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#QuestionOfTheDay what's a counterintuitive take you have on something you're interested in?
I'll start: i think there's an argument to be made that the 90s superhero boom was the actual superhero boom era and the current era is the "people with superpowers" boom
@ami_angelwings is this because superhero movies are opposed to brightly colored outfits?
@waitworry no, it's for a number of factors:
1) there was a much larger variety of superhero stuff in the 90s, not just the indie comics (altho there was a lot of that too), but like all the different knock off superhero films and games too, and a lot of people trying to make their own superheroes whether creators or fans, that creativity is imo very important to "superheroes"
2) and all of the superhero stuff, even the bad films people make fun of, still were about being a superHERO: having a secret identity, wanting to save people, wearing goofy costumes, even something like Mystery Men had a lot more heroing in it than stuff now where people are superheroes as jobs or have superpowers but actually are doing other things than being a superhero (or even wanting to be a superhero)
@waitworry 3) stuff from the 90s also had like unique superhero worlds that felt very comic booky, Batman 89's Gotham is obvious, but even Mystery Men's aesthetic is very unique, it's not just "what if superheroes lived in our world", it was "this is a superhero world"
I think to me that's the main difference, current superhero stuff is trying very hard to be "realistic superheroes", superheroes in the "real world" in real cities talking like "real" people and less like people who want to be heroes but people who have superpowers and are hanging out and occasionally fight something (or they're just evil), but to me "superhero" isn't just having superpowers, it's a genre with its own conventions and worlds, and the 90s stuff, comics, games, tv, movies, feels like it captures it more
@waitworry in general, I don't really like the shift of all genres to this "realistic" style, like the way current Star Trek has swearing and slang or Star Wars now has suburbs... it has nothing to do with "classiness" or trying to gatekeep... I just think it's okay for things to have a unique style and world, not everything has to have people talking like Buffy and has to look like a NY suburb... "realism" is a) in the eye of the beholder but also b) pointless in a totally fictional environment... it's fine to have your own conventions in your own world where things look different and people talk in their own consistent way
I think a lot of this has to do with executive conservatism and their thinking that the "plebs" can't understand genre worldbuilding & just want quips
@waitworry there's also something probably to be said about how superheroes when they do stuff now are just cops and are very pro-cop... one of the big superhero traditions is being on the run from cops, you see this even in the bad 90s superhero stuff like Steel, running from cops is like up there with coming up with a costume, learning your powers, etc, for superhero conventions... now it's like "thank you for your service officer"
@ami_angelwings even Batman traditionally starts with a pretty complex relationship with the cops
@waitworry yeah, and Spider-Man famously is very anti-authority, not just hunted by cops, but him making fun of Nick Fury and refusing to work with SHIELD whenever they wanted him was a big part of his character, and now he's like owned and raised by Tony Stark in the movies, and in the Disney animated show he was literally an apprentice trained by SHIELD
the fantasy of being a superhero, for me anyway, is to be free from authority not to be part of it
(there's also something to be said in the shift of children's fantasy from running away and going on an adventure to being in hero school like Harry Potter or Naruto)
@waitworry thinking about this and how the shift to children's fantasy where heroism is institutionalized and how that reflects modern discourses about kid's lives having to be regimented through institutions and systems, how the argument for more kids activity always means through schooling, more gym, more school teams, how we are increasingly removing public spaces for kids to play and hang out but when people decry the lack of kids going out the solution is "more league sports"
@ami_angelwings @waitworry This increasingly became my problem with My Hero Academia as it became clearer and clearer that the series didn't really seem interested in interrogating a. if it was possible to be a hero outside of the context of being an Agent of the State and b. if under that system the idea of villainy was more socially constructed than it first seemed.
@ami_angelwings @waitworry Someone else said recently that if there's been a big shift in genre fiction over the last two decades (superheroes, fantasy, sci-fi, you name it) its towards a sort of blind and even unacknowledged acceptance of the legitimacy of institutions, including security institutions. I think they're right, and I don't even think its deliberate, I think we're fish who are losing words for water.
@Mezentine @ami_angelwings @waitworry it's also interesting how often it's supervillains who make the most sense in some of these modern superhero movies.
Like, you clearly see that the life of a superhero is to be a super privileged supercop and punish activists fighting the system, while maybe saying a token word or two about how these activists maybe had some point but the system should instead be changed peacefully and from within (and doing nothing about actually changing the system... while the activists are rooting in prison in best case, or dead in worst)
@IngaLovinde @Mezentine @ami_angelwings also of course they randomly do some fucked up thing so you don't accidentally get too sympathetic too
@waitworry @Mezentine @ami_angelwings and so that it will leave an impression on you that activists do fucked up things, so that your subconscious will remember it whenever you hear about activists IRL