There’s another related aspect that’s worth noting: supervillains are active, superheros classically reactive. The Joker hatches a plot and Batman stops him. Brainiac threatens to take over the Earth and Superman stops him. Doc Oc tries to blow up New York and Spiderman stops him. Etc. Etc. Ad infinitum et nauseam. If there’s not any supervillain active on any given day in Gotham, Batman sits around preparing to fight them, letting most of the status quo stay unchanged.
To think about changing the status quo, think like a supevillain.
I so adore tropes, they give me something to subvert.
“According to all the stories, this ordinary world is what the extraordinary people try to protect. If you read a comic book about superheroes, it would be about superheroes defending all those everyday lives. The superheroes wouldn’t be trying to cure AIDS or feed starving children in Africa or otherwise change the world. We have scientists for that sort of thing. No, a superhero is someone who defends that ordinary, everyday life from the forces that try to change it. Even if those stories come from our imagination, still, those are the people we praise above all others.”
There do exist at least a few superheroes who are trying to change the status quo proactively. I don’t actually read that many comics, so I could be missing quite a few instances, but here are some examples:
Tony Stark a.k.a. Iron Man (movies): stops developing weapons and begins developing Arc Reactors instead, in order to eventually supply the world with limitless free power.
Tony Stark a.k.a. Iron Man (Civil War comic arc): dedicates a lot of effort to the Superhero Registration Act, in order to make superheroes accountable for their actions. Is ultimately proven wrong, I guess.
Professor X: wants to make the world a more tolerant place through a combination of charitable donations, public outreach, and, when absolutely unavoidable, mind control. Contrast his approach with that of Magneto, who wants to accomplish essentially the same thing through conquest.
Reed Richards: pretty similar to Iron Man, in that he is slowly trying to uplift the rest of humanity to his own super-technological levels. Creates the whole Negative Zone fiasco when he decides to think like a supervillain during the Civil War arc.
The Flash (cartoon, some comics): When he’s not facing the existential threat of the week, spends his time on infrastructure improvement projects, community outreach, education, and other such activities that many other superheroes feel are beneath them.
Daenerys Targaryen (books): Though initially motivated solely by revenge and personal survival, she stops long enough to overturn several existing social orders in order to improve the average quality of life. An arguable example, since no one in ASoIaF is particularly heroic.
These examples are just off the top of my head; I’m sure there are others.
Daenerys Targaryen (books): Though initially motivated solely by revenge and personal survival, she stops long enough to overturn several existing social orders in order to improve the average quality of life.
Nearly all of which turn out terribly if I recall correctly. Her freeing of the slaves for example on a utilitarian scale is somewhere between a particularly bad natural disaster and The 30 years war, especially since it seems unlikely to last.
Besides being basically at the head of a marauding horde that is a menace to settled civilization there are further reasons to doubt she has made a positive impact so far. My girlfriend recently had an interesting fired monologue on the subject, she hates the character and sees her as behaving like the worst possible stereotype of Western (in particular American) doogooderism and interventionism. And yes I did say stereotype so I’m not saying what follows is an accurate description of real world affairs.
Encounter stable working society
Deem noticeable features of it immoral
Not bothering to study the society use violence to enforce your morality
Notice things becoming complicated and incredibly messed up, like obvious great suffering and people dying in huge numbers because of your actions
Leave.
Encounter stable working society…
In ASoIaF I see Tywin Lannister being nearest to a paragon of good rulership that brings about utilitarian gains. Note how the Spider actually kills his similarly tempered brother because he finds it plausible he will do as good a job as Tywin and would get the kingdom’s act together enough to repulse the coming Targaryen invasion.
I suspect the TV show may end up reducing, if not the scope, at least the emotional empact of the harmful fallout of her anti-slavery actions. Pop culture tends not to play well with values dissonance. It is known.
Haha yeah, that analysis is pretty much correct. Of course, we could argue whether a “stable working society” based on (f.ex.) mass slavery is moral or not; i.e., whether military action against it (and thus the resulting deaths) would be justified.
Daenerys Targaryen (books): Though initially motivated solely by revenge and personal survival, she stops long enough to overturn several existing social orders in order to improve the average quality of life. An arguable example, since no one in ASoIaF is particularly heroic.
Both Dany and Jon, to point to obvious examples, are almost classically heroic in their actions and cbffvoyl gurve fgnghf nf zrgnculfvpnyyl qrfgvarq urebrf. Samwise, Brienne, Stannis, Ned, &c. are pretty straighforwardly heroic. The universe is written with a bell curve rather than bimodal distribution of morality, and it assumes that things like nitty-gritty politics actually matter, so it’s easy to pattern-match it “there are no heroes,” but I don’t think that’s particularly true.
