Spider-Man 3 should introduce Gwen Stacy as a trans woman to incinerate freeze-gamer brains

  • BeamBrain [he/him]@hexbear.net
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    1 year ago

    I can’t really fully agree with this. Superheroes have a lot less to do with fighting social injustices than they do with upholding the status quo and celebrating the military industrial complex.

      • UlyssesT [he/him]@hexbear.net
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        1 year ago

        Some people are just born special and are outright better than you inherently and they deserve special privileges that you don’t get and a different tier of law interpretation. homelander

        • GarfieldYaoi [he/him]@hexbear.net
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          1 year ago

          Chad Naruto:

          • Hard work beats out talent.
          • Naruto is an outcast for being a “freak” turns out what makes him a “freak” ends up saving everyone’s ass multiple times.
          • Yeah, Naruto was one of ‘the specials’, but at what cost?
            • booty [he/him]@hexbear.net
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              1 year ago

              Eh, in the later parts of the series we learn that he basically had the president looking out for him the whole time, and he gets access to special instruction just based on who he is. Not only does he become super special, it is revealed that he was super special and had special privileges all along. He just didn’t know it.

              Rock Lee shows the true limitations of hard work in the setting. Got his ass whooped a couple of times when anyone reasonably special showed up and then faded into irrelevance. He unfortunately lives in a world where hard work simply isn’t enough.

                • booty [he/him]@hexbear.net
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                  1 year ago

                  Yeah, it’s a real missed opportunity. I really like Naruto but at the end of the day it’s a comic book for 10 year old japanese kids in the early 2000s, and that’s the kind of shit that works for that demographic.

                  • zifnab25 [he/him, any]@hexbear.net
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                    1 year ago

                    Naruto’s extended cast really did fall away after the anime’s War Arc. They produced enormous amounts of filler and then just kinda wrote off / killed off anyone who wasn’t Naruto while focusing entirely on the Naruto/Sasuke rivalry. Then even that fell away so they could do some increasingly “My Power Is Bigger Than Your Power” dick waving bullshit into the closing arc.

                    Boruto was even worse, picking up straight off where the power-overscaled original story ended.

                    I wouldn’t even call it a problem of fascism, per say, since the bad guys were as over-the-top as anyone. It just didn’t do anything interesting with the premise, once everyone was God-Tier power level and just blasting away at each other with abandon.

    • worlds_okayest_mech_pilot [he/him]@hexbear.netOP
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      1 year ago

      True. Like a lot of things, superhero comics started out with working-class origins and generally took a stance on things, even in a liberal way. But they were definitely used to promote and encourage social change, such as the civil rights allegories of the X-Men, the racial topics with Black Panther, etc.

      But of course, comics got popular, and profitable. When capitalists got their hands on this art, they began to do their usual thing of twisting art, no matter how subversive it may have been, into reinforcing the status quo. Now, very few comics actually had real leftist messaging, but any progressive themes that they may have once had have been swallowed up by the Disney machine.

      The first multi-issue story arc in Marvel comics was actually about T’Challa, the Black Panther, leading a prosperous African nation in the comic Jungle Action (Yeah, that name is pretty racist now). The arc right after that has Black Panther fight the KKK, despite pushback from the public (dumbass white nerds) and even some Marvel staffers.

      Take the same arc in the modern movies, with Black Panther (2018). All the progressiveness is surface level. T’Challa allies with the CIA to fight comically-evil revolutionaries that make very real points about the status quo. Just embarrassing slop from the capitalists. All I can think about is that Disco Elysium quote, about how Capital can even subsume all critiques within itself, and turn them into propaganda.

      I’m no comics expert (I haven’t read all that many) and comics have always included many brainworms. But they definitely were cooler back when they weren’t written by billionaires to sell worldwide.