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  • Batman: This is a common issue in Batman comics, and superhero comics in general, when they attempt to provide the moral that "vigilante justice is bad". It's true that in real life, attempting to be a vigilante on the level of Batman is a terrible idea, but when it's a fundamental fact of the genre that vigilante justice not only works, but is usually the only way to solve the problem, any reader can look at Leslie Thompkins ranting to Batman about how he shouldn't be putting these people in danger and taking the law into his own hands, and then recall the seventeen times that year alone that Batman's activities saved the entire city, country, or the entire planet.
  • The Boys is centered around the idea that superheroes are unneeded and would be a terrible thing to have in real life. This entire message is undercut by the titular main characters being a group who has superpowers themselves, and in fact fit superhero archetypes closer than the characters who are supposed to be deconstructions of superheroes. The live-action adaptation attempts to rectify this by having most of the main crew as Badass Normals, but it falls flat there as well since their quest to take down the Supers is only made possible by friendly external forces on the same physical or political power level as them.
    • The "superheroes are useless" angle oscillates wildly, as the story wants to treat them as a danger to democratic society whilst also making the vast majority appear useless and weak. Aside from flying bricks like Homelander, Stormfront and Black Noir, almost all superheroes are regular humans with a not-too-useful secondary power (and a VERY silly costume, of course).
      • The waters get muddied even further here when Hughie meets Mallory, the first leader of The Boys, who worked tirelessly behind the scenes to make sure that Vogelbaum's work on Compound V would only give mediocre results. In other words, one of the reasons that superheroes are so useless is that a guy who hated superheroes made sure that they would be.
    • Billy’s final victory over Black Noir is clearly meant to show the ultimate superiority of Muggle Power over superpowers, as Noir is brought down by a hail of bullets from US Marines, with Billy landing the killing blow. However, again, the only reason that the Marines are even capable of hurting him is that Homelander, a superhero, had critically injured and half-killed him first, and Billy wouldn’t have been able to harm him at all if he didn’t have Super-Strength.
    • At one point, the series criticizes the superhero industry's usage of Rape as Drama for its characters, which can be hard to take seriously when one considers that Butcher's primary plot is avenging his wife, who was raped by Homelander (actually Black Noir), and Starlight's own Trauma Conga Line (which was planned to be even worse before Ennis started feeling bad for her).
    • Billy’s claims of how ridiculous superhero costumes look become a tad hypocritical when The Boys are the ones wearing matching black clothes and trenchcoats.
  • Flashpoint (DC Comics) is about Barry Allen trying to fix the timeline after he thinks his enemy, Eobard Thawne, messed with the past and created a hellish present. Barry needs to regain his speed to go back in time and stop Eobard. We eventually learn that it was Barry himself who created the dystopian timeline, when he went back in time to stop Eobard from killing Barry's mother, Nora. Thus, when he goes back in time, he has to stop his past self from saving her and allow Eobard to kill his mother. The story tries to deliver a message about how you can't change the past and need to look forward... except Nora should be alive! We know that because Eobard himself is a time traveller and only recently killed her in the past via time travel, and prior to that, she lived a long and full life. So you can change the past... but you apparently shouldn't even when your nemesis repeatedly and openly does so? Or maybe... you should make sure you change the past correctly?

  • My Little Pony: Friends Forever #14 tries to show that Profiling is wrong by having a group of ponies unfairly suspecting a group of dragons of arson because, well, dragons breathe fire. This falls apart because in the scenario, it's not the acts of arson that raise suspicion but that the fires perfectly match that of a dragon's breath, giving the ponies an entirely valid and logic-based reason to suspect a dragon culprit. This is the fantasy equivalent to calling it profiling to believe a repeat offender is Caucasian because Caucasian DNA was found at all the crime scenes.
  • In MAD, one article goes into how childhood lessons are undermined by national events. For example, a kid being told to be honest and accept his punishment for breaking a window is juxtaposed with headlines regarding Nixon and Spiro Agnew getting off easily for their role in Watergate and tax evasion, respectively.
