#superhero meta

[blitzy-wing]

The trope/headcanon I simply adore is when the super powered character kinda loses control of their powers in a very harmless and non-destructive way when they're happy and content.

[faultsandfractures]

I’m surprised more superhero narratives don’t equate it to a kind of blood sport, especially in comic book worlds where superhumans are common and the status quo never changes.

The job description of a superhero is to fight and die on the world stage. Enough heroes have shrugged off serious injury that it’s barely even seen as a battle if they aren’t beaten half to death. Many have been training since childhood, but can you name a retired superhero?

A human could never do this every night, but the heroes are superhuman. With great power comes great responsibility, you know? Sacrifice everything for the world, but say these quips while you do it. The fans won’t like it if the no-kill rule is broken, or if the persona slips. Superhero fights are both high-stakes and out of control, so how many civilians cope by treating it like just another form of media? Nobody important ever dies, so it’s just another show.

[pigtailedgirl]

Ooo Good Video

Despite being years ago this is really good reasoning on what the MCU set up for it’s main characters. The types of heroes. Why Clint never had character in the Avengers group. It explains why I was drawn to certain stories. It also explains why the MCU is problemed for me the longer it goes. The clash in not having the character and story ideologies really contrast and clash in their interaction when they should, and then ultimately abandoning them all for the sake of having them all smash together and sell. He really points out the brand wants infinite heroes, but we, the watcher and reader don’t examine why we align with our heroes.

Disinterest in the narrative, in knowing what the heroes are fighting for. 

When they come up against Thanos, did he and they clash on any ideological levels? Does Tony and Steve work as an ideological clash  in CACW like Steve versus Shield did in TWS? Does pairing them re Steve/Shield/Peggy or Tony/Shield or Steve/Tony or say AOU aligning Bruce/Tony versus Thor 3 with Hulk/Bruce/Thor make our heroes and stories do good moral wise or turn them from their heroes ideals?

Love his end question that subverts the what superpower you want fantasy and common talk “If you could have any superpower, how would you use it?” That’s the moral and story question.

[thejakeformerlyknownasprince]

ooh, please talk about how animorphs as a series exists in conversation with comic books!

Here it is, a whole bunch of questionably-organized thoughts off the top of my head (because if I wrote it out properly it’d be an entire dissertation): 

Animorphs as Graphic Novels

Superhero team-up plot

Need for secrecy and “dual identities”, including through hiding abilities from loved ones and civilians

Kids’ powers given by science which no other human possesses — they are extraordinary, “unique to the universe” (MM3)

Small team of fighters with variations on similar powers (strength, speed, stealth, etc. divided among morphs)

Inability to trust authority, forcing them to take fight into own (amateur) hands

Secret Invasion: the aliens are in disguise, characters take on others’ appearances and identities

Use of exposition conceits and contrivances

Notably eschews Magic Tree House convention of putting all exposition into prologue

Also does not follow Babysitters’ Club convention of info-dump (thank Jeebus)

Follows in convention of using various devices (memory recordings, personal introductions, dialogue) to introduce the reader to the plot

When these occur, deliberately written w/ character voices

Stylistic descriptions

Heavy use of onomatopoeia

Short sentences, short paragraphs, short words

Thought-speak

Written with hypertext symbols/pointed brackets

In comics, used to denote a translation from a foreign language (possibly b/c guillemets popular in French and Italian texts?)

In Animorphs, used to denote not-quite-real and non-audible nature of this type of speech

Simultaneous condemnation and celebration of need for lawbreaking and violence

Explorations of impermanent death

Rachel and Tobias in MM2; Jake in MM3 and #11; all of them in MM4; David (maybe) in #48, David definitely in #22; Cassie, Tobias, Rachel, maybe Ax in #41

Impact of death is NOT on dead character, but on surviving teammates left behind (Alaniz)

Explorations of impermanent disability

Loren in #49; James, Erica, etc. in #50; Tobias in #13 and MM2

THIS IS PROBLEMATIC AS FUCK and doesn’t age well, but it is still a convention of the genre

Vivid, lurid, unreal cover scenes, including stylized depictions of battles

Discomfort with public personas, including identity fragmentation

Jake being disturbed/horrified by own postwar lionizing (military awards, Mount Rushmore, etc.)

