"This study somewhat refutes the idea that villains are a product of their experiences." At least in fiction.
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What Marvel and DC heroes can teach us about resilience
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... about resilience, in fictional characters. Meaning: here are the range of accepted tropes of fictional super-human character behaviour.
I'll remember this next time I'm given lemons. WWFNSD?!
I'll remember this next time I'm given lemons. WWFNSD?!
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We can be heroes, just for one day
it's a good day when you can find a Bowie reference
it's a good day when you can find a Bowie reference
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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.
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.
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Batman may be a superhero with a severely traumatic past (how many times can you kill one boy's parents, anyway?), but he still beats up a shitload of people, even if it's ostensibly for the greater good.
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Interesting idea, but it is essentially a different take on the "Do video games make children violent?" question.
Also, there's a typo in the headline: it's the MCU and the DCEU. (I wasn't sure if the paper had it incorrect, too, so I checked; only the headline is wrong.)
EDIT: I'm curious about the downvotes. We all (as educated/informed adults) know that the video game reasoning is false, and has no real connection to making a child violent later in life, right? Or was it because I pointed out the typo that is still showing in the headline for me?
Also, there's a typo in the headline: it's the MCU and the DCEU. (I wasn't sure if the paper had it incorrect, too, so I checked; only the headline is wrong.)
EDIT: I'm curious about the downvotes. We all (as educated/informed adults) know that the video game reasoning is false, and has no real connection to making a child violent later in life, right? Or was it because I pointed out the typo that is still showing in the headline for me?
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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?
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?
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How about adult trauma like the Punisher, hero or villain? Always seemed like if Batman had no resistance to killing.
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A couple of things.
They say they didn't use the TV shows or comics in their research. So where does the idea that Loki was gender-fluid come from? In terms of the character as seen in the Thor and Avengers films, I don't recall that coming up, it was only mentioned in the TV show Loki. The Norse mythology figure, of course, was known to flip gender at a moment's notice, but that's not in the films.
Also, which Joker are they talking about. The one shown in the photo is Heath Ledger's, and we have no information about his childhood at all. He tells a different version his tragic backstory each time, so it's clear we have no idea about him. The version from the 1989 film doesn't have a tragic childhood, is just a crook who's driven mad by an industrial accident.
Besides, the whole hypothesis seems to stem from the "One Bad Day" theory (as mentioned above). This was introduced in The Killing Joke by the Joker as an explanation as to why he was a victim of circumstance rather than inherently evil. In the course of the story, it's also demonstrated to be completely false, since Jim Gordon doesn't become a supervillain or vigilante. (Also, Batman kills the Joker at the end and it was never meant to be in continuity.)
They say they didn't use the TV shows or comics in their research. So where does the idea that Loki was gender-fluid come from? In terms of the character as seen in the Thor and Avengers films, I don't recall that coming up, it was only mentioned in the TV show Loki. The Norse mythology figure, of course, was known to flip gender at a moment's notice, but that's not in the films.
Also, which Joker are they talking about. The one shown in the photo is Heath Ledger's, and we have no information about his childhood at all. He tells a different version his tragic backstory each time, so it's clear we have no idea about him. The version from the 1989 film doesn't have a tragic childhood, is just a crook who's driven mad by an industrial accident.
Besides, the whole hypothesis seems to stem from the "One Bad Day" theory (as mentioned above). This was introduced in The Killing Joke by the Joker as an explanation as to why he was a victim of circumstance rather than inherently evil. In the course of the story, it's also demonstrated to be completely false, since Jim Gordon doesn't become a supervillain or vigilante. (Also, Batman kills the Joker at the end and it was never meant to be in continuity.)
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Honestly this mostly looks to me like they were just having a bit of statistically rigorous fun.
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I've always though the comic universes are just modern iterations of fairy tales - which are simplistic good vs bad hero's journey stories.
That being said, I always favored the anti-heroes stories, as they generally have more complex character development with, hopefully, a redemption arc.
That being said, I always favored the anti-heroes stories, as they generally have more complex character development with, hopefully, a redemption arc.
