Ethics in World-Building: Vigilantes & Superheroes
“The Red Paladin knew his ability to strike fear into the hearts of evil. He counted on it. He marched into the alley, his flaming sword casting a flickering ember glow over his signature armor. Anyone who saw those fires knew he approached. He smiled as the ratty-looking thug quaked before him, face panicked. None righteous had need fear him, right? Of course right.”
Superhero stories can be fun. My belief is that the inclusion of powers or magic into a setting is an expression of that character’s agency upon the world. This is true whether your powers come from a belief in mystical space-magic, or were gifted to you in a laboratory accident when you were struck by lightning from a particle-accelerator explosion. That said there comes a few ethical hang-ups when we create power imbalance right into the very nature of our stories, especially with characters who often take the law into their own hands.
Some discourse surrounding cape comics and the superhero genre suggests that these types of stories are inherently authoritarian due to the imbalanced power dynamics at play. While I can understand and sympathize with this notion, I have to disagree. If only because the greatest architect of the genre as a whole, Jack Kirby, had intense anti-authoritarian views and it reflected itself in his work.
That said, there is a problem superhero stories have of becoming unintentionally authoritarian. When individuals gifted with powers and privilege begin to force their ideologies onto the world around them. Their position as moral arbiters of society is hardly questioned, because it is their power is what gives them that position to make those choices.
No further do you have to look for an example of fascist superhero stories than Batman v. Superman. The ultimate story of a rich white man who spends his fortune chasing after an illegal alien and murdering everyone who gets in his way. This is a film in which billionaire Bruce Wayne quotes Dick Cheney to justify his violent killing spree and vendetta against Superman.
“If we believe there’s even a one percent chance that he is our enemy, we have to take it as an absolute certainty and we have to destroy him.”
While it’s fun to pick on BVS, I refuse to place the blame solely at its ambitious but ill-conceived feet. Much of the film remains true to its source material, at least certain parts of it. Zack Snyder and Warner Bros pulled heavily from the visuals and themes present in Frank Miller’s highly praised graphic novel The Dark Knight Returns, even quoting passages from the book directly. It’s a book where praise for Batman’s violent vigilantism is followed with “Hope he goes after the homos next,” and those who criticize Batman’s fascist behaviors are met with all the incredulity of a sit-com laugh track.
Frank Miller’s Batman is a violent hyper-masculine thug who views his opponents as animals deserving of brutal treatments. In his series All-Star Batman and Robin, Frank Miller’s Batman is so fascist and violent, that it became meme-worthy. Content-warning here for ableist language, where he uses violent slurs to mock a recently orphaned Dick Grayson.
This is a superhero vigilante who is actively abusive and murderous, who believes his strength and power gives him the moral authority to do whatever he pleases. He’s the goddamn Batman. It is also the current most influential version of the character.
From the Dark Knight trilogy to the widely-praised Arkham games, Batman stalks and violently dispatches the poor and mentally-ill. The graphic nature of the Arkham games only continues to increase. In Arkham Knight, he’s seen blowing people to smithereens with missiles, torturing criminals for information, and breaking the limbs of helpless non-combatants he’s already subdued just to punish them.
This hyper-violent vigilante has shades in other heroes too, not just Batman. The hit tv show Arrow for example, features a violent and abusive vigilante actively seeking out targets on a list and murdering them in cold blood. The CW version of Oliver Queen often breaks limbs, leaves his foes for dead, and outright tortures them for information.
This type of ruthless vigilante is less of a superhero, and more of an archetype more commonly seen in shows like Law and Order, where cops flout due process and the rule of law to deliver the emotionally satisfying thrill of a punch to the badguy’s face. This archetype dangerously appeals to us because our lizard-brains like seeing evil-doers violently cold-clocked, because violence is fun.
Vigilantism in fiction tickles those parts of our brain that know that the systems in which we live are corrupt and do not protect good people from evil-doers. More than the thrill of violence, it is the moral vindication and righteous fury of seeing justice. The problem lies in the framing of these characters.
What might look to you like violence done in the name of heroism, is doing little more than justifying police brutality. We are inundated with cop dramas and thrillers that celebrate violent police action, in a world where police brutality and shootings remain consistently on the rise. Our vigilante stories often mirror these shows, sometimes by creating interrogation scenes that wouldn’t be out of place in any Law and Order episode.
We have turned the modern archetype of the vigilante into propaganda for cops who abuse their authority.
So, how do we write superhero fiction around this? The power imbalance present in these stories constantly suggests a hierarchy, which will always inevitably lean authoritarian. Hierarchies require inequality in order to exist after all, which means that we run into the risk of justifying oppressive power-structures and systems, and the abuse of them.
There is one simple and fluffy means of skirting around this, and that’s telling much lighter superhero fare and now everyone in your setting has a power of some sort, or at least enough so that these power imbalances become less glaring. Super powers become a fun aspect of the setting that’s simply a part of your world-building. Sky High manages to do this while still exploring and criticizing power dynamics within its own setting.
Another is by taking your superhero characters and pitting them not against ordinary average citizens, but against epic cosmic threats and larger-than-life villains. The point here as above is to normalize the grand abilities to create an even playing field between your heroes and your villains, so we don’t run the risk of justifying unequal power structures.
Then there is the approach used by Justice League TAS, and that was leaning into the criticism that superhero stories if told wrong, could become authoritarian. The over-arcing plot-line saw the fears of an out-of-control Justice League of godlike superheroic beings wielding unchecked concentrated power. We even saw an alternate reality of a fascist Justice League, and how easily these characters could be turned.
My personal approach I’d like to see more of though, is superheroes as activists. The vigilante archetype is a character who sees the limits of the rule of law, and works outside the system, yet so rarely has this archetype actually criticized and fought against the enforcers of this system. There have been moments in certain Captain America issues, but as a whole comics seem afraid of having a superhero actually fight a cop beating up a queer kid, or stop a US soldier from aiming a gun at a Palestinian civilian.
Instead, we create cheeky metaphor fascists to hint at these messages, but never commit.
Even when criticizing nazis, comic books have a habit of not wanting their mystic nazi-cult involved with actual white supremacists.
So the result is a lot of meandering, well-intentioned but ultimately toothless messaging that fails to grasp the true potential of what it means to have entire casts of characters that operate outside of the cisheteropatriarchal white supremacist legal system.
Instead of using the superhero story to justify and even celebrate hierarchical power structures, they could be used to see them dismantled. Vigilantes who take whatever gifts and talents and privileges they possess in order to turn on the corrupt systems that created them. For power to be ethical, it must be wielded by the people — not against them.
Dorian Dawes is the author of the queer horror anthology Harbinger Island. Their non-fiction and essay work has been featured in Bitch Media, Your Tango, Gay Pop Buzz, and the Huffington Post. You can support their work at patreon.com/doriandawes
