this post was submitted on 04 Sep 2023
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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.