No Right Answer: Superman vs Captain America - Most Patriotic Superhero

VanTesla

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Happiness Assassin said:
Didn't Superman at one point renounce his American citizenship in protest against the US government? I couldn't help but be reminded of that when watching this.
Then he got it back and after that the 52 reboot wiped all that away and made Supes more emo. Well in my view he acts and looks like it now...
 

VanTesla

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Therumancer said:
Ferisar said:
Therumancer said:
But then again, that's often being done in the context and perception of the U.S. In recent years, it's increasingly hard to have pride for the U.S. on a scale, or, rather, within the demographics that may read these comics. Yeah, sure, Freedom and stuff, but given the -general- perception of the U.S. as being a military powerhouse that does often use it, warranted or not, while giving the signals of being pretty paranoid creates a hard sell on characters that stand for idealism rather than for the their realistic depictions.
Similarly, it's not hard to have that occur on characters which aren't anywhere near the U.S. because their nation's perception by those same readers is a myth. Of course it's funny/admirable when a USSR Ruski superhero does "I Super Russian, Communism Gulag, hoho /tonguecheek" nonsense. It's all a myth to enjoy, even by someone who's from that country, because it gets exaggerated to the point of silliness, while providing the (majority) of readers from the U.S. and the such a very vibrant amusement park ride. At least that's my take on it based on what you've said. It's hard to have the same response be applied to multiple countries when those countries, globally, tend to be extremely different.

Also proooobably important to note that the majority of the "big" comics are written in the U.S. (afaik), thus the whole counter-culture response likely being fueled by being closer to home.

Or I'm just saying words. Who knows. I DON'T READ COMICS.

(Although Red Son was excellent)
No, I suppose there is some truth to what your saying. As I pointed out myself I believe it's largely that you have the left wing in the US controlling a lot of the media, and embracing a sort of socialist and "peace at any price" attitude. Political correctness has gotten to the point where in general you pretty much can't portray anything that isn't a Zombie, Space Alien, or white American as a bad guy without having someone inevitably get upset. You don't even have to get cartoonishly evil about it, just be accurate about who your dealing with for the most part.

A big part of my point though is that we generally don't do positive portrayals of patriots unless they come from other countries. Again there is a difference between some cartoonish "Boris and Natasha" portrayal of say Russia and how it's come across at times with say Colossus who has on a number of occasions done the whole "Russian Ultra Patriot" thing rather than simply being some Russian guy on the team without anything buffoonish being done with him.

As far as idealism goes, well the problem is less that, than the politics of those who largely control the media and produce/approve the writers feeling the need to use the media as what amounts to an attack platform for their own political agenda which is hardly patriotic.

For example, let's look at the basics of "The War On Terror". The left wing by and large embrace a peace at any price methodology and an unrealistic set of expectations when an actual war happens. The US going to war, no matter for what reason, or how well justified, is something it pretty much comes out to oppose. This lead to things like the whole "Civil War Event" being turned into an analogy for it, and Captain America pretty much going rogue as a result and fighting against the country, so the now-derailed storyline can try and make knocks on the whole US military industrial complex. What's more on the rare occasions when actual issues of terrorism linked to anything resembling the real world (as opposed to some fictional group like Hydra) Cap turns into a hand-wringer.

To put things into perspective, Captain America is a dude who is supposed to know about war, and what's more he's a guy who was a commando/black ops guy for all intents and purposes. Someone does something like 9/11 or whatever, realistically Cap is the guy who isn't going to be saying "let's coddle Muslims and pursue with with restraint" he's
the guy who is going to be saying "drop me and a bunch of commandoes into Iraq/Afghanistan/Where ever and I'll bring down the guys responsible when an army would fail. Granted the real world doesn't have Captain America (the world would probably be a much better place on a lot of levels with super heroes for this reason) but the guy would be cutting a swathe through The Middle East, making quippy now considered "racist" comments about the enemy to get under their skin (much like how he and Nick Fury would call the Nazis all kinds of names, starting with say "Krauts"). That's the proper ultra-patriotic Captain America reaction to these kinds of events. It's literally what he became Captain America to do, and did for years before the whole "Commie Smasher" bit which was retconned. Comics writers won't go there though because it intrudes on their "peace any any price" politics. Rather they prefer to blame the US, so instead weave a story that has Captain America acting out of character and pretty much attacking the government because golly gee, the government wants people to be held accountable for their actions. Although to be fair the finale of that event DID have Cap surrendering when he realized he had become exactly the thing the government was concerned about when he brought Namor and his army into it. But well... I'm rambling, if you haven't read it you don't know what I'm talking about.


