dealanexmachina:

jujubiest:

autisticsamusaran:

superhero media is too “apolitical” nowadays. where’s the superhero taking out drones in the Middle East to save lives and protect privacy. where’s the superhero who spends more time fighting cops than supervillains. where’s the superhero showing up to protests to protect protestors. where’s the superhero who fights all the evil capitalists causing water crises and environmental disasters. where’s the superhero who fights the KKK. where’s the superhero who helps real people with real problems instead of fighting aliens and robots all the time.

This. This a billion times. God, I’m so glad someone wrote this. Bless you.

Where’s the superhero that shows up to stop a cop from shooting an unarmed black child? Where’s the hard-nosed Green Arrow-style vigilante who rains terror and vengeance down on the heads of serial rapists who go unpunished due to slut-shaming, and then goes after the university disciplinary board who let it keep happening because their rules were geared more toward protecting the perpetrators than the victims? 

Part of what has always made superheroes resonate is that they filled a need in fiction that was not being filled in reality by standing up to the corrupt powers of their day. Captain America fought Hitler. Batman stood up to the mob and a corrupt police force. Oliver Queen fought against the drug trade and underhanded corporate practices and was an outspoken social progressive besides. Superheroes have always been involved with the politics of their time.

Now we have this weird generation of fake geek boys who are often vocally arguing the opposite of what OP said, whinging about how “political agendas” are ruining all the things they love, while completely forgetting that they largely owe the things they love to the brilliant writers and artists who had something important to say and chose to say it through superhero stories (and science fiction as a broader genre, for that matter).

The real kicker is how deeply hypocritical these complaints are, because a large number of these guys are the same ones who support their presumed ownership of this material (as “real fans”) by pointing to how important it was to them when they were getting bullied in school, how much they loved these things before it was “cool” to love them (and before they were cool, by extension).

And it somehow never occurs to them that the very reason these stories were so important to them, so relevant, was because they were powerless kids reading about/watching heroes who were attacking corrupt power structures. It somehow escapes them that there might be people out there who need that kind of boost just as badly as they did, or even more so.

This generation has problems, dudes. It needs heroes just as badly as you did when you were a kid. They may have different backgrounds than you’re used to and fight different monsters, but that doesn’t make them less true to the spirit of storytelling in comics. You wanna know why the MCU is starting to feel flat and rote? Because they’ve tossed out the soul of what made superhero stories so damn good and replaced it with a lot of shiny action sequences.

The truth is, politics aren’t ruining superheroes. Political apathy, poor representation, and whining fanboys are ruining superheroes.

This is why Black Lightnining’s pilot feels so refreshing. Because damn if they don’t tackle police brutality and racial profiling right from the beginning.