When you spend most of your waking hours alienated and powerless, it's nice to let the imagination wander, and that's exactly to what these stories cater. Unfortunately, too many people start believing in the bullshit.
Even as someone who likes it...It is pretty wild to sometimes contemplate how effective superheroes have been as a counterrevolutionary force. They have essentially not only served as a framework for the concept of "great man theory" of history, but also taught multiple generations of people that the truest morality is having absolute power and doing as little with it as possible.
Exactly; there's a reference to Nietzsche's master/slave morality in there somewhere, but I'm too much of an uneducated pleb to articulate it.
As long as I'm at the lathe, though, I'm guessing that there's a non-zero chance that Breitbart-loving CHUDs eventually deem Captain America: The First Avenger to be "too political" and/or "glorifying Marxist totalitarianism" because Cap punches Hitler, culminating in a Twitter panic wherein a bunch of boomers tweet videos of themselves smashing their Rokus and Fire sticks to protest a Marvel movie made in 2011. Many liberals are scratched during the incident.
It's power fantasy. Honestly...I sometimes fantasize about what I would do if I had force powers or if I had a healing factor.
It's juvenile I concede...but it is a real thing I think and experience and like to believe I'd do something with.
When you spend most of your waking hours alienated and powerless, it's nice to let the imagination wander, and that's exactly to what these stories cater. Unfortunately, too many people start believing in the bullshit.
Even as someone who likes it...It is pretty wild to sometimes contemplate how effective superheroes have been as a counterrevolutionary force. They have essentially not only served as a framework for the concept of "great man theory" of history, but also taught multiple generations of people that the truest morality is having absolute power and doing as little with it as possible.
Exactly; there's a reference to Nietzsche's master/slave morality in there somewhere, but I'm too much of an uneducated pleb to articulate it.
As long as I'm at the lathe, though, I'm guessing that there's a non-zero chance that Breitbart-loving CHUDs eventually deem Captain America: The First Avenger to be "too political" and/or "glorifying Marxist totalitarianism" because Cap punches Hitler, culminating in a Twitter panic wherein a bunch of boomers tweet videos of themselves smashing their Rokus and Fire sticks to protest a Marvel movie made in 2011. Many liberals are scratched during the incident.