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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[Edgar Allan Esquire]

Trauma, for the most part, is just a device to humanize the characters.

DC did do a run of "One Bad Day" for the bat-baddies that was supposed to be villain-triggering moment/origin story, but sometimes they don't want to cure cancer, they just want to turn people into dinosaurs.

Edit: threw up a convo from Soule's Shulk run with Shocker I liked about "wanting to be more" and the hero/villain breakdown

Edit2: Ow, the text was blurrier than I thought after uploading it. Pertinent parts:
Shulk: If I remember right, you built these things [his gauntlets]. You know, I couldn't build anything like these. I just don't get you guys sometimes. If you can do this, you don't have to do what you do. You could be so much more.
Shocker: You know, I look at you, you spent all that time, all that dough to become a lawyer... I mean, hell. I look at you and think... Wow, she could be so much more. Now, can I please have my damn gauntlets back?

 

[Edgar Allan Esquire]

They counted Batman as a villain, right?

Listen. You're not going to convince me a billionaire vigilante is a hero, no matter how much he happens to have defended the universe from evil demigod things.

The whole White Knight series really skewered that with the people hating the constant property damage from him ramping the Batmobile off of stuff and the cops were pissed that he'd been hording super-lightweight bulletproof armor and non-lethal weaponry in what frequently amounts to an urban warzone, but it felt more of a what-if/elseworld to me as it kind of shifted the character behaviors around. On the opposite side, Cataclysm/No Man's Land, more than any other run I think, drop a lot of mentions on the tons of money Bruce puts into trying to hold the city together through infrastructure and programs beyond the nebulous Wayne Foundation charity.

 

[Edgar Allan Esquire]

Would that have actually made Gotham a better place though? Gotham before Batman was a den of gangs all fighting and killing each other, while bribing the police to look the other way. If he'd just stepped in as what is essentially a stronger gang leader, would that have really improved the situation? In cannon while there are supercriminals running around, the actual gang warfare and corruption has been largely (though not completely) addressed between Batman and Gordon.

Red Hood/Jason Todd's M.O. was pretty much kill the opposition and become the new crime lord to enforce a code on the criminal underworld. In practice, though, death is only slightly less of a revolving door than Arkham, between various means of resurrection, portals, and I think at one point Harley just drove a motorcycle out of hell. Ultimately, the heroes must be ineffectual at stopping crime and crises from continuing to occur because then the publishers would lose money. Every now and then someone does a variant of "no more baddies left" and it usually turns into the superhero teams imploding and murdering eachother over love triangles or one of the heroes becoming a tyrant because the audience demands conflict and drama.