  • The Marshal Law arc Super Babylon satirizes Golden Age superheroes for their conservative attitudes and prejudices, but also constantly attacks them for their supposed sexual perversion. It's rather hard to take accusations of dated attitudes seriously when the comic itself treats bondage, crossdressing, homosexuality, nudism, and prostitution as either punchlines or signs of moral decay. It's especially obvious when Law's old girlfriend (a strident feminist who gave cogent arguments against toxic masculinity) comes back evil, which is shown by having her dress in a skimpy outfit and get in a relationship with another guy.
    • The crux of the comic is that superheroes are bad, nowhere as heroic as real heroes, and promote the idea that violence is the best option. The titular protagonist isn't exempt from this, when called out for how his actions inspire people to acts of just the characters he fights against, he doesn't deny. The problem is that while the comic criticizes superheroes for resorting to violence, some of the "real heroes" it praises are soldiers who fought in war, ie, people who took part in horrific acts of violence. Some storylines will criticize the army but the message is dropped whenever the comic feels like mocking superheroes by saying they are an insult to the real heroes.
  • The New Guardians was an attempt by DC Comics to address the issues of The '80s that fell flat and got canned after 12 issues due to poor writing. Prejudice Aesop? Make the main characters a bunch of walking stereotypes. Drugs Are Bad? Create the poster boy for Addiction-Powered characters and show him suffering no ill effects from inhaling a mountain of cocaine.
  • Marvel Adventures Spider-Man #39 has a foreign exchange student named Kristoff show up at Peter's school, and make a speech about how, unlike many of his countrymen, he doesn't hate America. Peter shows him around, and they talk until it's revealed that Kristoff is from Latveria, home of Doctor Doom. Peter freaks out a bit but accepts him for it. Then the Fantastic Four show up, attacking Kristoff seemingly just because of his Latverian origin, calling him a "potential threat to national security", and taking him away. So, it turns out that he's just a normal, nice kid and the Aesop is that ethnic prejudice is wrong, right? ... well, no, because it turns out that he was Actually a Doombot, and Spidey and the FF have to beat him up. So, the Aesop is that you should never trust people from enemy countries, even when they seem to be perfectly nice, and that it's logical to seize and search people who might be a problem.
  • Mystery in Space #8 featured the story "It's a Woman's World!", in which a man stuggles to prove himself in a future where women have dominated society. It appears to be a story about gender equality, but then you get to the very end, in which the male protagonist forces his wife to do housework, and the wife in turn admits that women ran things long enough and that men should take over again. The story, of course, was published in 1952.
  • Mélusine: The War without Magic has two broken ones:
    • War has erupted between Witches and Dwarves against Fairies and the Chinese community. At the end of the conflict, Mélusine makes a passionate speech that everyone has put aside their differences and worked together to end the war. Except, she omitted the Dwarves from her speech, though in truth, they didn't do anything meaningful to resolve the war.
    • The next day, Mélusine's teacher was moved by her words of wisdom and bestows upon her the title of graduate witch, saying she has nothing to new to teach her. Mélusine's friends take her to a lake to celebrate her graduation. However, Mathys, the student everyone bullied and whose magic was the only one functioning isn't among her band of friends.
  • From way back in The Golden Age we have Pep Comics #23 where one story's villain is "the World's Ugliest Man," a sideshow freak who can't take the humiliation anymore and sets out to murder handsome men. The hero acknowledges he is a Tragic Villain, but ends the story by saying "no matter what the reason, you can't take the law into your own hands!" Said hero is a masked vigilante who calls himself the Hangman, and he adopted the identity to avenge his brother who'd been killed by gangsters. And the reason said brother was murdered by gangsters was that he was a masked vigilante himself, the Comet, who also spent his career on the run from the police. So we have a guy saying it's wrong to take the law into your own hands, who not only does exactly that on a regular basis, he does it because he inherited the mission from his brother who also did the exact same thing on a regular basis (and was specifically a wanted man, so there's no way to say they weren't defying the proper authorities). That's not an easy moral for superheroes at the best of times, but it's hard to think of a more hypocritical example. And that's not the only Hangman story with a tragic figure as a villain and the same moral of not taking the law into your own hands at the end, meaning the writers missed the hypocrisy of that moral multiple times!
