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@ami_angelwings is this because superhero movies are opposed to brightly colored outfits?

@waitworry no, it's for a number of factors:

1) there was a much larger variety of superhero stuff in the 90s, not just the indie comics (altho there was a lot of that too), but like all the different knock off superhero films and games too, and a lot of people trying to make their own superheroes whether creators or fans, that creativity is imo very important to "superheroes"

2) and all of the superhero stuff, even the bad films people make fun of, still were about being a superHERO: having a secret identity, wanting to save people, wearing goofy costumes, even something like Mystery Men had a lot more heroing in it than stuff now where people are superheroes as jobs or have superpowers but actually are doing other things than being a superhero (or even wanting to be a superhero)

@waitworry 3) stuff from the 90s also had like unique superhero worlds that felt very comic booky, Batman 89's Gotham is obvious, but even Mystery Men's aesthetic is very unique, it's not just "what if superheroes lived in our world", it was "this is a superhero world"

I think to me that's the main difference, current superhero stuff is trying very hard to be "realistic superheroes", superheroes in the "real world" in real cities talking like "real" people and less like people who want to be heroes but people who have superpowers and are hanging out and occasionally fight something (or they're just evil), but to me "superhero" isn't just having superpowers, it's a genre with its own conventions and worlds, and the 90s stuff, comics, games, tv, movies, feels like it captures it more

@ami_angelwings ah ok and the modern stuff has lost too many of the conventions to really fit

@waitworry there's also something probably to be said about how superheroes when they do stuff now are just cops and are very pro-cop... one of the big superhero traditions is being on the run from cops, you see this even in the bad 90s superhero stuff like Steel, running from cops is like up there with coming up with a costume, learning your powers, etc, for superhero conventions... now it's like "thank you for your service officer"

@ami_angelwings even Batman traditionally starts with a pretty complex relationship with the cops

@waitworry yeah, and Spider-Man famously is very anti-authority, not just hunted by cops, but him making fun of Nick Fury and refusing to work with SHIELD whenever they wanted him was a big part of his character, and now he's like owned and raised by Tony Stark in the movies, and in the Disney animated show he was literally an apprentice trained by SHIELD

the fantasy of being a superhero, for me anyway, is to be free from authority not to be part of it

(there's also something to be said in the shift of children's fantasy from running away and going on an adventure to being in hero school like Harry Potter or Naruto)

@waitworry thinking about this and how the shift to children's fantasy where heroism is institutionalized and how that reflects modern discourses about kid's lives having to be regimented through institutions and systems, how the argument for more kids activity always means through schooling, more gym, more school teams, how we are increasingly removing public spaces for kids to play and hang out but when people decry the lack of kids going out the solution is "more league sports"

@waitworry
and then thinking about how the move away from superhero identities and masks also dovetails with our society's increasing surveillance state and the arguments in all parts of life that people, especially kids, do not deserve privacy or the right to their own lives or the right to anonymity or to reinvent themselves whether it be online or through sexual and gender identities, etc

a lot of the child fantasy of being a superhero IS the defiance of authority and also the secret identity, the idea that you aren't defined by your role in your family or in school or in your community, that you put on the mask and get to decide for yourself who you are

@ami_angelwings @waitworry Someone else said recently that if there's been a big shift in genre fiction over the last two decades (superheroes, fantasy, sci-fi, you name it) its towards a sort of blind and even unacknowledged acceptance of the legitimacy of institutions, including security institutions. I think they're right, and I don't even think its deliberate, I think we're fish who are losing words for water.

@Mezentine also 9/11 happened & it really changed how much security and surveillance ppl have to accept in society, and it affected media a lot too with the acceptance that cops & soldiers & other authority keep us safe, outside the "corrupt" ones

the Department of Defense has also been spending a lot on movies since the 2000s and especially on superhero movies & the MCU so not all of it is incidental:

Captain Marvel was a joint effort with the Air Force which heavily advertised it: https://taskandpurpose.com/news/captain-marvel-featurette-air-force/

Black Panther was used by the CIA to recruit: https://web.archive.org/web/20180915045033/https://www.cia.gov/news-information/featured-story-archive/2018-featured-story-archive/wakandan-technology-today-a-cia-scientist-explores-the-possibilities.html

Part of why SHIELD was destroyed in Winter Soldier was due to the DoD objecting to an organization existing outside the RL chain of command & pulling their funding from Avengers 1: https://www.wired.com/2012/05/avengers-military/

@Mezentine @ami_angelwings @waitworry (written about the third film in 2012, and before "MCU as ventriloquist dummy for American empire" was as blindingly obvious as it was by the end of last decade, but i still think he managed to identify some of the fundamental ideological commitments of the genre, as interpreted by post-9/11 hollywood)

@IngaLovinde @Mezentine @ami_angelwings also of course they randomly do some fucked up thing so you don't accidentally get too sympathetic too

@waitworry @Mezentine @ami_angelwings and so that it will leave an impression on you that activists do fucked up things, so that your subconscious will remember it whenever you hear about activists IRL

@LastEquinoxx @Mezentine @ami_angelwings @waitworry Came here to suggest this too!

@negativeprimes@urusai.social @LastEquinoxx@mastodon.social @Mezentine@social.treehouse.systems @ami_angelwings@urusai.social @waitworry@sakurajima.moe Definitely. I liked the spin-off much more than the main series ​​

@JenYetAgain @waitworry sailor moon, nighthood, cybersix (i count the early 00s as 90s due to lag time of production and influence, also 2000 & 2001 pre-9/11has more in common with the 90s than everything after)

@ami_angelwings @waitworry Did it all start with Ninja Turtles in '87? There's no way to know but in this series of posts we can speculate...

@JenYetAgain @ami_angelwings and to think ninja turtles was originally a parody of the sorts of comic books they had at the time

@waitworry @JenYetAgain lived long enough to see themselves become the villain

@arichtman @waitworry @ami_angelwings Yeah, specifically Frank Miller's Daredevil, the depressed teenage mutants with attitudes living in the sewers were very much... Well, I don't know if parody is the right word since the original comics weren't particularly funny iirc?

@waitworry @JenYetAgain @ami_angelwings I mean The Foot always felt funny, same with Shredder. Now it's even funnier, thanks!

@arichtman @waitworry @ami_angelwings Oh, yeah, Shredder died in the first issue, he wasn't really a thing until the Cartoon.

@waitworry @arichtman @JenYetAgain krangpin

@ami_angelwings @waitworry @JenYetAgain Thanks y'all makin my DAY!

@BigShellEvent often it's not well thought out either, there's SO MANY non-white villains and Imperials in Star Wars now, or like when all the secondary characters get cast as PoC so when you start killing people off its just PoC (see: Galactica, Battlestar, 2004)

@ami_angelwings YUP. It's usually a weird mixture of whitegazing and dehumanising. I didn't realise how common it was until I watched The Squid Game on Netflix, and it's the first time in a western platform where I didn't feel the whitegaze at all. Which is the strongest feel I got from that series