I find it difficult to pattern-match any of the characters to the classic hero template, especially when you compare them to traditional hero archetypes such as Green Lantern or someone like that. As I said, Dany is initially motivated by personal survival, with a dose of revenge fantasy on the side. Her actions are impressive, but hardly selfless. Her motivations do change as her character develops, at which point she begins to think in terms of social structures and armies—again, as opposed to a more classical hero who would think in terms of beating up bad guys in person.
You are right about Jon being more of a heroic archetype, but even he ends up making several distinctly un-heroic choices that cause a lot of damage to the… well… not the “good guys”, exactly; I guess you’d call them the “comparatively less bad guys”.
Ned is probably the most heroic character in the entire story, which is why ur trgf xvyyrq bss engure dhvpxyl. Urebrf qba’g ynfg ybat va gur jbeyq bs NFbVnS.
Oh, and I am reasonably sure that the [quasi-]supernatural properties of any of these characters will have little, if anything, to do with their ultimate fates (other than in terms of PR). At least, this has been the pattern so far.
I only have indirect knowledge of most of these characters through friends who actually follow their series, but I’ll note that Reed Richards is iconically ineffective at the whole uplifting deal (tvtropes link).
Well, his character changes between different comics and cartoons. In some, he is indeed useless. In others (IIRC), he introduces things like cheap clean energy, fast transportation, and even competent economic planning at some point. This applies to most of the well-known characters, actually, as every team of writers put their own spin on them.
Tony Stark a.k.a. Iron Man (Civil War comic arc): dedicates a lot of effort to the Superhero Registration Act, in order to make superheroes accountable for their actions. Is ultimately proven wrong, I guess.
Doesn’t he act in characteristically supervillainish ways during that arc? Cloning Thor and all that.
IIRC, there was an Elseworlds comic where he acted slightly differently and it worked out fine. It was framed with a Mysterious Stranger offering to show him what would have happened if he chose differently, as I recall. So it was just bad luck, I guess?
If he hadn’t threatened Captain America just before Clor went crazy, Cap would have joined forces with him to fight the Thor clone, ended up joining the pro-registration side, and he’s so damn trustworthy that everyone would have signed up. So yeah, it was basically karma.
Oh, and it was actually a What If?, not an Elseworlds. Those are DC, aren’t they?
If there’s not any supervillain active on any given day in Gotham, Batman sits around preparing to fight them, letting most of the status quo stay unchanged.
Well, his secret identity spends his time making large amounts of money and giving it to charity.
I think you mean “reactive”. Unless you’re thinking of some superheroes who do an aikido-esque “I’m just going to get out of the way and … oops, your plot seems to have blown up in your face” sort of thing.
Yes, fixed thank you. (Although the newspaper comic version of Spiderman might actually fall into the passive category pretty often- that seems to be the exception.)
To be fair, I think this is more a fact about the medium (written stories) than about the characters. It’s much easier to write something in which your protagonist reacts rather than being the first mover. This would not necessarily be the case when extrapolating the character outside the context (e.g. when faced with a dictatorship, a superhero may act to overthrow it).
The point is that a superhero can’t take preemptive action. The author can invent a situation where a raid is possible, but for the most part, superman must destroy the nuke after it has been launched—preemptively destroying the launch pad instead would look like an act of aggression from the hero. And going and killing the general before he orders the strike is absolutely out of the question. This is fine for a superhero, but most of us can’t stop nukes in-flight.
A dictatorship is different because aggression from the villain is everywhere anyway—and it’s guaranteed that we will be shown at least one poor farm girl assaulted by soldiers before our hero takes action against the mastermind. Only when the villain is breaking the rules egregiously and constantly is the hero allowed to bend them a bit.
If you have a situation with both an antihero and a hero in it, the hero can be easily predicted—as opposed to the antihero,who is actually allowed to plan. Superheroes end up quite simple, since the rules they obey are so strict, they can only take one course of action (their choices tend to be about whether they follow the rules or not, and not between to courses of action that are both allowed). And that course of action often isn’t the most effective.
It really depends on what we mean by “superhero”. If we stick to the archetypal Western examples, you’re probably right. But things becomes less clear if we consider something like Watchmen, V for Vendetta (V is pretty super), or the many gray area types Marvel and DC have (I’m leaving that vague because I’m not too familiar with the canon), not to mention various manga and anime heroes (Lelouch?) But maybe we wouldn’t call them superheroes precisely because they don’t fit the “only act in response to clear, certain evil”. Mostly, I think this points to the fact that, to no one’s surprise, {Supervillain, Superhero} is not a comprehensive summary of thinking styles, nor are they sharply defined categories.
