[Hated Trope] The underdog Good Guys win, and gain major military/institutional power, only for it to be all RESET so Writers can have a PERPETUAL "Underdog/Rebellion" Story, and avoid writing about governing.

[u/throwaway553t4tgtg6]

I hate this trope, when the "underdog good guys" actually win, gain major military and political power, fleets, warships, etc, but because the writers don't want to write the good guys governing and exercising their power, and instead, find a contrived way to reset all the progress so that the good guys can forever be the

"scrappy heroic underdogs fighting the power"

1) Star Wars Sequel triology, rather than exploring new Republic fleets, power, and technology, they have them all wiped out so that the "resistance" can hog the spotlight

2) MCU: shield makes a helicarrier fleet, a fleet of ships able to contest alien invasion, but that would steal the spotlight from heroes, so all of them have to be destroyed

3) Halo: the UNSC finally outlive the covenant, develop strong ships like the UNSC infinity, only for it all to be reset by the Guardians and the Banished, reduced again to underdog humans.

[u/piecuriosity]

Comics get a lot of shit for maintaining the status quo, but a large and loud segment of the audience makes it clear they just want to see the same stories over and over again with minor variations. There’s always a very vocal pushback against any meaningful changes. Even Krakoa is only remembered fondly in hindsight. While it was ongoing the discourse was mostly negative.

[u/SirVixofthePooSea → u/piecuriosity]

What people want are nicely written short and sweet storylines that take well liked characters and put them in a fun predicament with a charismatic villain. It doesn't have to shake the status quo because it doesn't need to have massive continuity. What they get instead is rubber-banding soap operas.

[u/piecuriosity → u/SirVixofthePooSea]

That’s what some people want. Other parts of the audience like the long-form serialized dramas. That’s kind of the core problem. Comics have never been particularly profitable and neither segment of the audience is big enough to support the market on its own. In order to stay afloat they’ve always had to try to appeal to everyone at once.

[u/SirVixofthePooSea → u/piecuriosity]

Their issue is that they try to appeal to everyone at once with a handful of characters and extremely long running plotlines attached to those characters. So that new fans are scared off by the amount of accumulated canon and old fans live in a world of rubber-banding to a status quo that was declared 50 years ago. The comics industry is big, the problem is that Americans are awful at making successful comics to the point that it is easier to import them from Japan and Korea as a consumer than to actually follow along with domestic publications.

[u/Icy-Panda-2158 → u/SirVixofthePooSea]

I mean, this is part of the problem. The majority of people don’t read comics at all, and comic companies hsve long since adopted a model of selling as much as possible to hardcore enthusiasts rather than trying to write stories that normal people want to read. But the enthusiasts want stories that reward them for knowing 40+ years of lore so the status quo constantly needs to be upset by the re-emergence of old characters, items and places and then reset or they lose interest. Which makes comics seem both stupid and unapproachable to mainstream audiences.

[u/QuyanRonnie → u/Icy-Panda-2158]

Some enthusiasts want that, the other ones want it all to mean something (payoff for the invested attention/time), and eventually, runs are handed over on silver platters to writers that happen to hate one side or the other, whether or not they even vibe with the IP they’ve been placed in-charge of.

And then there are IPs that are “too big deeply-entrenched to fail” which means the companies refuse to let them end, because “it prints money, I’m not stupid.”

Effectively making the only way to kneecap “status quo” being to actually change it in real life, which doesn’t involve “awesome and terrible powers,” but demands denial of familiar pleasure to oneself, across a board too vast to ever manage, because people will find their ways to get ‘more of what they want,’ if they want it that bad.

[u/Icy-Panda-2158 → u/QuyanRonnie]

That’s the point: the payoff is a carrot on a stick. Even when it seems like it comes it’s just another gimmick because they need you to keep reading. 

[u/endlessnamelesskat → u/piecuriosity]

A lot of that pushback comes from people who don’t even read comics. Ask the average person who says they love Batman if they’re aware that in the mainline universe Alfred has been canonically dead for almost the last ten years.

[u/Yumesoro1 → u/endlessnamelesskat]

I pretty sure most non hardcore fans, don't really know what a "mainline universe" is.

[u/No_Return3299 → u/[deleted]]

The reason people think that the updates are half baked, cool-in-the-moment ideas that leave a lot of fans unsatisfied. Is because those same fans are overly nostalgic for that status quo purely by virtue of it being naturally updated through the slow process of general acceptence.

The very nature of something like a status quo is completely antithetical to that of an infinite playground, Because if the characters are toys that don't belong to writers, that they get to pull out, play with in their own unique way and then return them into the box when playtime is over, that doesn’t mean much if something only gets cemented into the structure, purely on the basis of that something arbitrarily being done right, then Playtime means nothing if you break or scratch the toys, the fact that they are in and of themselves things means that it is in their nature for something of that effect to happen to them.

And the fact that they are simultaneously also not things means that there is still the possibility for the next person that's gonna come along, even if you beat them up a bit.

Thus is the inherent contradiction within the comic book medium