 Alright, so the idea of superheroes has been around basically as long as humans have been telling stories. You know, stuff like the epic of Gilgamesh and the myths about Hercules. Those are basically just stories about superhumans going out and doing superhuman things. And I know that comic books and comic book movies and such have been much bigger lately. Some would say oversaturated or overdone, but with stuff like the MCU and the DCEU, they have become much bigger. And as something gets more popular, a lot more people want to try and copy it and do a similar thing. I've talked about this phenomenon before with like the Hunger Games and Twilight. You know, like when those came out and got popular, a lot of other things came out that tried to ape on that success. With some of them, some of the time it worked, some of the time it didn't. But what also happens is that things come out that try to subvert or deconstruct these genres. And with superheroes, this has actually been around for quite a while because, like I said, the idea of superheroes has been around for quite a while. And we're just now starting to see a bigger explosion. I don't want to say explosion because I don't think there's quite enough to do that, but this idea of like, okay, if superheroes were around, it probably wouldn't be as great as we think. Stuff like watchmen wanted Superman, Red Sun, injustice, irredeemable, bright burn, the reckoners, the boys, and invincible. And I've seen all these things and I've liked some of them. I haven't liked others quite as much. But a lot of people have been saying that these are becoming overdone now. That like, okay, this deconstruction of heroes or like what if heroes were real but they aren't actually the good guys. A lot of people think, okay, this is becoming overdone. Which is fair, you know, sometimes the subversion of something becomes the mainstream after a while and then you have to try and subvert that somehow. It's like how when Game of Thrones became popular, a whole lot of fantasy books started trying to be all dark and gritty and most of them didn't do it very well. It's a mess. But I thought about it for a little while, especially after watching Invincible and then I recently started reading the Reckoners and don't worry, I'll do a video on those at some point. But I started to realize that they aren't all deconstructing it in the same way. And so that's why it's still feeling kind of fresh for me at least some of the time when it's done well, I should clarify. And so I thought about it for a little while and I came up with like basically four different ways that we've seen superhero stories get deconstructed. And these all have some overlap between them, obviously. Like none of them are pure one way or another. But I just kind of wanted to talk about all the different ways I've noticed. So number one is exploring superheroes as almost a force of nature. So this is stuff like Injustice, Superman, Red Sun, Brightburn and the Reckoners. So with this one, it's basically the idea of you take this Superman-esque figure in many cases. In some cases, it's literally just Superman. But in other cases, it's a copyright evasion form of Superman. But you take this godly powerful figure that humans really can't do much against, at least not with conventional means, and you just make them evil. Make it so that they have to be stopped for whatever reason. And this one I think is the easiest to do, but it's also very easy to screw up. Because in stuff like Red Sun and Injustice, again, it's literally Superman and it's just him going, well, what if I knew better than everyone else and I could just take over the world and I could fix all the problems with it by ruling it as a dictator. And then not only do regular people have to kind of do what he says or join some sort of resistance or something like that, but all the less powerful heroes have to do the same thing. And this is kind of a neat one, at least the first couple of times I've seen it. I've seen it done a lot now. But it's basically the idea that superhumans would, if they were real, at least one or two of them would be power hungry. They would want to rule over things. Power changes people and that doesn't apply to all of them, obviously, but really it only takes one with the powers of someone like Superman in order to screw this up. And that's the basic general idea. It's like, if superheroes were around, this might not be great because it really only takes one going bad to screw things up for everyone else. The second way I've seen it done is with superheroes being representations of government or other institutions. So this would be stuff like Watchmen or The Boys show. Please note that I said the show and not the comic. In this one, superheroes are usually a lot weaker and they usually work for others. So, for example, in Watchmen, the comedian and other heroes, including Dr. Manhattan, who is not weak, but most of the other heroes, they went to Vietnam and fought with the US military. They were fighting on behalf of the government and they went out and they just straight up murdered a lot of people. And this is usually meant to show off corruption and abuse of power and other stuff that nobody likes from government and business. The Boys show is much more blatant about that because, again, the superheroes are just working for corporations. They're more of a brand than they are people. This one is a bit more cynical than the first kind because in the first kind, it usually shows that, okay, there are some good heroes here, but not all of them and it only takes one or two to screw it up for everyone. In this one, it's just like, yeah, the vast majority of superheroes suck. Having them around would be terrible because they would just use it to bully other people kind of the same way that people with power in real life do it. People in the government or in business throw their weight around and it kind of sucks to have them there. The third way of doing it is to throw them into this crazy world that's just full of superheroes and other stuff kind of like the comic universe