  • In Runaways (Rainbow Rowell) #11, Nico extracts an apology from Klara for her past homophobia, which would be all well and good, except that this comes in the middle of Gert baselessly accusing Klara's foster dads of being evil.
  • The Sandman (1989) has a rare in-universe example. The Kipling-quoting "Indian Gentleman" tells his companions a tale he hopes will "prove" that women are inherently evil in "Hob's Leviathan." But the men in the story are no angels themselves, and as his shipmate Hob points out, the sum Aesop of the story seems to be more along the lines of "men and women are both capable of deeply hurting each other."
  • Simon Dark: The series slowly works its way towards an aesop that clinging to others and refusing to let them die is selfish and messed up, with the final villain being an unfortunate transient man whom Gus revived as an experiment who is in constant pain and who really didn't want to be brought back especially as something so difficult to kill. Once the Sympathetic Murderer gets his point clearly across and Simon kills him, Simon immediately revives Gus and this is treated as an unambiguously happy ending.
  • Superman:
    • Superman: At Earth's End has one of these. Superman loses (most of) his powers and has to rely on a gigantic machine gun to solve his problems. After using his gun to kill two Hitlers and a Batman zombie (don't ask), he tells his allies (some little kids with guns) that he's dying. The little kids then bawl and say that guns killed Superman before throwing all of their guns into a bonfire. No one bothers to point out that guns also saved the kids from two Hitlers and a Batman zombie! Worse is the fact that Superman himself admitted that the only thing keeping all these kids alive in this After the End Gotham was those guns. And Batman, for God knows what reason, has the gun that killed his parents proudly displayed in his batcave - it's even labeled "THE GUN THAT KILLED MY PARENTS". For someone who despises guns like Batman does, it makes you wonder why he spent time locating the gun in the first place.
    • One Superman annual has a Bad Future where Superman starts acting more authoritarian after the death of Lois, until his actions lead to the death of a criminal. The government sends in Batman to apprehend him and show him he's wrong. The moral is obviously meant to be against that brutal approach to crimefighting. Except Batman is wearing the armor and using the tactics he used in The Dark Knight Returns - a comic about a Bad Future where Batman started acting more authoritarian, his actions led to the death of a criminal, and the government sent in Superman to take him down, and his actions were portrayed as generally in the right. The heavy homage causes the moral to come across as more "Batman is always right, even when he's taking the exact opposite position that he did last time."
    • In The Killers of Krypton, Empress Gandelo's rants about the Kryptonian race being a danger to the universe that needed to be exterminated are treated as an evil monster's excuses and justifications... except that most of post-1986 storylines involving Krypton in both comics and other media have given the message that the universe dodged a bullet when Krypton blew up. From Byrne's reboot onward, Superman's homeworld has been consistently depicted as a dystopia inhabited by arrogant, prideful, short-sighted, power-hungry assholes who are prone to conquer and abuse weaker races, with only two exceptions being usually decent people. And even so, Superman's goodness is treated as something stemming solely from his Earth upbringing, and the Injustice continuity treats Superman as a weak-willed, self-entitled tyrant who is one wife away from snapping and enslaving mankind.
