New Brevoort Formspring

I think this has as much if not more to so sub-textually with the audience wanting to feel good about itself.

it started a little bit in the 80s, but especially ever since 9/11, there’s been an underlying narrative throughout popular fiction that amounts to, “In order to fight terrorists, the only thing that can be done is to become a terrorist yourself.” And that seems to me to be a product of a society that knows that things like the abuses at Guantanamo Bay are wrong, but doesn’t actually want to change the behavior or demand accountability. In a world where even Superman can’t find a way other than to become a terrorist, it’s more all right for ordinary people to feel the same way.

I think grappling with hard moral choices, and the question of where heroism stops, at what point you become a villain, is definitely interesting–it’s certainly been the backbone of the storyline in AVENGERS and NEW AVENGERS for months. But I don’t think the example that was given fulfills that quandary. That isn’t a hard choice at all, not for a super hero–if it is, then they’re a piss-poor super hero, and will be dead on in prison soon anyway. No, it’s a false choice that we want to see go the other way because we’ve become societally convinced that doing so makes somebody a “badass” and worthy of emulation.   And because, on a visceral level, we want to see the bad guy get theirs. But that isn’t justice, that’s vengeance.