Super heroes stories destroyed

So interesting https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/30/podcasts/ezra-klein-podcast-ted-chiang-transcript.html

TED CHIANG: I understand the appeal of superhero stories, but I think they are problematic on a couple of levels. One is that they are fundamentally anti-egalitarian because they are always about this class of people who stand above everyone else. They have special powers. And even if they have special responsibilities, they are special. They are different. So that anti-egalitarianism, I think, yeah, that is definitely an issue.

But another aspect in which they can be problematic is, how is it that these special individuals are using their power? Because one of the things that I’m always interested in, when thinking about stories, is, is a story about reinforcing the status quo, or is it about overturning the status quo? And most of the most popular superhero stories, they are always about maintaining the status quo. Superheroes, they supposedly stand for justice. They further the cause of justice. But they always stick to your very limited idea of what constitutes a crime, basically the government idea of what constitutes a crime.

Superheroes pretty much never do anything about injustices perpetrated by the state. And in the developed world, certainly, you can, I think, make a good case that injustices committed by the state are far more serious than those caused by crime, by conventional criminality. The existing status quo involves things like vast wealth inequality and systemic racism and police brutality. And if you are really committed to justice, those are probably not things that you want to reinforce. Those are not things you want to preserve.

But that’s what superheroes always do. They’re always trying to keep things the way they are. And superheroes stories, they like to sort of present the world as being under a constant threat of attack. If they weren’t there, the world would fall into chaos. And this is actually kind of the same tactic used by TV shows like “24.” It’s a way to sort of implicitly justify the use of violence against anyone that we label a threat to the existing order. And it makes people defer to authority.

This is not like, I think, intrinsic to the idea of superheroes in and of itself. Anti-egalitarianism, that probably is intrinsic to the idea of superheroes. But the idea of reinforcing the status quo, that is not. You could tell superhero stories where superheroes are constantly fighting the power. They’re constantly tearing down the status quo. But we very rarely see that.

EZRA KLEIN: If you were to write a superhero story that was about overturning the status quo as opposed to reinforcing it, how would you do that? What would not the first issue, where they take out the White House, be, the sixth issue would be about?

TED CHIANG: That’s a good question. It’s not clear where you go with a story like that. But one of the attractive things about the story where you reinforce the status quo is that you could tell endless sequels. Because the end of the story leaves you pretty much where you were at the beginning of a story. And so, yeah, you can tell the same story over and over again. Stories about overturning the status quo, it’s very difficult to tell a sequel. Maybe you can tell a sequel, but it will look radically different than the first story. So that makes it hard to sustain them the way that large media companies want.

Some of that also has to do with the fact that the way Marvel and DC work is that they sort of have this continuity that they want to stick with. Let’s say if we got rid of the whole idea of there being ongoing continuity, so let’s say you told stories where every Superman story was a standalone Superman story. They’re like stories about Paul Bunyan. Paul Bunyan stories, they don’t fit into a chronology. No one asks, well, did this happen before that one? They’re pretty much disconnected.

So, in that way, you could tell individual stories where superheroes fight the government. And the more powerful your superhero is, that might be creating more problems. Like Superman, because he is so powerful, that poses difficulties. But someone like Batman, he is someone who could fight the government on an ongoing basis. The real problem is, again, from a media company standpoint, is that basically, you are writing a series — you’re publishing a title — about what we would consider a terrorist, someone who repeatedly attacks government facilities, someone who is, say, fighting the police or breaking people out of prison. That’s someone who we would very likely label a terrorist. And that’s not something that any big media company is going to really feel comfortable doing.

EZRA KLEIN: Is this the way superheroes end up being magic and not technology? Because as you’ve been saying this, I’ve been thinking about that distinction. And one issue here is that if you’re going to overturn the status quo without much power, then, obviously, you end up ruling. And for rule to be legitimate, it needs to be representative. But if you are the only one with the power, it’s not going to truly be representative.

And so you end up, pretty quickly, even as superheroes like Iron Man or Batman who are technologically powered, but there’s something they’re able to do that nobody else can do, the reason it’s very hard to have these stories go anywhere over time, putting aside sort of the one-off idea you’re offering here, is it you eventually need to build something representative? You have to build something that doesn’t know you are a superhero, right? A system that is not about you, the great savior. And that’s just a little bit intrinsically difficult for the medium. It is very, very difficult to move from a story about how much power this one person has to a story about how you moved into egalitarian, representative governing dynamics in a way that made marginal improvements across a lot of issues reasonably regularly over a long period of time.

TED CHIANG: Yes. So superheroes basically are magic. Even if they are ostensibly technological in their powers, their technology never behaves the way actual technology does. We have fleets of very expensive fighter jets. There’s no reason that there’s only one Iron Man. So pretty much all superheroes behave in a sort of magic way because the abilities are embodied in a single individual. Those abilities never really spread. As for the question of the difficulty of telling a story about what does real change look like, what does a better system of governance look like, that is a legitimately difficult question.

Because when you think about actual heroes in the world, people who affected great change, say, Martin Luther King, so Martin Luther King, Jr., yeah, he did not have superhero powers. He was a regular man, but he affected enormous change. The types of stories that you can tell about someone like that, they’re not as dramatic as a story about a superhero. Victory is not as clear. You don’t have the tidy ending where everything gets wrapped up.

Because when you start trying to tell a story like that, then you get into all the issues that you mentioned. Legitimate political change doesn’t come from one person, even a superpowered just person making decrees. Legitimate political change would have to come from a broad base of popular support, things like that. We don’t know what a comic book about that would look like. It might not be that interesting or popular. Or at least, we don’t know how to tell stories like that.