Is the "professor x just made a bunch of child soldiers" argument as tired as the "If Batman donated all the money it took to become Batman he'd do more good" line?
.No, but I think there’s an interesting reason why it’s not, and it has a lot to do with textual intent.
In Batman comics, Batman IS the solution to the problems with Gotham City, which we know because WE ARE READING BATMAN COMICS AND THAT IS THE PREMISE, AND IF YOU DON’T UNDERSTAND THAT YOU DON’T UNDERSTAND FICTION. Billionaires in the real world? Terrible, inherently immoral. Billionaires in the fictional universe that has shit like Green Lantern rings and x-ray eyes? Literally the only thing keeping a crocodile man from eating your face. Bruce Wayne is a philanthropist on the side, but, as I’ve written before, writing a check to the local school district or offering comprehensive health insurance to employees of Wayne Industries does not solve the problem of A Murder Clown Is Poisoning The Water Supply Right Now. I do not understand why people claim they want to see fucking Batman meet with his accountant and figure out if construction of the Thomas and Martha Wayne Memorial Humanities Building at Hudson University is a good tax write-off for 20 God damned pages every week, which I assure you they do not actually want, but that’s not the point, really. The point is disingenuous refusal to engage with the text. The actual text of Batman comics is that Batman is a good idea.
The actual text of X-Men comics is that Professor X gathered teenagers and, in the guise of a school, turned them into a secretive paramilitary strike force that went on missions where they were sometimes killed. The argument is whether that’s the best way to go about things, which is an argument that people have within those comics. The text tends to come down on the side that he was right to do so because the alternative is getting murdered by giant purple robots made of racism, but there’s still an exploration. It’s why Cyclops is an interesting character, because he’s The Most X-Man — the guy who found out at 15 that he had to learn how to be really good at aiming the uncontrollable laser beams concussive force blasts that shoot out of his eyes because the alternative was that he and everyone he cared about was going to die. Like, that’s something that’s gonna fuck you up pretty bad, but according to the past 50 years of X-Men comics, it’s also 100% true.
With Batman, the question is not “why doesn’t Batman provide real solutions to to the real-world root causes of crime” — because that’s an astoundingly stupid question to ask — it’s “how is Batman going to solve the problems that are presented to him in this fictional universe that is uniquely built around him?”
With the X-Men, the question is usually “how are the X-Men going to survive this experience?” The idea of questioning whether Professor X was wrong all this time is a core component of that.
The former is refusing to engage with the premise. The latter is asking the questions the premise invites. If you don’t like the premise, you don’t have to engage with the media. There’s a lot of stuff out there and if you don’t like Batman because that idea doesn’t make sense to you, I’m not going to hold it against you. I will, however, hold it against you if you try to break the premise to make it worse.
Here’s a huge tangent where I just know I’m gonna get lost in the woods:
I actually feel a similar way to opinions I’ve seen about the MCU, and how it’s built around a very militaristic idea of superheroes, which makes some people uncomfortable. And, you know, that’s fair! Those movies are built around that idea, because they were built on the foundation of a movie that was the absolute embodiment of transitioning from traditional action movies (ie, stories about loose cannon cops, spies, space marines, Kurt Thomas, and other heroes who usually have the backing of a larger organization) and superhero stories (which are almost always about heroes acting independently of, and occasionally in opposition to, those same larger forces). Those movies never really get away from the idea that Tony Stark, the guy who sets the tone for the entire roster of films to follow, is fundamentally a dude whose primary character trait and fatal flaw are that he always believes he can solve his problems by building a bigger gun. The militarized aspect of S.H.I.E.L.D. and the Avengers spins out of this as both a structural result of the action to superhero genre transition, and as a convenience to get Iron Man (former defense contractor), Captain America (literal soldier), Black Widow (spy), the Hulk (military scientist) and Hawkeye (for some reason a spy like in The Ultimates and not a redneck carny like he should’ve been). The odd man out is Thor, which, for all the problems with those first two Avengers movies, is why he first shows up as an antagonist in the first one and then completely bails on the whole thing to go deal with his own stuff on the second one. The military structure is literal plot structure.
So yeah, that gets kind of weird when it filters down to Spider-Man. A lot of that weirdness has to do with things that are beyond the control of the universe, in that Marvel’s most beloved character, the second big success the company ever had whose popularity has endured much stronger than the first one, the flagship superhero who was literally on their paychecks and has never not been popular, had to be a late addition to a universe that already had, like, the Vision in it.
But because they had to work within those constraints, they had to work within the premise they were already given. It makes perfect sense that in that universe, Peter Parker would look up to the world’s most famous superhero nerd, and it makes sense that Iron Man would see Peter as this blank slate that he could stop from making the mistakes that had defined his life. That, to me, is a really interesting dynamic, but it’s also one that requires Spider-Man to take a lot of cues from Iron Man, which is not a dynamic that those two characters ever had in the source material. It winds up giving them different consequences.
And like, if that’s not your thing, I get it. Spider-Man being recruited by the superhero military and having a high-tech suit that talks to him is a jarring shift, even if they do a good job of bringing in most of the core tenets of the character — something about responsibility and… I wanna say… muscles? Is it muscles? — which I think they did. But, if you don’t like that setup, which is a product of the larger universe, then you don’t have to buy into the premise. Like, yeah, it sucks that you’re fundamentally not going to dig this Spider-Man movie, but how do you think I feel? I’m a Batman guy and I literally have to see these movies with their endless terrible premises for my job.
Back when Far From Home came out, I remember seeing someone talk about how the MCU Peter Parker was fundamentally flawed because he didn’t have Uncle Ben, and I don’t think that’s correct. For one thing, Spidey pretty clearly has an Uncle Ben in that movie, it’s just that the reference to him in Civil War is a little less explicit than it usually is, presumably because we’ve seen Uncle Ben die on screen like five times since 2002. Second, it actually makes it make more sense that he’d latch onto the next influential father figure who walked through his front door. Third, even if we got way more Uncle Ben in those movies, it wouldn’t change the fact that the Peter/Tony Stark relationship and the way it played out was a function of the larger universe and the way those two characters had to interact within it. I don’t want to generalize too much or claim to know what people are thinking better than they do, but I’d suspect that if you don’t like that stuff in Spider-Man, the thing you really don’t like is the larger structure of this take on the characters. And that’s fair!
That’s not to say that a premise can’t be bad, or that a twist on a character that posits a new premise is always good by nature of including some of the stuff that works. Again, I’m a Batman guy, and the last three movies to feature Batman are bad partly because the premise is fundamentally broken (the other parts are literally everything else about those movies because they are irredeemably terrible on virtually every level). But, you know, none of them have Batman writing a check instead of fighting crime, so that’s something.
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