Yeah, but so is an insurance policy.
Batman vs. Superman: Killing and Expectations
- Thread starter Nikkolas
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all fictions
I hate you! (it's not against the rules!)
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Really? You want to go there?
Let's make analogies then.
I don't know if you noticed, but this theory of yours that, that as soon as a technologically superior individual or individuals show up, they are going to get worshipped, it is extremely similar to the false legend that the Aztecs worshipped the white Cortéz because they supposedly believed his landing was the return of the god Quetzalcoatl.
Uncomfortable comparision yet? Should I bring up other examples of natives seen as naive fools worshipping white men, like in The Man Who Would Be King and Heart of Darkness?
I have actually been respectful of faith and religious beliefs in this thread, by arguing believers wouldn't just equate Superman to their gods or worship him just because of his superpowers. It's you and Mortis Nuntius that are pushing what is no different than stupid gullible Savages narrative, but instead applied to the whole human race.
So go insult someone else please.
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The only one insulting people here is you by suggesting they have no right to worship whateverl they want for whatever reason they want.
Superman is not Cortez. For starters, he's not a self-interested colonist. More to the point, Superman is literally a godlike being who could end wars, poverty and bring technological innovation to the globe. If that is undeserving of reverence in your mind, that's fine. But you have no right to say that worshiping such a being is "shallow" or "wrong."
Frankly, your entire analogy to "stupid savages just don't know any better" falls apart since I myself would have no problem worshiping Superman for the reasons I've listed.
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xa na xa
A.E.I.O.U. - Antarticae est imperare orbi universo
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Did you really watch the Folding Ideas video (link)?
It's all about how the exact dismaying ways post-911 justification of violence have changed (in DCU and MCU superhero movies) and the political and cultural climate changes of early 21st century US society they reflect since then; not about violence justification in general fiction or comics pre-911.
"Don't worry. It's all okay. It's always worth the cost."
TURBODERP
aptly named
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I remember watching Man of Steel in theaters, and how shocked I was by the Smallville fight scene.
Remember when the chopper gets nailed and is going down? I 100% expected Superman to fly and try and stabilize the chopper or at least ease it down, and for Faora/Namek to capitalize on that.
Instead, Superman decides to help the one guy who fell and then take his time while letting the chopper fall (and not bother checking up on those dudes).
In the fight versus Zod, I kept thinking "Superman is gonna look and see the screaming civilians constantly surrounding him and try and take the fight out of the city as fast as possible." NOPE.
I don't have an issue with the death toll or Superman having to kill Zod. I take issue with the fact that in the big important fight scenes, Superman didn't even try to take the fight elsewhere, or prioritize helping people caught in the crossfire.
Remember when the chopper gets nailed and is going down? I 100% expected Superman to fly and try and stabilize the chopper or at least ease it down, and for Faora/Namek to capitalize on that.
Instead, Superman decides to help the one guy who fell and then take his time while letting the chopper fall (and not bother checking up on those dudes).
In the fight versus Zod, I kept thinking "Superman is gonna look and see the screaming civilians constantly surrounding him and try and take the fight out of the city as fast as possible." NOPE.
I don't have an issue with the death toll or Superman having to kill Zod. I take issue with the fact that in the big important fight scenes, Superman didn't even try to take the fight elsewhere, or prioritize helping people caught in the crossfire.
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I admit I was too busy reading everything else to watch the video at the time but I did watch it now. It's interesting but I don't think his criticisms are as timely as he makes them seem.
We were just talking in another thread about politics in comics and if superheroes are Liberal or Conservative. To me, all he's doing is echoing the "superheroes are conservative" idea which has been around for a while. Superheroes are by their nature vigilantes who think the legal system is a hindrance or just unsuited for the task at hand, whatever that task might be. Batman has been fucking with criminals, basically torturing them, for years before 9/11.
I suppose another issue I take with the video is I don't think anything he says is actually wrong like he's trying to make it out to be. He's clearly coming at this from an 'erosion of democracy and freedom" angle and I don't care about either of those things.
