One of the more frustrating parts of consuming superhero content is putting up with “copganda” bs. It can be similar to watching police procedurals sometimes - often it will have a lot of the same flawed logic. Like the idea that sending someone to prison is the same as solving a problem. Or the idea that you should never support a civilian breaking the law, even if that law is unjust, and never mind the fact that the police (and vigilantes in comics) also break the law.
But the main thing that I’ve been thinking about lately is superhero media’s tendency to make all criminals like...crazy maniacs? murderers? or even just sadistic in general.
Like, for example, the vast majority of car thieves are not going to be ok with murdering someone. Most thieves in general are not going to want to kill anyone. Aside from the fact that murdering someone will land you in much more trouble than theft, the idea that all criminals are willing to hurt/kill people is copganda brain rot
And yet a lot of superhero media will have thieves just like...open fire into a crowd or some shit. Or even worse, they’ll have a random criminal be totally down for child murder for no reason?? Like, in a lot of Batman content, they’ll have thieves and drug dealers respond to Robin with immediate murderous intent, which is just....not how it would go down in reality. Obviously it’s possible for people to react violently when startled, and some people are going to be sadistic bastards, but if you are creating a world where the vast majority of criminals are down for child murder, then you might want to examine where you got the idea that all criminals are inherently monstrous.
For a real life example of what I’m talking about - when a car thief accidentally steals a car with a child in it, the vast, vast majority of the time, they will take the kid somewhere safe and then ditch the car. Because most car thieves, like most people in general, don’t want to hurt or kill an innocent kid.
Idk, it’s just frustrating how prevalent copganda attitudes are in comics and superhero stuff in general. Some stories handle it pretty well - that one episode of Justice League Unlimited that showed the Flash treating his “villains” with compassion and getting them into mental health treatment is one of my favorite moments of that show. And some Batman stories do tackle the idea that poverty is at the root of most crime, and have Bruce Wayne trying to fix that. But at the end of the day, most superhero stuff is going to have the heroes hauling all the “evil” bad guys into prison, and they don’t really get into the ethics of all of that.
I feel like part of this problem is just caused by writers needing to have high stakes for their stories - having criminals trying to kill the hero all the time is a lazy easy way to create tension. But a bigger part of the problem is our societal tendency to swallow the narrative that all criminals are inherently bad people that just want to hurt others
