Spoilers Star Trek Beyond Coming Out Against the Military..???

I guess it depends if people think that war makes people unpersonable in life outside of the military... but I think I jumped the gun there...

 

Well, I certainly don't think it can be argued that going through the kinds of experiences people tend to experience during war change them.

I have a coworker whom I actually worked with at a different job 15 years earlier (I know, it's weird). He's in the National Guard, and during our last stint together he was deployed to the Middle East. We were able to Skype or otherwise communicate with him a few times, and things seemed to be going fairly well for him...almost boring at some points.

His first day as my new coworker he told me all about all kinds of crazy experiences he'd had while he was stationed there, and when I noted the contrast with how he'd sounded at the time he said it had taken him a long time to process everything, etc. It was jarring and unsettling to think that...well, I suspected that what he was revealing at the time was probably watered down, but I had no idea...

 

It's one of the very first things I was taught in fiction, really. A lot of things are unintentional or speculative. But even so, fiction is often an expression of how we view and understand reality, whether they're interpersonal relationships in small scale stories, or the politics that inevitably come with giant fantasy battles. And that perspective on its own is worth exploring just as much as anything else, because it provides depth and connection for the audience.

I'm reminded of the X-Men. When they were first created, Stan Lee and Jack Kirby certainly used the racial minority/Civil Rights metaphor, but only to a limited point and quickly went to standard superhero tales. It really wasn't as concerned with those issues other than as a backdrop rather than theme. The X-Men didn't really talk that much about those issues until later writers like Roy Thomas came in, and then Chris Claremont really elevated that material. But Lee and Kirby will always get that credit because, frankly, there had to be reasons for them to go down that angle anyway, as it affected them enough to create a comic around it. Many things they wrote for the X-Men were unintentional, and that's okay, because then later writers picked up those pieces and ran with it.