#written before cacw
The more I think about it, the more the “family friendly” carnage in superheroes movies bothers me. I just stumbled across a post lauding Marvel for saving every civilian in AOU, and I’m sorry, but there is no possible way the scale of widespread destruction in that movie wouldn’t have left a massive trail of casualties all across the world, no matter how many they managed to save.
It’s the same problem in Superman’s epic battle against Zod in Man of Steel*. But while the DCU is almost at its starting point these days, Marvel has an established franchise that I think is worth examining.
The superheroes movies we’re used to don’t show the inevitable death toll unless it’s a general pan over of the villains’ victims. These movies are mostly rated PG-13, so they can’t really show more than that, or that’s the usual apology. Instead we get heroic montages of the heroes breaking through ranks of evil, often faceless and clearly identifiable enemies, like aliens, masked Nazis or robots. Heroes capture the bad guys, and if the bad guys die, it’s often by their own incompetence or by indirect action, or simply because they forced the hero into using deadly force. It’s deserved, and it’s always framed as just.
Nevermind that simple physics would indicate that each Avenger has killed a vast amount of human beings in each Marvel film by now, both by sheer careless use of force and by direct intent and action.