To put things into perspective, the perception of the US as being some kind of aggressive military bully is largely perpetuated by Americans through the media and things like comics, and I mean when we say it, are our critics going to disagree to something that plays to their advantage? For the most part we spend trillions of dollars on military weapons we don't even use. It's the height of irony that we downsized our military based on the idea that if the US ever really went to war we would outright demolish any nation/culture that crossed us. We'd render opposing militaries obsolete so quickly, and wipe out so many civilians so quickly with our weapons, that our enemy would literally vanish overnight. Indeed we've got tons of bombs, missiles, and other weapons that can wipe out entire towns and villages without even having to go nuclear. Things like Daisy Cutters and Fuel Air bombs are horrifying. When we've actually intervened militarily though we've left all of this stuff off the playing field. For "The War On Terror" we were so moral that we pretty much tried to re-build a conventional military force, calling in reserves never intended to go overseas, building up armed hummers and such which we didn't have because we figured we'd never go in to fight man to man in a war like this, and all so moralists would be happy. We of course accomplished nothing. Yet of course those same moralists demonize the US from within the country and pretty much write the material for our international critics.

Arguably the whole point of a "Super Patriot" is to do what the US should be doing in events just like this. Captain America for example was literally designed as a wartime icon. Right now the guy should be portrayed as say punching out Russians on the Crimian front, leading commandoes into North Korea, thwarting Muslim nuclear scientists in Iran, or protecting Chinese civilians against the excesses and human rights violations of their government. Doing the things a real person/commando couldn't do because you know, he's a super hero. Part of why he sort of fell apart with the whole "commie smashing" thing is that he doesn't really work as well in a purely domestic sense. Rather the guy who spearheaded war against the Nazis under the current breed of writers is actually written as being some kind of borderline hippie protestor who in the big picture seems to spend as much or more time fighting the authorities as he does actual national enemies.

HOWEVER, that's kind of my point, some people, including the writers, find that kind of thing offensive and against their politics. Thus you don't see any heroes really doing that, if anything the "heroes" stop people from doing that
it seems. Someone showing patriotism for another country oftentimes critiques the US so it's allowed, but send Cap in to say kick Putin's teeth down his throat? Almost unheard of (though in World War II it was okay if he say punched Hitler or equivilents to third reich leaders).
Not to get to much into the argument on Left vs Right in the USA, but both sides are at this point and time to me out of control when it comes to the elected officials in the current office. To me both sides are getting more extreme on their own issues and rather have it divided with the mind set of choose a side or your against us... The propaganda on both sides is so huge that people will just take a side and defend it even when the core ideas that are preached on either side are actually not used and both just do what is most self serving for their party. Both sides say they are for the USA people, but when they speak they don't mean the people of the country, but their funders. I am sure there are some good left and right wing people in gov't that want to serve the country well, but I believe they are a minority as of now and will be as long as the USA people keep being closed minded on sticking with a side even when that side is not doing the job it was elected to do.

You would think with information being more available in this day and age we could reduce the propaganda, corruption, and hate, but instead people are constantly misusing, abusing, fabricating, propagating, and overall using our knew technology to dumb us down... If we want to change our problems we need to unite as a country be we have different opinions on certain matters we will never fix this mess until we stop acting like puppets for the left and right that is played out in this country to divide us... I think I ramble way to much and so now I will go get some sleep... My apologies for the crazed rant.
 

gorfias

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Therumancer said:
Yes the two fought at the end of the so called "Amalgam Era" and the fight was never concluded. The two godlike beings basically looked at all of the creations and decided they were all beautiful and not to bother to go through with the whole "only one world can survive" thing and just ended it. It was less a draw than the duel that was never fully resolved due to the needs of the story.

The lead up to the fight when you had the two universes meeting (without being combined) and they were battling each other's rogues gallery in brief snippits was more amusing. There was a scene of Bane about to snap Cap's back "Knightfall" style only to have Cap's shield richochet and nail him in the back of the head... and stuff like that done to be cute. :)
Oh yeah, and we ended up with hybrid characters like this batman/wolverine mix


Rather than Cap vs. Superman, just mix the two!
 

zvate

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Superman could balance the budget by going out and bringing back a gold asteroid the size of the moon (or a variety of small rare materials so as not to mess up the economy. You want health care, bam... you want nuclear missile defense, bap... you want free power, set up a giant gerbil wheel attached to a generator and their you go. That debate doesn't interest me; the one I want to see:

Who is the more patriotic character: Captain America or The Red Skull? (or maybe Dr. Doom because the Red Skull's often been retconned as non-nazi these days)... Because sometimes Patriotism is both bad and evil.
 

