@lemmy.world 60 points 1 month ago

It's a major driving force in Civil War even the watered down version in the MCU.

Tony Stark: I don't have powers but made something that almost wiped out a nation so we should all register with the government that really hasn't liked us all that much.

Captain America: That's a massive invasion of privacy and I fought against those who catalogued people, so get bent.

[-] CitizenKong@lemmy.world 29 points 1 month ago

Well, it's more motivated than the comic version where Reed Richards and Tony Stark suddenly acted like super villians and cloned Thor without his consent as well as establishing a concentration camp for superheroes in the negative zone. Comic Civil War was wild.

[-] SpaceCowboy@lemmy.ca 19 points 1 month ago

Yeah this is my take too. Comic book writers aren't very good at being subtle, so it ended up being Reed Richards and Tony Stark become supervillains for a while. The whole debate about the laws were rendered moot when they made a Thor clone and a negative zone gitmo.

The movie had put the debate over the laws a little more prominently, and it was more about the character's differences in how they saw things. Cap favouring individual responsibility over instituitions made sense given the whole hydra infiltration. Stark not trusting his own judgment makes sense because his story started with almost being killed by a weapon he invented. Different experiences led to different conclusions and neither of these guys turned into super villains.

Nice little touch to have an actual villain manipulating things in the background and almost getting away with it because the heroes were too busy fighting each other to even notice him.

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[-] Zorque@lemmy.world 10 points 1 month ago

To be fair the motivating factor of that one is a bunch of teenage heroes accidentally get a school (and themselves) blown up because they were filming a reality TV show.

[-] SpaceCowboy@lemmy.ca 7 points 1 month ago

To be even more fair it was Nitro (a villain) that blew up the school, not the teenagers.

Only character I liked in that plotline was Wolverine because he didn't bother with any of the bullshit and was just trying to track down Nitro and kill him.

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[-] peopleproblems@lemmy.world 9 points 1 month ago

Also Civil War - Cap punches Iron Man, and Iron Man recoiled.

The same Iron Man that takes a tank round while airborne, has an uncontrolled landing, and stands back up with some scratches and scorch marks.

I loathe that film.

[-] AwesomeLowlander@sh.itjust.works 31 points 1 month ago

Since when has superhero logic ever held up to close inspection?

[-] ripcord@lemmy.world 12 points 1 month ago
[-] RecluseRamble@lemmy.dbzer0.com 9 points 1 month ago

Yeah, that take is beyond ridiculous. If unrealistic fiction movies get you that riled up, stick to other genres. There are some great documentaries, too.

[-] Kolanaki@yiffit.net 16 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago)

Both are kinda weird considering just being in a suit of armor isn't gonna save you from concussive forces turning your body into liquid inside that armor.

Just consider that Captain America is stronger than a tank shell.

[-] Shapillon@lemmy.world 13 points 1 month ago

He surely has stopped a tank shell with his shield at some point or another.

Also it's pretty common for the strength of super heroes to vary wildly depending on the script's need.

[-] unexposedhazard@discuss.tchncs.de 7 points 1 month ago

The thing is that the stories are nonsense and unrealistic. There is no way that real superheroes wouldnt be either under government control or spiral out of control like in "the boys". What people hate about these movies is the naive belief that superheroes would be a force of good in the world and not just another tool of destruction like any other weapon.

[-] PiousAgnostic@lemmy.world 18 points 1 month ago

The stories are just the evolution of the fables of gods walking the earth as men. Comics and fables have some pretty deep meanings. Yes, they are unrealistic. But they are not nonsense.

[-] Makeitstop@lemmy.world 15 points 1 month ago

Superhero stories are usually well aware of how people might abuse super powers. Those people become supervillains. The only way this criticism makes sense is if you think that no one would ever try to use their powers for good.

[-] sundray@lemmus.org 14 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago)

Perhaps it is naive to tell stories of a powerful being who remains uncorrupted by power. But perhaps it is also naive to tell stories of a man who can fly like a bird. Suggesting that making up fantastical, magical human beings is sensible in itself, and that it is nonsense to then imagine them being both good and powerful seems like an insult to imagination altogether. But I suppose that it's easier for some people to re-imagine the laws of physics than it is for them to temporarily quiet their lack of faith in humanity long enough to enjoy a movie.