  • During the original IDW run of The Transformers (IDW) (Robots in Disguise and More than meets the Eye in particular) it tries to paint the conflict between the Autobots and Decepticons as Grey-and-Gray Morality with both sides being not so different now that the war is over. However, we see in multiple flashbacks that the Decepticons have committed numerous atrocities during the war, examples include  while we do see that the Autobots have done some shady things over the course of the war, they don't hold a candle to the things the Decepticons have done and much of the War was simply the Autobots trying to stop the Decepticons from rampaging across the galaxy so making it look like neither side is fully good or bad just rings hollow.
    • Another attempt a blurred morality is having the Autobots be The Remnant of Cybertron's authoritarian pre-war government and the Decepticons be a lower-class resistance group that had risen against them. However, most of the founding Autobots were the token good teammates who also turned against the government while most of the Autobots who joined later on came from the same oppressed lower-class groups as the Decepticons.
  • Uncanny Avengers is the first real attempt at a team book that has the Avengers forming an alliance with the X-Men in the name of promoting diversity and tolerance for the mutant condition — and in some eyes, it's fallen flat on its ass. Issue #5 has Havok give a speech that could be taken to say, "I want to be seen as more than just 'that mutant'"; however, given the wording, many have taken it as saying, "Merely adopting a cultural identifier such as 'mutant' is a divisive gesture that separates us from others." It's not helped by Issue #9, which features such greatest hits as "Members of the majority don't understand why minority puts so much stock in cultural identity" and "Being born with a certain condition isn't a real cultural identity."
  • Usagi Yojimbo plays this one for laughs. As a young man, Usagi's teacher Katsuichi enters Usagi into a tournament at the local dojo. The following conversation is held before Usagi's first bout.
    Katsuichi: Do you remember what I taught you?
    Usagi: Yes, sensei. I am here to test my skills, not necessarily to win.
    Katsuichi: And?
    Usagi: "Spirit and inner strength are essential. Winning is unimportant!"
    Katsuichi: And if you don't win?
    Usagi: You'll beat me to a pulp!
    Katsuichi: Hah! You've learned well.
  • Wonder Woman (1987): Diana manages to redeem both Circe and Cheetah during this run, due to her compassion, truthfulness and love showing essentially that the power of friendship is stronger than their petty hate. In both cases later writers who wanted to use the villains had them come back as immoral mass murderers set on torturing Diana.
  • X-Men: Many.
    • The original five X-Men were a group of young, white, privileged Americans who attended an exclusive private school. Additionally, four of them were very conventionally attractive and Beast, who was supposed to be the “freak” of the group, was Ugly Cute at worst pre-secondary mutation. This all made the discrimination analogy ring fairly hollow. Marvel seems to have actually realised this, and when the new team was introduced in 1975, it included a more diverse roster including: Thunderbird, a Native man; Storm, a black African woman; and Nightcrawler, a German man who looked like a blue demon. Though this still didn't help much with the fact that the cast was more or less all good looking- Storm is one of the most beautiful of all X-Men and Nightcrawler is a Cute Monster Boy. Even Thunderbird was fairly handsome in an angry, brooding sort of way, while Wolverine would be made progressively better looking as the franchise went on.
    • Despite trying to lecture the world about how great mutants were and how they should be allowed to embrace their identities, Xavier spent most of his life masquerading as a normal human who just happened to be a mutant expert. Xavier only involuntarily "outed" himself during Grant Morrison's New X-Men run when he was possessed by his evil twin.
    • James McAvoy said he actually kept this in mind while portraying Xavier in X-Men: First Class. He pointed out that Xavier is a well-meaning, but ultimately misguided liberal, as he still has tons of societal advantages (especially considering the time period the film is set in) given that he's white, heterosexual, male, and extremely wealthy. He certainly doesn't have to put up with the same bigotry many mutants (and many real world minorities) still face, which causes his message of peace to ring, if not hollow, at least simplistic to many.
      • It should be noted that Xavier would have faced discrimination for being disabled as even today not everything is wheelchair accessible and accessibility was certainly worse back when the X-Men comics first came out, but as the comics focus on mutant discrimination this wasn't explored.
