this post was submitted on 04 Sep 2023
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Superheroes are pro-police propaganda. They teach you to be afraid of those who disobey the state rather than yhe state policies that drive impoverished and precariats to desperation.
What does Spidey do with the suspects he catches? He leaves them to get processed into the prison system where they can be used for slave labor, are subject to abuse by the staff and occasionally are killed by thirst or by getting braised in the showers.
White collar crime causes way more loss of life, more destruction and more cost than all the petty crime by multiple orders of magnitude and yet Spidey still goes after street goons. _The same for Batman, Superman, Wonder Woman, Ironman and Captain America. If they're not fighting their own rogues gallery, they're hunting street thugs.
They're certainly not interested in the plutocrats who have captured our governments.
This is a weird take when "really rich guys doing depraved things" is a recurring villain trope across an awful lot of comic books and take up a huge portion of the narrative. Insane wealth is often framed so powerfully in these contexts that sometimes it can parallel superpowers.
The green goblin and doc oc are just really rich guys that do fucked up things! It's implies that spidey puts goons and henchmen into the justice system because of course he does, what else is he going to do? His other options are killing them or just letting them get away with whatever the insane rich guy wants to do, which is often some kind of terror attack on NYC. And those both suck too.
Spidey is too busy trying to literally prevent some business tycoon from idk opening a demon portal under central park to also advocate for prison reform.
Just let the stories be fun.
The villains appear after the fact.
Spider-man, the Batman all the rest fight crime because (generic) crime is the problem. As with James Bond and SPECTER (SPECTRE?), there's a point when the USSR and the cold war was too complicated to be an easy-to-punch baddie, even with the gulags and tanking, so James Bond got a Moriarty, a nemesis to fight instead. The superhero rogues galleries are what happens once it becomes awkward that all the superhero does, is as Garth Ennis put it beat up poor people. And so Jokers and Doc Ocs and Red Skulls are invented when the real Nazis are no longer a threat.
When we stick superheroes into the modern western world, the pretense is that the system mostly works, essentially that Ronald Reagan isn't around gutting social programs, turning prisons into (pretty literal) gulags, fueling the war on drugs and otherwise making the federal and state justice systems into even more of a system of oppression than they were after prohibition (specifically to target non-whites, at that). In the DC and Marvel worlds, police are not overly brutal. Prisons are not overwhelmingly unhumanitarian (nor are they impacted). And yes, criminals really did make some avoidable bad life choices (rather than IRL getting steered into the school-to-prison pipeline).
Though the silver age, the system ran by magic capitalism, even as IRL industries were capturing the regulatory agencies that were supposed to prevent them from driving precarity and poverty to 80%+ of the nation (and thereby fueling the white Christian nationalist movement that is taking over the federal government and many states today).
Through the dark age (that is 1985-1995-ish), Batman sometimes killed, but Frank Miller noted that the thugs were so awful that they deserved it. The criminal element were painted as literal undesirables you could do anything to without moral concern. Sure, Arkham Asylum was a literal dungeon and the jails were infested with rats, lice and scabies (as they are IRL) but it was okay not to give half a fuck about the inmates, because we know what they did.
And yes, even when the current MCU villains have a point, they are obligated to offer a solution that involves decimating the public, so that they can be waved away as too radical, and the Avengers can go back to serving the establishment plutocracy (and not the public). Heck, even Adrian Veidt (Ozymandias in Watchmen ) killed half of New York in order to stop a nuclear holocaust.
Christ you know how to suck the fun out of escapist media don't you.
If being able to point out the biases within a medium sucks the fun out of it, then there are bigger problems that belie the medium... or the fun.
To be fair, the biases of comics are typical throughout movies and television as well. As I noted elsewhere, the GCPD in Gotham what is supposed to be the nadir of police corruption is actually less corrupt and more concerned about public welfare then every police department in the United States. Considering all the content produced by Dick Wolf consumed by Americans, it's no wonder we have cognitive dissonance when we see video footage of real-life officers gunning down detained suspects or escalating non-violent incidents.
There are many ways to approach this. My wife still enjoyed true crime television recognizing that the world portrayed is not the one we live in. You can continue to read comics, but look for ones that take steps to move the dialog forward. It's what some folks did regarding the wizard game.