Cassie noting how much Rachel’s funeral would have discomfited Rachel herself, and the lack of accuracy in statements made about her postmortem

All Animorphs, especially Jake and Tobias, responding to praise with shame

Writing structure

Short sentences, short paragraphs, short chapters, short books

Heavy use of imagery, with emphasis on worldbuilding through unreal imagery

Dialogue does not let up throughout story — not during dreams, not during battles, not during self-reflection

During rare moments when no one is talking, everyone is doing something, w/ very little room for long reflection

Emphasis on concrete, physical sensations and images over wishy-washy abstraction

Catchphrases!!!!

“Let’s do it”

“This is insane”

Arguably: “Good grief”; “Don’t call me prince”/”Yes, Prince Jake”

Superman as someone with “a body that retains no marks, on which history cannot be inscribed” (Bukatman)

Heroes getting “spear deaths” while villains and the pathetic get “straw deaths” (X)

Rachel’s death as heroic sacrifice

Jara Hamee, James et al, Rachel, Ax (?), Elfangor, Jake et al (?): dying in battle while bravely facing down hopeless odds

Visser One: stepped on almost accidentally after being stripped down to nothing by execution process

Visser Three: denied death in battle; must die after lifetime spent in prison

David: made helpless and pitiful before begging for death rather than continuing to exist in this state

Tom: “‘This pitiful, broken thing?’ He [the yeerk] gestured to his own body.” just before death (#53, emphasis mine)

Saddler: vilified and (guiltily) victim-blamed before dying in bed

Even “mock deaths” in Megamorphs books follow this pattern

Animorphs as SUBVERSIVE Graphic Novels

Ultrarealistic (humorous) embodiment of experience of fighting battles in multicolored spandex

Condemnation of violence

Emphasis on consequences beyond the physical

Physical violence is gross, disturbing, horrifyingly realistic (contrast: comics are often bloodless, or have unrealistically pretty violence) (Pizarro & Baumeister)

Unhappy endings

Superhero stories: “happy ending” = wife, kids, picket fence, heteronormativity

Animorphs: happy ending would be the chance to rest/recover and stop having to make moral decisions (#31); happy ending moves out of reach over course of story

Almost outsized emphasis on impact of secrecy, lies, violence, and injury on protagonists

Superhero comics (and later superhero movies): strangely bloodless stabbings, often played for humor or pathos but no gore

Animorphs: Marco’s entire jaw being ripped off as his tongue lolls loose from the hole in his face (#49), Jake tripping over his own entrails where they trail on the floor following disembowelment (MM4), Rachel being blinded by amount of blood gushing from a head wound (#41), etc.

Tobias

Descended from an ancient line of alien warriors, abandoned unwillingly by his parents at birth with unworthy guardians, grows up with no advantages, goes on to become a messiah-figure to the hork-bajir… and after all that, he’s just some guy on the team

It's not the story of Tobias and the Superfriends (or of Jake and the Superfriends) b/c he’s a part of the team

Characters like Cassie, who has ordinary (and therefore unconventional for superhero) backstory, actually get just as much development and even more narrative time than Tobias does

Showing impact: he has chronically, almost pathologically low self-esteem as a result of how he was raised, he experiences a lot of anger with both his parents for abandoning him, he gets continuously bullied in school for markers of poverty (wrong clothes, overweight, need to change school districts)

Jake

Another common superhero narrative: ordinary kid with group of friends accidentally stumbles into alien secret, ends up in charge of a group of superbeings almost overnight, all the while maintaining a secret identity as an ordinary (mediocre) boy non-hero to his normative suburban parents, aware all the while of villainous figure lurking in their midst…