But in any event, if you are going to criticize lone individuals for going out, ignoring the law and doing what they personally feel is right, you might as well shut down dam near all superhero stories.
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Rarely gets confronted by real problems? He gets confronted by real problems all the time- whether by real problems you mean foes that can contest him, or difficult judgement calls.
There is this image of Superman always waltzing through issues and that really hasn't been the case since the silver age.
It feels to me like posts like this are more about the image of Superman rather than Superman the character, because his stories really aren't like that and haven't been for longer than I've been alive.
No, he really couldn't. Main comic Superman couldn't, and Man of Steel even less-so. He has great powers but even a swiss army knife isn't the right tool for everything and he can only be in one place at a time.
A pop image of people who don't read the stories thinks he could, but what's the last media depiction that actually presented that as the case?
Ehhhh....
Superman is in a position to stop some wars (but a lot of the messier conflicts aren't that simple that a single strong person can simply 'stop'), can't really make poverty go away, and he could release Kryptonian tech (in *some* versions) but that's about it.
Like, Man of Steel Superman isn't trained in Kryptonian technology. He can hand pieces of kryptonian tech to scientists- and we see scientists working on K tech- but he doesn't know how it works any more than they do going on.
The Jesus iconography didn't really bother me - or, really, I didn't really care - but we could probably use less Judeo-Christian symbolism in films on principle, true, and it would've been better if they had played up the rookie angle more explicitly, on that we are agreed.
In fairness, he saved that one guy because he was falling towards the ground faster, and before he could help the helicopter, he was being sucker punched down the street by someone with greater physical strength and being turned into a ragdoll simulator. And even then, his first instinct was to throw the Ranger he had just saved out of the way of a superhuman punch.
I think one of the things I've been stressing is that at very, very few points in the Superman VS Zod fight did the former gain control of the fight. He got in a few good punches, but he spends most of the fight literally being punched through buildings. I think it's hopelessly naive to assume that Superman - at that stage of development, against a threat of that magnitude - had the capacity to "take the fight out of the city as fast as possible", especially since Zod was explicit in his desire to prioritize killing as many humans as possible over killing Kal; Kal was just...physically in the way. And let's be honest: When you have a threat that can literally kill more people faster than you can physically save them, your priority should be taking out that threat as soon as possible if you're actually trying to save lives.
Like I said, maybe the film shouldn't have given Superman a threat he could barely handle. I understand that avenue of complaint. I understand that sometimes we want stories about superpowered, unironic heroism without having to explore how horrifying actual, real-life superpowers would actually be on society and on civilization. But I respect that the film chose to do what it did. I like that the film goes "doing good is hard because life isn't black-and-white, but you do it anyways". I'm glad that the film was honest about the kind of damage and death toll superhero fights would actually have, and that the film didn't go out of its way to contrive a situation in which Superman magically saves everything.
TURBODERP
aptly named
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The thing is that even when the fight was...even (which it was for a decent amount), Superman didn't really even try to get Zod out of the city. The reason the fight even goes into orbit is because Zod takes it there.
Zod also did not say nor prioritize killing humans over killing Kal. He says that he will make them suffer and kill them, in order to hurt Kal more, but it's made pretty clear that he's going to beat the crap out of Kal and make him watch that as punishment for destroying Zod's dreams and Krypton's future. This is also shown because Zod does not actually intentionally target civilians during the fight until the very end.
I think what you're saying is all valid in terms of what the film could have shown, but the film did not actually show this. If instead, we saw Zod actually going out of his way to target civilians even a few times, Superman taking the hits/attempting to stop Zod from doing so and getting punished by such a powerful opponent as a result, it would make more sense. Then, by the end of the fight, when Superman is trying to divert Zod's gaze, it becomes even tougher because Kal is already badly injured, etc.
Hell, even if Kal tried covering Zod's eyes with his hand and the beams started burning through, forcing Kal to snap Zod's neck with adrenaline-driven strength, I'd buy that as a better finish than what we got.
