fyi, that's the reason why I'm asking if you're arguing in bad faith. Despite people repeatedly pointing out your examples seem kinda detached from the actual topic (inherent political nature of comics/stories, which you seem to also disagree with) you keep bringing up these really abstract examples that don't seem really related.
I see.
I should clarify that I'm a bad amateur philosopher. So when you put limits on what is possible, I go straight to the edge, and ask whether the edge is really there.
Are you sure this is truly impossible? What if I... etc
Thus far I see people pushing the line of what construes politics to fit stuff in. Expounding the definition of politics often as much as diluting the actual political comment a piece makes.
Let's start at the top. When I think of politics, it centres primarily around governance. So primarily speaking, for me, Ghostbusters fan fiction doesn't induce politics or talk of governance. It's fighting crime per say I guess... but really, it's just some people having fun busting ghosts. If someone
were to think of Ghostbusters fan fiction as actually about fighting crime and somehow commenting on it, what do I care? For me they missed the whole point of it. I'd just disagree vehemently with this analyst. Making it political in this kind of way is absurd and unreasonable. So it doesn't fit the first primary understanding I have of politics.
Going deeper, I understand a secondary definition attributed to politics; how decisions at the highest level affect different members. Best example being in the case of the newest Ghostbusters, I can see where someone would say gender politics comes into play. And you can even apply gender politics by reversing back to the first example, e.g. you can talk about the lack of female science fiction authors, and the reversal of this in the number of female slash writers.
So yeah, from this angle the political commentary makes sense. Ghost-busters when talking about gender politics is a good example to use in an essay.
What I'm
then saying is that in fiction, I don't limit the imagination. Anybody can write about a donkey wandering the desert. What's the politics there?
It only works in a political context when you want to see politics there. It's not inherent to the piece at all.
Let's try something else. If I say think of an elephant. You'd hopefully will. What's the politics at play there?
Well, being an amateur linguist interested in this field, I'll answer. You can talk about the relationship and the power the author has over the reader or the listener.. etc etc. Still, this has no real bearing on the piece. That is just one interpretation among billions of possibilities. It has no greater truth than all the billions of times somebody said elephant before and and when absolutely nothing was made of it.
Further on, I can expound this reasoning to every other piece of content in history, just as you guys expound the definition of politics to fit your frame of reference. There are some philosophers, for example who believe that life has no inherent point. At that level, how can anything have any inherent point? And if not, then nothing is political. We're just chemicals. Just one chemical hitting another one. and politics is just an illusion. Cause and effect etc...
But I don't go that far. you'd go crazy if you did. I'd just wait for somebody to show me their political slant to it. And I can say I agree in this regard. And I don't agree in that regard. And further after, it's just noise. A woman wants to write a slash rape ghost-busters fantasy, I'd just say, okay. She says, I don't mean anything by it, its just popped into my head. I'd be like, who cares, Go for it.
Admittedly, it's harder for something like batman to be apolitical, as echoshifting pointed out above, even when you don't study it closely.
For lots of people though, it's just batman. And Capullo is addressing this audience.