You can also look to recognize that you are really in a cyberpunk dystopia in which our plutocratic masters want to keep you harmless and then exploit you as a laborer or soldier until you are depleted and need to be replaced, and your own story is how you break out of that paradigm. So there's grounds in all our lives for hero stories.
... you might be reading too much into a silly superhero. He fights a man with mechanical tentacles named 'Doctor Octopus'. He has an enemy who is literally just a stage magician called 'Mysterio'. There are several animal-people. One villain is literally made out of sand.
It's... generally not that deep.
The MCU is one of the biggest moneymakers in Hollywood. It is literally Disney's flagship media line and curiously when they attained Spider-man from Disney, the first thing they did was pull Spidey out of poverty and put Aunt May on the Avengers payroll.
It may not be that deep in the comics, but it's still teaching kids the way to fight crime is to punch them in the face, break their legs and put them in an impacted and inhumane prison system.
Just like Ronald Reagan, George H. W. Bush and Dan Quayle taught us we should do as they were subsidiIng the prison industrial complex and pushing the War on Drugs.
I'm not saying you shouldn't enjoy Spider-man. I read Spider-man as a kid and my grandson does today. He also fantasizes about punching baddoes in the face, and I can only hope he'll realize that's fantasy before his first real encounter with law enforcement.
Alright but 99% of my memories of superheroes as a kid weren't them fighting crime, but them fighting supervillains, which is generally the main draw for kids.
It still instills a dynamic that the best way to solve disputes is by force and that some parts of the public are undesirable by fiat.
Given the current affairs of the US in which half our federal officials are trying to outlaw trans folk, I'm hyper-aware that this is a bad message to give.
How often is it that superheroes start the violence? Or are you suggesting that smiling as your teeth are knocked down your throat should be the reaction, here?
... given the predilection of comics for redemption arcs, antiheroes, the struggle of being different, and the fucking X-Men, I'm gonna have to press X to doubt on that.
You're hyperaware that a message that isn't being sent is bad. Okay. I'm very aware that Teletubbies advocating genocide is bad. Good thing that's not at all relevant.
How often is it that superheroes start the violence? Or are you suggesting that smiling as your teeth are knocked down your throat should be the reaction, here?
Here in the US, law enforcement escalates to force far more often than they encounter someone who is already aggressive, so it raises a question why villains in comics so consistently engage first?
The propaganda is in what is implied. Redemption arcs are the exception not the rule, and the implication is that most villains don't get redeemed.
Now maybe it's because they know their audience wants to see brightly colored supers knock the tar out of each other, and that might be true, but in the context of police work or vigilantism, it does paint human civilization as a lot more violent than it is. How often do heroes see violence break out during their day to day life (rather than, say, tracking it by police radio?)
I get that you don't want your hobby criticized too sharply. Still, have you seen Spider-man stopping Proud Boys from harassing a drag queen? Have the avengers interposed themselves between a BLM demonstration and the police armed with CS-gas and riot munitions? (I really don't know if they've done these things. I'd be delighted to see right-wing culture wars cross into the MCU, but Disney has their own opinions about their right to continue capitalizing.
Do you actually read comics as it seems like a lot of your assumptions are taken from adaptations like the MCU. Of course these versions of the hero's and their stories are watered down and the edges sanded off as they have to appeal to as many people around the world as possible to justify their production costs.
The actual comics deal with these kinds of issues a lot and tend to have a pretty progressive message thoughout these days.
... because superheroes aren't cops?
This is not in any way a normal reaction to a image of a woman in a catsuit called Black Cat singing showtunes from the musical Cats.
Take your hangups somewhere else.
Except that superheroes fight crime that's vigilantism or law enforcement. And yes, when they were fighting crime, the police did have a (well cultured) reputation of restraint, all the while releasing dogs on civil rights protestors. And yes, police in the comics were Andy Griffith police, not even COPS police.
Take your hangups somewhere else.
Feel free to block me if you truly think I'm being hyperbolic. I'm far from the first person to make these observations, though.
You do know that spider-man is famously hunted by the police and is rarely on their good side. They often open fire on him before even shouting freeze. Not only that but when spider-man was the ceo of a corporation he hired someone who he caught doing a crime instead of leaving him for the police because he was doing it for his family.