TURBODERP
aptly named
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Like, even when Superman is not in control of a fight, he should still try and attempt to focus on saving lives/getting a super opponent out of the city, even at his own risk. Even if he fails.
We see this in Superman vs Doomsday in pretty much all incarnations (sans the latest to an extent). Superman can't actually stop Doomsday from reaching the city. Superman is not in control of the fight during this struggle, and even gets badly injured doing so, but he actively tries and focuses on the "save civilians even at my expense" thing.
It also makes a decision to kill even more powerful because it shows how much Superman values life, that he will put his own on the line to protect others'.
We see this in Superman vs Doomsday in pretty much all incarnations (sans the latest to an extent). Superman can't actually stop Doomsday from reaching the city. Superman is not in control of the fight during this struggle, and even gets badly injured doing so, but he actively tries and focuses on the "save civilians even at my expense" thing.
It also makes a decision to kill even more powerful because it shows how much Superman values life, that he will put his own on the line to protect others'.
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I guess as I said in the Comics thread, my views have been strongly influenced by Red Son. It definitely put forth the idea that the only thing stopping Superman from fixing everything is a different set of morals.
Back when I first watched BvS, I made a topic on SB about what are the obligations of someone like Superman. Does he owe is to us to fix everything? Does he have a right to think of his own personal happiness first?
Unhappy Anchovy linked me to this comic which, while comedic, I think gets the point across well.
Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal - 2011-07-13
It's that kind of idea I find fascinating.
Rather than the specific symbolism, it's that Superman is played up so much as an icon, when his actions are far more that of a rookie and he hasn't done enough to be attached to iconography at that point.
I mean, no wonder he's so down in BvS, everyone seems to have attached the Superman reputation and it's backlash to him on full when he was in all of one major conflict and in over his head during it!
Like, for all that I criticize him, if I met MoSupes, I'd give him a hug, then ask if he wanted to sit down and discuss rescue tactics.
Hm, but it's not that Marvel films have no casualties or even low casualties all the time. It's just we see actions intended to minimize it. Guardians 1, we had pirates trying to protect a city to partial success and a heroic police force response almost all wiped out. Both these actions saved a lot of lives, and a lot of lives were lost in them as well. Avengers, Cap was sending police and local responders out as much as anything, and there was clearly not only damage but deaths, the Avengers didn't save everyone by any means, but they tried.
I think that's what most people here are pressing- it's not whether they succeed that matters, they just had to try, and make some difference.
Note on Red Son, even there Superman took decades to do so. And his methods came at high cost, he was working continually to do so.
Red Son Superman changed the world and it was a slow, energy intensive process that took a heck of a lot of work.
Now if you say, "Over the course of decades, Superman can really change the world and make it a Utopia," I say, sure! I'm with that. He helps out scientists a lot, he does diffuse some wars and make people think twice and minimize disasters and does a lot of good. Part of the reason there's not more change is simply because the comics are real-world based, and part of it is floating timeline where Superman's rarely been active more than a decade.
My point is it's not simply a matter of Superman holding back/not doing enough that prevents change like Red Son, because Red Son, a decade after he first appeared, only made moderate progress, it took time for things to really sink in and prosperity to be widespread and that majorly different. Superman was active for fifty years in that story.
Superman's not a godlike figure who can easily solve these problems. He's a strong figure who can add his work to our own and help us plow forward and defeat these problems together.
Man of Steel Superman? He's been active, what, maybe a year? The kid doesn't need these kinds of expectations!
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Imrix
Periodically Malevolent QM
Yeah, and, to put it more politely, that doesn't track. The MCU consistently tries to emphasise a heroic effort to minimise the casualties of superhuman violence, because like that Folding Ideas video said, it understands that superheroes are supposed to save people, not just stop bad guys. Then on top of that, it also acknowledges that even this heroic effort is not enough, would never be enough, and that this would spur the nations of the world into legislative action which, for all that Civil War fumbled its handling of the issue by muddying Cap's principled objections with a personal focus, did actually succeed in forcing the most destructive Avengers to submit themselves to governmental authority.