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Even in the show I don't recall any single Loki being gender fluid. He had different variants and Sylvie just happened to be a female variant. There was also an alligator Loki. That doesn't mean Loki is 'species fluid'. I do remember there was a brief dialog that indicated Loki was a bisexual.
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Their bisexuality was what I was alluding too, although I do get that it's not really gender-fluidity, although the existence of Sylvie does suggest they might be.
Still, in the original myths they've given birth to more weird children than they've sired. And they're definitely species-fluid.
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Batman's arguably not a superhero, just a hero (albeit a rather superlative hero), since he doesn't have any _super_powers. The paper seems to intermingle superheroes/villains with typical heroes/villains quite regularly though, with some of the subjects they discuss.
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And mother of Fenrir.
[EDIT] Sorry, father of Fenrir. I was sure they were the mother. Never mind.
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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.
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.
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Yeah, that stood out to me. Joker infamously doesn't have a cannon backstory - he's got a dozen he'll tell you depending on the situation, but there's no reason to believe one of them is more true than the others.
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His status is entirely dependent on your faith in the justice system. Canonically, he's a Vietnam veteran whose wife and children were killed by mafia hitmen, and the police did nothing to try and apprehend the killers, so he took matters into his own hands. He's entirely aware that he's a vigilante operating outside the law and murdering hundreds/thousands of people, but considering his victims are pretty much all criminals/crooked cops, it's hard to say that he's a villain.
He's a "hero" in the same vein as Paul Kersey and Harry Callahan; an employer of abhorrent methods that achieves (ostensibly) good results.
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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.
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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.
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Rorschach would be a better example, especially since Watchmen was purposely written to kind of criticize the superhero stuff. And pretty much all the "heroes" around him agree (in the same way as the Punisher) that he's a lunatic who just happens to kind of align with what they think is good but has no qualms about beating the shit out of people.
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A good analogy. This is an interesting exercise that tells us only that two grad students had an indulgent advisor.
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.
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How fucking pointless with a cherry-picked group of fictional characters. I was hoping this would be a LOT more interesting than it was. Pffft.
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Hard disagree. Kids love Spiderman, and him being riddled with self-doubt is what made him popular in the first place.
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In universe, they tried to deal with this by making him three different people. I don't think that's stuck, though.
Again, going back to The Killing Joke, which does provide a backstory for him, but that wasn't supposed to be canon. Except because DC Editorial breaks everything it touches, especially if it's written by Alan Moore, it kind of was. Except then it wasn't. And then, like I said, three different guys.
We don't need a backstory for Joker, any more than we need a back story for Condiment King. I get that sometimes the backstory becomes a big part of the character, like Mr Freeze for example, but that should be the exception rather than the rule.
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The Sheep Look Up
Ars Praetorian
Black Manta's is one of my personal favorites: he fucking hates Arthur Curry. The end.
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I really wanted to say this study was bullshit, that it was authors mostly goofing off and trying to mooch a paper out of it.
(And tbf, still pretty skeptical that they needed to watch all these movies, since biographies generally match across media in MCU, afaik—ya'll correct me if I'm wrong, not really a Marvel movie fan.)
But....ughhhhhh. Fiction is important, both in how it reflects us, and how the fiction we take in changes how we think, feel, and see the world. The truth is, it is actually pretty important to see what these wildly popular films model for everyone, among other things. I'd love to see a follow-up study on fans of the movies with trauma, if that is doable. Do they differ from people who don't watch them? How?
It's obvious that media can be therapeutic, and perhaps about as obvious that the effect is idiosyncratic. Do Marvel movies help people cope with stuff? And if they do, why? They're pretty optimistic films, afaik—could that alone help bring people along a more positive path?
So, curmudgeon checked at the door. It's actually a very cool study, and I'm stoked Ms. Outlette shared it with us.
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.
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The movies established that she was an orphan, her twin brother was killed by Ultron in Age of Ultron, she lost Vision in the movies, and also the loss of her children in Wandavision is what drives her in the movie, Dr Strange in the Multiverse of Madness.
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I'm curious when you think this happened? Or are you maybe 70+, and miss the Golden Age comics of your youth?
