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Notes -
Mainstream superhero films.
It's a fundamentally conservative genre where heroes exist to defend the public from change. Obvious, stylized costumes signpost good and evil. Problems are not subtle, though occasionally, only the heroes can see through a villain's deception. Fortunately, they tend to be able to bring overwhelming force to bear. After the violence is over the heroes settle down to eat shawarma and wait for the next ideologue to threaten dramatic changes to their way of life.
Comics have been through a series of deconstruction/reconstruction cycles on the subject. Blockbuster movies haven't kept up with comic-book weirdness, and continue to play it straight. Marvel may play around with genre and storytelling, but they consistently remain in the bounds of heroic, straightforward narratives.
Frankly, I think you're wrong to identify the destructive impulse as foundational to our art. It's a trend that comes and goes, an ongoing Hegelian synthesis. Yeah, "subverting expectations" got a lot of mindshare in the wake of Game of Thrones' disastrous conclusion; when people talked about prestige TV, they had a ready-made catchphrase. But those catchphrases, those trends, exist on a substrate of quality art. They are attempts to differentiate in a market with higher production values than any time in history. They're working on you, right now, when you can bring examples to mind for one trope but not another.
And when audiences wise up and roll their eyes at "subversion," its edge will be lost, until some fresh-faced exec pitches an honest, refreshing show about interesting people doing interesting stuff.
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