I have finished the pencils on my zine and have them all scanned in! Well, I have to get a couple pages rescanned, but I am basically ready for the final stretch. I’m very happy and excited about it. At work, though, it really is the start of the Christmas shopping season now. The store isn’t set up for it yet, so it’s getting pretty cramped and hard to move. We threw away a bunch of old Halloween merch because it’s store policy to purge previous holidays, a good reminder that my entire job is basically future landfill. All this shopping craze while people are going hungry and we’re barreling closer and closer to a dictatorship, it gets very tiring. You get home, you look at the news, and you look in the store, and it’s like no one thinks anything is different in the world. Or maybe this is how they can feel like things are fine, which is sad to me. All we exist for is to shop, it’s a hobby, it actually saves money when you do it right, here’s a credit card. I am grateful that the state violence hasn’t gotten to my vicinity yet, and I’m sure people are taking their creature comforts where it is happening, it’s just all so overwhelming.
So, apropos of nothing, I want to talk more articulately about superhero violence. I grew up practicing martial arts, and I’ve been reading and at times writing stories about superheroes and a wide array of heroic characters who are celebrated for their fighting. Which is to say, I’ve spent my life thinking about the reality and ethics of violence. It’s worth noting before I get too deep that I have been fortunate enough to face no violence in my life, but it’s always on my mind. Either as a fond memory of class, or as part of a story I’m enjoying, or as that tingle of fear that someone is going to slam my head into the wall in a public restroom because of my gender. So I don’t want to present myself as an expert in real life violence, but rather as someone who’s put more thought into it than I typically see presented in regard to superhero fiction.
First, I want to make it clear that there’s nothing wrong with enjoying fictional depictions of otherwise bad things, including violence. Simulation is not reality, depiction is not endorsement. You’re allowed to be satisfied exploring a novel part of life you otherwise can’t experience in a fictional setting, where it’s safe. You’re allowed to have any impulse that runs through your head, including violent ones, because feelings and thoughts aren’t the same as action. We all want to make the bad people hurt for the hurt they’ve caused, we all have this desire to set the universe right through some action that directly counters the negative. We’re also allowed to have conflicting desires, like not actually wanting to hurt anyone ever, even as that other part of you does.
That’s the space that fictional violence, especially fictional heroic violence, operates in. It’s a space that allows us to safely explore and exercise the desire to hurt the villains, to punish them. They’re stories where hurting the bad people actually does solve a problem or help others, when that’s often not the case in real life. It gets a lot more complicated in the real world. As a martial artist, I do believe that allowing violence to happen because you refuse to be violent is not nonviolence, yet at the same time, there’s a million variables in different circumstances that complicate the calculation for when it is the right choice. In the world of fiction, you can sidestep all of that and simply make it so people respond approvingly to seeing the despot beaten by the symbol of justice, and all is right with society. Or you just make villains so overwhelmingly evil that no one can deny or misconstrue the narrative. If you assume circumstances such as that arise in every story of violence, it’s a lot easier to have a hero use violence to defeat evil. And when you see it happen in those circumstances, you’re safe to revel in the coolness of the violence, the impressive athleticism, the culmination of years of hard work and emotional buildup.
We come from a nature where violence is a frequent and necessary component of life. All animals, like us, have to kill and eat other living creatures in order to survive. Those at the bottom of the chain eat stationary creatures like plants, and then have to worry about violence ending their own lives as predators search for food. Those at the top have gotten there because of their superior capacity for violence (except for baleen whales, they just got really big with minimal violence), and all animals have some level of social violence to affirm their position among peers. Violence is harmful to those it’s directed at, but it’s also a necessary force in life, as it has existed on Earth up to this point.
However, one thing that’s different about humans is that we have seen the capacity for life without violence. We can use our social connections and intelligence to make a good life for everyone with minimal violence only for food procurement. There’s some evidence that humans may have self-domesticated ourselves, in comparison to our less-developed hominid relatives; at the very least, that’s a good rhetorical premise to back the framing of violence as regressive. Our progress as a species is to move away from violence. That’s why we have all our high ideals, framed in religious, spiritual, and civic perspectives, that we should value justice, respect our fellow human, and work to make life better for everyone. These are the kinds of values that our violent heroes work to obtain, to fight their way out of a world of violence and darkness to make a world of peace and light. There’s literally no figure, whether fictional or real, who used violence and terror to create a world of violence and terror that any substantial number of people agree is heroic. The heroic goal of violence is to one day have no violence.
All of which is to say, superheroes are the most pure version of that view of heroic violence. The entire premise, from the start, is that the systems of the world are insufficient to achieving the high ideals we strive for – at times, the systems are working against those ideals – and so it’s up to those of us with power to make a change with direct action, against or in violation of the system when necessary. Over time, in order to look “more mature,” many superhero stories have dipped more deeply into the violence well. You can also track a rise in vocal fans asking for more violence, asking for superheroes to kill. That’s happened more often in stories, often just to create a difference between heroes. It’s bad.