It's not a perfect portrayal of superheroic violence, no. But it's a damn sight better than the DCEU, and comparing the two is frankly kind of insulting.
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It's very convenient you took away what you wanted from that FI video considering it equally condemns Iron Man's actions and all the buildings being destroyed. I mean, I know Marvel can't make anything insightful to save their lives and all that happens is a lot of destroyed property while people magically vanish but the video you yourself reference is against you.
I should also note that no one on DCEU's hero team is literally an uncontrolled rage monster that does nothing but destroy yet somehow never kills innocent people because.............................
Imrix
Periodically Malevolent QM
Except the thing is the MCU's treatment of Iron Man is on board with that. They're fully aware that Tony Stark is a screwup who only learns responsibility and to trust others over the course of multiple movies, which, again, culminates in submitting himself to governmental authority.
Claudette Savagely
Ball of flies
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Your really strong level personal of identification with a franchise is somewhat unusual mate, and you could probably stand to examine why that is.
Edit: "frankly insulting"? I'm talking about badly executed corporate product here but anyone else might think we were discussing the virtues of your sainted mother.
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Ser_Serendipity
Building Character
"I don't have anything clever to say; stop caring so much about my ill-considered opinions." What is this buddy, amateur hour?
all fictions
I hate you! (it's not against the rules!)
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There is clearly no point in continuing this convo if you keep missing the point so thoroughly you might as well speak from a parallel universe.
Hint: just taking whatever word I said and sprinkling them in your reply doesn't make it seem like you actually read what I'm saying. For starters, it's not the act of worshipping Superman that I said that is shallow, you silly man.
I agree that a comparison isn't fair, but not in the way you're thinking. The films are trying to do different things. The MCU is able to emphasize the "heroic effort to minimize the casualties of superhuman violence" because superhuman violence in the MCU is extremely sanitized. I like the MCU, all things said and told, but one of the things that has always frustrated me is the lack of scale; it's difficult to take the level of violence in the MCU seriously when the Hammer drones in Iron Man 2 - supposedly a program designed to bolster the capacity of the United States armed forces - have weapons with destructive power less potent than hand grenades, when alien invaders have capabilities significantly less potent than modern helicopter gunships, when the Ultron robots are about as threatening as Putty Patrollers from Power Rangers. The fight chereography in the MCU has always been a Dynasty Warriors-like hack-fest wish-fulfillment fantasy where the protagonists get to face off against dozens - if not hundreds - of mooks about as threatening as tissue paper.
Which is fine. That's the way the MCU wants to tell its story, and that comes with its own narrative strengths. Man of Steel, however, gives for Superman's debut an ensemble of enemies that outclass him at almost every turn. That's the difference between praising your mother's performance in Tetris in her first-time video game experience and criticizing your mother's performance in Dark Souls in her first-time video game experience. I'm not saying this to be insulting, and I can easily agree to the idea that the way Man of Steel approached its story was not without its flaws; I'm just saying that I respect what Man of Steel did. However, to then compare the two with the idea that one of them is "a damn sight better" is...well, to use your words, "frankly kind of insulting", but not in the way you think it is.
It's also worth pointing out that it's not like the MCU hasn't committed a lot of the same sins. I mean, sure, the MCU has had character development through multiple films, but I think it's unfair to use an entire franchise as a point of comparison against a single film, and single films in the MCU suffer from a lot of the same problems that are being mentioned here. Does nobody remember that in the aftermath of the invasion of New York, the first thing the heroes do - instead of mourning the damage caused by the invasion - is to joke about eating at a shawarma restaurant? Or how a battle involving three superweapons over Washington, D.C., ends with Black Widow giving one-liners to a government subcommittee? Or how Thor deliberately blew up a oil truck in an urban combat environment while civilians were evacuating? Or how everyone is all smiles after a costly battle that involved a city nearly being used as a world-ending kinetic strike with massive casualties? Or how the whole idea of Tony suffering from PTSD after New York or guilt after Sokovia - or the damages and costs inflicted therein - wasn't even touched on until future films so as to not get in the way of "and then everyone was happy" endings?
