Terrorism and Social Control,
or: How to Promote Fighting Games
“The Shocking Origin Story for the Best-Selling Fighting Game Continues!”It’s not exactly the kind of back-cover blurb that usually makes me want to take a closer look at a comic book, but Injustice: Gods Among Us continues to be that rare exception to the rule: a fighting-game-based comic book that is actually readable, enjoyable even. It is accessible, full of big ideas and over-the-top drama, the storytelling is crisp and fast-paced, and I guess the whole thing feels strangely relevant in a world increasingly under the spell of a phenomenon we call terrorism.
It also doesn't hurt that this second volume fleshes out the characters a bit more, giving us a better sense of their motivations and goals. Admittedly, as somebody who has hardly read any superhero comics outside the so-called Golden and Silver Ages I was quite surprised by the motivations and goals of some characters, especially those of Lex Luthor (he’s Superman’s best buddy now? isn’t that against the super-villain rule book or something?) and Wonder Woman (whatever transformed my peace-loving Golden Age princess with a firm belief in re-socialization and healing into this quasi-fascistic, merciless killer in the name of justice? sign of the times, I guess…) – but what the hell, I do my best to roll with the punches.
The story also gains more political relevance in this second volume, as it increasingly turns into a thinly-veiled allegory on America’s so-called War on Terror, casting some superheroes as proponents of super-powered, completely undemocratic, proactive and ultimately deadly mega-surveillance, while others come to the conclusion that this approach to “crime fighting” may go a little far, and that maybe it could be problematic to take the old super-surveillance to the extreme.
It’s scary to see how far to the political right the discourse has shifted by now. I mean, the superhero conflict of Injustice: Gods Among Us reads a bit like a conflict between the out-of-control post-9-11 FBI and the Reichssicherheitsdienst, that is, the SS inner security force in Nazi Germany. Watchmen asked the question: super-powered and undemocratic surveillance - yes or no? Injustice: Gods Among Us asks: super-powered and undemocratic surveillance or super-powered and undemocratic and proactive and deadly global-space-mega-surveillance? Sorry, no other options available.
I guess it makes sense for a story designed as the prequel to a fighting game to create a fictional world that is so threatening (alien villain threatening Planet Earth: “If you’re not prepared to take a life, then you can’t possibly fight a war… You’re weak… too weak to do what needs to be done… You’d rather spare the lives of your enemies than safe the lives of your people…”) that super- and mega-surveillance are the only options on the table. If there was a way to resolve conflicts peacefully, after all, there would be no fighting game.
The scary part, to me, is that super- and mega-surveillance also appear to be the only two options on the table as far as the only two political parties in real-life America are concerned, and that the fictional world presented in Injustice: Gods Among Us, a world forced by unheard-of threats to accept unheard-of levels of social control, thus very much resembles the picture of the real world that Republicans, Democrats, and the mass media have been painting ever since 9-11. It is a picture of the world that casts proponents of more and more extreme forms of social control as fundamentally reasonable, benevolent, even heroic people who, like Superman and Wonder Woman, are concerned with our safety and nothing else.
Could all this possibly have something to do with the fact that fighting games, both the fictional and the real-life variety, have become increasingly profitable for those who control American politics and media?