Being a Superhero: is It an Easy Task

The Desire to be a Superhero

Most if not every child’s dream was to be a superhero. People love the fact that superheroes fight crime, obtain super powers, and gain fame and praise from saving the day. However, once a person really takes it into consideration, would he or she still want to be a superhero? There would be many things to deal with being a mutant with superpowers living in today’s society. In our world today, I would not want to be a superhero because I would be stereotyped, I would be a victim of prejudice, and I would have too large of a responsibility.

I would be stereotyped in many different ways in society today for being a superhero. In Chuck Tate’s essay titled “The Stereotypical (Wonder) Woman” he explains “Not even girls want to be girls so long as our feminine archetype lacks force, strength, and power” (148). Being a woman in the regular world is already challenging enough because men are usually seen as the powerful ones and the leaders. A female superhero today would have a difficult time because of all of the strong opinions and familiarization with superheroes, thus people would expect a lot from her for being both a woman and a superhero. Tate continues to express that all cultures have stereotypes about gender groups (154). Women seem to be more likely to be victims of negative stereotypes because they have been viewed as weak, non-leaders, or the woman in trouble rather than the hero in the past. Women have indeed gained respect over the years, but even so, I could not deal with being degraded with negative stereotypes because of my gender.

In today’s society, superheroes are seen as cliche and would be targets for prejudice and discrimination. In Scott Fishman’s article titled “Getting Inside Heroes’ Minds: Psychology of Superheroes & Supervillains” he offers that “the popular X-Men series becomes more about prejudice and segregation, how a dominant group — culturally, socially, financially — effectively ostracizes and creates, through language and images, the ‘other.’” (par 2). The X-Men are a diverse group with ethnicities from all different backgrounds, however, since they were classified as mutants, others had a negative prejudice against them. A negative opinion toward a group seen as different is more common because people lack knowledge of their background and therefore cannot form a clear or objective opinion. I would not want to be a superhero trying to save the people around me just to get criticized and victimized for being different than them. Mikhail Lyubansky in his essay titled “Prejudice Lessons From the Xavier Institute” proposed that anti-mutant prejudice developed because humans were predisposed to not recognize the humanity of the mutants and to follow the demands of the fanatical few who stirred people’s fears and pushed an anti-mutant agenda (80). Humans are naturally judgemental, even when they say they are not judging a person. With how my personality is, I would not do well with people having a negative opinion or judgement about me. Being a superhero like any of the X-Men would just set me up to be criticized for being a mutant or some woman with powers unlike the other humans. For these reasons, being a superhero would lead to being a victim of prejudice and discrimination.

Being a superhero comes with more responsibility than the average person can handle. Christopher Peterson and Nansook Park in their essay titled “The Positive Psychology of Superheroes” imply that “one of the defining features of a superhero is an over-riding mission to serve the larger world and to defend it” (8). People who have seen any superhero movie would agree that with fighting crime comes destroying parts of the city which I would have to be held accountable for if I were the superhero. Superheroes are super for a reason, they protect and save lives. The feeling of saving multiple lives may be greater than any other feeling, but the responsibility would be too large because the lives of others would ultimately be in my hands at the end of the day. In Wind Goodfriend’s essay titled “The Social Psychology of the Justice League of America” she states “Such a dangerous and frightening experience leads the heroes to affiliate with each other and appreciate each other” (24). Superheroes are supposed to be put in dangerous situations that police or the government can not handle alone which is very intimidating. Having a good team is always a positive with heroes, but usually within a team the responsibility falls more on one person than the rest. As a superhero, I would not be able to handle the pressures of large responsibilities.

Superheroes are amazing individuals that many people do in fact look up to. They possess powers and strengths that normal humans could never achieve which is what makes them so admirable. I was never one to imagine myself as a superhero because I knew that I would never be able to obtain those special powers that superheroes have. They are put in too dangerous of situations and are also viewed negatively in the eyes of many critics as well. Though I would never desire to be a superhero in today’s society, the idea of them is very interesting and does spark interest.

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