How It Should Have Ended

Into the Spider-Verse acknowledged it. It’s going to be around forever.

What joke? Emo-Peter? No, that shouldn't die because there are already way too many apologists for it. People going "oh no, the point is that it's supposed to be dorky and lame" just doesn't jive with 95% of emo-Peter's screentime.

I understood what they were going for with "emo Peter". I thought it was cringe-worthy and poorly executed, but it makes perfect sense in the context of the story. It's internally consistent with his character arc and with the nature of the Venom symbiote. He's spent so long concealing his inner feelings that the sudden cathartic release makes him Drunk on the Dark Side and keeps him from noticing that they are being perverted to destructive ends until it's nearly too late.

Take anyone who's neurotically insecure, give them something to de-inhibit them (or sometimes, just convince them they are free of inhibition), and you never know what kind of crazy behavior you are going to get.

I didn't like it, but that's a different matter entirely. This speaks to a problem I have with a lot of what passes for criticism these days, especially fan criticism: the conflation of "I don't like it" with "it's bad".

Edited by Fighteer on Feb 1st 2019 at 4:16:18 AM

Of course there was gonna be a Batman cameo since a shark is in it.

Edited by MrTerrorist on Feb 7th 2019 at 11:08:36 AM

Enough with the Batman already, a few jabs at it doesn't mean it's fine to keep using him.

Actually, this time I liked the cameo. It's much more understated and subtle, and doesn't hog other character's spotlight like in Aquaman.

Yeah, I actually like that one. It actually helps that it's a a reference to something specifically Batman and shark related that's silly and makes sense, rather than throwing him in just because he's Batman. Also that it's short and after the rest of the animation, rather than half the damn thing just because he's Batman.

These last chapters, Batman has been unbearable.

The moment I hate the most is when he took the moment of glory away from Aquaman.

I said this in the Aquaman thread as well, but I'm just gonna go ahead and say that Movie!Batman is no longer cool anymore. With an exception of Lego Batman maybe.

It's been seven years since the last good live action movie with Batman. Come on Warner Bros, get your head together already in regards to him.

Everyone seems to think Batman is the greatest superhero...for some reason. I actually remember the guy from Nerf Now talk about it, Batman typically acts like a paranoid asshole who plots attacks on his friends on the off chance they go bad and keeps trying to measure dicks with Superman. Superman on the other hand acts as a symbol while Batman can't even keep his own backyard in check.

The real problem, if we choose to call it that, is that Batman is the most relatable superhero. Nobody is getting bitten by a magic radiation arachnid and gaining superpowers, or has access magical African herbs that give them superhuman strength and speed. Those things distance us from these characters and remind us that they aren't real no matter how much a writer tries to make their stories reflect real-life issues.

But almost everybody can work out, or study a martial art, or read a book. And prior to Batman being an omnilingual Memetic Badass who challenges gods and doesn't afraid of anything, that's what he was. A rich guy with dead parents who went around the world and studied everything. And none of this because he was picked by a ring from outer space, or dipped in a vat of chemicals, or captured by aliens and made into a super soldier, or caught in the center of a nuclear explosion. But because he suffered from the loss of his parents, something many can also relate to.

I like that HISHE continues the joke but pushes it's boundaries, like what happened at the end of Ant Man and the Wasp. I've not laughed this hard at a HISHE short since the first Avengers one.

Edited by Soble on Feb 16th 2019 at 8:17:15 AM

He inherited a billionaire fortune and studied martial arts in multiple countries, I wouldn't call that relatable.

It's that veneer of attainability that draws in the worst of Batman fanboys. Same with any other Badass Normal or Science Hero.

There's more to Batman than being a paranoid rich guy that people relate to, or are attracted by:

• Plenty of people come into money and plenty of people study abroad
• Plenty of people wish they could outfox law enforcement
• Plenty of people have lost their parents to street violence
• Plenty of people want and eventually buy sports/luxury cars
• Plenty of people want their own sanctuary/mancave/home away from home
• Plenty of people want children that they can project onto and raise into a better version of themselves
• Plenty of people want to share the family business

I'm sure you could pull similar examples from other popular characters, but I doubt any of them cover as many as Batman does. And at the end of the day,most of them will be an alien, or struck by a magical bolt, or given alien powers by some strange device. For Batman, it's just him having money and education.

Also consider that he's a successful white entreprenaur typically portrayed as having outstanding moral fiber in spite of his aforementioned character flaws. I wouldn't say he's at his most relatable in 2019, but I wouldn't say that he's been particularly hard to advertise since 1939 either.

Edited by Soble on Feb 16th 2019 at 11:29:38 AM

I don't think people relate to Batman, so much as people feel empowered by Batman. Batman is an escapist fantasy for antisocial paranoid types who want to be told, "The fact that you would rather spend Friday night at home cleaning your guns and fantasizing about a break-in instead of enjoying the company of other people IS WHAT MAKES YOU A HERO."