    • Compare Xavier's and other's powersets to those of characters like Rogue, Toad, or Cyclops. Xavier and Frost for example have telepathy — a power they can control perfectly, that has absolutely no negative effects on them physically or mentally, that is a massive benefit to their lives, and cannot be detected by normal humans. In comparison? Rogue's powers kill anyone she has physical contact with. She cannot control this or stop it in any way, and has resigned herself to being isolated from her peers. Her powers have drastically injured her self-esteem and social life. Toad's mutation turned him into an ugly, lizardlike humanoid and made him the subject of severe bullying from other children. Cyclops projects a continuous wave of destructive energy from his eyes and relies on special glasses just to live a normal life. Even Phoenix, another telepath, is often overwhelmed by the thoughts of others — to the point of mental instability. Looking at the general trend of mutant powers, it's hard not to think that Xavier and others really lucked out where the Superpower Lottery was concerned.
    • Furthermore, even if you ignore evil mutants who use their powers for terrorism, it's not uncommon for a mutant's powers to get out of control and end up hurting or killing a lot of people or causing a ton of property damage, giving humans a valid reason for not wanting them around or wanting to deactivate the X-Gene through various means. Even worse, for all their talk about wanting equality with mankind, we almost never see the X-Men try and welcome regular humans be around them. And they don't really try to make the few humans who do try to be around them feel welcome. For example, the Xavier Institute once employed a regular human nurse named Annie. At one point when they needed her help with a group of crucified mutants, Jean Grey used her telepathy to call her and was annoyed when she panicked after hearing Jean's voice in her head without any warning and the group talked down to her for being human. Similarly, after M-Day, many mutants lost their powers, including members of the New Mutants and other X-Men affiliated teams. What was the X-Men's response to this? Oh, sorry, you're not a mutant anymore so we're not going to help or protect you anymore. Many newly-powerless former mutants were booted from Xavier Mansion, often with the only place for them to go to be returned to their abusive parents. They were promptly captured by anti-mutant extremists and most were murdered.
    • Speaking of M-Day, the meta reasoning for it, according to Joe Quesada, was a belief that many recent stories had focused on a nascent mutant culture with a few million members worldwide, and therefore it was becoming unbelievable that mutants were still persecuted note . Ignore for a moment how completely clueless it is to claim that if you have a distinct culture or more than a few hundred members (something true of nearly every minority in history), you can't be prejudiced against, this actually broke the racism metaphor the other way. The evil of forming an opinion on all members of a community doesn't seem nearly as significant when it's a community so small that the majority of them live in the same mansion; it's like going from "I hate Jews" to "I hate the people in my apartment building."
    • On the other side of the coin, a common moral is to go against the "evil Well-Intentioned Extremist" who only cares about advancing mutants and protecting mutants rather than supporting all humans, naming it Jumping Off the Slippery Slope to mutant supremacy, particularly with post-Schism Cyclops. Thing is, in the Marvel comic books themselves, groups prioritizing the rights of other minorities are rarely portrayed as supremacists, and characters prioritizing their own loved ones (a group infinitely smaller than mutants) are frequently portrayed positively. And even then, the idea that mutants don't need special attention or protection looks at best naive and at worst incredibly dismissive, considering that the government routinely attempts genocide on them. Yes, all life is sacred, but at least one group that focuses on shutting down the registration programs is hardly evil, especially since other superhero teams only seem to get involved in such affairs in crossovers or when it threatens them.
    • Ultimate X-Men #41 ends up hanging a spectacular lampshade on the issues in the "randomly superpowered people as oppressed minority" narrative, when a teenager awakens his new mutant power of causing every living thing in a radius of several miles to spontaneously combust. He unwittingly genocides his entire town in a matter of minutes, then meets Wolverine... who fully admits he's here to kill the kid because his existence alone validates every single point the anti-mutant crowd has ever had. It's not a happy story to say the least.
