Superhero Fatigue Is Bull@#$% And We Need To Stop Blaming It!

So it’s still out there. I saw a video today denouncing the concept of superhero fatigue because Hollywood and their willing propaganda machine are still trying to blame superhero fatigue for the current fall of the Marvel Cinematic Universe and why the DC Movieverse is filled with problems. Kingsman director Matthew Vaughn even joined the chorus this week, though at least he’s only suggesting a slowdown instead of a full stop and actually addressing the problems with the movies themselves. (Then again he liked The Flash(point movie), so judge him accordingly. I haven’t seen it nor plan to.) The rest are pushing the “superhero fatigue” narrative hard. This is total BS pushed upon us by auteur directors, writers who don’t want to write this stuff but need the paycheck, and a collection of activists, misery obsessed types, media snobs, and everything for meeeeeeeeeeeeee types that make up the modern press. Even supposed geek media says people are done with superheroes.

My response is in there.

Not a year of my life, including the first few years I wasn’t really paying attention to (being a baby or toddler at the time), has gone by without more than one live-action or animated superhero TV show or movie being released. Even the old radio shows gave us Superman, the Green Hornet, the Blue Beetle, and the Shadow. Serials gave us the original Captain Marvel, Batman, the “rocket men”, and still more Superman. The superhero genre isn’t even accounting for half the movies and shows out there now, even with the saturation on Disney+, and rarely are there two new superhero shows going on there at the same time, though it has happened. The idea that people are tired of superheroes is such a crock of bull that I’m starting to get ticked off about it. You know what the real issue is? CRAP Fatigue. Allow me to explain.

As I said, superheroes have been a part of media even before comic books if we include comic strips and the “mystery men” who hide behind another identity but lack superpowers. If we don’t expand to mystery men and pulp heroes there’s still a lot of superheroes outside of comics, though comics and animation are often where they flourish. Without the worries of “reality” making things hard to believe it’s easier to suspend disbelief. Looney Tune jokes don’t work as well in live-action even when they’re comedies (though they can still amuse) because animation’s unreality allows things that look weird to us easier to accept. As Bugs Bunny once said: anything can happen…in a cartoon.

That doesn’t mean you can’t do a live-action superhero production, but shows like the Power Rangers franchise or The Greatest American Hero were made for live-action. While Superman: The Movie made you believe a man could fly by showing Superman fly without being an obvious backdrop you still didn’t see Christopher Reeves pull off the flying moves you see in cartoons. Even Brandon Routh and Henry Cavill didn’t fly the way the DCAU or even the current My Adventures With Superman Kal-El can depict him doing not only to SFX that have only recently allowed Spider-Man and Iron Man to look awesome using their powers and boot jets but because being set in the real world keeps you bound a bit more by real world perspectives like gravity and weather. We don’t ask how cartoon Superman can lift a bus or fly through a hurricane but channels will devote time and science to explain why it’s impossible in the real world and use live-action more than animated and drawn superheroes as their example.

However, even that really isn’t the problem. The problem is who is making current superhero fair. Let’s meet the culprits.

A black superheroine who practically led the team? You said they didn’t exist. My childhood said otherwise. Also, “nah nah” and it wants a cookie.

Activist writers insist you have a quota of this or that “marginalized group”, which usually involved race/gender/orientation swaps because it isn’t enough to exist. Their egos want the big names regardless of past depiction, and even then what you get is some stereotyped token pretending to be true representation. I grew up with superheroines, black superheroes, and black superheroines but their stories were about fighting crime and saving lives, not their race or bedtime partners. This has led to terrible superheroes not because of their skin color or biological identification but because that’s all there is to them. Get into the stories and the character ranks from bland and uninteresting to insulting to the very people they claim to represent. This has been an issue in comics as well recently but we’re talking the live-action fare, since the media snobs want nothing to do with comics and cartoons.

Call them out on bad writing and they break out the Ist Shields. “You’re racist, sexists bigots who can’t handle (insert cause du jour here) as a hero”. No, we want to see them do something heroic, not sit around dealing with “internet trolls” who didn’t like your previous movie because they were badly written. You’d think they would WANT to write a good gay black woman so people would love them but they would have to care about what they’re writing and be good at writing first. Just existing is enough to these lazy hacks who purport to be “allies” but won’t put the effort in to make their “allies” look good.