Again, I'm not trying to diss the MCU. I'm a heck of a lot more invested in the MCU than I am in the DCEU, which - beyond Man of Steel - reeks of a cynical cash grab to screw with Marvel. I'm just having this really strange sense that there's this weird double standard going on here.
Claudette Savagely
Ball of flies
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The notion that Marvel movies portray superheroic responsibility more effectively than DC movies,after such shambolic spectacles as the evacuation of Socovia by 4 tiny flying taxis and one big boat, Tony still being a free man after making Ultron, or a giant very explosive smash up in an airport involving a pressganged 15 year old as one of the combatants, is an interesting one. Quite why it persists is even more interesting.
Is it because people confuse small tokenistic efforts at damage mitigation with genuinely effective action? Is it because the characters doing these silly things are portrayed as personable and affable individuals, so when they do stuff like make super death AIs or blow up giant ships right above a city, the audience is more willing to excuse their actions on the basis of strong personal identification? Maybe it's a much broader problem, where the kind of framing that pervades most superhero comic books, wherein a chosen few must do anything necessary to hold back the dark (and therefore can't be subject to the normal moral constraints that would otherwise bind powerful actors) translates really easily to the big screen, and fans are already primed to accept that kind of thinking?
Maybe it's all of the above.
Maybe superhero movies of all kinds have serious problems with the way they depict their subjects, and maybe this doesn't constitute a "frankly insulting" personal attack on the people who like that sort of thing.
Maybe it's ok to say "actually yeah this whole genre has internal problems that are pretty fundamental and which are no less serious from franchise to franchise, corporate property to corporate property"
Who knows.
Is it because people confuse small tokenistic efforts at damage mitigation with genuinely effective action? Is it because the characters doing these silly things are portrayed as personable and affable individuals, so when they do stuff like make super death AIs or blow up giant ships right above a city, the audience is more willing to excuse their actions on the basis of strong personal identification? Maybe it's a much broader problem, where the kind of framing that pervades most superhero comic books, wherein a chosen few must do anything necessary to hold back the dark (and therefore can't be subject to the normal moral constraints that would otherwise bind powerful actors) translates really easily to the big screen, and fans are already primed to accept that kind of thinking?
Maybe it's all of the above.
Maybe superhero movies of all kinds have serious problems with the way they depict their subjects, and maybe this doesn't constitute a "frankly insulting" personal attack on the people who like that sort of thing.
Maybe it's ok to say "actually yeah this whole genre has internal problems that are pretty fundamental and which are no less serious from franchise to franchise, corporate property to corporate property"
Who knows.
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Okay, first off, I respect you and I think you're trying to be respectful to religions. That's cool. That's what I'm trying to do, too. It's why I'm perplexed by your statements.
I did read what you said and disagree with all of it.
Let's unpack what you say then.
You cite Superman's lack of a "message" or "preaching" as a refutation of his worth as religious symbol. That's wrong.
You later go onto acknowledge the presence of Raelianism which, again, refutes your entire point here. Your point being that because we see other Kryptonians, because everything about Superman is "known" and "science", that Superman as a religious symbol doesn't work.
To cap it all off....
Your entire argument is that only ignorant, less advanced people could worship Superman. If we didn't know where he came from, if we didn't know how his powers worked, then he could be a religious symbol. The uninformed would venerate him, no one else.
If this is not what you are saying, could you please clarify because I don't see how I could have misinterpreted what you said. It all seemed pretty obvious to me.
