What's the reason why humanity need heroes? 🦸♂️
Comic Books, you've got to love them earlier, until the politically correct times of madness came and turned dreams into nightmares, especially in the last years whether it's reimagining Bruce Wayne as an asian american teenager accompanied by his gay Butler Alfred or a body positive wonder woman that strikes fear into the hearts of all you can eat buffets everywhere. The entire industry seems to have spent the past few years self-destructing, I mean reinventing itself into something more diverse and inclusive.🥴🏳️🌈
What could be more diverse and inclusive than a year novel about the gay goth plus-sized daughter of legendary DC-Superhero Starfire, called "Nightstar", who is struggling to escape the long shadow cast by her famous mother and find her own sense of identity during her turbulent teenage years? It's a crazy premise, obliges the writer to explore questions of family legacy, personal identity (and identity disorders), social expectations, the real world implications of fame and the complex and often difficult relationship between mothers and their teenage daughters, so let's take a look at this exciting new work, should we?
The drawing of Nightstar does prompt a few questions though like: Why does her upper lip project several inches from her face? Why does one of her hands seem to be suffering from chronic gigantism? Why does this front cover look like it was drawn by me after several pints of methylated spirits? I thought the whole point of ya novels is that they're intended for, well, young adults, so they're supposed to look cool, edgy, sexy and compelling, but this looks like the kind of thing your weird hippie aunt would get you for christmas when you're five years old and you'd politely dump in some cupboard and never talk about again.
Ist there a reason the author might have chosen to style her main character like this? Well, let's take a look at her and find out. Now call me crazy, but I do detect a faint resemblance here to the author Mariko Tamaki. The thing is, it would be easy enough for me to point and laugh at what's clearly just another cringe-worthy self-insertion vanity project doomed to fall into the garbage can of history, written by an author whose ego probably outstrips her creative ability and commisioned by a struggling publisher, desperate to appeal to a woke audience that probably should have allocated its declining resources to something with a better chance of success like burning money.
I could mention all of these things and probably have a good laugh along the way, but really, the bigger question that comes to mind for me is: What exactly are we becoming, if this is the new standard for our comic book heroes?🤔🙄 See we've been doing this kind of thing for a lot longer than you might think! In fact, ever since us humans have been able to conceive of stuff beyond our own experience we've been kind of fascinated by the idea of heroic characters embarking on epic adventures, righting wrongs and defeating evil enemies. All of this is kind of the basis for our whole civilization.
Whether it's Achilles and Hector and the Illiad or Perseus slain Medusa or Beowulf fighting Grendel or Saint George killing the Dragon and so on. You could pick basically any culture on earth at any time period and the chances are you'll find legends and stories of heroic men and women accomplishing great deeds, characters who could best be described as more of human. Men of destiny, men of great skill or superhuman strength that allows them to overcome the most powerful and terrifying enemies imaginable.
Jumped forward a few thousand years, we're still doing the exact same thing with a new generation of heroes and villains, that we've created all for ourselves. The classical heroes, gods and monsters from our ancient legends have been replaced by modern day reinterpretations and instead of storytellers spinning their tails around a campfire now we have comic books, movies and TV to satisfy our needs.📺🦸 The technology might have changed, but the basic motivation hasn't!
We still have the same drive and hunger for stories of larger than life heroes and villains, the same need to believe in things that are grander and bigger than our petty existence. The same aspiration to be more than we are and I guess this is the real point I'm trying to gonna make here. The heroes we create are a symbol and a reflection of our human potential, not human reality, they represent the very best of what we can and should strive for, they encourage us to reach higher, to try harder, to go further than we ever thought possible, they push us to see beyond the boundaries and limitations of our everyday lives, to dream about what we could be instead of fretting about what we are!
Perhaps most importantly of all they remind us we wish that there's still something fundamentally good in all of humanity. For all our flaws and our mistakes and our weaknesses it's our ability to pick ourselves up to move forward to strive to better ourselves and overcome our limitations. All of this defined all our history, it's what's driven us to build great cities, invent new technologies, compose great symphonies and works of art, to explore the furthest reaches of our planets and to reach for the stars
The potential that exists inside each and every one of us is as unlimited as our imaginations and the heroes that we create to inspire and motivate and guide us, reflect the very best aspects of that boundless potential, so I gues it's kind of sad and disheartening to watch today's cynical, nihilistic, mean-spirited attempts to subvert and degrade those same heroes. Instead of respecting them, it's become fashionable to mock and belittle and criticize them as relics of a bygone era or symbols of oppression or discrimination without really understanding what they stood for in the first place.
People who once looked to our heroes as symbols to aspire to as a motivation to become more than they are now see them as an unflattering reflection of their own weaknesses and failures. Rather than try to be better themselves and their lives through hard work, courage and sacrafice they instead find perverted joy in tearing down anything that stands higher than them, bringing everyone and everything down to their level, instead of the harder, but more rewarding task of raising themselves up.
The end result of this way of thinking is a petty, envious view of the world, the kind of thing that belongs in the minds of petty, envious people, who hide their dark intent behind a facade of compassion and fairness, the kind of people who hysterically preach acceptance of everything, no matter how ridiculous, harmful or pathetic, because once you accept everything, then there's no need to strive for anything! Instead of the mighty and inspriring heroes we used to look up to, well, you end up with stuff like Nightstar from Mariko Tamaki (hashtag: FREAK!!!), which - to put it mildly - is a poor substitute for our childhood heroes who, in the end, make the impossible possible through their determination and the power of love and triumphantly defeat the seemingly overpowering villain to save the day after all.💪🙂
And now just ask yourself how few people there are who would swap such old school heroes for these progressive freaks in TV and comics that Marvel, DC, Disney & Co. are constantly trying to make palatable to us in line with their progressive agenda.😆 😅 😂