Lhianon

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i am scared by people that think patriotism is a good thing.
you know which people are really patriotic right now? the russians, the chineese and the people of north korea.
you know which populus was really patriotic in the recent past? the citizens of germany during WW1 + 2, the japaneese people during the same period.
we really should stop using such a useless concept like patriotism, it usually only serves to get people to do stuff they would not have done if they had gotten the time to properly think about it (not dissimilar to religion). instead, could we please start thinking about what would be, in the long run, be the best for humanity as a whole?

Therumancer said:
-snip-
Now, again, I won't get into government morality, or what's good or bad here, I'm just saying that the US is probably the least patriotic/nationalist country on earth despite pretensions to the opposite by the counter culture.
-snip-.
while this may be something that, in your opinion, is true, it is not true in an absolute, objective way like you phrase it. simply compare schools in europe to schools in the USA, in most european countries nobody cares about the oath to the flag; in germany you even get detention if you sing the first verse of the national anthem ("germany, germany above all else") because it got heavily missused under the nazis.

you heavily stress the point that in recent comicbook-history, the captn sometimes behaved like a terrorist. while i have not read the issues in question, may i point out that the french revolutionaries as well as the independence movement in north america were viewed as terrorism by the ruling class at that time? furthermore, isn't the point of the second amendment to give the citizens of the USA the tools as well as the legal justification to overthrow a tyranical government that uses it branches to get rid of the freedom american citizens fought for? because if you keep that in mind, a captain america that takes action against a government that slowly becomes similar to the one in "1984" would be one of the more patriotic things he could have done.

i apologize for gramatical and orthographic errors, english is not my first language.
 

softclocks

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Neither of these are associated with America anymore, none of them are particularly patriotic.

Vivi22 said:
jdarksun said:
And, yeah, Spider-man is smarter, stronger, and faster than Captain America. I just don't see Steve Rogers winning that fight.
All of the power stuff is true, but Spider-Man is untrained as a fighter, not an expert in tactics at all, and Cap regularly holds his own against stronger opponents because he is a trained soldier and tactical mastermind. It'd be a close fight, but I think Cap could potentially take it.

There's a good reason the weakest guy in the Avengers on paper is also their leader.
Untrained as a fighter? He's got like 10 years of training on his back now, not that any martial artist would effectively train someone who fights like a spider :|

Hell, Cap's one of the many people who have trained him.
 

Therumancer

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VanTesla said:
[

Not to get to much into the argument on Left vs Right in the USA, but both sides are at this point and time to me out of control when it comes to the elected officials in the current office. To me both sides are getting more extreme on their own issues and rather have it divided with the mind set of choose a side or your against us... The propaganda on both sides is so huge that people will just take a side and defend it even when the core ideas that are preached on either side are actually not used and both just do what is most self serving for their party. Both sides say they are for the USA people, but when they speak they don't mean the people of the country, but their funders. I am sure there are some good left and right wing people in gov't that want to serve the country well, but I believe they are a minority as of now and will be as long as the USA people keep being closed minded on sticking with a side even when that side is not doing the job it was elected to do.

You would think with information being more available in this day and age we could reduce the propaganda, corruption, and hate, but instead people are constantly misusing, abusing, fabricating, propagating, and overall using our knew technology to dumb us down... If we want to change our problems we need to unite as a country be we have different opinions on certain matters we will never fix this mess until we stop acting like puppets for the left and right that is played out in this country to divide us... I think I ramble way to much and so now I will go get some sleep... My apologies for the crazed rant.

Oh don't get me wrong, I'm critical of both parties. It's just that on an issue like this one the problem is with the left wing. To be honest one thing about these forums is that the areas of politics where I lean leftward rarely come up. Though admittedly I am registered Republican and do tend to wind up empathizing with that philosophy first, and feel it's more likely to be "saved" and turned into something constructive than the left wing which I feel is increasingly delusional.