There’s another related aspect that’s worth noting: supervillains are active, superheros classically reactive. The Joker hatches a plot and Batman stops him. Brainiac threatens to take over the Earth and Superman stops him. Doc Oc tries to blow up New York and Spiderman stops him. Etc. Etc. Ad infinitum et nauseam. If there’s not any supervillain active on any given day in Gotham, Batman sits around preparing to fight them, letting most of the status quo stay unchanged.
To think about changing the status quo, think like a supevillain.
http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/VillainsActHeroesReact
I so adore tropes, they give me something to subvert.
http://www.fanfiction.net/s/5588986/1/Trust-in-God-or-The-Riddle-of-Kyon
See also: HPMOR
There do exist at least a few superheroes who are trying to change the status quo proactively. I don’t actually read that many comics, so I could be missing quite a few instances, but here are some examples:
Tony Stark a.k.a. Iron Man (movies): stops developing weapons and begins developing Arc Reactors instead, in order to eventually supply the world with limitless free power.
Tony Stark a.k.a. Iron Man (Civil War comic arc): dedicates a lot of effort to the Superhero Registration Act, in order to make superheroes accountable for their actions. Is ultimately proven wrong, I guess.
Professor X: wants to make the world a more tolerant place through a combination of charitable donations, public outreach, and, when absolutely unavoidable, mind control. Contrast his approach with that of Magneto, who wants to accomplish essentially the same thing through conquest.
Reed Richards: pretty similar to Iron Man, in that he is slowly trying to uplift the rest of humanity to his own super-technological levels. Creates the whole Negative Zone fiasco when he decides to think like a supervillain during the Civil War arc.
The Flash (cartoon, some comics): When he’s not facing the existential threat of the week, spends his time on infrastructure improvement projects, community outreach, education, and other such activities that many other superheroes feel are beneath them.
Daenerys Targaryen (books): Though initially motivated solely by revenge and personal survival, she stops long enough to overturn several existing social orders in order to improve the average quality of life. An arguable example, since no one in ASoIaF is particularly heroic.
These examples are just off the top of my head; I’m sure there are others.
Nearly all of which turn out terribly if I recall correctly. Her freeing of the slaves for example on a utilitarian scale is somewhere between a particularly bad natural disaster and The 30 years war, especially since it seems unlikely to last.
Besides being basically at the head of a marauding horde that is a menace to settled civilization there are further reasons to doubt she has made a positive impact so far. My girlfriend recently had an interesting fired monologue on the subject, she hates the character and sees her as behaving like the worst possible stereotype of Western (in particular American) doogooderism and interventionism. And yes I did say stereotype so I’m not saying what follows is an accurate description of real world affairs.
Encounter stable working society
Deem noticeable features of it immoral
Not bothering to study the society use violence to enforce your morality
Notice things becoming complicated and incredibly messed up, like obvious great suffering and people dying in huge numbers because of your actions
Leave.
Encounter stable working society…
In ASoIaF I see Tywin Lannister being nearest to a paragon of good rulership that brings about utilitarian gains. Note how the Spider actually kills his similarly tempered brother because he finds it plausible he will do as good a job as Tywin and would get the kingdom’s act together enough to repulse the coming Targaryen invasion.
I suspect the TV show may end up reducing, if not the scope, at least the emotional empact of the harmful fallout of her anti-slavery actions. Pop culture tends not to play well with values dissonance. It is known.
In terms of disliking her as a person, or as thinking she detracts from the story?
I more or less agree with her description, but while I dislike her in the former manner, I definitely don’t dislike her in the latter.
I’d be pretty disappointed if she comes out on top in the war though.
Haha yeah, that analysis is pretty much correct. Of course, we could argue whether a “stable working society” based on (f.ex.) mass slavery is moral or not; i.e., whether military action against it (and thus the resulting deaths) would be justified.
Both Dany and Jon, to point to obvious examples, are almost classically heroic in their actions and cbffvoyl gurve fgnghf nf zrgnculfvpnyyl qrfgvarq urebrf. Samwise, Brienne, Stannis, Ned, &c. are pretty straighforwardly heroic. The universe is written with a bell curve rather than bimodal distribution of morality, and it assumes that things like nitty-gritty politics actually matter, so it’s easy to pattern-match it “there are no heroes,” but I don’t think that’s particularly true.
