Great. So we're going to be seeing this meme 8 times every month?
this post was submitted on 28 Apr 2025
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dc is more guilty of this than marvel, but yeah.
Sam Raimi Spider-man spent most of his time saving people from imminent harm and stopping armed robberies. He fought the CEO of a company that developed military technology who was killing people to hang onto his position of power and wealth. He then fought a mad scientist that spent the entire movie putting innocent people in danger, attacking Spider-man and ultimately risking the deaths of millions out of an obsession and the influence his technology had over him. In the third one... he turns into a bit of a dick for a while because he's being partially controlled by an alien, and the theme for all three villains is revenge. At no point in the trilogy does he target anyone who is trying to make a political or social change, just people that are attacking him personally and/or putting innocent bystanders in harm's way.
In the Amazing Spider-Man movies he pretty much just fights a guy who is trying to turn everyone into lizards, his own stalker who just happens to get electricity powers, and the rich brat that blames him for not giving him blood samples which he thinks will cure his disease (they won't, but the reason for the refusal is still poorly defined).
MCU Spider-man gets recruited to fight half the avengers, which might play into this if the civil war was about a larger societal issue, but it wasn't. As far as the movie presents it, the entire issue is about the rules governing the avengers themselves and the fate of Bucky. Arguably the Captain America side is presented more favorably, but that too would go against the point the comic is making because they are the ones resisting the status quo and sticking it to the man.
And in his actual movies, MCU spider-man fights a guy who is flooding the streets with high tech weapons just for the money, a con man that's willing to kill innocent people to make himself look like a superhero, and all those villains from the previous continuities who is actually just trying to send home.
Maybe spider-man was a bad example. Surely the rest of the MCU must be pro-government propaganda, right?
Iron Man 1: Rich selfish asshole has a wake up call, realizes that harm he's done by filling the world with weapons, immediately exits the arms industry and dedicates his company to developing peaceful technologies to help the world. Uses the technology he developed to intervene in conflicts where civilians are getting massacred and no one is willing to do anything about it. Defies the US military to do it. The villain is a greedy executive that tries to kill Tony to seize control of the company and continue building weapons.
Iron Man 2: Tony is continuing his policy of protecting people in war zones, in defiance of an angry US government. The government tries to steal his suit for the military, and works with a rival company to develop drone versions which Tony destroys.
Iron Man 3: Wouldn't you know it, another company developing military tech is run by an evil guy and is killing innocent people.
Captain America: Literally fighting Nazis.
Captain America 2: Fighting the Nazis that have infiltrated the US government.
Captain America 3: Fighting to save his friend in defiance of a government that would rather kill him than bring him in peacefully.
Thor: Shakespeare in space, plus Thor learns humility.
Thor 2: Blowing up the universe is bad.
Thor 3: Thor literally helps start a revolution to overthrow a dictator.
Thor 4: The gods are assholes who should care more about people.
The Incredible Hulk: Science man good, military guy bad. Smashy smashy.
Ant Man: An ex con who went to jail for hacking a corrupt corporation gets recruited by a scientist who helps him take and an evil CEO of a corrupt corporation.
Alright, I'm not listing any more, there's a million of these things, you get the idea.
I took this to be about MCU specifically, so I'll skip the first two Spiderman film continuities.
Homecoming - the villain is a lower class guy who has been screwed by the fallout of the Avengers and is making money to improve his family off of it. He is somewhat sympathetic, but the moral of the story is trust in the authorities because a well meaning guy will fix the hiccup in the system, and responding to systemic issues with force is wrong. Could be argued the real villain is Tony Stark.
I did not see the remaining MCU Spidermen, but they look to focus on more otherworldly Meta-continuity forces.
Black Panther - the villain is an extremist with a point. Killmongers desire for revenge and modes go too far. He should be better, like the royal family are. Luckily Killmonger inspires the legitimate authority to make a choice to do more and be more benign. Maybe he just should have trusted in the legitimate authorities all along and stayed inside the social bounds... Which had not made change until his use of force and theft?
I have seen the Iron Men, but not recently enough to engage with.
Civil War: the authorities want something that is controversial, but it turns out they weren't the legitimate authorities, but secret Nazis trying to bring harm to everyone. The legitimate authorities had folks best interests at heart and fix everything. Could go either way, since forming a terrorist cell to fight authority is pretty radical.
The Thanos films: Thanos' malthusianism is presented as bad, but not actually as wrong. There have been plenty of ways at this point to show that Malthusianism isn't accurate, (and wasn't actually an original part of the character) but it was put in here and not debated or shown to be wrong in itself, just "bad that he did it". Malthusian ideals are strongly linked to right wing ideologies (as well as some nutty far left ones) that have been ascendent in relatively core right wing parties in the last 20 years.
