Retroversy

People who demand for politics to be kept out of their superhero media are ridiculous. What else is a superhero but someone who fights for good? Who protects the innocent? To write something like that, we need to define what “good” is, right? What counts as “innocent”? What people need to be protected from? At that point, you’re already doing politics.

So what people really mean when they say “no politics” is that they don’t want to be confronted with an interpretation of what is “good” and worth fighting for, or what is “bad” and what people need to be protected from, that makes them uncomfortable. What they want is not “no politics”, but “no mention or discussion of political issues I don’t like”.

Usually, the reason why they don’t like these issues being touched upon in superhero stories is because they realize that if, say, climate activism were to be seen as, in essence, the same thing as the Avengers thwarting Thanos’ plan to kill billions of people, then that would mean that opposing climate activism would make them the villains.

So they’ll say, “I don’t want Spider-Man to be a feminist, I want him to stop Doc Ock from kidnapping orphans!” or “I don’t want Kamen Rider to stand up for immigrants, I just want him to beat up Shocker goons menacing civilians”, probably fully aware that, say, “queer people do not want to be second-class citizens” and “the inhabitants of Earth do not want to kneel before General Zod” are in fact — at least at the most abstract level — the same fight.

After all, if the real world had no authoritarian oppressors telling folks who just want to be free what to do; if it had no hateful ghouls out to strip others of their humanity; if it had no such politics, we wouldn’t be able to conceive of what “protecting the innocent” even means. How can you protect the innocent without anything to protect them from? Without concepts that can be called the opposite of “good”, what meaning does that word even have?

So, of course the very idea of a superhero is, ontologically, political. The Joker’s plan to poison every child’s birthday cake is just as political as Michael Knowles’ reprehensible call to “eradicate transgenderism [sic] from public life”. The only difference is that one is so cartoonishly evil it’d make even judges in The Hague believe they’re being pranked on candid camera, and the other is the plot of every other Batman comic from the 1970s.