I’ve always been of the opinion that superheroes don’t kill. I’m not to be swayed by examples you can pull of it happening, because I already know about them. Heroes are allowed to stumble and stray as a story goes on without corrupting what their archetype is meant to be. It’s also true that I simply don’t accept some characters who are presented as superheroes, as superheroes. This is a personal position based on an adherence to the basic tenet that superheroes exist to stand up for our highest ideals as a society. Ideals like violence being bad and killing being wrong. There’s no amount of words or emotional pressure you can put on me that will get me to say a figure like Batman or Spider-Man should kill, in the same way that my dislike for murder is why I’m opposed to the death penalty. There’s just no two ways about it: If killing is wrong, then we shouldn’t do it, and superheroes are the characters who most purely represent that ideal. There’s a reason we look to the Silver Age as the most purely superheroic fiction, and (for some reason proudly) frame the modern age as a compromised position. There’s a reason why superheroes exist now, and couldn’t have existed in ages past. There’s a reason why our least good leaders abhor the lack of violence in common life, prop up football and other violent sports, and love the Punisher. I totally understand the appeal and satisfaction of seeing fictional depictions of over-the-top violence, including lethal violence, but that doesn’t mean Superman has to be that character, too. If you can’t accept that, then maybe you don’t actually like superheroes, and that’s ok.
And beyond that, the way killing is brought up in superhero fiction is often completely lacking in nuance and understanding. The divide between more and less violent heroes isn’t, or shouldn’t be, based on lethality. There’s so many more shades to violence between “punching someone so they stop hurting another person” and “kill anyone you decide is evil.” I know ways to break an elbow that will render it unusable for the rest of your life; in martial arts class, my teacher would describe some of the worst techniques as “making their orthopedic surgeon earn their paycheck.” There’s “cool,” “ooh,” “bad,” and “gross,” and I think most people only know about “cool.” It often seems like I hear people describe the violent choices as either you stick to punches or you kill them, probably with a weapon. The reason we always see Batman and most every superhero punching and kicking people is because that’s the nicest way of handling a violent situation with violence. You could always start by breaking a finger. It only takes like five pounds of force, I think less. Then you can go for a wrist, elbow, or even knee. Most joints aren’t very strong if you can attack them at the right position, and martial arts is all about moving the opponent into position. Whatever is fastest that makes the attacker unable to fight anymore and is convincing enough that more fighting would end badly for them.
Most people are going to attack you with strikes, and are thus imagining strikes hitting them back in kind; joint attacks aren’t on their radar. Meeting them with strikes in kind is very polite, and it gets nicer the more lethal they go into battle. If you actually take the time to learn about violence, and contemplate performing violence on others, then even without experiencing it, you’ll see that there’s a huge spectrum of possibilities. You’ll understand that the reaction to different acts isn’t based solely on lethality, and that when and why you choose to take certain actions is a huge part of the calculus. It’s like the fantasy that the police can use “nonlethal” rounds (which can still be lethal) and it’s ok. Because when you say that, you don’t think about someone losing an eye to a rubber bullet, getting lung scarring from tear gas, or neurological damage from a taser. Being “nonlethal” doesn’t mean spraying magic sleep powder in someone’s face and having them fall into a warm bed. “Nonlethal” can and often does stick with you for the rest of your life, and is appalling. And that’s without getting into a broader view of violence, like how messed up it was that on the CW’s Flash, they just made an illegal prison with no constitutional rights to hold all the people he fought. Those were tiny torture chambers with no visible beds or restrooms, worse in many ways than solitary confinement. Why is that something we’re supposed to accept as part of the vision for justice? Because it’s “nonlethal”?
That’s why if you’re interested in the use of violence, you have to learn everything about it, and how to do as little as possible, and only when immediately necessary. And if you’re writing a story about a heroic figure using violence to bring about justice for the world, you have to be cognizant of these realities. It’s not asking a lot that people recognize how Batman is different than Perseus. Superheroes are unique in their civic motivations, that they are of the people and are fighting to make society work the way we were all promised it would; they are not operating because of an institutional or religious mandate to end a specific evil, which will immediately make the world better. Because of that civic virtue, it’s more important that superheroes do the right thing and operate by our highest ideals. I’m fine with characters stumbling along the way, and with characters having different views on what those ideals are and how to carry them out, but I’m never going to be fine with a character presented as a superhero deciding that one of the most foundational ideals of society can be ignored if it’s convenient or emotionally satisfying. If those representing our purest and most noble conceptions of justice decide that actually, those with power should be able to decide if you live or die, then we’ve all lost. In a similar way, we can’t keep using lethality as the borderline between good and evil, because it justifies a lot of heinous acts simply because they aren’t meant to cause death. It is the issue of our time.
Life in the Gutters 