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which movie is this referring to? I've been plugging away at the mcu movies and most of the time the enemy is the nazi spinoff faction seeking to subjugate all of humanity that embedded itself in multiple parts of the government. I only watched one of the other spider man movies and don't remember anything about it
This reminds me of a reel on Instagram where the singer Aurora said something along the lines of "Isn't it weird how the «villains» want to break the status quo while the «heroes» seek to restore it?" and in the comments there were ones that said "For this nonsense people become leftist" and exactly right below that another one said "For this nonsense people become right-wing".
The super hero genre is an individualist power fantasy. It's about giving power to individuals, whereas in real life power rests in groups and systems. That includes the power to effect social change.
It's an escapist response to living in an impossibly complicated world where we want to do good, but we feel powerless and unable to.
The story of a character organizing a series of protests wouldn't really benefit from that character having super powers. Using super powers (physical force) to push political beliefs is terrorism.
So the constraints of the genre mean that social messages have to exist alongside the A-plot power struggle. And they frequently do.
Black Panther is about abandoning isolationism and using a government's power and wealth to help people.
The Avengers have an unmissable theme of not supporting the military-industrial complex. Same with Iron Man.
Common Marvel villains include fascists, bigots, businessmen, and corrupt law enforcement, in addition to the madmen and evil gods.
I've seen this point made a few times, and it just reeks of someone backfilling a reason to hate something popular without actually spending a moment to, you know, watch that thing.
"I'm a Virgo" touches on some of that, including having a character with a power related to rousing speeches who organizes community action.
Yep, it's also worth noting that the Avengers organisation is infiltrated, and the actual superheroes end up fighting against the organisation they started.
Spider Man in particular is often at odds with the authorities.
And that's not even mentioning the new season of Daredevil, which could not under any circumstances be described as "pro-cop".
It can still end up as a conservative power fantasy. Kevin Sorbo invaded Space Iraq to stop space weapons of mass destruction while being hated by the government he tried to build.
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I haven't watched those films in a while but isn't one of spiderman's things "fuck the police, help the poor"? I know he runs a food bank in the new games
It's inconsistent, to put it mildly. Spider-Man is generally a working class hero and is also an impressionable kid constantly struggling under the pressure to do good. Sometimes that puts him at odds with NYPD, sometimes he comes out in favor of the Super Registration Act (he flip-flopped later)
That's what happens when a thousand writers contrivute to one canon.
Tbh they only really swerved into it that hard with this Falcon movie.
You know, the movie with themes of black empowerment where they engage in relentless apologia for General President Ross turning a man he did medical experiments on into a slave.
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Metal Gear Solid 2 plays out like this. Spoilers below but it came out in 2001 so whatever
The bad guy is a former President that knew his job was just as a figurehead, nothing more. He found out the hard way that even his orders came from a cutout.
He recruited "terrorists" to take the sitting President "hostage" so they could "force him" to detonate an EMP over the east coast. The plan is to dismantle the shadow government (actually AI) running the government/censoring public opinion and hopefully free the country
You play as the wide eyed idealistic special forces infiltrator, trained heavily through VR and sent to "rescue" the sitting President from the "terrorist leader" and learn that everything you know is wrong and you were given orders by the AI all along
This is tangential to the main point you are making, but:
... I also always interpreted Raiden as basically Kojima more or less openly mocking or taunting the western player base of... well, mostly white male, naive/emo/astoundingly insecure children.
I remember there being absolutely massive backlash when MGS2 came out with tons of 'gamers' just calling Raiden a 'gay little effeminate f@ggot boy' and shit like that.
... Which I found quite funny in a meta-ironic sense.
And then of course, if you....actually do play through the game... well, from Raiden's POV, .... it basically is a shonen, a coming of age arc, making mistakes, struggling, being confused... but ultimately getting his shit together just enough to ... well maybe not " "save the day" ", but avert utter catastrophe...
... as well as Raiden develops maturity as a character, reveals that... he actually has a lot of extremely serious trauma in his past, and he genuienly becomes a hero as he comes to terms with, and overcomes much of it.
...
MGS2, where Hideo Kojima dared to ask: What if an action hero wasn't an absolute badass with a gruff voice?
(took western culture almost 20 years to even come up with the phrase 'subversion of expectations'...)
Spoilers below but it came out is 2001 so whatever
I had someone get mad at me b/c I described a plot from a book written 70 years ago. I declined to edit my post to hide the "spoilers". I guess I am the asshole.
I beat that game once and this is the first time I had any idea what it was about, thanks for a solid explanation
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The most shocking revelation was that Jack didn't have any posters in his room!
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