Superhero Fantasy
“The thing is, when one admits she lives in a world where a superhero is a reality, she also has to confront the reality where he is needed.” That sentence carved itself into my brain yesterday morning. An opening sentence. Or maybe just my roadmap. I’m not sure. But it started the dominos falling into place. I found a name that I won’t mind typing up and reading for the next two years… and I started thinking about the story that will require me to do so.
It’s a happily entertaining occupation of my imagination whilst I drive into work. A much more pleasurable focus than cramming the misogynistic dialogue I must know down my throat and into memory… and I very much look forward to having more freedom of my thought to focus on these inspirations.
I did get a little sidetracked in my recent contemplation, as I tried to sculpt the concept of my hero into place. I was curious enough to inquire what people thought an admirable trait in a hero – to whatever a genetic mutation or freak accident with science might alter a man… for good… and that adjective helped me realize I really am writing a fantasy.
In a totally unoriginal back story, I was thinking about pharmaceutical science. It is a very popular villain in reality and fantasy throughout the media today and… well, we can go back to Mary Shelley for this conversation. But… if we think of that hero, was the drive to make things better for science really an altruistic motivation? Isn’t hubris as much the motivation? But maybe hubris comes from saving lives. Didn’t Spiderman or someone teach us that?
Then I thought of Batman, the super billionaire who goes around beating up people for the greater good. So that made me ponder billionaires today… and how they don’t use their corporate jets to fight against mobsters, but to go and party with them on private islands.
I know I’m generalizing quite a bit – I have to in order to make this blog relatively short. But… it did lead me to contemplate why we are so drawn to the superhero fantasy… maybe it isn’t about the fact they can fly or disappear or shoot fire from the palm of their hands. Maybe… there is something admirable in the fact that they will use that discovery of power and wealth for someone other than themselves… and in the process defeat the ones who do choose to use the power and wealth for themselves.
Or maybe that’s just me. I have been criticized several times for my unrealistic idealism. People have to survive in this world. I can’t expect all businesses to sacrifice success for the good of the people. And… maybe that’s why I am where I am in life because I have such high expectations for my real life heroes to think of a greater good first.
It doesn’t stop me from resenting the fact we keep trying to paint the real life super villains as the people who will save us. Be it a drug company who extorts the desperately ill and old, or the weapons manufacturer who manipulates our fear… or the hatemongers who turn one of the oldest superheroes of all time - Jesus, into a gun-loving, wealth celebrating bigot.
And that’s it, really. Superheroes are a mythology, that even with the given of fantasy become religious and thus interpreted across a huge spectrum of logic. And maybe because my religion is the act of goodness and kindness that’s why I decide my ideal hero is the embodiment of that.
Well, it’s a lot of food for thought… and this is just the beginning of this writing journey. I can, at least, say I have a lot of fodder for villainy.
Comments
And that's really how we came to conceive of gods, those beings with power greater than our own, mingling with and interfering in our lives, for their own reasons (which, not surprisingly, reflect our own reasons if we found ourselves with such power). And, of course, over time, pantheons grew, and then started to condense into fewer gods, until the dominant was a single (almost schizophrenic) God who did both the torment as well as the release.
But eventually, this was no longer enough. As we became more educated, and science started to show us things do follow a testable order (for the most part), we started to need to look elsewhere for our escapism. And that lead to superheroes.
When introduced in 1938, the mighty man of steel, Superman, was nothing like he's known today; Strong? Certainly. Fast? Sure. Able to fly? Well, no - he could jump an eighth of a mile, and "leap tall buildings in a single bound," but not fly. And his strength, while greater than anyone else's, wasn't nearly as great as depicted years later, when he would routinely wrestle planets our of their orbit. Nor was he completely immune to Earth-born harm. Sure, bullets bounced off him, but his durability was described at the time as "nothing short of a bursting shell could penetrate his skin." Nor did he have any enhanced senses yet, like super-hearing, or X-ray vision. Just a really strong, really tough guy, who could leap pretty far.
And what did this "strange visitor from another planet" do (and, for the record, I've always thought that was an odd description since he wasn't visiting, he was a refuge)? He used these abilities to champion the rights of those who were victims of the Great Depression and corporate greed; a social crusader. He tackled a munitions factory owner who tried to cause a war just so he could sell ammo; he went undercover as a mine-worker to expose safety violations in mines; he threatened a corrupt politician with the fear of falling to his death to get him to not pass legislation that would have hurt the average working person badly. All of this in just the first issue!
Of course, imitators followed. Some were too close of a copy, and were litigated out of existence, but many more weren't, and thrived, and so, several whole new pantheons of characters that fought either for us or against us came into being, filling that need to escape from the at-times overwhelming negative aspects of life. And it's been that way ever since.
We've always needed heroes, and we'll always continue to need them. The individual reasons vary, of course, but collectively, we need to be reminded one way or another that there are as many good points in life as there are bad. It can be tough, because the bad is frequently flashier and broader in scope, while the good generally tends to be more subtle. Believing in heroes gives us a way to focus our desire for good into something flashier than the bad, and gives us a chance to wonder and dream, and, hopefully, a chance for some of those dreamers to strive to make it a reality.