Peter Parker is an archetype. So is Wolverine, or Phil Coulson, or Deathlock, or Felicity Smoak. (Oooh, DC reference, sorry! Ha!)
We've had the discussion about Nick Fury (white) being different than Nick Fury (black), and I think we're circling back to a key idea: do we need /separate/ archetypes for different races, the way the industry has been Ms.-ing superheroes for the last twenty years? (Only recently have they made any significant changes in storytelling, though.)
Are we talking about gaining ground against cultural inertia, at long last, or are we finally looking at our own /culture/ differently? Neither of us are more than armchair sociologists, but it's a good topic for a more formalized study. My hope is that we're finally seeing our own culture differently, and thus making the media mirror more accurate.
A good friend and I regularly argue whether dictionaries should be prescriptive of language, or descriptive. This is the same notion: should our entertainment tell us more about the world /as/ we see it, or as we /want/ it to be?
Archetypes
We've had the discussion about Nick Fury (white) being different than Nick Fury (black), and I think we're circling back to a key idea: do we need /separate/ archetypes for different races, the way the industry has been Ms.-ing superheroes for the last twenty years? (Only recently have they made any significant changes in storytelling, though.)
Are we talking about gaining ground against cultural inertia, at long last, or are we finally looking at our own /culture/ differently? Neither of us are more than armchair sociologists, but it's a good topic for a more formalized study. My hope is that we're finally seeing our own culture differently, and thus making the media mirror more accurate.
A good friend and I regularly argue whether dictionaries should be prescriptive of language, or descriptive. This is the same notion: should our entertainment tell us more about the world /as/ we see it, or as we /want/ it to be?