[-] ArcaneSlime@lemmy.dbzer0.com 10 points 1 month ago

It's escapist fantasy lol, of course it couldn't be real, you think radioactive spiderbites would give you any powers other than cancer?

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[-] finitebanjo@lemmy.world 28 points 1 month ago

Yeah, sure, Doctor Octavius was creating a revolutionary nearly infinite source of power.

In the middle of fucking Manhattan in the form of an all consuming Miniature Sun.

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[-] cerement@slrpnk.net 17 points 1 month ago
[-] Makeitstop@lemmy.world 29 points 1 month ago

This video is dumb. It's making contradictory criticisms while having no alternative of its own to suggest.

The heroes don't use their powers to radically alter the world because, first and foremost, then it wouldn't be our world, it would be a very different one. Once you actually apply all the innovations that should be possible, the setting starts looking more like Star Trek, and it becomes a very different story. This is the same reason that Batman will never keep his villains off the street, whether he captures them or kills them. It's the same reason the Doctor always makes his way back to current year earth somewhere in the UK. The status quo they are maintaining is the one that let's us continue telling this kind of story.


Second, things like time travel and reality altering magic, things which can fundamentally change our world in an instant have to be kept limited, or we have no more stories. This goes beyond just the status quo of the setting and gets into the basics of storytelling and having tension. Make your heroes too powerful with no limitations, and you can't maintain a conflict without gigantic plotholes.

Second and a half, fundamentally altering the world with time travel or super science or magic is a concept that should be terrifying in its implications. Maybe time travel could alter the timeline for the better, but who gets to decide what is better, and what trade offs are worth it? Who gets to decide that it's worth unmaking millions of lives to alter history into something you think might be better? And how many ways can it go wrong? The world is a complicated place, you can't make sudden drastic changes without inflicting a lot of harm, even if you think the good it does will outweigh the harm. And doing so with forces that we may not fully understand or control is reckless. I mean, fuck, Ultron is the example they give of something to change the world, and would you trust the people making AI today to put that in a self-aware army of iron man robots?


Third, what kind of message would it send if the heroes used some bullshit super science or magic solution that quickly and easily solved environmental issues or social problems? Is that really addressing the issues in a way that's helpful for us in the real world? Is it setting an example for us to follow when they aren't faced with any of the real difficulties that come with solving those problems? it seems like that would just be dismissing the problem and implicitly endorsing the kind of vaporware solutions that polluting industries often try to hype up to avoid real change.


Fourth, do you really think the world would end up better if a small group of super powered individuals tried to overthrow governments, destabilize economies, and transform civilization by force? We're not just talking about intervening in a specific conflict like Ukraine or Palestine here, the video makes that clear. If at the end of the day, they aren't radically altering society, they are just defending the status quo. But, how do you think that would actually play out, especially in a world where there are other super powered individuals who will oppose them? World domination by benevolent dictators imposing their will on society while tearing the current order down by force is not going to be pretty, it's going to be a fucking nightmare. And let's be honest, none of our heroes have shown the capacity for building back the world they would be destroying, which is the much harder part.

Well, actually, no, despite criticizing the heroes for not using their powers to single-handedly institute radical change the video goes on to argue that change would actually require larger movements lead by the public, and condemns the idea of an elite few hogging power (should iron man be flooding the streets with military hardware? And how the fuck is the hulk suppose to share his power?). So, what then is the right thing for them to do? I guess they should engage in peaceful activism and support the people when they aren't called away to stop some murdering asshole from killing a bunch of innocent people. So, basically what we have now, but with a few more scenes of them making political statements and doing volunteer work that doesn't actually contribute to the plot.


Fifth, the villains are sometimes given sympathetic motivations because we want some nuance and complexity. The world is complicated and most conflicts are not just black and white. The lesson isn't that change is bad and evil, it's that you can't just view the world in such simplified terms. The alternative of making the villains all bad and the heroes all good is actually far more dangerous, because it reinforces the idea that we can just see the world in simple us vs them terms, with no need to understand other points of view or to question our own.


Sixth, they do fight the status quo, just not the parts that the video wants to address. Daredevil can't solve all the world's problems but he can and does fight both organized crime and corruption. Captain America isn't going to overthrow the government, but he will fight SHIELD when it crosses the line. Iron Man changed his own company to address its role in the world, and uses it to innovate to make the world a better place, that's just not the focus of the story.

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this post was submitted on 07 Sep 2024
385 points (77.3% liked)

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