Before “The Dark Knight Rises” came out I was actually hoping that Batman would turn out to be the bad guy in it and Bane the one to lead the impoverished masses against the plutocracy. In the end, understanding himself to be the head of the problem as the wealthiest, most self-involved man in Gotham, Batman would give himself up to the revolutionary forces to be sacrificed as a symbol of the start of a new age.
Needless to say I found the actual movie rather disappointing.
Probably a good time to bring up China Mieville’s take on Iron Man.
I really don’t want to spoil the last couple of lines, but it’s a more interesting (and given the author, more socialist) take on the character.
I feel Bioware could get there if they tried a little harder. Even with the messianic undertones of the Mass Effect and Dragon Age series, the “special one” still requires help from skilled individuals in a team effort. They just need to make that more overt.
And Gail Carriger’s Parasol Protectorate series and her use of the [Demeter Myth] is another example of there being no “I” in team1:
Women in ancient myths often accomplish their quests through the building and maintaining of friendships and family groups. They use networks to complete tasks on their journey. I think it’s a cultural problem that we often view this behavior as weak. We are obsessed with the idea that in order to succeed a hero/heroine must be strong and independent and act alone. All of my heroine’s greatest strengths are in their friends and their relationships. I always try to ensure that my stories highlight this fact.
Also worth a look:
Not quite a single hero, but Warren Ellis’ Global Frequency sort-of had crowdsourcing heroism.
Bruce Wayne is such a light weight; “Doc” Clark Savage Jr was willing to get his hands dirty in the fight against crime. Carrying out unlicensed, non-consensual brain surgery to cut the EVIL from the minds of criminals before turning them loose as a valuable, compliant workers.
But, batman does do all of that. His fortune is heavily invested in to the city especially schools for the empoverished and orphanages. He gets involved with politics, fights corruption in the courts and the police force.
He does just as much crime fighting as Wane as he does as Batman. It’s just that when you get terrorists like the Joker around funding to the school system isn’t quite as immediately effective as bomb disposal and face punching.
I mean, if it was just the Joker, maybe. What would be good for Jack is hospitalization and powerful meds and a good therapist. Face punching isn’t going to get him to give up his destructive persona. You can’t end violence with more violence. Batman can bludgeon one perp into submission, but the world makes no sense for a lot of people, and fighting that cultural malaise with your fists just isn’t very effective.
Because Jack isn’t the only one dressing up in costumes and killing people. So it’s not just one dude, it’s a whole city. So you need to prevent FUTURE Jacks from arising, or else you get rid of one and someone else starts dressing up in costumes and blowing stuff up in all-consuming nihilism. There’s no change in the system. That’s not something violence fixes.
Also, I found Bruce’s moral code a bit odd, as a kid - he’s ok with beating the everloving hell out of a criminal, but could never kill anybody. 12-year-old me was just like “Bruce, it’s obvious that locking up the Joker is not solving the problem. He always escapes somehow. Just fucking kill him already.” I mean, even as a kid I could tell that he kinda got off on beating people up, so that was why he didn’t bother killing them to eliminate the problem entirely. Beat em up, lock em away, then in a couple months they escape and you get to rinse and repeat.
Yes. Yes. And yes again.
This reminds me of two essays by David Brin:
… and, older and a little longer:
Joker had a good therapist once.
which he already does and frankly the ones that take over aren’t much for villainy, not much more than thugs that do really bad Christopher Walken impressions.
Frankly after batman was done the only real threat was corporate corruption… of the radioactive kind.
“You either die a hero or you live long enough to see yourself become the villain.” - Mussolini
I saw the movie version. V had some superhuman abilities – which were really superfluous to the story. Really, his thing was “propaganda of the deed”, an old anarchist concept of heroic individual action.
This sort of thing has been a question for me for a long time, but Mieville’s had the most influence on my thinking about it. As in that short piece, he keeps wrestling in his stories with the problem of heroism against collective action. It’s most direct in the third of his New Crobuzon novels, The Iron Council, in which there are two distinct but related narratives: one concerning a character who decides to take the route of “propaganda of the deed”, the other is about an especially talented golem-maker (in a setting in which mages are basically artisans or “professionals”); in both sides of the narrative, we see collective actions, in the context of which individual heroism proves problematic.
I thought the best of the three New Crobuzon novels, by the way, was the second one, The Scar, which interestingly concerns a floating city cobbled together from pirate ships.
Those are good essays.
As Brin points out, in most incarnations of Star Trek, the crew is bound together with the common project of maintaining the starship (or space station). In the case of Star Trek, we’ve got an idealized military, so there’s a clear hierarchy, mitigated as it appears there’s a real connection between seniority and merit. There are, of course, many other science fiction series and movies in which the characters are crews of ships, often not in an idealized military: Blake’s 7, Firefly, or Farscape, the latter of which I’ve been watching and enjoying lately. So it does seem like a good model for more “democratic” heroism.
Lately I’ve been playing a lot of Star Trek Online, which I enjoy, but has a lot of serious faults. The biggest is that it’s an MMO with no role-playing at all. Players are ship captains – and in the shows, most interactions are between members of the ship’s crew. There’s little reason for captains to interact, in character. Worse, the overall game has a fixed narrative, in which the player character is the one and only greatest hero in the universe. So the game narrative prohibits any interaction between players based on role-playing through the narrative.
Not only does that cut against the grain of Star Trek, but it’s a trend in MMOs, to set it up so that the player is the one-and-only chosen one, as in a single-player game. What’s really sad about this is that older MMOs at least tried to democratize the gameplay experience – for instance, the narratives implied that the player character’s experiences weren’t unique, that a player character was a member of a large class of adventurers, who may or may not succeed in saving the world through cooperation.
That’s 'cuz this lady was a shitty shitty shitty therapist! 
I mean, therapy 101 is proper boundaries with yer clients.
That’s because THE PLOT DEMANDS IT.
But the Joker, he’s so charming! 
He’s a strawman; all villains are strawmen.
Yeah, Hint #1 you might not be cut out for working with the mentally ill: you find insanity charming.
But that’s just the finger pointing to Gotham’s bigger problems. I mean, Harley was considered good at her job and an ace student by her teachers and was allowed to see a client she CLEARLY had a non-professional interest in.
You know what zillionaire Bruce Wayne could do? Buy Arkham Asylum and put in place managers and case workers who aren’t idiots.
The fact that he doesn’t is either because he’s dumb (which, in-world fiction, he’s clearly not) or because he doesn’t want Arkham to be secure, so he has an excuse to dress up like a bat and punch people.
Though honestly when talking about how media treats the mental health profession, the tired old saw of “therapist falls deeply in love with her troubled client” is probably only the tip of an iceberg that goes all the way to Teegeeack and back (that’s a Scientology term for those unfamiliar with that high weirdness).
Aren’t you thinking of The Scarecrow?
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