“The T'challa/Killmonger dynamic in the movie Black Panther (2018) is a perfect example of David Graeber's critique of superheroes, in Super Position: Superheroes are never allowed to actually change the world, to improve things, to do things. They just preserve the status quo from threats. The only ones who try to build and change are the villains. In superhero world, wanting to preserve this system is something born out of altruism, ethics, solidarity and so on; while the only reason why anyone would ever try to disrupt the system is due to sociopathy, violence, greed etc. So superhero stories are structurally conservative, more than thematically.”

(Reader’s comment, LARB, 2018)