In the overall scope of a discussion like this the dark side of the right wing is that they are all for economically screwing the average person for the benefit of the top 1%. The right wing is largely responsible for a lot of the problems with banks, corporations, and other issues. The thing is that these kinds of issues rarely come up in comics, at least not here. See if Captain America wants to punch out some corrupt financier or otherwise bring him down that's absolutely fine with me. Indeed comics have in the past used evil CEOs as stock villains, Marvel for example has "Roxxon Oil" as their go-to evil corporation, and the oil industry is actually not a bad choice for showing all that's wrong with out of control business interests and how they negatively impact society. HOWEVER, in the scope of this discussion we're talking about the representation of the country, it's ideals, and it's interests as in patriotism. This involves doing things like attacking our enemies, and pursueing our interests in a way that makes those aspects of corruption less necessary.

To again use "The War On Terror" as an example again, both sides of the political spectrum can be blamed there. The left wing can be blamed for derailing the entire war effort, pushing a peace at any price agenda, demanding we do not use our weapons properly or try and break the cultures we were facing, and actually lionizing/protecting Muslims in order to try and prevent them from being targets and rally the people against pushing the war. The right wing on the other hand became interested in running the war to make money, and was more concerned over things like government rebuilding and security contracts, so they could be passed off to friends and donors in exchange for kickbacks.

Now, despite how that might look the point here isn't to argue left vs. right wing, and I'm not going to go any further on this. Instead I'm going to bring up the issue of a patriotic super hero. The purpose of a character like Captain America is to show the country more or less on track and point out what the war is about. The War On Terror was in response to long-term Muslim aggression, which eventually resulting in suicide attacks on both military and civilian targets. Captain America's point is to say "this is about kicking the butts of Muslims, and making an example out of them so nobody ever does this again". He's very much all about the violence. He's the guy who should be running around making comments about ragheads much like he called Germans crouts, as he leads Commandoes on raids of Baghdad, kills dudes doing things like Chemical Ali did, hunts down terrorist cells, and otherwise does everything to keep things on track and with a clear definition of who our enemies are and why.

Indeed this is exactly what Captain America was created for, during World War II, a lot of people didn't want the US involved in the war. A lot of people even sympathized with Hitler and German culture, the dude was an international man of the year for crying out loud. There were also a lot of politics involved, going back to economics, and some valid points that the treaties that ended World War I went too far given that Germany was still allowed to remain a strong country, and made this kind of backlash inevitable. What's more the Allies engaged in all kinds of ugly things to win the war, guys like Arthur "Bomber" Harris (who was a Brit) were considered monsters equal to the worst of the villains of the third reich by the other side. The idea is for Captain America to bring it back down to basics, and say "these guys are bad, they are against America... and thus we kick their ass and make it cool to do so" while making it clear it's un-American to disagree with that point of view while we're at war. The very fact that the left wing has issues with this kind of thing, and doesn't "get" the purpose of something like Captain America on a lot of levels summarizes exactly the problem with the left wing. The trick to Captain America is that he is right as he does this, not a patritic douchenozzle... and really the left wing by definition presents patriots AS douchenozzles. Look at the attacks people endure just for supporting "The War On Terror" even in it's politically castrated form.

Now that said, someone like Captain America would also properly be used to point out problems with the right wing as well, as punching out/arresting politicians involved in rebuilding and profiteering schemes. He'd properly oppose something like "Blackwater Security" not so much because they killed Muslims (which is more or less what your supposed to be doing in a war) but because by definition this is the job of the US military, and one should not have a bunch of corporate thugs running around playing soldier simply so the government can pay their bosses. The whole bureaucratic mess groups like that running around doing their own things was the source of countless problems... and again the situation that enabled them was largely because the US wasn't fighting a real war (go in, decimate the area and break the culture, force the survivors to agree to our terms, go home and forget about it other than to point to what happened to this area of the world when someone broke enough deals with the US and attacked it).
 

Therumancer

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Lhianon said:
i am scared by people that think patriotism is a good thing.
you know which people are really patriotic right now? the russians, the chineese and the people of north korea.
you know which populus was really patriotic in the recent past? the citizens of germany during WW1 + 2, the japaneese people during the same period.
we really should stop using such a useless concept like patriotism, it usually only serves to get people to do stuff they would not have done if they had gotten the time to properly think about it (not dissimilar to religion). instead, could we please start thinking about what would be, in the long run, be the best for humanity as a whole?

