Supercell Comic

Something I've been thinking about lately as a result of this page is how I might handle things if I was writing a campy "haha, child soldier so cool!" bonafide Shonen type story and I legitimately don't think I could pull it off. An issue I have with a lot of sci-fi and fantasy writing is in how utter socipathic the settings are. And I get that on some level you have to frame stuff like that sometimes in order to explore a concept or present an idea in a certain way, but it's so easy to make it feel so extremely fake; comes off as dishonest and I have a hard time enjoying that (Right now I'm thinking Star Wars, Marvel/DU, Sonic, all the big ones). Entire worlds and settings bend over backwards to facilitate for named characters to just be able to god mode their way through a situation and the narrative treats that as a "hooray for our main character" but that only holds up for as long as you don't consider the implications their actions have for anyone else.

I genuinely wish I could grab a lot of protagonists by the shoulder and shake them with "you're not the main character of the world" but that'd be moot since writers treat them that way and on some level it reminds me of irl people who are so self absorbed, they fail to consider how their crap impacts their environment and others around them. It makes me think a lot of people secretly want to have unchecked impunity and writing like that is the power fantasy; the wish fulfillment; while I'm over here thinking "but I like other people, though" lol.

And no, I'm not accusing writers of being sociopaths or anything like that, I'm just starved for more stories where writers actually think about those kinds of details and allow their characters to exist in a world rather than have a world exist around a characcter (or just their named cast, as it were. This isn't to imply that I want stories to name and develop every bystander, buuuuuut it tends to be super weird when someone needs help on the street and your named character is the one and only person to come to their aid. That just paints a really, REALLY bleak picture of the setting this is taking place in.

Enjoy!