    • The entire story of Genosha is this. Originally a green and prosperous African island, Genosha was at one point stated outright to be "the most technologically advanced society on Earth," surpassing similar trailblazing countries such as Latveria and Wakanda. The catch? All that advancement was built entirely off the backs of mutant slave labor, and mutants were not only a slave underclass in Genosha, they were put through a dehumanizing regimen that sealed them inside artificial bodysuits that recycled their own waste, wiped them of all their memories, and programmed them to each be subservient to the magistrates of the island nation. The X-Men put an end to this and freed Genosha's slave population, but all that did was plunge the country into a years-long civil war. Seeing this, Magneto decided to come in and install himself as the island's leader, which in theory would have granted mutants a sanctuary nation of their own for the very first time... except that Magneto screwed things up even more horribly than the civil war did, things got even worse between the humans and the mutants, and ultimately all 16 million of Genosha's mutants were slaughtered by Sentinels. Later superhuman conflicts killed off the island's remaining population completely. Saying things would have been better off if a bunch of slavers had kept power is a terrible thing, but thanks to bad writing and this trope it's unfortunately the truth where Genosha is concerned.
    • The general moral of the conflict between the X-Men and Well-Intentioned Extremist mutant groups seems to be something of an analogy for real-life conflicts between activists, such as Malcolm X versus Martin Luther King Jr., with the appealing but ultimately destructive radical on one end and the more incremental but successful moderate on the other. The problem comes when, after years of continuity, this strategy has shown very little success in actually winning people over; every other storyline still seems to deal with mutants being nearly exterminated and the government still barely tolerates the X-Men, making it seem like the more radical groups might have a better idea. This overlaps a bit with Clueless Aesop, as people familiar with the real MLK can tell you he wasn't nearly the moderate The Theme Park Version of him would imply: while he did criticize black nationalists and more radical activists, he also spoke out against people calling for more "slow and steady" progress and saw the philosophy as a dead end.
    • In Classic X-Men #13, Jean Grey and Misty Knight (they were roommates at the time) go boating with some friends and Jean "hears" a mother in distress as she and her children are under attack by a shark. She and Misty naturally go to her rescue. They succeed, only for Misty to find out it was a pod of dolphins this whole time, and she's upset to discover that she risked her life for "fish." Jean corrects her that dolphins are mammals and quite intelligent, and that she telepathically sensed the mother's distress and felt compelled to help. Intelligent or not, dolphins are no less carnivorous than sharks; rescuing one type of marine predator while forcing another to go hungry suggests that it's okay to interfere with nature if it means saving "cute" animals from "scary" ones. Misty was absolutely correct in thinking they should have never gotten involved.
    • The X-Men were originally supposed to be a statement about general tolerance, peaceful coexistence, and opposing all forms of supremacism. Admittedly, the essential concept of an inherently "superior" race of superhumans being oppressed by the "inferior" normal humans sounds rather far-right supremacist in itself, but the original idea seems to have been a well-intended if clumsy allegory. However, as of the Krakoa storyline, genocidal sadistic supremacist psychopaths like Apocalypse, Mystique, Mr. Sinister, and Exodus are among the main decision-makers in the council of the community, as is Emma Frost, who has a long history of torture and mind-rape, and none of them have been taken to task for their past transgressions.
    • X-Men were also seen by some as applicable to people with disabilities and neurodivergence - since after all, plenty of disabilities are from mutations in real life. Several characters (such as Professor Xavier) are in fact disabled, and some mutant powers negatively impact the standard of life for other people. The problem comes from the fact mutants are considered to be "Homo sapien superior" - which runs completely contrary to what neurodivergent and disabled people actually think of themselves as. Additionally, for every mutation that is troublesome, there are plenty that are just flat out Superpower Lottery (Which no real life disability or neurodivergence ever grants).
