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Are We the Baddies?? A Quick Look at a Discourse

2021-04-30 · letter vlog · Hank · 3:58 · watch on YouTube

Topic: Internet & YouTube (also: Pop culture) · mode: Personal essay

Using two viral tweets about why supervillains care about real problems, Hank argues that Twitter is indispensable but dystopian, oversimplifying ideas to make people angrier, and that the deeper lesson of superhero stories is that individuals cannot solve systemic problems: only we can.

What is said

The parts of the video and what is said in each (★ — how much it matters to the video).

00:00:00 — The Ezra Klein Show's claim that Twitter is indispensable and dystopian; two tweets about supervillains

  • ★★ Hank heard on The Ezra Klein Show the claim, which he has made to John and John has disputed, that Twitter is both indispensable and dystopian. — 00:00:00 · Twitter
  • ★★★ Hank says Twitter is dystopic: a room without walls where everyone must perform for everyone, with no space for careful, thoughtful, de-escalating conversation. — 00:00:00 · Twitter
  • ★★ Hank says Twitter is indispensable: much culture is made there, especially in politics and journalism, and powerful conversations start there, though its structure strips their nuance. — 00:00:29 · Twitter
  • ★★ Hank says a villain works best when the audience can understand their motivation, and there are several ways to give one. — 00:00:29

00:00:58 — How villains are motivated: mattering, hurt, power, and real problems with simplistic villainous solutions

  • ★ In the Carl books the antagonist mostly wants to matter, largely the same motivation as the protagonist, which Hank calls a fun dynamic. — 00:00:58 · An Absolutely Remarkable Thing, A Beautifully Foolish Endeavor
  • ★★ Hank argues villains who seem to enjoy chaos are really about power: forcing chaos on others after lacking agency, culminating in world domination. — 00:00:58
  • ★★ Another villain type cares about a real problem but has a simplistic villainous solution: Poison Ivy rightly sees harm to the planet but kills CEOs; Bane would blow up corrupt Gotham. — 00:01:27

00:01:56 — The Twitter discourse: policing tactics over problems, the left-wing-villain response, oversimplified to make people angrier

  • ★★ Hank reports the original tweets' pitch: storytellers want viewers less concerned about problems and more about policing the tactics used to fix them. — 00:01:56 · Twitter
  • ★★ Hank rejects the response that stories make left-wing values villainous: villains are often motivated by right-wing values, and no one thinks Batman films condemn fighting corruption. — 00:01:56
  • ★★★ Hank calls the original point legitimate but not the only one: it is oversimplified to make the point and to make people angrier than they would otherwise be. — 00:02:26
  • ★★ Hank says the writers aim not to change society but to sell movie tickets, writing a broadly appealing story that makes $300 million. — 00:02:26
  • ★★★ Hank draws another implicit lesson: systemic problems are exactly the problems individuals are very bad at solving. — 00:02:26

00:02:55 — Individuals are bad at systemic problems; the lone-ruler thought is villainous and a Twitter thought; only we can solve them; sign-off

  • ★★ Superman declaring himself emperor of Earth would be evil, not just wrong; the Avengers should not be the government: they are good at punching, not leading. — 00:02:55
  • ★★★ Hank says thinking that as the one individual with all the power you would force the world into your preferred shape is a villainous thought, though we all have it. — 00:02:55
  • ★★ Hank says that lone-ruler thought is also kind of a Twitter thought. — 00:03:20 · Twitter
  • ★★ Superhero stories are necessarily simple, epic battles under three hours; we do learn from them, and analyzing what we learn matters. — 00:03:20
  • ★★★ Of the answers to why movie heroes don't solve big problems (Disney vilifying leftists, manufacturing consent, selling tickets), Hank offers a sympathetic one: heroes can't solve them; only we can. — 00:03:20 · collective action

In the description and comments

  • ★★ The description says the most interesting thing is the tweets' traction: the conversation they created was never less extreme than the original tweet, always more extreme. — video description · Twitter

Threads in this video

Mentioned

Central: Twitter

Also: Works: A Beautifully Foolish Endeavor · An Absolutely Remarkable Thing · The Ezra Klein Show

Organizations: The Walt Disney Company

Concepts: collective action · moral outrage

Characters: Avengers · Bane · Batman · Gotham City · Poison Ivy · Superman

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