redkrypto:

OK, see this? This is why I’m having a lot of trouble with how the entire conversation surrounding SJ issues in pop culture, and particularly superhero stories, is shaking out. It’s not that I disagree with any of these criticisms. It’s just that these are all about individual characters, whereas to my mind the biggest, most devastating flaws in Supergirl S2 were all in its handling of institutions and concepts - in issues like police brutality, refugeeism, and genocide. You could certainly argue over how to rank these different types of problems, but to not even mention the latter seems inexplicable to me. (To be clear, this is not a specific callout of BGN; as far as I can tell, this problem is endemic to all pop culture criticism.)

Like, if you asked me what the biggest problem in Supergirl S2 was, my very first answer would be: Alex, and the way the show uses her to pinkwash police brutality. Alex becomes the show’s breakout character in S2, with her touching coming out story, her stable and supportive romance with Maggie Sawyer, and an entire episode late in the season dedicated to showcasing how much of a badass she is, and how much her friends love and need her. And she also spends the season brutally beating up bound prisoners. I’m not even talking about the jokey stuff, like the alien small-time criminal whom the characters take turns roughing up for information over the course of the season (this is a plot element the show thought it was OK to field in fucking 2016, for the record). I’m talking about big dramatic moments meant to show off Alex’s character and even, on some level, to make her look more heroic - because she cares so much about catching bad guys that she’ll beat up prisoners to get information out of them. After one particularly egregious incident, J’onn even apologizes for sidelining her because of it.

As much as Alex is the poster child for this issue, the DEO has become a huge issue for the show just in general. My biggest problem with the Guardian storyline wasn’t that it was bad (though dear lord, it was terrible), but that it took James, the only character in S1 to express doubts over the DEO’s illegal detainment of prisoners, and turned him into someone so gung-ho about extra-legal violence that even Kara is taken aback by it. (Not to mention, the very fact that in 2016, a black man becomes the head of a major media conglomerate, and immediately turns around and decides that he can’t do any good in that position, and that he’d be contributing more to society by going out at night and beating up poor criminals.)

Or take the way the show handled its refugee storyline. There are a lot of good intentions at the heart of the “illegal aliens” story that runs through the season, and some of how it’s handled is pretty good. But you also get things like how a major S2 storyline is kicked off with a poison gas attack in an alien-frequented bar that kills dozens - basically the superhero-show equivalent of the Pulse nightclub shooting. And not only are the rage and grief of the community following this attack completely ignored (the only time it’s mentioned after the episode in which it happens is when a character makes a joke about how no one wants to go to the bar where their friends were murdered), but the attack itself is merely a kickoff for another story - something to establish stakes, not a meaningful or traumatic event in its own right. Even worse, by the end of the season, Kara joins forces with the architects of this attack (to reiterate, these are people who used poison gas to exterminate what they perceive as a dangerous infestation of humanity; the parallels are not subtle), in order to defend the Earth from - wait for it - evil refugees. And the solution she comes up with to defeat these invaders is to poison the Earth’s atmosphere so they can’t live here, which has echoes in so many nativist and racist ideas that it’s genuinely scary.

(Not as bad as either of these issues, but there are a lot of problems with the M’gann storyline and the way it delves into the Green Martian genocide. Somewhat unsurprisingly for American TV, the show immediately plumps for the “victims of genocide must forgive their people’s murderers for the sake of their own psychological wellbeing” canard, and then there’s the bit where M’gann decides to present herself as a Green Martian, which is wrong on many levels.)

And look, superhero stories - hell, television in general - are an individual-focused medium. It’s not wrong to concentrate on how these stories handle their characters - and particularly their diverse characters - as a litmus test for their commitment to progressive ideas. The fact that one of only two female-led superhero shows running right now spent its second season allowing its heroine’s character development to take a back seat to her boyfriend’s by-the-numbers redemption story is absolutely a problem we should be talking about, not least because of how it highlights the reflexive way in which TV writers treat male characters as inherently more interesting than female ones, even when the female characters are the leads. But it really feels as if this is happening at the expense of a broader discussion of how the tropes of superhero stories - and the way those tropes are realized in shows like Supergirl - end up reifying regressive, authoritarian ideas.

Because let’s face it, superhero shows are currently the dominant form in pop culture, and the ideas they propagate reach a lot of people, particularly young people. Shortly after the murderer of Philando Castile was acquitted, I saw someone on twitter say this:

To which my reaction was: yes, cop shows have done a hell of a lot to not only valorize cops, but to normalize behaviors that in the real world are used to abuse and oppress specific ethnic groups. But how many young people watch cop shows these days? Isn’t the bigger problem the way that superhero stories have turned their supers into the equivalent of cops, but without any accountability, due process, or civil rights protections? Remember how the cop shows you watched as a kid always had a storyline where the hero cop kills a child - either by accident or because they genuinely had no choice - and then feels terrible about it? Remember when you realized that this was the narrative playing in peoples’ heads when they justified the murder of Tamir Rice? Well, now we’ve got Agents of SHIELD giving that exact same backstory to Melinda May, one of its most positive and heroic characters, who was “forced” to murder a child who had powers she couldn’t control. And we’ve got an ally of the Flash murdering a prisoner in order to protect his daughter, while in the real world prisoners being murdered in their cells look like Sandra Bland and Freddie Grey. And we’ve got The Flash, Agents of SHIELD, Arrow, and Supergirl all positing a secret police force that can jail and torture people with no oversight or accountability, even though in the real world that looks like the Chicago police department’s secret black site. (And I’m not even getting into the way that The Flash and Agents of SHIELD treat non-human people as inherently dangerous and inherently killable, unless they sign up with the heroes’ agenda.)



Right now, the most important, most influential site for the normalization - the valorization, even - of police brutality, xenophobia, and unchecked government power is coming from superhero stories. And as far as I can tell, nobody - certainly not anybody from pop culture sites with a social justice slant - is talking about this. It is absolutely important to agitate for more diversity, and better representation of diverse characters, in what is currently the dominant form of pop culture. But that shouldn’t extend so far as cheering when the lady cop who murders a child is Asian, or when the other lady cop who beats a prisoner is gay. Alongside calls for better individual representation, we should also be seeing a more serious examination of how these shows approach issues of civil rights, and the accountability of power.



(via cacchieressa)