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Welcome again to everybody. Make yourselves at home. In the time-honoured tradition of our group, here is the weekly discussion thread.
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That's a really good idea. It would be the superhero equivalent of a spreadsheet simulator game lol.
But I think a pretty important part of defining superheroes is by individualism, which is the bread and butter of Western culture. If there's not violence, there's still individualism. Like, think modern Sherlock Holmes. He doesn't commit a lot of violent acts, but he's still pretty much defined by being impossibly smart, almost to the point of having a "superpower".
The original Sherlock wasn't like this. Maybe I'm reaching, but maybe there was some influence from superhero stuff. He used to be an amazing detective, but had big gaps in his knowledge (like he didn't know the Earth revolved the Sun). Newer adaptations kind of make him a superhero in a sense.
I don't know if it's necessarily individualism that is the source of interesting stories or if it is cultural hegemony. I think it would be interesting to read some Marxist-inspired story where some group of workers build a party from the ground up.
That's an interesting point. Sherlock Holmes might actually be something of a precursor to the modern "great man" superhero style individualist figure. The original one (as I recall) is more down to earth than modern adaptations, but nevertheless, he has outsized ability for one person and gets called upon to solve problems that the cops can't, which is similar to superhero writing. The narrative style of it being from Watson's perspective also lends itself well to alluding to how "great" Holmes is without having to explicitly "prove" it in detailed writing.
Then modern adaptations tend to turn it into a dynamic that is something more like Batman/Robin, where Watson is a sidekick and Holmes is this high octane figure who we're actually seeing do some of the wild stuff that would normally be alluded to in the original stories. So his reasoning capability ends up more showy to the point it looks more explicitly like some kind of superpower. Whereas in the original narratives (if I remember right), part of the excuse for him being so clever as a detective was that not only did he know a lot of specialized things, certain observable details also contained narrower possibility within them. In the modern world, this more falls apart, like illustrated in the Pete Holmes comedy sketch about Sherlock Holmes that is clearly parodying the BBC Sherlock representation of him; he seizes repeatedly on mundane things and tries to extrapolate, only to be wrong over and over. In a way, it parodies Holmes almost as akin to a psychic; someone who is seizing on what they see, spinning narrative from it, and trying to awe the person they're talking to like it's a show.
This is probably more a reasonable critique/parody of the BBC portrayal than the original though. After all, the original emphasized stuff like "whenever you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth." Which has more in common with the scientific method and the null hypothesis than it does with showmanship, i.e. it's more about trying to prove yourself wrong first and then looking at what remains.