Grounded = Lazy

Four years ago, I made a video about the one thing every good writer needs to create their own superhero universe.

I was watching many of my favorite comic book characters become shells of their former selves. Characters that had once been larger-than-life heroes were being stripped of the things that made them great.

The one thing I said every writer needed was imagination.

Instead, writers were abandoning what made these characters great and filling their stories with DEI talking points and their own political and social views. The characters became self-inserts. The writers no longer needed imagination to continue creating their universes. They simply used their own worldview.

Four years later, here I am once again banging the drum for imagination.

This time, I’m taking aim at the people pushing for superheroes in movies and television to be grounded.

Of course, what they really mean is that they want superheroes to be realistic.

And while this isn’t a new idea, I think the more recent obsession with it can be traced, at least in part, to one man: Christopher Nolan and his Batman movies.

Now, don’t get me wrong. I love the first two movies. Batman Begins and The Dark Knight are fantastic films.

The third one? Not so much.

But what Nolan did with his version of Batman was the exception, not the rule.

You can make a realistic superhero story. You can even make a great one.

What you can’t do is take that approach and make it the foundation for an entire universe populated by superheroes.

At some point, reality has to give way to the fantastic.

Look at Arrow, the Green Arrow television series.

The show clearly took inspiration from Nolan’s version of Batman. The goal was to create a realistic superhero who could plausibly exist in our world.

And for a while, it worked.

Then they introduced Barry Allen.

The Flash.

And suddenly, all that realism had a problem.

Because there is no way to have a realistic Flash.

It’s impossible.

A man who can run faster than the speed of light isn’t realistic. A man who can vibrate through walls isn’t realistic. A man who can travel through time by running really, really fast isn’t realistic.

And that’s okay.

Arrow eventually had to abandon its original commitment to realism and embrace the fantastic elements of the larger superhero universe.

That’s because you can’t build a functioning superhero universe by pretending the extraordinary doesn’t exist.

Superheroes are not, and never were, meant to be realistic.

They are larger than life.

They are our modern mythology: men and women with abilities far beyond those of ordinary human beings. They face situations that would destroy the average person. They do things we could never do.

They should never be brought down to our level simply so the audience can believe they are “real.”

And yet, that’s exactly what I think some of the people making these movies and television shows are trying to do.

They look at Nolan’s success and think, “We can do that too.”

But they’re missing the point.

The success of Nolan’s Batman doesn’t mean realism is the secret ingredient to great superhero fiction.

It means Nolan made a great Batman story.

Those are not the same thing.

And there’s another distinction that I think is even more important.

Superheroes don’t have to be realistic to be relatable.

That’s where I think a lot of writers get confused.

We’re never going to fly.

We’re never going to knock down a building with our bare hands.

We’re probably never going to save a city from an alien invasion.

But we can relate to the person who does those things.

Superheroes still feel.

They love.

They get hungry.

They become frightened.

They experience joy and grief.

They agonize over difficult decisions.

They feel righteous anger toward the villain.

They feel satisfaction when they’re able to help someone.

All of those things are human.

That’s how you make superhero fiction relatable.

You don’t make the superhero realistic.

You make the extraordinary character human. Be

And that’s where imagination comes in.

The challenge isn’t figuring out how to make Superman behave like an ordinary man.

The challenge is imagining what kind of man Superman would be when he has the power to do things no ordinary man could ever do.

That’s storytelling.

That’s imagination.

And that’s what superhero fiction was built for.

You don’t make the superhero realistic.

You make the extraordinary character human.