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Apr. 12th, 2013 06:25 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
seekingferretAnd uh... I just got up to the Final Exam storyline in Avengers Academy, which makes explicit a lot of the stuff I wrote about yesterday and then twists it all on its head in delightful fashion by returning to the Heroes vs. Villains paradigm that it has been so wary of. A character tries to use an archetypal supervillain plan in order to demolish the Heroes vs. Villains hierarchy that he thinks is endangering the world, forcing the characters of the Academy, who have been kicked out of Avengers Academy in the wake of AvX and thrown partially outside the world of Caped Superherodom, to become all-out heroes and save the world by foiling the villain's plan.
There are lots of ways to read this, and I think ultimately the interpretation I settle on is going to be contingent on how they follow up on the events of Final Exam. We could see it as reasserting the importance of conventional narrative, that ultimately comic books depend on larger than life heroes clashing with larger than life villains, and that the reason people read them is because of this deliberate distortion of reality. In the notion of a 'final exam' we see it affirmed that for all the questioning, the characters have learned the lessons the Avengers taught them. That is to say, they have passed the exam to become superheroes, like unwilling math students with just enough algebra crammed into their heads to pass the state tests. They were given powers, they aren't evil, therefore they must be superheroes.
Or we could see it even more prosaically as a statement of the fundamental conservatism of the Marvel universe (which conservatism does interrelate with the statement of conventional narrative I mentioned in the first theory, but I'm referring more to political conservatism for once). Villainy and radical revolutionism are conflated, nihilism and communism held so far away from the viewer that they look the same. Think of how often HYDRA and its offshoots are reduced to minions by being called 'terrorist groups', so that their ideology no longer matters. For all that Avengers Academy subverts the heroism/villainy meme on a personal level, it has no interest in actually evaluating ideologies and making decisions about who is ideologically correct. The government as Lockeian agent of the people is always correct. That is why Dark Reign could happen, after all. Maybe I'll continue this idea tomorrow insofar as it relates to Civil War and the Secret Avengers, and why they are so controversial and fascinating.
Today is the seventeenth day of the Omer
There are lots of ways to read this, and I think ultimately the interpretation I settle on is going to be contingent on how they follow up on the events of Final Exam. We could see it as reasserting the importance of conventional narrative, that ultimately comic books depend on larger than life heroes clashing with larger than life villains, and that the reason people read them is because of this deliberate distortion of reality. In the notion of a 'final exam' we see it affirmed that for all the questioning, the characters have learned the lessons the Avengers taught them. That is to say, they have passed the exam to become superheroes, like unwilling math students with just enough algebra crammed into their heads to pass the state tests. They were given powers, they aren't evil, therefore they must be superheroes.
Or we could see it even more prosaically as a statement of the fundamental conservatism of the Marvel universe (which conservatism does interrelate with the statement of conventional narrative I mentioned in the first theory, but I'm referring more to political conservatism for once). Villainy and radical revolutionism are conflated, nihilism and communism held so far away from the viewer that they look the same. Think of how often HYDRA and its offshoots are reduced to minions by being called 'terrorist groups', so that their ideology no longer matters. For all that Avengers Academy subverts the heroism/villainy meme on a personal level, it has no interest in actually evaluating ideologies and making decisions about who is ideologically correct. The government as Lockeian agent of the people is always correct. That is why Dark Reign could happen, after all. Maybe I'll continue this idea tomorrow insofar as it relates to Civil War and the Secret Avengers, and why they are so controversial and fascinating.
Today is the seventeenth day of the Omer