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True, but this is a separate matter than whether or not intent to avoid casualties is shown. Hulk is used because he's one of the two biggest powerhouses on Earth, 95% of the time is the quite controllable Banner, and even as the Hulk he's not a blind rage monster. If I was in A1 and was running from aliens and ran right into Hulk, he might give me a Look and then just step past to smash an alien. A2:AoU was different, but that was under outside force (and still fairly undirected, it was more flailing than ranging at people specifically until Tony showed up). And showed the Avengers did have contingencies for if he did go berserk. Including stuff like Tony having a 'grab' function on the arm of the Hulkbuster purely so he can lift up Hulk and fly him away from a location.
I mean, I'd be shocked if he didn't kill people with the under-construction-building collapse in A2 (which also lead to him quitting the team and getting away from everything), but he's also played a major role in saving the Earth and there's an equation there between 'is it more useful to have him around to smash these frankly huge threats, or more dangerous in case he loses control?'. When you're facing stuff like the Avengers 1 invasion the answer is certainly 'worth it,' but in other situations it can be much more up in the air.
Again, visual storytelling. The Marvel fights with regularity show heroes and other people actively working to minimize casualties in a way that is obviously apparent in the battles themselves.
Irresponsibility is more likely to be in the chain of events before or after the fight.
Personally I find that sort of argument especially poor. It's not about moral constraints being off- police officers and other nonpowered people are doing the same thing the Avengers are in Avengers 1, and in Guardians of the Galaxy we have police and pirates fighting side by side. Rather than morals being off, morals look most assuredly on for a wide number of people doing what they can. The Avengers are the ones with the power to enact the greatest resistance in their movie, but "fighting against some big destructive thing results in damage," does not equal removal of normal more constraints under any circumstance I can think of.
Even with people noting how Man of Steel is lacking in these moments, it's not 'morals off.' It's 'could've done better/clear sign he's a rookie/etc.'. None of these characters are evil or morals-off for being in a situation that results in mass destruction, when their purpose there is to end it.
Writing off efforts to minimize damage as token is erasing a very fundamental part of the movies that undermines that line of reasoning strongly.
Big destructive hero fights don't automatically have the problems you're ascribing to them, though, and I think there's a conflating of the hero's motives, often to minimize damage in a way very visibly seen and which is not particularly problematic, with the creators, which is to show us a big flashy fights where big threats are defeated (which is still not a pro-destruction moral message).
I mean, sure, Age of Ultron, Civil War, those are the heroes' bad. You can make a solid argument about some of Marvel's movies raising serious questions about the hero's moral positions.
Avengers 1, Guardians of the Galaxy, though? Not so much. They handle the fights, and specifically the character's approaches to the fights, in ways that don't really hit some of the negative points you name.
I think the idea that they're all handling it the same in a fundamental way is overly simplistic and, when looking at differences in plot, visual storytelling, and most importantly what characters do and why, there are definite major differences among them and many do not really fit your thesis. The idea that they're presenting an argument for characters being in situations where normal moral constraints don't apply strikes me as especially off-base, as quite often the point is the opposite, presenting characters focusing on helping even when the world is literally in danger of coming to an end over those who do want to cut moral corners and say it doesn't apply to save the day.
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I haven't seen anything since Avengers 1. Well, I watched part of Iron Man 3 but I didn't really pay attention because Tony Stark offends my senses.
I thought about watching more MCU but the ones I've seen were meh-to-terrible with Thor 1 being my favorite. And The Avengers was so bad that I really couldn't see myself watching another movie like that. Whedon really let me down. We're talking Alien Resurrection levels of let me down.
Maybe I should get around to watching some of the newer stuff but I'm broke enough as it is without spending money on movies I might hate. Maybe I can bum the movies off some friends of mine.
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You don't have to like it or enjoy it- if it's not your thing, don't force yourself.
It's merely on the topic of heroes trying to minimize damage, and especially the visual storytelling thereof, where this is very definitely a theme. Whether one did or didn't like Avengers doesn't change that the heroes actions there were solidly on the side of trying to save who they could, when they could, and the presence of Hulk certainly didn't change that, seeing his focus on destroying the giant flying alien war beasts who were actively and deliberately causing damage.