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Hello, and welcome to this episode of Superhero Ethics. Hey, we're giving you one of our member only episodes where we're continuing this idea of the core questions. What are the things that are kind of like fundamental to any discussion of superhero ethics. And one of the topics that I think comes up again and again and again and so we wanted to dive into pretty early on is that of accountability of superhero Accountability of who are superheroes
accountable to, if anyone? Should they be accountable to anyone? What should happen when something goes wrong? Should there be registrations? Should there be oversight bodies? Should there be none of this? All of this, all those questions that sometimes get kind of summarized as team Tony or team cap but as we're going to talk about, are a lot more complicated
than that. And we'll be using MCU's Civil War, both the comic books and the movie and talking about some of the differences for those as a jumping off point. But we're not here to relegislate what exactly happened in that movie or that comic book show or what should have happened. We're here to talk about this larger question of if there are people in the world who have powers far beyond what most of us have, and those people choose those powers to do their version of good,
what should the rest of us do about it? And when something goes wrong, what should happen. I've got some kind of things I'm going to say to frame this discussion, but Riki, let's just starting out by that. Want to introduce yourself and give kind of your general thoughts on this topic and why you think it's important one to discuss.
Yes, hello Matthew and listeners and chat. I guess we are live here. I'm Riki, And for me, the most important thing about this is that for the longest time, superheroes were framed as good. I mean, they are right, they're heroes, but the idea that they were not accountable was there was never any discussion baked into these stories about that. For the longest time, it was just assume that they're good because they are. And then we got
this shift. I want to say, maybe starting in the eighties, late eighties and nineties.
Where we've got more stories that were focused on well, what if superheroes were bad, right, Like The Watchmen is one of those big moments in comic books where the whole industry really shifted around it, and I think it set the tone for a lot of the stories that came later, asking these questions like you know, literally, who watches the Watchmen?
Yeah, and then it developed and we get to the point of civil war in the comic books, and then of course in the MCU really put that on the map for mainstream media, especially the MCU version.
And I'll say that it's a long and I'll say a long time ago on this podcast, we did a series of episodes with Jessica Regiez before you became a co host, I believe, yeah, act she was long before on the history of comic books. And one thing we talked about was that this moment in the late seventies early eighties where we started thinking about these questions a lot more. It's not coincidental that that's happening at a time when a lot of people are starting to ask
are the police always doing good? Is the military always doing good? And frankly mean people have been asking those questions for a long time, but between the comics code that we've talked about Mcarthyism and all sorts of stuff like that. Those either weren't topics being discussed in mainstream
America very much. It was thought of was like, oh, that's just the hippies, the liberals, they're crazy ideas, or it was ideas that you couldn't talk about in comic books and things like that, and so part of this and then I think we'll talk about there's always been this conversation about our superheroes kind of stand ins for the police, or for the military, or for something else,
and it's not coincidence. At the same time we start talking a lot more about, you know, war crimes in Vietnam and police brutality, that we start also asking about superheroes, like what if they are not always doing good or trying to do good, but bad things are happening.
Yeah, well, he said the seventies, and immediately my mind went to President Richard Nixon. Of course, the Watergate scandal and his ultimate resignation from the presidency really shook the country and the world to the core of this idea, like the president committed crimes and had to resign because of them. You know, he was in the process probably of being impeached and being removed as president by Congress, and that really set the tone for people's, like the
public's perception of people in power. Yeah, I think it was always you would always be critical of presidents, probably like if you're an average citizen and be like, oh, I don't like this policy or that policy, but you accept their authority, like they're the president, like they should be allowed to do all these things, et cetera. And that was the moment in history when people were like, wait a minute, wait a minute, like you can't do that, Like even if you're a president, you can't do that.
And of course, like we are currently dealing with times where presidential powers once once again being stretched and tested by the law. And we also coincidentally have a MCU story coming out as of this recording. It's releasing tomorrow in theaters, Captain America Brave New World, where the President of the United States is like a villain figure in the story, definitely questioning his motives.
Now, before we jump into this too much, I do want to frame the discussion a little bit, which is saying that the questions of a lot of the questions we're going to discuss are questions that by nature are probably not going to be dived into in great degree in the media that we talk about themselves, and that's somewhat intentional, and it's part of what we like about this podcast is kind of getting to dive into those and with superheroes especially, I think there's two ways in
which that comes forward, and one of these was really well spelled out by my brother in law, Joseph J. Dixon, in a post teammate on Facebook response to a question I asked where he was talking about how one of the things that's weird about superhero media is that we fundamentally think of people as having superpowers in terms of their ability to do violence, in terms of their ability to be in confrontation, and he had suggested that actually, like you know, in a world of superheroes, you might
think of, like you know, a person with weather control could actually be incredibly helpful working with farmers and agriculture, but that doesn't really make for a Hollywood blockbuster. In the same way and in the same way, you know, as we've often talked about like Captain America and Tony Starks in a room and talking back and forth about well, should there be some accountability, but his registration too much, and what could different accountability look like? And how do
we find the middle ground? And can we trust the government go do it? Or should someone else that doesn't make a big movie the way Captain America and Bucky and Tony Stark are punching each other does And so we're kind of diving more into those questions a little bit and just kind of framing it that way. Just want to kind of start by saying, like, there's an extent to which we could peel open the whole superhero genre and say, like, well, but what if we went
in these totally different ways. We're acknowledging that, Yeah, the movies aren't gonna do that, the TV shows aren't going to do that, But we still think it's important to ask these questions because, as you said, these are reflecting the real questions we're dealing with in our own world as well, and that's the whole point of this podcast.
