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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[Fatesrider]

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.

The issue I have with it is that it assumes everyone starts from the same starting line. The "child" is a blank slate and all children are "the same" and would react in the same manner.

I'm involved with a large group of folks who, like me, are cognitively "different". Most, like me, are on the spectrum or have other similar cognitive/perceptive/physical issues like ADHD, gender dysphoria, depression and other psychological or physical "abnormalities" that influence their lives.

From that perspective, the superheroes were are all "normies" who are then "changed" by a single traumatic experience or some other similar influence. They have a "breaking point" that turns them into a superhero, or a supervillain. But very few of the origin stories really go into the psychophysiology of the superhero/villain BEFORE they became a superhero/villain, and the result is usually pretty trite - if not ridiculous. Typically, if they weren't "normal", the became supervillains.

Let's just say the backstories were, at best, barely enough to get the bottom of the foot wet. Obvious puddles in the annals of "literature". And that makes sense if you think about why comics book superheros came about in the first. They had to have clear, simple themes that appealed to KIDS.

IMHO, the adulting of superheroes is what fucked them up. Adding the angst, the self-doubt, the self-loathing, etc. That's not shit kids can often relate to in a positive way. And many of the superheroes we have seem to have serious, untreated psychological disorders. The whole genre takes the very real issue of psychological issues and presents it in a largely negative way, creating the kind of stereotypes we can comfortably pigeonhole people into and call it "good".

Once superheroes became fodder for adults to be entertained by, they lost the heart and soul of what superheroes were supposed to be for kids. And for that, I won't forgive Marvel or DC for letting that happen.