Superhero Re-imagining – Rise of the Expies

I have been thinking about superheroes again.

I blame the Avengers. And the book Seven Wonders. And Mark Waid. And Cirque du Soleil, oddly enough. Cirque are the word leaders in good looking spandex outfits right now – they made the most recent Spiderman costume. They’re also the world leader in people doing amazingly athletic things in spandex (you may argue the Olympics have them beat – I disagree).

The recent-ish trend in comics is to acknowledge that, after 80 odd years of superheroes, there really aren’t any interesting new ideas left for superheroes. You really can’t come up with a new set of superpowers that hasn’t been done before. So the new approach is deconstruction and The Expy (warning! Tv Tropes link!). Alan Moore started the thing with Watchmen. Mark Waid did it recently with Irredeemable (Superman) and Insufferable (Batman). There are plenty of examples in between.

The deconstructed expy approach had some definite advantages. It lets the writer play with the tropes of the original, all the raw material of underwear pervert comics, without having to deal with the sacred cows of the original’s iconic stuff. As one reviewer of the Avengers noted, the original material suffers from time-shifting – characters from the 30s, or even the 60s, are overwhelmingly white, and there aren’t a lot of good roles for women. DC spent a lot of time trying to fix that (go Gail Simone!), then more recently decided to give up on diversity and double-down on the straight white male demographic. But you can only do so much with the originals – Batman will always be a rich white guy with emotional problems. Superman will always be a Christian white guy with traditional values. Captain America, symbol of the nation, will always be a white guy. Wonder Woman will always be a white woman who fights crime with a bathing suit and bondage gear. You can’t change the iconic elements of the character too far before the pop culture zeitgeist pushes back. The expy lets you change things in ways the originals can’t be changed, to tell new, interesting stories.

That’s the background I’m coming from right now.

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Authoritarian Apologism

(Originally posted here)

In a comment on a friend’s post, something that’s been bugging me finally came together in my head.

In various recent events (Peter Watts’ Squidgate, the g20 mess, etc.), there has been a bunch of commenters (live and on the net, natch) who seem to cheer louder the more it looks like the police have abused their power. These are the folks who say things like “if a cop tells you to do something, you do it *immediately* or you deserve what happens to you”, “if you haven’t worn a uniform, you don’t get to complain”, etc.

The general idea of Authoritarian Apologism is that anyone that gets beaten up by the police, or the border guards, or anyone with a bade or a uniform, deserves what they get. That those forces are always justified in whatever they do to their citizens.

I’ve been trying to figure out what it is that drives me so nuts about this position, besides the obvious. It finally clicked today – it’s the same logical fallacy that drives Rape Culture victim-blaming and shunning of people who are ill. It’s the idea that Bad things don’t happen to Good people. So when bad things happen to someone previously presumed to be Good, the Apologist makes the inference that the person must be Bad. Because the alternative is that Bad things *do* happen to Good people. And that’s terrifying – the Apologist naturally sees zirself as a Good person. If something bad can happen to some random writer, to some random jogger or random tourist, then it means that something bad can happen to *me*!

And a lot of people can’t face that. So they go to great lengths to come up with reasons why people deserve to be beaten by cops, to be raped by their “friend”, to get cancer or AIDS. I mean, of course that guy deserved to be arrested and held in a pen in the rain overnight with no drinking water – did you *see* what he was wearing? He was *asking* for it! Good thing I’d never do something like that, so I’m safe.

It’s all about Othering victims so that the Apologist can feel safe knowing that bad things only happen to bad people. It’s about fear, and letting that fear make your world ever smaller.