There are a ton of stories of spider-man just talking to the regular "criminals" he's going up against and helping put them on a better path or pointing them towards FEAST, a soup kitchen that also helps people find jobs. You're making massive sweeping judgments on a medium you literally haven't read based off of the most watered down, focused tested, US Military approved versions that exist (and anybody who has read more than 2 comics in their life can tell you're doing that)
And if you wanna talk about cops in comics how about you read The Punisher or Batman and tell me they don't deal with corrupt police
And before you pull the "billionaire does nothing but beat up poor people to fix things" card with batman (saving you from embarrassing yourself some more) he does put his money into making the city better in every way he can. The city's problems are just so deep that Bruce Wayne's money can't fix it all (ranging from things like corruption so deep the money goes back to the mafia to the city is literally cursed.
Pick up some of the better Green Arrow runs and tell me what you see is right wing propaganda
Read The Flash and act like it's anti-rehabilitation when it's literally a meme the community that when he shows up he makes his villains feel bad because he's disappointed in them
Or just read the freaking X-Men and tell me that shit ain't progressive
You know literally nothing about what you're talking about and "your" observations are as shallow as they come. Baby's first leftist comic critique
Everyone in this thread is now dumber for having read your posts. I award you no points, and may God have mercy on your soul.
Curiously, the GCPD in much of the canon is owned by the Carmine Falcone which is a bit more typical of Chicago during Prohibition, and political power gained by law enforcement justified by organized crime (and the War on Drugs and the War on Gangs) that drove us to our present state in which precincts are run very much as crime syndicates, turning those powers to prey on common citizens. In the United States, the police industrial complex hunts for liquidatable assets that can be seized via asset forfeiture that are in the hands of civilians who could not afford a legal defense.
It's a huge racket. In 2015 it was estimated $5 billion had been seized across the states, which is more than all the burglaries. Some states are trying to limit or stop asset seizures. Police are often ignoring the law, figuring they'll get excused by IA or some back-the-blue judge.
I bet police in Batman aren't robbing the people this way, even in 2023. I'd be impressed if he was. I'd be impressed if Batman cared when SWAT raided houses in black neighborhoods or when police gunned down a kid without cause in the district park. I bet Batman is still punching thugs.™ I'd be delighted if I was wrong.
The United States (and the UK, and Canada, and parts of the EU) need to systemically change, and if superheroes aren't acknowledging this then they are champions of the establishment, not the people. We can't save the world by punching Thanos in the face; in fact, Thanos killed only half of all life. What is happening IRL is going to result in more than half of all life dying, and that's going to happen even if we achieved carbon-net-zero today. Thanos and Darkseid and all other fictional world eaters have been made irrelevant by real-world events.
And yes, Batman trying to save Gotham by punching thugs makes him irrelevant as well. Feel free to continue reading Detective and rooting for him, but we just don't exist in that world anymore.
Everyone in this thread is now dumber for having read your posts. I award you no points, and may God have mercy on your soul.
If someone's depending on me to inform their opinion, then they can't get much dumber. I invite people to go online and do some websearches about the real shit going on in the world, what real-world corruption in the 2020s looks like (as opposed to the 1920s) and the real monsters that we are facing that will take way more than superheroes to oppose.
But also I get it if you are so miserable, so overworked, so distraught that seeing Batman fight Two-Face is the only light in your world. In that case, yeah, read. Smoke your doobs. Do what you need to do to survive, because this world is fucked up enough that everyone is justified coping however they do, and comics are not the worst habit in the world.
But you still get people's unconscious biases influencing their work.
Sure, but that could be said for any media, and saying that superheroes as a whole are just pro-cop propaganda is way over the line of what is a reasonable interpretation. I'm not even a big superhero guy and I recognize that. Shit, a big part of a lot of these superheroes is that the cops aren't their friends and are part of the reason why they hide their identity.
Yeah definitely. But it's still good to examine the assumptions of the paradigm to know what it's viewpoint is. I agree, I don't think it's intentional and I wouldn't call it propaganda. But it's always good to try and find the pov things are written from.
That's literally so wrong.
Why did Spidey become a hero in the first place? Because the cops couldn't find the killer, so Peter did and killed the guy. Which was not justice.
So many heroes of NY in Marvel are focused on justice and the concept of what is justice. The Punisher kills, Daredevil punishes, Spidey is learning. Sometimes he lets people go, otherwise he believes imprisonment is an alternative. Sometimes there is an option that don't fit either.