I find it difficult to pattern-match any of the characters to the classic hero template, especially when you compare them to traditional hero archetypes such as Green Lantern or someone like that. As I said, Dany is initially motivated by personal survival, with a dose of revenge fantasy on the side. Her actions are impressive, but hardly selfless. Her motivations do change as her character develops, at which point she begins to think in terms of social structures and armies—again, as opposed to a more classical hero who would think in terms of beating up bad guys in person.
You are right about Jon being more of a heroic archetype, but even he ends up making several distinctly un-heroic choices that cause a lot of damage to the… well… not the “good guys”, exactly; I guess you’d call them the “comparatively less bad guys”.
Ned is probably the most heroic character in the entire story, which is why ur trgf xvyyrq bss engure dhvpxyl. Urebrf qba’g ynfg ybat va gur jbeyq bs NFbVnS.
Oh, and I am reasonably sure that the [quasi-]supernatural properties of any of these characters will have little, if anything, to do with their ultimate fates (other than in terms of PR). At least, this has been the pattern so far.
I only have indirect knowledge of most of these characters through friends who actually follow their series, but I’ll note that Reed Richards is iconically ineffective at the whole uplifting deal (tvtropes link).
Well, his character changes between different comics and cartoons. In some, he is indeed useless. In others (IIRC), he introduces things like cheap clean energy, fast transportation, and even competent economic planning at some point. This applies to most of the well-known characters, actually, as every team of writers put their own spin on them.
Doesn’t he act in characteristically supervillainish ways during that arc? Cloning Thor and all that.
He does, it’s true, I forgot it was him who did that. In Iron Man’s case, thinking like a supervillain had worked out… poorly.
IIRC, there was an Elseworlds comic where he acted slightly differently and it worked out fine. It was framed with a Mysterious Stranger offering to show him what would have happened if he chose differently, as I recall. So it was just bad luck, I guess?
I don’t know, I haven’t read the Elseworlds version. People tend to make their own luck though, good or bad...
checks
If he hadn’t threatened Captain America just before Clor went crazy, Cap would have joined forces with him to fight the Thor clone, ended up joining the pro-registration side, and he’s so damn trustworthy that everyone would have signed up. So yeah, it was basically karma.
Oh, and it was actually a What If?, not an Elseworlds. Those are DC, aren’t they?
Well, his secret identity spends his time making large amounts of money and giving it to charity.
I think you mean “reactive”. Unless you’re thinking of some superheroes who do an aikido-esque “I’m just going to get out of the way and … oops, your plot seems to have blown up in your face” sort of thing.
Yes, fixed thank you. (Although the newspaper comic version of Spiderman might actually fall into the passive category pretty often- that seems to be the exception.)
To be fair, I think this is more a fact about the medium (written stories) than about the characters. It’s much easier to write something in which your protagonist reacts rather than being the first mover. This would not necessarily be the case when extrapolating the character outside the context (e.g. when faced with a dictatorship, a superhero may act to overthrow it).
The point is that a superhero can’t take preemptive action. The author can invent a situation where a raid is possible, but for the most part, superman must destroy the nuke after it has been launched—preemptively destroying the launch pad instead would look like an act of aggression from the hero. And going and killing the general before he orders the strike is absolutely out of the question. This is fine for a superhero, but most of us can’t stop nukes in-flight.
A dictatorship is different because aggression from the villain is everywhere anyway—and it’s guaranteed that we will be shown at least one poor farm girl assaulted by soldiers before our hero takes action against the mastermind. Only when the villain is breaking the rules egregiously and constantly is the hero allowed to bend them a bit.
If you have a situation with both an antihero and a hero in it, the hero can be easily predicted—as opposed to the antihero,who is actually allowed to plan. Superheroes end up quite simple, since the rules they obey are so strict, they can only take one course of action (their choices tend to be about whether they follow the rules or not, and not between to courses of action that are both allowed). And that course of action often isn’t the most effective.
It really depends on what we mean by “superhero”. If we stick to the archetypal Western examples, you’re probably right. But things becomes less clear if we consider something like Watchmen, V for Vendetta (V is pretty super), or the many gray area types Marvel and DC have (I’m leaving that vague because I’m not too familiar with the canon), not to mention various manga and anime heroes (Lelouch?) But maybe we wouldn’t call them superheroes precisely because they don’t fit the “only act in response to clear, certain evil”. Mostly, I think this points to the fact that, to no one’s surprise, {Supervillain, Superhero} is not a comprehensive summary of thinking styles, nor are they sharply defined categories.
Many of those examples are probably classed as antiheroes. Punisher would be a great example of a hero who changes the status quo (by shooting it.)
Aim to be an antivillian? Someone who wants to conquer the world and rule it with an iron fist, but is unwilling to use evil means to do so...