Marvel introduced all of that with Fantastic Four a good 64 years ago. There's a whole round of "We don't understand Alan Moore's point" that bubbled up in the late 80s, into early 90s, and Brad Meltzer's atrocious Identity Crisis 20 years ago "adulted" things in the way of all who feel the need to make things Adult™ (pointless, unpleasant, indeed outright offensive trauma), but these are specific threads and angles that popped up at particular times.
Being as I've been reading comics for the last 30-odd years (including currently! Just picked up my pull list...) this is just a strange sentiment to me—given I started as a kid 20+ years after "angst", "self-doubt", and "self-loathing" were introduced, and I've recently been diving into early FF, complete with the contemporaneous letters pages. The appreciation of exactly those qualities is palpable in the letters kids (and, admittedly, adults) write in.
What killed them as something for kids is way more in the realms of business practices: speculation, the death of anything but the direct market, and the outrageous inflation of floppy prices (once Daredevil and Captain America hit $4.99 an issue, not even writers I really enjoy could bring me back to them). The only Venues for entry are into "superheroes" (via other media), not comic—so they're more adult-focused because it's the only market they can hope to sustain under the circumstances.
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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.... 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.
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There are “studies” about this? What an intellectual embarrassment. I sure hope not a single dollar of public tax money went anywhere near this.
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If this counts as an academic paper, then me and my friends deserve f*king PHDs for all the in-depth superhero discussions we've had as teenagers hanging out "researching," in my mom's basement.
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I really wanted to say this study was bullshit, that it was authors mostly goofing off and trying to mooch a paper out of it.
(And tbf, still pretty skeptical that they needed to watch all these movies, since biographies generally match across media in MCU, afaik—ya'll correct me if I'm wrong, not really a Marvel movie fan.)
But....ughhhhhh. Fiction is important, both in how it reflects us, and how the fiction we take in changes how we think, feel, and see the world. The truth is, it is actually pretty important to see what these wildly popular films model for everyone, among other things. I'd love to see a follow-up study on fans of the movies with trauma, if that is doable. Do they differ from people who don't watch them? How?
It's obvious that media can be therapeutic, and perhaps about as obvious that the effect is idiosyncratic. Do Marvel movies help people cope with stuff? And if they do, why? They're pretty optimistic films, afaik—could that alone help bring people along a more positive path?
So, curmudgeon checked at the door. It's actually a very cool study, and I'm stoked Ms. Outlette shared it with us.
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.
The study is literally just analyzing fictional characters with fictional, contrived for drama, fake trauma backstories - and not even the real gritty original comic book backstories, but exclusively the sanitized, made-for-Disney/WB MCU/DCU versions of those backstories, at that.
It has nothing to do with how fiction reflects society, or real people with actual trauma in their history, and consequently has zero applicable value to real people in reality.
The follow-up study you propose - "Do Marvel movies help people cope with stuff" - is what this study should have been in the first place, as something like that, potentially being about real people in real life and how they interact with fictional media, sounds like it might actually contribute useful knowledge.
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What a stupid study. Perfectly reflects the self absorption of the academic world with pseudo-importance, paid for by someone else. What does the childhood backstory of Marvel and DC comic characters tell us? That decades ago some illlustrators patched together dozens of heroes journeys in order to make some money for themselves and the publisher, and this perhaps was fleshed out some decades later by scriptwriters living in the LA bubble, to make money for themselves and the film company. In all cases influenced by personal world views and experiences, but mostly by weak story tropes and the financial urge to satisfy a demand. Nothing more.
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I've always been slightly disappointed that my trauma hasn't made me a super-villain.
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icebergFromLaputa
Ars Centurion
I feel you would have said the same about, say, fundamental research in astrophysics, if you could even remotely comprehend its meaning.
Today we learn how popular superhero movies shape their narrativs about how trauma doesn't influences moral character - tomorrow we will understand why so many people think that rehabilitation of criminals is useless and that all criminals are just bad people by their very nature.
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No! Astrophysics has many clear benefits to humanity. Doing a “study” on superhero movies does not, and is why academia is clearly failing so many students these days. I would be so embarrassed if it was my child participating in writing about superheroes for their masters or PhD program. What a joke.
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