The point is Spider-Man knows killing isn't justice and the cops/system doesn't either, he literally is an enemy to police always. He simply is trying to make a dangerous world a little more safe in his local area.
Fuck out of here with your fake ass political take. Especially such a terrible one.
There's a reason the Punisher is the unofficial mascot for the Thin Blue Line community.
In the Spider-man series, what is the problem that is plaguing Queens, that is driving Spider-man to vigilantism?
Punisher's creator hates that cops use the Skull:
https://www.forbes.com/sites/lisettevoytko/2020/06/11/the-creator-of-the-punisher-wants-to-reclaim-the-iconic-skull-from-police-and-fringe-admirers/
You're barking up the wrong tree with your misguided "superhero's are police propaganda" there's plenty of heroes who go against the cops, like the Punisher, and plenty of villains with valid points, like Magneto. Overall Stan Lee and Jack Kirby created the heroes they created together to inspire their readers to be good people, and they created those heroes in very inclusive ways to represent all of us and our flaws.
https://www.bbc.com/news/entertainment-arts-46192799
Pax et Justitia
Magneto has to threaten the lives of thousands (if not millions) so that he can still qualify as a villain and his valid points can be dismissed. The same is true of all the other masterminds who want to shift the world from the status quo.
To be fair, maybe you're right and police in comics set in the United States from 2016 - 2023+ routinely escalate non-violent situations to violence and routinely kill people who are neither armed nor resisting, sometimes who aren't even responsive, and are then cleared of wrongdoing by internal affairs. Maybe police in these comics do over-police non-white neighborhoods and harass people on the street for no pretextual reason other than they looked suspicious Maybe in these comics houses routinely get breached-and-cleared by SWAT teams sometimes leading to the injury and death of whole families. Maybe police in comics are addressing homeless by raiding tent colonies with CS gas and batons, sometimes killing or hospitalizing children among their victims.
If they aren't doing that then they're misrepresenting the police across the nation.
And yes, maybe young people in well-to-do suburban communities would rather see superheroes punch the tar out of brightly colored crime clowns than face the real circumstances in their society. In capitalism, the house always wins.
The punisher literally kills cops he deems to be corrupt and hates cops that admire him. Conservatives have literally no media literacy, is Killing in the Name pro cop because the Thin Blue Line crowd was dancing to it?
Yes, a concession that lends the assumption that some people in law enforcement are not bad, are not part of an institution that is actively oppressing the public.
I'd say this is no longer the case but has always been the case for large swaths of the US population. We just now have a regular stream of videos of officer involved homicide.
Iron Man has plenty of stories where his enemies are other rich businessmen. The plot of his first two films have those bad guys. Captain Americas stories tend to be more about international espionage than street level crime, especially since Brubakers but reinvention in the early 2000s. Batman/Bruce Wayne canonically pumps tons of money into social programs for Gotham. When was the last time you picked up a comic? 1965?
Philanthropic foundations are known to be a really poor way to actually fuel change in a neighborhood, but a great way to get tax breaks and some positive marketing. We knew that when Andrew Carnegie dumped a bunch of his own money into community works.So no, the Wayne Foundation is no such program. However, note that because of Bruce Wayne's charitable contributions, you managed to believe that was a way that a billionaire might be remotely ethical. A lot of people would like to believe that people who are filthy rich can keep their money and be ethical. It's really not possible.
It comes down to what are they fighting for? What is it that the rich businessmen are trying to do that Iron Man must stop them? What is Iron Man and Batman protecting?
The status quo. If we imagine that this is fine and that our civilization is intrinsically good and just needs protection from some external evils, then sure, it's just like every other 1980s TV show.
And you know, when the fossil fuel industry was able to effectively obfuscate that we weren't headed towards global ecological collapse (because in the 70s, few people had heard of the Holocene extinction, and the crying Indian was telling them it was their fault that the environment was trashed). Batman isn't fighting to end industrial control of the government of Gotham (and the whole US). He's fighting to preserve his own control of government.
That said, I read Batman mostly in the eighties and nineties, After BTAS, the later animated series dropped in quality, and movies got really strange after the Nolan films and the DCEU series emerged. But The Batman the most recent one actually acknowledges how the paradigm typical of the late 20th century (and the MCU and DCEU in the 21st) are more like pro-wrestlers.