  • In continuities as old as Marvel and DC's, the inevitable retcons often break initially intact aesops. For example, many of the older X-Men storylines involving Nightcrawler made it clear that Fantastic Racism is bad, that we shouldn't judge people by their external appearance, and that having a tail doesn't necessarily make you the Antichrist. Enter Chuck Austen, and it turns out Nightcrawler really was half-demon all along. Similarly, any superhero comic with a message of "You need to accept people die, and move on" (for instance Spider-Man's denial of MJ's death in Amazing Spider-Man Vol. 2 #13), since most superheroes have seen their loved ones come Back from the Dead all the time, and the chances are it'll happen this time as well (as MJ did in ''Peter Parker: Spider-Man #29, a year and a half later), however permanent the original writer intended it to be.
    • One of the most egregious examples was the infamous One More Day storyline as it breaks the aesop that Spider-Man is supposed to embody, as instead of taking responsibility for his actions, he dodges it by making a Deal with the Devil against the wishes of its main beneficiary and guilt-tripping his own wife into going along with it. The message then becomes "the ends justify the means", and that instead of learning how to cope with loss and move on with your life, you should hold on to what you have and never let go, even if the cost of doing so might be too high; for you and others.
  • Zipi y Zape: Several, usually courtesy of the twins' parents. For example: Mr. Pantuflo has promised, several times, that if their twins get an A he will buy them a bike, the object of their desires. They got an A once (they got As quite frequently in fact), not because of any academic prowess, but they got it fairly. So Mr. Pantuflo was obliged to "buy them what they wrote on a piece of paper" they gave him before. The paper was, predictably, full of typos ("We wan a visikle wit too weels") so Mr. Pantuflo said "I don't know what a 'visikle' is, it's not in the dictionary - so I'm not buying it." Kids, don't bother being a good kid: unless your spelling is good, your parents will screw you on a technicality.
  • Blacksad uses a World of Funny Animals as a metaphor for race. In Arctic Nation, concerning an elite racist organization of white-furred animals, Blacksad points out a Siberian tiger's son's severe learning disability from inbreeding as why maybe mixing genes is a good thing. What's the problem, aside from that being kind of a Jerkass thing to do? The son is both a cheetah and not white-furred, meaning that he can't be that inbred and the tiger was in fact mixing his genes. (Additionally, both of the main mixed marriages in the arc end poorly, but that's more a product of the Film Noir atmosphere.)
  • Infinite Crisis is a comic that is meant to be, at its core, about how the idea that comics need to "return" to some prior era to fix their problems is wrong. Unfortunately, most of this is also punctuated by a very heavy implication that anything after that given era is an aberrant deviation: for instance, it's offhandedly claimed that various Post-Crisis Legacy Characters wouldn't have been from the original DCU, and the comic itself kills off dozens of C-List Fodder characters (including wiping out the Blood Pack in one panel), most of whom were introduced post-Crisis and go largely unmourned. The claims that the villains are wrong to believe that the current world is flawed for its violence, mass deaths, and increasingly morally-grey heroes is also undermined by the fact that all their criticisms, in-universe, are completely accurate; the DCU had been getting increasingly Darker and Edgier and Bloodier and Gorier, and Infinite Crisis was something of a watershed moment in both categories, with multiple characters being brutally ripped apart on-panel. While the book ends on a note that the heroes will resolve to be better in the aftermath and make a more optimistic and honorable world without needing the universe reorganized along strict moral lines, it comes across as hollow when the next few years would feature even more mass death, gore, and violence, along with the universe being increasingly restructured to match the pre-Crisis status quo (largely by the architects of Infinite Crisis, no less).
  • The plot of the 2021 Amethyst, Princess of Gemworld series is about the Spoiled Brat protagonist maturing as a person and fixing her mistakes. The problem is the main conflict is caused by the Amethyst Keystone being damaged, which her brother did, not her. Yet, both the story and characters, including Amethyst herself, treat the situation as if it was all her fault. Meanwhile, the brother gets no blame despite nearly dooming the world.

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