I’ve seen more and more of the arthouse, auteur, and artsy directors having a fit over superhero movies even when they are written well. They think every movie needs some deep, meaningful, spiritual lesson and fill you with “emotions”, usually the depressing ones like anger or sadness. Happiness and joy are not considered emotions to this crowd and thus their movies do not end happily or at best bittersweet. “We lived, but at what cost to our therapy bills?” Their movies are filled with dark colors and steeped in a cynical form of “realism”. It’s not just superheroes victimized by this trend, either. Westerns, war movies, and action movies are alway about the worst of mankind but rarely the best. Action movies today lack the action of the 80s movies, like Commando. James Bond has already lost the fancy gadgets disguised as normal items, they’ve taken away his sex appeal, and now they’re going to further reinvent him. I’m not even sure what you can take away next, and I’m not even a huge Bond fan. The Cold War is over but terrorists still exist, you can still have the criminals with big robbery or world domination schemes without the USSR (though Putin is working to restore that), and he’s supposed to be a male fantasy. Can’t have that.

The bright colors are also gone. Superman hasn’t had a bright blue outfit since Superman Returns and even that wasn’t as bright as previous costumes. Superman & Lois has Supes in a close to proper outfit for a couple of minutes in a flashback sequence and that’s it. Spider-Man’s colors already weren’t that bright but they’ve gone darker. Bright colors are a bit useless with the saturation being turned down to begin with but compare TV and movie costumes to what the cosplayers are wearing at conventions and costume parties and you can see the difference. People who actually like superheroes like the bright colors, something only the preschool kids are getting. Nobody’s asking for Dick Tracy because that movie didn’t understand how color works in a comic and thus you had a poor translation to live-action. This still isn’t the biggest problem.

If I thought of it at the time I would have added the red tights, just to really tick the sad sacks off.

All of these issues are bad enough on their own but what really turns off superhero fans to the current crop is the lack of the “hero ” part. If you support the same cause you cheer on the “hero” attacking the strawman representative of someone you hate, but for the rest of us who actually like escapism for a few minutes so our minds can relax and reset to properly tackle a situation with an open mind this just bogs us down further in the cynical view of the real world. Current storytellers (and I’m using the “legal” definition of “story” here) lack optimism, lack empathy, lack a belief in the better parts of human nature and only focus on the worst parts of human nature. This is reflected in their take on heroes, why they lack the tolerance of bright colors and fun stories that have nothing to say except “I know you’re tired, so relax by watching generic baddie #4 that may or may not reflect your life in a general sense for a hour and a half of the hero defeating him/her”. Not every story has to be about one specific group or issue because then you limit it to that one group who cares about that one issue. I’m not saying you can’t make those things. By all means, do. Just make it the exception rather than the rule. Allow everyone to see their personal struggle in your hero saving the day and I’m happy. Oh right, you hate happy people. Have to be sad, bitter, and angry all the time.

It’s not superhero fatigue, because that’s not a thing. If anything it’s the lack of hero fatigue, of seeing a positive world, of not being bogged down with the same real world issues we always see. I’ve seen more excitement about allowing a sick child the chance to fight crime alongside Batman than I have anything on the big screen. Yeah, remember Batkid? A simple request by a sick child to the Make A Wish Foundation touched so many people that practically the whole darn city got involved. Kids love superheroes and denying them a chance to see superheroes in action is a whole other debate but not mentioning it here would be a mistake. It’s also a problem that adults complain that superheroes are for kids then turn around and make superhero shows for adults only. And yet, preschoolers are getting the best superhero shows, but I’ve already gone over that.

If you want to save the superhero genre, and we’ve just gone over the fact that you don’t and that’s part of the problem, make good superhero stories. Show us bright colors. Show us interesting villains we can all see our problems in. Give us heroes who struggle and overcome not just with their powers and gadgets but finding a way to use them along with your brains to make it exciting, or a little help from their friends. You can make them any race, gender, or orientation you want (so long as that’s how the original was or show some creative backbone and create one) but ditch the stereotypes and make them actual people, focusing on the adventure instead of skin color and dating profile. Then make them heroic. Show that they can fight some major villain and still be humble enough to rescue a cat from a tree, show them try to make us better because they believe in people…because they ARE people themselves. Show them good natured, give us exciting adventures, USE PRIMARY COLORS THAT AREN’T SATURATED TO THE POINT THAT THEY’RE BLACK AND GREY, and let us have a fun adventure.

The fatigue isn’t from too many superheroes, it’s from the lack of actual heroes buried under the supercynical.