The societal implications of having superheroes though.
They’re not celebrities, they’re bigger than that, but they’re not politicians, and they’re not part of a corporation (shh ignore Stark Industries for a sec), but news outlets would probably never stop trying to get their opinions on political or social issues, especially someone like Steve. And they would be on the news all the time and there’d be youtube videos of them saving the world and I bet their techniques would be analyzed and critiqued (like watching a tennis match or something). And their personal lives would be smeared over every news/gossip site and tabloid, and little kids would dress up like them but would do it with the hope of one day actually legitimately meeting them, or even being them, because they’d be real, and influential, and iconic, and still probably super enigmatic. No one would know the real them (like we know them from the comics but they’d be a mystery to us if they were real, just like we never truly know celebrities and their “real” lives). Wow, I don’t know, it’d just be so amazing.
Yes, EXACTLY THIS. ALL OF THIS. Oh, God, this is perfect. And it would be such a big deal? I don’t even know. I think it would really change things and just … yeah.
I can’t help but wonder how different things like this would be in the MCU verses 616…mainly because in 616, not only do you have so many more superheroes in general, but you have superheroes active in between the time of Cap and the emergence of Iron Man. The television media and our celebrity culture would have been shaped and influenced by the existence of superheroes in a way that it couldn’t be in the MCU. I think the media culture in 616 could be very different from the way it’s even presented in the comics themselves (I can’t help but think a logical outgrowth of superheroes would be a lessening in the desire to publish ever single detail about the lives of our public figures).
This is actually the thing that fascinates me the most about superheroes, their relationship with the public and how the impact the world around them. They are a type of public figure that does not have any comparable real world figure, so it’s fun to speculate how it would work if they actually existed. And how all this attention affects their personal lives.
It’s something I don’t think they cover as much as they should in this genre. All the comics have people in spandex solving problems by punching things, but I’d like to see more about the celebrity culture that has developed.
This! In comics/movies based on comics, the biggest resistance usually comes from politicians with unfair claims or restrictions.
(Source: stevesnotepad, via strawberrylaugh)
