Traumatic Childhood trope

[tanithryudo]

"Star Trek is one of those happy, clean, bright futures which means there is a high ratio of adults to children in adult bodies."

Came across this comment - actually an author's response to a comment on a fic - and the sentiment kinda just struck me. It does seem to be one of the aspects of my dissatisfaction with the reboot Star Trek film - the playing up of angsty manchild trauma as the main fill-in for character interaction.

And, even looking beyond just the Trek franchise, it's a little pervasive in Hollywood films as a whole, isn't it? I mean, the reboot Superman and Batman are all about revisiting their childhood traumas over and over again in every film and reboot. Perhaps this is also the reason why Iron Man is not my favorite MCU film/character.

I think it says a bit about my personal tastes...

Comments

[cashew]

I completely agree. There's just too much manchild drama instead of actual drama with actual pain from living the vagaries of life, like discrimination, bigotry, cultural clash, ideological/philosophical conflict. While I understand that superhero genre is meant as escapism, specifically from all the messiness of real world politics where the problem of the world can't be blamed on a villain/villainous group, that just emphasizes the problem.

Hell, look at the current election. It's the reason Trump has as much support as he does. A demagogue who can rally people behind blaming all the world's wrongs on a group of people and saying that he and he alone has the solution. People aren't looking at the reality of the world's complexities and just want a superhero to swoop in to solve everything.

So, yeah, it's no surprise that Hollywood is capitalizing and perpetuating this problem. *sigh*

[tanithryudo]

Well, the original example wasn't superhero genre, but most of my other examples were because that's the genre I've been mostly watching in terms of films so...

Anyway, I kinda do get why the trope is popular. Specifically the "coming of age" story is kinda standard vanilla "hero's journey" and all that. But...coming of age doesn't always need to go from immature tantrums to slightly less immature tantrums.

I guess at the very least, the latest reboot Trek film at least goes for maturity (even if it's hard to pull off without a TV series showing the growth and progression of the main cast).

The superhero movies... I dunno. Especially with the DC franchises, they reboot it so often that we just get stuck with revisiting the same origin story over and over again. MCU is slightly better, comparatively, unless you count the endless Spidey/X-men reboots...