He has the same kind of appeal that zombie apocalypse planning has. He's basically the ultimate conservative fantasy in a genre that skews conservative more than liberal. At the end of the day, a rich white guy walking the streets, breaking the faces of drug dealers and the mentally ill, flipping off the crooked government who can't run a city like he can, and then blasting off into the night in his souped-up turbo-car to figure out how to beat up all his neighbors is exactly what a significant portion of conservative middle-income white men wish they could be.

When you're conservative, paranoia is strangely empowering. It's something you take pride in. In my younger days growing up in a right-wing household, I remember reading an Ultimates comic where Black Widow betrays the Avengers and tries to kill them, only to be foiled because her husband, Tony Stark, installed a killswitch in her body as part of cybernetic upgrade for his wedding gift, an Iron Man suit she could wear.

Ultimate Tony Stark installed a killswitch in his wife that he could trigger at any time. And instead of recognizing that as creepy as f*ck, I thought that was the coolest shit ever, because I was young and right-leaning and we're taught that the ability to f*ck up anyone in your life if they ever try to f*ck with you is a useful and vital tool.

In that regard, Batman's fans are no different. He has a plan to take down each and every member of the Justice League. He has extensively catalogued all of his peers and figured out how he can kill any and all of them if necessary. And Batman's fans think that's the coolest shit ever, because they were raised with the same attitude I was.

Conservatives believe that the world would be a better place if everyone had a gun pointed at everyone else all the time. And that's Batman: a gun pointed in every direction, with a million backup guns hidden under sofas. And it's all for the sake of raining heaps of violence down on people with mental disorders or other social irregularities, about whom there is no need to empathize or try to understand them because those irregularities automatically turn them into them evil murderers 100% of the time.

Edited by TobiasDrake on Feb 18th 2019 at 8:08:47 AM

I don't understand why people keeps saying the superhero genre is ultraconservative? I don't see why the likes of Superman, Spider-Man or the X-men ot their themes would be conservative? Although I do understand your point about Batman.

Perhaps because it keeps relying on the same pool of superheroes?

I think film in general has become more conservative lately, with an overreliance on franchise building, sequels, reboots, and origin stories.

I think that's less conservative and more commercialization.

I think there is some conservatism in it, too, though, since it relies on tried and tested characters and nostalgia. Also, conservatism wants to maintain the status quo, which could just as well apply to culture as politics.

The superhero genre is in general conservative because it relies heavily on themes of individualism over collectivism.

In superhero media, the government is an evil institution filled with evil people that exists only to do evil. It is always corrupt, it is always genocidal, and it passes laws only to make as many people miserable as possible and/or kill huge swathes of the population. The only person you can count on, the only person you can trust, the one person who will save you, is the "ME AND MAH GUN" individual. He might have powers, he might have technology, but what really matters is that he answers to a higher calling: his god-given upstanding moral righteousness that supercede all laws of man.

The superhero may work with the police, he may work with the government when it suits him, but make no mistake: he is above the law. He is greater than the law, holier than the law, and the only reason he ever runs into trouble with the law is because of the aforementioned wicked government corruption. Anything and everything that he does in pursuit of justice will be deemed acceptable by the metric of the story, which measures rightness by his standard and not society's.

Superheroes are an escapist fantasy rooted in individualism, in much the same fashion as the Cowboy Cop. It's all rooted in the idea that one Great Man of History fundamentally understands right from wrong, is empowered to carry out that agenda without bureaucracy or red tape standing in his way, and is made incorruptible by sheer virtue of not being subject to the whims or agendas of others.

Edited by TobiasDrake on Feb 18th 2019 at 4:24:49 AM

To expand on that, even movies that purportedly subvert the lack of consequences of collateral damage and working outside the law, like The Incredibles, still portray the government in this conservative manner: a monolithic bureaucracy that aims to protect it's citizens by removing those in the best position to do good and oppose supervillains (read: situations that are well and above the capability of regular law enforcement to handle).

In that sense, superheroes also represent the military, in that they alone are capable of facing supervillains, who transcend the day to day threats faced by police forces, such as bank robbers and burglars. And the military, as well as patriotism in general, is (at least in the US) a traditionally conservative affair.

Although I have noticed alot of superhero comics will frequently have liberal/progressive messages, anti-war, environmentalism, racial equality, anti-corporate (that last one is especially ironic considering many issues in superhero comics are caused by corporate executives).

Edited by Kaiseror on Feb 19th 2019 at 5:50:32 AM

That last one isn't really ironic so much as cases of The Man Is Sticking It to the Man.

Edited by Redmess on Feb 19th 2019 at 12:21:51 PM

Or maybe a case of Writer Revolt.

Or they just never thought about it. The individualist theme is so thoroughly ingrained in the basic building blocks of the superhero genre that a lot of people never really think about it. Things like the cops being useless, secret identities, volunteer militias of Unique and Special Snowflakes aka super-teams, etc. are just what you do in superhero fiction.

If you were to write a superhero story that didn't have any of the conservative themes inherent to the fundamental premise of superheroes, then it wouldn't be a superhero story. Even the X-Men reserve the right to train a private army and fly unsanctioned military ops around the world in their billion-dollar super-jet.

Edited by TobiasDrake on Feb 19th 2019 at 6:00:08 AM