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by dTal 1237 days ago
Nowadays it's extra-legal billionaire vigilantes with magical powers that save the world. Did we go wrong somewhere?
1 comments

Batman's pushing 90 and he wasn't the first rich vigilante.
Batman, and superheroes in general, have always been a bit of campy fun. The target audience was children, like the comic books they were based on. It wasn't until The Dark Knight that anyone took Batman seriously. That really seemed to break the seal on the "gritty, realistic superhero" genre. The trouble with that is that in the real world, the existence of superheros would be horrifying (an observation satisfyingly deconstructed by The Boys). Perhaps we can overlook that for a movie or two, for the novelty, but after a decade and a half of wall to wall "gritty, realistic" media depicting violent anarchistic ubermensch as the good guys, one has to wonder if this is entirely healthy.