This is really interesting. I think I've told you my basic take on Civil War was that "Everyone needs to be hit on the head with an Enlightenment philosophy textbook. Hard."
The thing about Black Panther and Thor: Ragnarok is that they're stories about the legacy of colonialism before they're stories about governance. It's a lazy and ill-thought thing to say, but at a first pass, any problems with these monarchies can be ascribed to colonialism rather than the inherent flaws in the system.
And of course both monarchies and democracies have been historically responsible for colonialist practice, and the history of the Enlightenment is inherently tangled with the history of colonialism. Questions of personhood and who is entitled to the rights of natural law are inherent to the anti-colonialist critique of the Enlightenment.
So I think one of the ways in which Civil War falls down is that it fails to successfully critique the colonialism inherent in a system where a bunch of superpowered people can run around the world imposing justice on people whose rights to autonomy they don't recognize, but what was frustrating about Civil War is how close they came to that critique without reaching it. Lagos is how a story that did end up reaching that conclusion about the Avengers would have started, it just wouldn't end with a bunch of men in suits beating each other up on an airport tarmac over an incoherent legal charter.
I like what you say about representative democracy being cognitively demanding and how that poses unique challenges for the storytelling.
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The thing about Black Panther and Thor: Ragnarok is that they're stories about the legacy of colonialism before they're stories about governance. It's a lazy and ill-thought thing to say, but at a first pass, any problems with these monarchies can be ascribed to colonialism rather than the inherent flaws in the system.
And of course both monarchies and democracies have been historically responsible for colonialist practice, and the history of the Enlightenment is inherently tangled with the history of colonialism. Questions of personhood and who is entitled to the rights of natural law are inherent to the anti-colonialist critique of the Enlightenment.
So I think one of the ways in which Civil War falls down is that it fails to successfully critique the colonialism inherent in a system where a bunch of superpowered people can run around the world imposing justice on people whose rights to autonomy they don't recognize, but what was frustrating about Civil War is how close they came to that critique without reaching it. Lagos is how a story that did end up reaching that conclusion about the Avengers would have started, it just wouldn't end with a bunch of men in suits beating each other up on an airport tarmac over an incoherent legal charter.
I like what you say about representative democracy being cognitively demanding and how that poses unique challenges for the storytelling.