Yeah, I will say that in the comic version of Civil War, both the characters of Daredevil and she Hulk, because they're day jobs as Matt Murder and Jennifer Walter's their attorneys, so they actually like had I would say, pretty big roles in like that desk job sort of way of not fighting or fighting in the court of law and challenging superhero registration Act in various ways.
So my favorite one of my favorite Jessica Jones cartoon, one of my favorite Jessica Jones stories from the comic is about her dealing with a teenage girl who's pretending to be a superhero, because that's kind of like the girls who have superpowers as teenagers are kind of the outcasts, but therefore also kind of cool in like the high school way, and it's a great story, like getting into all those details, and you're right, I do think one of the ironies of all this is that in general,
the wider you make the audience, the less likely you are to deal with depth and nuance, and the more likely you are to have really awesome explosions, because that's just the kind of like mass marketing versus like a comic book or a novel or something like that can often explore a lot more of these things, and a lot of the TV shows and seeing I think understandably, like you know, get into a lot more of those nuances for those kind of reasons. So let's talk about this.
Let's talk about the questions we're dealing with. And Civil War starts with an an incident, and I know it from the movie, and the book is probably a little comic books a little bit different. I don't want to legislate exactly what Wanda did or didn't do, but I think that a situation like what happens at the start of Civil War is a good place to start this question of accountability. So let me start asking Eureki. Superheroes are out in the world. They think they have identified
what they think is something bad. They are taking action to stop something bad. As a result of the actions they take, innocent bystanders die. Now, there's lots of questions about this off, like could they have done something so that those innocent bistadors wouldn't die? Would more innocent bistadors have died if they'd didn something else? Obviously, there's all these questions surrounding it. What should happen in your mind in a perfect world, what would happen next?
There should be an investigation and fact finding, and it should be determined by the investigating body whether the heroes acted in a proper way. Yeah, and how like how responsible they are for the deaths. So you mentioned the comic version. The comic version is like much more stark,
no pun intended. It is I can't even remember the name of the group, but it's like some throwaway not young not the young Avengers, but like young Avenger type like kids who have powers, like and they are filming a reality TV show, So like that's the level of superhero they are. They don't care as much about the
saving people. They're like doing it for the clout, right, and they like in trying to apprehend a super criminal, they cause like this criminal has like atomic powers and they cause them to explode and basically like it goes off as a nuke and like a city is destroyed, right, and that is the inciting incident of comic Civil War.
So it's much more like of an irresponsible interesting especially because it's like filmed right like this this camera crew is filming them, so everyone has the footage and like these kids are like cracking jokes and stuff and like we got ICs. It's easy.
So the idea that like superhero superheroes existing in the way that they do without any change is totally fine. Like that's just not a part of the cop Like, I think you could look at what happens in uh Nigeria and what happens to the connon students, and there's an argument certainly of like look, yeah, maybe wand it should be better trained or whatever, but like just let cap and then handle it. That's not an argument that
can be being made. It sounds like in the comic book version, like it's very clear something is not right with the way superheroes are getting to act. Yeah.
I think the movie kind of tries to parallel that by making Wanda the one responsible because she's the newest member of the team. She's young, you know, she wasn't a part of the Battle of New York, et cetera. So they're trying to frame it as like, well, she's inexperienced, but they never truly touch upon it in the same way that I think the comics were like, who the heck let these kids play superhero? Right, that's kind of
like the framing. Yeah, and that's how it's approach of like this superhero thing has gotten out of control, because in the comics, of course there's there's hundreds, whereas in the movies it really is like this core a dozen or so at this time.
Right, it's a much smaller group.
Yeah, so it's less it's less so in the movie about like the idea of superheroes kind of getting out of control. I think, right, and it's more like these people.
And it's interesting because I think I've talked to before and don't want to get stuck just too much on civil war it self. But one of my frustrations with that is that winds up pitting the idea of the Sokovia Accords against any kind of accountability, and where CAP winds up kind of standing behind a position of like, no, let us handle it. No one else should be thinking
about it except us. And it sounds like, at least in the comics, there is some acknowledgment of some degree of accountability is probably good, but the Circoba Accords are not the right way to do it. And it becomes the conversation about registration and all of that is that you think that's an acurate description about what happens in the comics.
So I would say that there's two main differences in a comics version versus MCU. One. In the comics it is USA based, right, Like, solely it is like the US government saying we have to control superheroes, whereas the MCU, the Cecovia Accords is a United Nations resolution. Right, it's the international agreement, and I think that's a very important distinction.
Right.
And then the second party, as you mentioned, it's about registration, like the key thing. It's called the Superhero Registration Act, and it decrees that if you are going to vigilante or like legal ante, if you are going to act as a superhero to fight crime, then you have to register with the US government, which includes most importantly revealing your secret identity.
Right.
And Spider Man Peter Parker becomes the key person in this struggle because you know, he's Spider Man like, he has kept his secret identity hidden for the you know, the longest time amongst this community, and importantly for his character because Norman Osborne, the Green Goblin, discovered his identity,
he targeted Gwen Stacy and ultimately murdered her. And so he because of that incident, he holds a secret identity very closely because he does doesn't want you now at may or MJ to become hurt or targeted as a result of his activities as spider Man, and that's like always been a part of his story. So he ends up revealing his identity in a press conference where he says, I'm Spider Man, takes off his mask and my name is Peter Parker and he joins Team Talk.
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