This week has been pretty stressful and busy, which didn’t help when it came to class on Monday and Wednesday, and reading The Illiad didn’t help make my week any better, in fact it gave me a headache while I was reading it I needed to sparknotes it afterwards to ease my pain. When we were discussing the story in class we brought up other issues while also trying to solve the main problem we’ve had for I believe the past two weeks, which is how do we categorize humans, super humans, heroes, super heroes, superheroes, etc? I posed the topics and questions that we had discussed in class and asked my parents what they thought, it was my dad who kept pointing out that everything depends on one’s perspective. I tried to see if he would say anything close to what others had brought up in class, but he kept giving me one answer, “It’s all about perspective.” I even gave him the example of the nuclear bomb in the stadium and if that person could be considered a hero or a nuisance (ends vs. means) and again he said, “It’s all about perspective.”
So afterwards I described Achilles to him and asked him if he would consider Achilles as a hero, superhero, or neither; I’m sure we all know what his answer is, “It’s all about perspective.” When I ask myself the same question I don’t even have an answer, Achilles just doesn’t appeal to me. I think it’s because he was all about making sure he got what he wanted his way, but he did go through one of those “defining moments” because it took the death of his closest friend to really give him a cause for fighting. It’s difficult to keep writing this while working on the group presentation because a part of me wants to relate Achilles to Gilgamesh. I’ll save what I want to say for later.
I started to really think about superheroes during the weekend, and I started to think about the Power Rangers, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Sailor Moon, Astroboy, and Kikaida. If you don’t know about Kikaida, he’s like the Japanese version of Iron Man, he’s a guitar playing motorcyclist that transforms into this half machine half man thing, but the focus is on protecting Japan from an evil organization. I’m pretty sure we’re all familiar with the other shows maybe not Sailor Moon, you can always google it, but how would you categorize them? Power Rangers are the ones that I’m not too sure about because with the power rangers they were specially chosen to become the rangers and they learn martial arts and stuff to beat the weird looking evil minions. Then when the main evil character grows like a 1,000 times bigger they use these remote control things to form a megazord thing and they’d win. They don’t really have any powers except for their megazords, so I guess I’d consider them super heroes, besides the fact that they destroy parts of the city and don’t do anything about it.
When I was in elementary school, I would spend the mornings watching Power Rangers and Sailor Moon and to me Sailor Moon seemed more of a superhero than the Power Rangers. Sailor Moon was my version of Wonder Woman, she became someone I wanted to be but knew that it could never happen because I’d never be able to have those “powers.” I got away from the main topic that I wanted this entry to be about (Achilles & The Illiad) but I couldn’t help if it got me thinking about Power Rangers or Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.
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This kind of thinking is good. You're trying to connect the dots and make sense of things. Your dad has a point, but at the same time he's wrong. There is a certain amount of perspective to who and what is a hero/superhero, but these characters have some tropes that we all recognize. How hard was it for us to come up with a list of the things necessary for a superhero? We did that fairly quickly, which indicates to me that we know that there is something specific to these characters. As far as anime/manga, that's an area I have to be careful with because my only exposure to the style is Trigun, which wouldn't help with the defining of superheroes in that context. It's a weakness I'm going to have to remedy at some point.
ReplyDeleteI have been thinking a lot about how we have been trying to categorize heros and superheroes and I guess your dad is right, it really is all about perspective. I think our best bet in finding out a full proof definition and criteria for superheroes is to try and think of things on the most simple and basic terms. If we venture to far out with what if's then it really does just all become one persons perspective.
ReplyDeleteI also think it is something interesting when talking about anime/manga because many have lots of heroic characters. If Sailor Moon is a hero, does that make the rest of them heroes too, or are they just not "as big" of a hero as she is. The introduction of many other good characters is something that makes anime/manga unique when talking about superheroes. @Mr. B, if Trigun is the only one your familiar with it's somewhat fitting because that's one of the only anime/manga series I would say has a clear-cut superhero in Vash the Stampede.
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