What Marvel and DC heroes can teach us about resilience

"This study somewhat refutes the idea that villains are a product of their experiences." At least in fiction.

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[graylshaped]

This actually seems to be similar to the problem with LLM 's. The input we've given them is based on a series of biases. This one seems to extremely biased to studying how humans develop in stories from comics. Comics which were legislated to be morality plays or else facing bans during the Golden age of comics.

Doing a study like this off of fiction rather than what happens in real life and you'll get biased outputs that folks might misread. It's essentially a hallucination, executed by people.

A good analogy. This is an interesting exercise that tells us only that two grad students had an indulgent advisor.

They also limited their study to Marvel and DC characters depicted in major films, rather than including storylines from spinoff TV series. So Wanda Maximoff/The Scarlet Witch was not included since much of her traumatic backstory appeared in the series WandaVision. Furthermore, "We omitted gathering more characters from comic books in both Marvel and DC universes, due to their inconsistency in character development," the authors wrote. "Comic book storylines often feature alternative plot lines, character arcs, and multiverse outcomes. The storytelling makes comic book characters highly inconsistent and challenging to score."

Conclusions drawn about fictional characters with cherry-picked data. Such a study might be interesting if done as a literary analysis done through a qualified program in that field, where the nuances of the details an audience comes to understand about a character affects their perception of the quality of the overall work. Kingpin as a hydrant-headed thug, or Kingpin as shaped by a his experience as a kid who murdered his own abusive father in defense of his mother? The Nolan Batman, or the Snyder Batman?

tl;dr: this is a literary paper applying a psychological hypothesis that tells us nothing about the validity of the psychological hypothesis.

 

[graylshaped]

... And "clever girl" to the researchers who thought of a way to get academic cred as well as salary out of watching stuff they already like (one assumes)—in addition to doing something worthwhile.

I had the pleasure of doing analysis on multiple forms of media for a variety of reasons as an undergrad, graduate student, and at various points in my career. Having to engage at a mechanical level demands a lot of compartmentalization to do that well and also enjoy the work for what it is.

 

[graylshaped]

Yeah, it's weird that people on a forum about science seem to completely lack the thought processes that could see use for studies like this. Just off the top of my head, it's not too hard to extrapolate theories on the connection between trauma in formative years and behavioral patterns later in life for people in the real world, which could be applied to help at-risk kids find productive outlets.

I remember back in the day the popular punching bag for "scientists are wasting your tax dollars on stupid studies" was something like $2million spent on the study of snail mating. To the laypeople it looked like 1% of an F-16 jet spent on people in lab coats staring at bugs, but considering the scientific consensus that the future will have a lot more "alternative" sources of protein to feed a growing population, figuring out how a current delicacy reproduces could yield very tangible benefits.

I have no problem with studying something like this. I question the methodology here and the framework under which it was done.