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: So there have been a couple tries at that, obviously, over always on the side of the main stories. But there was one series called “The Authority,” particularly during the war on terror, where they hand over a George W. Bush stand-in to the aliens to end a war. There’s another in the DC universe called “Injustice,” where Superman, after a tragic loss in a particular dimension, basically, it creates a fascist super-regime, trying to impose justice on a world that has too little of it.
And it always seems to be the problem with those stories, is that they never know where to go with them. It always collapses immediately into fascism. They don’t know how to tell stories about governance. 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.
— Why Sci-Fi Legend Ted Chiang Fears Capitalism, Not A.I.
The idea that Superheroes are not often portrayed as fighting against government entities and antagonists and corruption is a really weird idea, considering just how often they occur in these storylines. One of the most famous Batman scenes in media, where he’s comforting a dying child, the villain of that story is Amanda Waller. The 3 most popular superheroes of all time, Batman, Superman, and Spiderman, all have massive antagonists rooted either in government corruption or capitalist establishment.
Injustice definitely wasn’t really a well-written story at all, but it easily falling into fascism was very much an intentional theme, there was a point to that. The idea that any ideology is susceptible to fascism, moreso than you may think, especially one founded by Superman. The very idea of Superman, A “superman”, is often recited in Nazi ideology and literature, the overman, the ubermensch. Not a very well articulated point, but a point nonetheless.
The line about an obsession with continuity is also strange in the case of DC, considering how often crisis-event continuity resets happen. It’s weird to see someone speak with such certainty about Superhero media while seemingly knowing nothing.
