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My theory about super-heroes and super-villains isn't particularly original I fear, but it's to do with the basic easiness with which super-heroes interact with other people. Their aspirations for the world are defensive, they're not transformative - they want to keep things as close to what they tend to see as down-home values. Their morality is obvious and any complexity must be abandoned and reduced to a more obvious morality at all times. Because of this they generally find other people easy to get on with.
If you look around yourself in your daily life you can see a lot of superheroes - they're the people who have a kind of weird charisma about them for whatever reason - they're good looking or they're athletic or something and as a result, they've not battled or struggled for much, life has seemed essentially simple for them. These are the bastions of obvious justice - the most banally noble of humanity. They're the people that secretly we all want to be, even when they accomplosh nothing. But in fact they often accomplish great things without realising how difficult it should have been. People part like the red sea in front of them, lesser people work to help them accomplish great things out of some weird sense of adoration or awe...
Super villains are entirely more complex beasts, or at least they believe themselves to be. The best villians aren't in fact villains at all - they simply have a more complex approach to morality or to the world. They're normally borne of frustration, of a sense of disconnection. There's often fundamentally a sense of resentment - that the world isn't as it should be, that THEY are not what they should be or want to be, and that something needs to be done about this situation. Super villains are, in essence, as bitter as super-heroes are oblivious.
I know a lot of bitter, frustrated people who want to accomplish great things. I know as many of those as I know the comfortably and happily naive who accidentally accomplish great things. I'm a bitter griping super-villain. This is obvious. At best I'm someone morally neutral and inscrutable like Metron or something. I'm not sure I'm a Magneto - but I'm something like that...
Fist is an interesting one in that he's clearly NOT bitter about his place in the world, but he's also not naive about it either. He's a pragmatist to the bone I think - the kind of person who would have no problem balancing an immediate wrong for a greater moral gain in the medium term. So he's an ideal Batman , really. The kind of person whose only not a super-villian because his ends coincide with everyone else, even if hiis reasons are profoundly different...
Nick just IS more difficult that this though - he does adhere to a slightly blurry moral code that infuses everything he does - he doesn't believe in ends justifying means, which I think both Fist and I do (to varying extents) and I think he has that permeating sense of spirituality and the essential warm fuzziness of life that bounces off me like bullets or compliments. I think he's got traces of the Martian Manhunter in him because - again - his short-term ends meet with the ends of the blander superheroes, and are very strongly against the more linear process-driven thinking of some of the rest of us. If I'm a super-villain and Fist's a super-hero (because it remains expedient to be one), then Nick is - I think - more of an accidental hero - a priest or something. It's KIND of like this:
I think the world should be changed.
Fist thinks the world should be fixed.
Nick thinks the world should be helped. |
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