Therumancer said:
-snip-
Now, again, I won't get into government morality, or what's good or bad here, I'm just saying that the US is probably the least patriotic/nationalist country on earth despite pretensions to the opposite by the counter culture.
-snip-.
while this may be something that, in your opinion, is true, it is not true in an absolute, objective way like you phrase it. simply compare schools in europe to schools in the USA, in most european countries nobody cares about the oath to the flag; in germany you even get detention if you sing the first verse of the national anthem ("germany, germany above all else") because it got heavily missused under the nazis.

you heavily stress the point that in recent comicbook-history, the captn sometimes behaved like a terrorist. while i have not read the issues in question, may i point out that the french revolutionaries as well as the independence movement in north america were viewed as terrorism by the ruling class at that time? furthermore, isn't the point of the second amendment to give the citizens of the USA the tools as well as the legal justification to overthrow a tyranical government that uses it branches to get rid of the freedom american citizens fought for? because if you keep that in mind, a captain america that takes action against a government that slowly becomes similar to the one in "1984" would be one of the more patriotic things he could have done.

i apologize for gramatical and orthographic errors, english is not my first language.

Patriotism is a good thing when it comes from the right people (big smile), at least up until the point where we unify the world into a single global culture and one world government, but that's an entirely different discussion. To be honest the reaction I normally get when I talk about globalism and a single world meta-culture and government tends to prove my point. You'll rapidly find tons of people going off about how "OMG, you can't expect everyone to hold to the same standards and live at one" which of course amounts to patriotism in a way. Globalism is an endgame but until that point certain nations, especially those with an idealogy that could lead to a functional base for a world government, need to pursue their own agendas, and make sure that when the final wars do happen they are in the best position possible. What's more the more unity one causes through the simple spread of ideas, the less violence ultimately needed in building a single world government, which is necessary for the continued survival of humanity. I've explained why before (and mostly people wind up agreeing with me, even if begrudginglyly) but explaining the necessity of that would derail this conversation away from patriotism and super heroes and more towards globalism, resource shortages, overpopulation, and similar things.

As a general rule overthrowing a government you disagree with is not generally a good thing, especially when you can work within it. I for example do not consider the socialist/communist takeovers of Russia, China, and even France to ultimately be good things for example, and on a lot of levels represent exactly why patriotism and opposing ideologies that lead to that are necessary.

More on topic though, the thing is that in "1984" (which a lot of people like to reference, but few have read, admittedly for me it was a long time ago and it does run together with a lot of similar works like "Faranheight 451" which is actually what a lot of people seem to be talking about when they mention "1984") dealt with a societal construct where everything, including the existence of an actual "big brother", and the war with "Eurasia" was questionable at various points in the book. In comparison the threats we see nowadays actually do exist, China's human rights violations are a matter of record, Russia has invaded Georgia and Crimea, you do have Theocrats plotting the destruction of the Western world (Iran has even referred to us officially as "The Great Satan" in diplomatic meetings which in of itself is disturbing), and of course again with China we have them not only building up a military but intruding on US allies over control of island chains, and fishing waters. All of these threats exist. As do some of our initial promises to nations like Ukraine that we would protect them should Russia try and invade or re-absorb them (at the time we didn't insist they officially join NATO for diplomatic reasons, as we wanted to encourage more nations to break away from the USSR and become indepdent like they wanted, as opposed to feeling like their only option was to trade one empire for another).

It should also be noted that a lot of the problems that lead to things like "1984", the old movie "Metropolis", "Faranheight 451" and various other stories largely come from overpopulation, combined with resource shorages, which of course leads to tighter control for humanity to survive. After a while it does raise the question where "is surviving like this once your realize it, really worth it?". One of the reasons I go off about globalization, and of course the needs for a massive war that eliminates 90% of the population, followed by tight population control to prevent things from going beyond that point, is specifically because by doing that these kinds of scenarios can be avoided. Less people, means higher standards of living for each, and less need for conflict. Without there being multiple nations and cultures to get paranoid of each other technology can thus advance into areas like space travel and exploration, and the population can slowly expand as our resources and living space also do. If we keep going down this path, yeah, we're going to create "1984" type governments, and then finally wind up depleting resources to the point where we can't save ourselves if we want to, or sustain our population even under those terms, eventually we'll wind up seeing the mass deaths equivalent to a huge war like I suggest, except there won't be any resources left to encourage. Humans will carry on as savages until the sun finally goes Nova and we all die... The End. I don't articulate much of this well, but again it has little to do with patriotism or the subject at hand.

Also my own English skills aren't great, so don't worry about yours. Your fairly coherent so it's no big thing.