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Gamers yearn for the Ditko days where Spider-Man was some Randian chud (CW: reactionary Gamer malding)
(hexbear.net)
Spider-Man 3 should introduce Gwen Stacy as a trans woman to incinerate 
brains
I can't really fully agree with this. Superheroes have a lot less to do with fighting social injustices than they do with upholding the status quo and celebrating the military industrial complex.
The boys is the only accurate portrayal of superheroes
Chad Naruto:
Eh, in the later parts of the series we learn that he basically had the president looking out for him the whole time, and he gets access to special instruction just based on who he is. Not only does he become super special, it is revealed that he was super special and had special privileges all along. He just didn't know it.
Rock Lee shows the true limitations of hard work in the setting. Got his ass whooped a couple of times when anyone reasonably special showed up and then faded into irrelevance. He unfortunately lives in a world where hard work simply isn't enough.
Yeah, it's a real missed opportunity. I really like Naruto but at the end of the day it's a comic book for 10 year old japanese kids in the early 2000s, and that's the kind of shit that works for that demographic.
Naruto's extended cast really did fall away after the anime's War Arc. They produced enormous amounts of filler and then just kinda wrote off / killed off anyone who wasn't Naruto while focusing entirely on the Naruto/Sasuke rivalry. Then even that fell away so they could do some increasingly "My Power Is Bigger Than Your Power" dick waving bullshit into the closing arc.
Boruto was even worse, picking up straight off where the power-overscaled original story ended.
I wouldn't even call it a problem of fascism, per say, since the bad guys were as over-the-top as anyone. It just didn't do anything interesting with the premise, once everyone was God-Tier power level and just blasting away at each other with abandon.
Good god I despise the anime combat being "just hit it with a bigger laser beam until someone says uncle."
In Full Metal Alchemist, since it was science based, there was some thought to the combat and I really liked that. Power creep and its consequences.
Laser beams are cheap to animate. Some of the funniest bits in Naruto were the wacky jitsus. The dog guy who pees everywhere to negate illusion effects. The diviner who sees your chakras. Insect guy. Shadow guy. Mind-zap girl. Everyone has their own niche, and the teams evolve to exploit their niches. But then they all fall away and its just the Kicky-Punchy Show.
I saw a video essay on "The MAPPA Effect" where they talked the same way. How combat got more banal as their timelines and budgets contracted.
To their credit, FMA had a very light touch when it came to fight scenes. Lots of the show was drama and intrigue, keeping the show engaging without busting your budget on some elaborate battle scenes. The better anime tend to cling to this style of story telling, both because it makes the stories better and because it means you don't need to CGI the crap out of your show.
The only good Naruto character was Rock Lee and they did him dirty in the Gaara arc.
True. Like a lot of things, superhero comics started out with working-class origins and generally took a stance on things, even in a liberal way. But they were definitely used to promote and encourage social change, such as the civil rights allegories of the X-Men, the racial topics with Black Panther, etc.
But of course, comics got popular, and profitable. When capitalists got their hands on this art, they began to do their usual thing of twisting art, no matter how subversive it may have been, into reinforcing the status quo. Now, very few comics actually had real leftist messaging, but any progressive themes that they may have once had have been swallowed up by the Disney machine.
The first multi-issue story arc in Marvel comics was actually about T'Challa, the Black Panther, leading a prosperous African nation in the comic Jungle Action (Yeah, that name is pretty racist now). The arc right after that has Black Panther fight the KKK, despite pushback from the public (dumbass white nerds) and even some Marvel staffers.
Take the same arc in the modern movies, with Black Panther (2018). All the progressiveness is surface level. T'Challa allies with the CIA to fight comically-evil revolutionaries that make very real points about the status quo. Just embarrassing slop from the capitalists. All I can think about is that Disco Elysium quote, about how Capital can even subsume all critiques within itself, and turn them into propaganda.
I'm no comics expert (I haven't read all that many) and comics have always included many brainworms. But they definitely were cooler back when they weren't written by billionaires to sell worldwide.
Marvel defenders of the status quo - Pop Culture Detective
we will have this debate over and over forever until cape comics are finally abolished under the DotP.
Many of them had some real fucking problems long before the first Iron Man movie
Then your initial caveat means nothing because we aren't talking about fucking Speed Racer