in DC or Marvel. This would be stuff like Invincible or Irredeemable where usually the main heroes are just a tiny part of a much bigger world. In this sort of thing, normal people are usually very unimportant beyond personal relationships. Like in Invincible, Mark's mother is not that important to the world as a whole. Like, she's important because of her relationship with Mark and Omniman, obviously, but that's really just important to those two people and to the other people that, you know, she's friends with. But the world as a whole, she could die and it wouldn't change all that much. And normal people just kind of have to learn to live with that reality. It also has like this giant kitchen sink full of all these different villains and power types. You know, you have people that get their powers from magic. You have people that are aliens or get their powers from aliens. You have people that got it from vats of toxic waste and you have other dimensional beings that will invade sometimes. You know, just things like that. And so after a while, it all just kind of blends together and becomes noise and people get used to it. And you can do this either comedically, which Invincible does a pretty good job of at several points. Like in, I believe, the first episode, Mark makes a comment about how the White House gets rebuilt once a month at this point and then like, yeah, nowadays in real life, if the White House got destroyed, it'd be a huge deal. But if it happened all the time by various super-powered villains, like it wouldn't be that big a deal. But you can also do it in sort of a horror way. And this is like mild spoilers for Invincible. So if you haven't seen that show, go watch it. It's pretty good. But this is like the revelation that Omni-Man is not just the Superman figure who's evil, but he's a Superman figure who is not benevolent and comes from a race of other people just as powerful as him. Just as powerful as him, who are basically all space Nazis and want to take over. Like it's this idea that humans and especially normal humans are just these tiny specks in the universe that all we can do is try and hope to avoid notice, otherwise we're dead. And it's kind of Lovecraftian in that sense. You know, like if the Elder Gods ever woke up and realized humanity was there, we would all be gone instantly, just like that. And the basic idea of this type is to basically show how those comic universes with all those different things all mashed together. It's kind of absurd when you really think about it and how all these pieces would not fit together very well if they somehow existed all in the same world. And it just acknowledges that and really shows it to us. And we go, oh yeah, I guess it is kind of weird that Dr. Strange is fighting aliens. And number four, the last way of deconstructing superhero mythos that I have noticed is just showing that superheroes are psychos. You know, it's not that having their powers made them psychos. It's that the only person who would want to be a superhero is probably a psycho to begin with. So this would be stuff like the comic version of the boys, the ass or wanted. Again, the comic version is not so much the movie version. And this one is basically just about people who want to abuse others. They're powerless usually, so they go out and grab it somehow and then they just use that power to abuse people. Wanted is especially blatant about this, but it's just... Oh man, how do I even describe the wanted comic to people who haven't seen it? You know, it's basically just imagine if instead of Wesley becoming an assassin he just decided he wanted to be a serial killing rapist and then he goes out and does that. That's basically the plot of the wanted comic. It's not very good. And this type just really doesn't have any point beyond being edgy. You know, like, I get the feeling that the guy who made Wanted and Kickass just really hated the idea of superheroes and wanted to make fun of them except he did it in a way that wasn't very fun or funny. And same with Garth Ennis. Like, I know for a fact Garth Ennis who wrote The Boys really hates superhero stuff. So he just like, yeah, superheroes are all psychos. Take that. Like, the only reason you would want to do this sort of job is because you're psycho. And, well, this is probably how a lot of regular people would act if they had powers to be totally fair. Like, most people, if they got superhero powers, excuse me, they would not want to be godlike beings who rule over the earth or rule over countries or anything like that because that's a lot of work. Most of them would just be kind of like small town bullies. You know, they go out, take what they want, if you're in their way, they'll kill you. But they're just kind of lazy to do, they're too lazy to do anything other than that. Whereas in type one where superheroes as a force of nature, the idea is that okay, yeah, most of them are okay because it's kind of like regular people, most of them are okay, but it only takes a couple to ruin it for everybody. And that's about all I have to say. You know, this was a relatively short video and I know I didn't go into all that much depth with it, but it does feel a little outside my usual range of stuff that I want to talk about anyways. And it was just bothering me a little bit how people were saying that like Invincible and The Boys and all that other stuff were kind of the same because even though Invincible and The Boys are both Amazon original shows based on comic books, they do feel quite a bit different from one another. And I just kind of wanted to talk about all this because, you know, each one of these four ways of doing it could one day become its own genre, which then branches out and then people get tired of it. And that's about all. I don't have anything else to say. Goodbye. You guys are the best. If you want to get your name on here and get your things in other videos, vote on other videos, become patron, give, give money. I need money to live, to eat, to pay rent. I need money. Please, help me out. 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