But then, that is consistent with hypotheses that human society is infantilizing, and are less interested in seeing reflections of our own world as we are some dudes smacking each other around on a stage or in a cage.
Stories of heroes are as old as written word and likely older.
And it surprises me that we don't introduce new paradigms. As Red (from OSP noted) The Scarlet Pimpernel was an early superhero (mostly with unearthly levels of panache) who rescued French aristocrats from (those evil, murderous) revolutionaries.
Part of the problem is that the narratives we get are made by companies that don't want us to think about why we have super-agencies like SHIELD, and who are they serving (hint: The same people that are served by CIA, DHS and special forces we send to undeveloped countries).
Imagine, for instance, a citywide industrial strike (because our teachers / freight drivers / baristas / dockworkers / etc.) are underpaid, get no sick leave and have shitty healthcare for themselves and their families. They can't live like this, but the company management is beholden to shareholders who want their money (and will litigate to keep dividends high). Management thinks (much as in Hollywood right now) they can just wait it out, even if the economy is tanking, the workers will start getting hungry. (Yes, it's a literal siege.)
But the neighborhoods and developed mutual aid organizations to help the strikers and keep them from being forced to return to work...
So...the state governor sends law enforcement to bust up mutual aid stations. Violently. With dogs and shooting. (ICE does this kind of work frequently, as part of Customs Enforcement That's why they were in New Zealand to raid the Kim Dotcom estate)
And then street-level superheroes (like Spider-man!) emerge to defend the mutual aid groups from the police anti-riot teams. (Eventually the companies will hire mercenaries, much the way they did to attack the water protectors stopping the Dakota Access Pipeline, which would become the opposing rogues gallery)
This is a superhero story I could get behind, since it's actually about serving the public good, rather than an establishment that wants to replace us with robots or AI generative systems ASAP.
Why don't you write and publish that story if that's what you personally want to see? I imagine you're not the only one. But criticising the exiting publishers for not following your wants in a story is silly if people are buying the content that they are making.
Stories that reflect truth is a different set (with some intersection) as stories that are popular, which is a different set than the stories that are produced and promoted. We can see from the gutting of Firefly and the post-release market of Inception how Hollywood management kills stories they don't like despite their popularity. (It's also why we only have 2.x seasons of Star Trek TOS).
As someone with only a fraction of the skillset and no resource that give me inroads into the publishing industry, I'd have a snowflake's chance in Hell of creating something that could be released. I suppose, I could self-publish but that would still require more resources than I have.
None of this changes the assumptions made in the Marvel and DC diegeses, that police are inherently well-behaved and reserved, despite what we see IRL (as I mentioned elsewhere, the Gotham City PD is less corrupt and more concerned about public interest than _any IRL precinct in the United States, or the DHS and its subdivisions, but also Gotham has a crime rate that is outrageously higher than any municipality in the US -- the Cabot Cove problem) None of this changes that these differences inform people how they see the US legal system much the way that true-crime fiction and police procedurals serve as pro-law-enforcement propaganda.
These also fuel the great man myth, that it is singular powerful individuals that affect change in the world, and not collectives of ordinary folk among the public.
Well, there are still villains like Lex Luthor, Kingpin and Amanda Waller to represent the actually evil part of society. They're just a minority because goofy over-the-top villains in silly costumes are more entertaining for the kids.
Superman's primary villain is literally a white collar criminal that uses the system in order to stymie efforts to hold him accountable. A lot of superhero media could stand to be more critical of the police and prison system but it's a little more complicated to dismantle capitalism than it is to foil violent crime and respond to accidents and disasters.
Yes, and the society that Superman lives in is one that is inherently good and functional, and just needs to be groomed once in a while (or defended from exterior elements).
Granted, they tried to get Superman to force nuclear disarmament, and that didn't go so well.
Superman is actually the zenith example of defenders of the status quo. Superman's job is to return things back to normal which IRL we can no longer pretend is acceptable.
I don't think every piece of media has to promote revolutionary politics in order to justify its existence.
would you rather they kill the villains than send them to prison?
So these are the only two options?
US prisons are nightmare fuel. And law enforcement officers routinely kill suspects who are neither armed nor resisting.