But he remains, at the end of the day, not that special: the only “secret ability” he has to conceal is the ability to morph, not super-smarts or super-strength or any quality that makes him a brilliant rather than a merely decent leader

Again, impact: his family gets torn apart by weight of his and Tom’s yeerk’s secrets, something Aunt May (for instance) is much less likely to have to contend with

Rachel’s death as planned sacrifice play: Jake makes no attempt to die in her place

Contrast graphic novel trope (Superman and Jason Todd, Captain America and Bucky, Black Widow and Hawkeye, Hulk and Iron Man) of superheroes going to almost-ridiculous lengths to die in each other’s place, and superheroes almost never dying outside of concerted effort to prevent/undo friends’ deaths

Animorphs goes for military realism over classic self-sacrifice presentation

[cacklingskeleton]

Hot Take: the “what if superman turned evil” and the “superman, but evil!” stories are overdone and aren’t the unique, interesting story ideas comic book companies think they are anymore. It’s gotten to the point where it feels like we haven’t just gotten a “good for the sake of good” superman in popular media in forever.

People should tone it down with the edgy evil superhero stuff, it’s not as interesting as they think.

[disregardcanon]

can you imagine the legal battles concerning merchandising rights in the dc or marvel universe (focusing on dc though because i’m more familiar with it). say this one company is the FIRST ones to start selling superman t-shirts and other merch and they try to sue competitors who start selling merch afterwards. 

“we were the first ones to do this so we own the legal rights!” 

“actually, superman should own the rights! it’s his symbol after all!” 

“superman does not have a known legal or economic entity, so he cannot own these rights!” 

“does that mean that rights to the superman emblem are in the public domain? is that how it should work?” and there’s this debate over just every single hero and which companies have the right to manufacture and sell which merchandise and also? is it ethical to sell joker merchandise? the rest of the gotham rogues? catwoman most definitely has her own merch store that she runs herself and collects the profits from 

[chiauve]

Are those high-speed superheroes ruined for anyone else because Ishinomori was smart enough to realize that when moving at mach 5 or however fast grabbing someone moving at normal speed would kill them?

Those dramatic scenes with the hero moving so fast everyone’s still and chucking them around to get them away from harm and I’m just.....nice, buddy, you just ruptured their organs or something and snapped their neck five times.

Also making Joe incapable of handling normal people while accelerated is a fantastic limiter on his power that he has to work around now and again.

[racefortheironthrone]

How do you feel about the varying power levels of characters in the MCU between films, and indeed within films? Justified by the Rule of Drama?

It’s not just fine, it’s absolutely necessary. I’m a firm believer that variation is at the heart of all great storytelling, and I think that applies to superpowers as much as anything else. 

Take the airport fight sequence in CA: CW, for example. 

Part of what makes the fight so much fun is that you have all kinds of different power levels going on - non-powered spies like Hawkeye and Black Widow, supersoldierish folks like Cap and Bucky, tech-suited guys like Iron Man, War Machine, and Falcon (to a lesser extent), Black Panther is somewhere in the middle of those last two categories, then you’ve got Vision and Ant/Giant-Man and Scarlet Witch doing all kinds of crazy shit, and then you’ve got Spiderman somewhere in between those last two categories. 

Thus, as the various fighters pair off in different combinations, you can show all kinds of different power dynaimcs: Ant-Man crawling inside of Iron Man’s suit or suddenly turning giant and grabbing War Machine and then getting ESB’d by Spider-Man, or Cap and Spider-Man having a shield vs. webs battle, or Scarlet Witch throwing a parking garage’s worth of cars at Iron Man, etc. 

Now imagine that same sequence if everyone had Superman’s power set. Imagine how boring and repetitive it would get, with all of these flying bricks punching each other through buildings over and over again.