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It's superheroes and not their super-villain counterparts that we should really be afraid of. This idea has been explored in a number of superhero movies, including such diverse fare as The Incredibles, Watchmen, and the post-Sokovia adventures of the Marvel Cinematic Universe. In each, lawmakers shackle our protagonists in response to the collateral damage caused when they step in to save the day.
But perhaps collateral damage is not what we should be worried about. According to a new study, the "good guys" are actually significantly more violent than the antagonists they're trying to stop. These findings were presented on Monday at the annual meeting of the American Academy of Pediatrics. Pennsylvania pediatrician Robert Olympia and his colleagues sat through 10 superhero movies released in 2015 and 2016, cataloging each specific act of violence and noting whether it was committed by a protagonist or villain.
As anyone who has sat through a recent summer superhero tentpole can attest, there is a lot of violence to catalogue—on the order of 23 acts per hour for the good guys, with just 18 violent acts per hour for the bad guys. And it is mostly guys—male characters were five times more likely to engage in violence than female characters.
Well, it's edgier that way.
[For the sake of discussion, here's a 3-minute clip on YouTube: Incredibles 2 Fight Scene in Full: Jack-Jack vs. Raccoon (Exclusive). How many violent acts do you count? --Ed.]
(Score: 5, Insightful) by unauthorized on Friday November 09 2018, @07:26PM (3 children)
Depicted. Important keyword here. The reason heroes inflict more violence than villains is because they get more screentime per hour since they are the protagonists of the story. If you were to take a story with a villain-protagonist, you'd get the inverse effect in spades. See Judge Dredd and Deadpool for example. Furthermore as the villains are antagonists, they happen to fail to accomplish their intended damage because there are heroes to stop them - villainous goals if realized usually would result in damage that is orders of magnitude greater than what the heroes do to stop them.
And to put the final nail of the coffin, their sample size is FUCKING 10. No, I'm not missing a zero, these "scientists" watched 10 superhero movies and wrote a "scientific" paper about it. This is the state of oppression studies academia people.
(Score: 2) by Unixnut on Friday November 09 2018, @07:53PM
> And to put the final nail of the coffin, their sample size is FUCKING 10. No, I'm not missing a zero, these "scientists" watched 10 superhero movies and wrote a "scientific" paper about it. This is the state of oppression studies academia people.
So, they got paid grant money to sit around for days on end, watching superhero movies? Probably had to re-watch them several times to make detailed notes and make sure they didn't miss anything.
Sounds like a pretty decent gig. Only thing missing is them being able to expense the food and drink (if they were any good, they would already have managed to expense the home theater system they had to use for the project).
Of course, the end of any project is usually some kind of paper. No matter how bad, you have to provide something in return for the grant you got.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by corey on Saturday November 10 2018, @02:43AM (1 child)
You might be right about the fact that the hero is shown more. But the average kid doesn't analyse it this way. The motivation behind the research was children's exposure to violence.
(Score: 2) by unauthorized on Saturday November 10 2018, @11:26AM
The average "kid" doesn't watch movies rated 13+, and if yours does then that's your individual responsibility as a parent. As for teenagers, they are quite capable of comprehending the nuance of justifiable violence in response to a terrible transgression.