It does raise questions of why villains exist, except as something that heroes can punch without thinking about it.
for spiderman and most super heroes yes that is the only option they can't exactly afford to run their own private secret prison focused on rehabilitation so the only other option is let them go blow up more hospitals cause oh well us prison bad yeah but so is dangling a bus of school kids off a bridge
That is a seriously dark position, but I get it. Very much the way that the only solution we have for people considering suicide is to lock them up in an institution where they have a 30%+ chance of being abused by the staff (orderlies like to get handsy and nurses like to get everyone on tranquilizers so they're not too much trouble). So do we leave our despairing friends on their own to kill themselves, or send them to a facility that could actually be living Hell.
Actually, seeing Spidey confront such matters would be a real treat, and might drive him to look towards underground reform and start a mutual aid program. But that's not as fun as seeing him punch Vulture in the face, is it?
In the meantime, we don't have many hospitals getting blown up, or school busses dangling off bridges, IRL. They have to make that stuff up to justify that someone needs punching. It's like the ticking time bomb scenario (would you torture someone who knew how to defuse a city-busting bomb?) And those scenarios (which appeared in 24 Hours ) were used to justify torture during the War on Terror. And the US still tortures to this day.
This is propaganda in action, especially if it's convincing you the monsters out there are ones that blow up schools rather than the ones that just make sure they will have no choice but to join the army the day they age out of high-school.
The supervillains yes. It's why I don't like most superheroes.
Like Batman for instance. Batman has the blood of every single innocent person the joker killed on his hands because he refuses to solve the problem.
"iF yOu KiLl A kIlLeR tHe AmOuNt Of KiLleRs ReMaInS tHe SaMe!!!11!1!1"
Not if you kill all of them.
And especially not if said killers have killed hundreds/thousands.
Why hasn't the Gotham justice system executed him then? Why not put the onus of them? Or any GCPD cop turning off his bodycam to shoot someone who deserves it for once?
Batman generally doesn't kill because, in all the interesting comics, he realizes that he is mentally unwell and, if he starts down that route, he won't know where he ends up. That's why there are so many stories of plans Batman made to stop himself (generally be suborned by someone else and putting him and others in immediate danger). He's a nutcase with a lot of money who's afraid of himself but trying to do the right thing.
Your stance only holds any water when the villains are literally unable to be physically managed by anyone except one of these demigods.
That's my whole fuckin point.
These are exactly the people that should be straight up killed.
They can't be contained. They can't be reasoned with. They can't be controlled.
They just kill and kill and kill and kill and kill.
The only way to stop them is to kill them. It's that simple.
You need to read Batman White Knight. That deals with the whole concept of whether the Joker can be redeemed or not really well.
Imo it doesn't matter whether or not he can be redeemed. He's killed so many people that his life is forfeit
That'd be like saying Hitler or Stalin were worth keeping around because their multiverse counterpart was able to do good.
I mean, I don't believe in caltial punishment so I'd disagree with the "life being forefit" idea in any sense.
The book deals with the idea that the persona was a mental illness and with treatment he becomes a useful member of society again actually entering politics and improving the city.
The Joker is physically a normal human being. He gets out of prison due to manipulation, not because he punches through steel and concrete. So again, it's not Batman's position, right, or responsibility to execute him.
And you believe they exist in significant numbers.
The Jeffrey Dahmers and John Wayne Gacies of the world are extremely rare.
Far more common are the gypsy cops police officers who kill, are covered by internal affairs until evidence goes public and then lose their job... until they're hired in a new precinct. Derek Chauvin was the exception because we had nationwide protests to which the federal government reacted badly. Meanwhile our ICE troopers are acting like fucking Sicherheitsdienst (and I hope some decade nazi hunters go after them for their crimes against humanity.)
But the real damage comes from the Gates and Bezoses and Musks in the world. The Koch brothers may have singlehandedly killed us all by instilling doubt in a climate problem we've known about since WWI, and deferring global response so that we're still not doing enough a century later, when the world is literally on fire. All the serial killers and gang lords and street purse snatchers and whatever else is represented by Frank Miller's mutant overlord do anything compared to Purdue Pharmacy and the Sacklers. Or DuPont chemical poisoning the global water supply with PFOA.
And yes, they kill and kill and kill but they also control the entities that control the justice system. Kinda like ~~Jeff Bezos~~ Lex Luthor.
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