Watchmen and The Dark Knight Returns came out at roughly the same time and can be conceived as having roughly the opposite opinions on the dynamic between Superheroes and the State. Watchmen- written from some stripe of left-anarchist perspective- holds thats Superheroes would be at best ineffectual at addressing society’s underlying systemic problems and at their worst would be directly, gleefully complicit in the institutional malfeasance that creates those problems. The Dark Knight Returns, written from a right-libertarian perspective, advances that in the face of institutional collapse in the face of apocalyptic nuclear war, the figure of The Superhero would be the last functioning institution as everything else goes belly up, the last guy around with the willpower and clarity of purpose to actually get anything done instead of grabbing the bag and running for the hills. In Watchmen the machinery of state doesn’t give a shit about the Masks; in The Dark Knight Returns the machinery of state cannot suffer the Mask to live, because of how the Mask puts the lie to the legitimacy of that state just by virtue of continuing to be themselves when it hits the fan.
Despite the obvious political daylight between these positions, Alan Moore exhibits intense professional and artistic respect for what Frank Miller was going for with TDKR in his 1987 write-up for Twilight of the Superheroes; most specifically he praises the act of actually closing out the myth, and the aesthetic commitment to writing in a mythological register when writing the story of Batman’s last stand. Here’s Beowolf vs the Dragon, here’s Robin Hood firing off an arrow to mark his burial site, and here’s the Feds dropping the ten-ton hammer on Batman because they cannot suffer a great man to live. But what’s equally interesting is how Twilight of the Superheroes proceeds to embrace TDKR’s thesis about Superheroes as The Ones Holding The Line As We Fuck Everything Up and reframes it as a horror story from a left wing perspective.
The premise of TOTS isn’t that the Capes launched a coup- it’s that they just stuck around through the collapse of late stage capitalism, made themselves visible as the most consistent and unconditional source of support in times of crisis, and thus proceeded to personally form the core of emergent regional governments centered on where they happened to live. And in the process they basically recreate feudalism by accident and to some extent against their will. And now Batman’s cast as the anarchist revolutionary out to depose of all gods and masters and restore power to the people. We were within spitting distance of Left-wing TDKR that that was nonetheless equally Weird About Women
One of the most famous examples of it had to be written by Frank Miller because it’s legitimately easier to write in that heroic, mythic register without discomfort or dissonance if you already approach the world from some kind of right wing viewpoint. The superhero genre, and every other “heroic” genre (spy fiction, action heroes, high fantasy) lends itself incredibly well to great man theory and individual exceptionalism, that’s basically the default shape that it takes unless you’re actively working to shape it otherwise (and it’s often painfully painfully visible when an author is trying to reconcile the contradictions between the genre they’re trying to write in and their own personal moral and ethical systems.)
It’s not impossible for a left-wing writer to temporarily deliberately inhabit and tell a story from within a right-wing worldview; in fact, I believe that Moore’s ability to do this was the source of his professional respect for Miller’s work despite his obvious political disagreements with it. But if you’re going all in on glazing the singular heroic figure, even in a ‘doomed mythic last stand" way, there’s going to be way less friction if you’re already some kind of authoritarian who feels no dissonance about enthusiastically leaning into the authoritarian overundertones of pulp.
(To say nothing, of course, of the fact that there’s an incredibly large market of readers who also unreconstructedly buy into the right-wing worldview of TDKR- the book got big for a reason, the same reason every other reactionary morality play gets big! Lots of people eat that shit up, and from a pure craft perspective it’s kinda the high-water mark for works produced from within that worldview.)
https://paypal.me/kiridifferent hi, sorry. i’m still doing job search, and my parents borrow my money for debt and groceries. i need to pay off around 250$ of debt, thanks in advance
hi sorry for keeping bumping this
100/250
sorry for bumping. haven’t got a job
sorry bump again my parents borrowed from my savings again. ive sold some of my stuff (clothing and whatever) already
how about instead of responding to the achingly inane innovations being pushed of AI that will write your emails so that another AI can read them and provide a summary to the person you’re emailing by defending the sacred art of emailing we instead stop to consider what kind of systems we have created in which people are constantly sending emails so worthless that getting an idiot robot to both read and write them seems like a sensible value proposition
minecraft for the last few years has had maybe the most confused development direction of All Time
theres one guy at minecraft who is under the impression they are making an educational game to teach kids about different types of igneous rocks and what foods are bad for what animals and anopther guy at minecrasft who is uinder the impression hes making Skyrim Remasdtered: Blocks Edition. and one guy who has wastched Youtubrs and is under the impression theyre desighing Industrial Slaughter Simulator 2024. and all of them live in separate offices and add their updatres independently of each other and dont know the others exist
guy 1: bad news everyone we have to take out wolf domestication because i Just Learned you cant domesticate wolfs in real life
guy 2: SPear. Lets add the Spear. itll be like the sword but different because 1. its its a Spear, 2 its more Tactical. guys are you hearing this shit. Spear Update
guy 3: we have heard the feedback of the community and will be increasing the spawnrate of helpless baby seals in the vicinity of the Crusher block to make blubber farms more efficeint
microsoft: anyway we’re pleased to abnoucned another entry in the awesome minecraft IP, “big trough of uneaten pig food (creeper shaped)”
