It's fun to dress up for Halloween. There are so many options for costumes, and especially with friends, wearing costumes can be such a great bonding experience. As you can see here, my friends and I decided to dress up as superheroes: Iron Man, Spider-Man, and Captain America.
Anyone who was out for Halloween this year knows we certainly weren't the only ones who dressed up as superheroes. It's hard to deny that superheroes are popular costumes, and there are so many to choose from. I think one of the reasons why we love to dress up as superheroes is that they are American mythology.
Legends and mythology are a part of almost every culture, and they reflect the values and attitudes of those cultures. The ancient Greeks had stories about what happens on Olympus; granted they lived at a time when the forces behind natural elements were still a mystery for many. England has its tales about the extraordinary king who united their country, a country whose peoples at a point came from various origins and had little in common. But America has tales and epics about extraordinary individuals: their struggles, their accomplishments, and the internal battles each of them is fighting the whole time.
These stories keep going on until it's time to start everything over, and when they do start over it gives a chance for new readers to follow these epics without having to catch up on 500 issues, and it gives old readers the chance to see the stories unravel once again from the very beginning with a new twist. And while there is a loyal fanbase that has followed the comics before the recent surge in superhero movies, most superhero movie productions today become blockbuster features with so much talk around them. And unlike before, they can now capture the true awe and inspiration from the comics in live action productions by using our advanced CGI technology.
Beyond blockbuster success and commentary surrounding the upcoming movies, superheroes are also examples for kids in America to follow. Superhero movies and TV shows are always around for kids to watch, because they expose kids to values such as willpower, intelligence, kindness, humility, and other characteristics that make us better people, while still being filled with incredibly entertaining action, humor, and plotlines for kids. And today as a college student, I still fondly look back on the days when I waited for the Justice League on early Saturday mornings.
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I think that superheroes are the product of the American ideals of individualism, based on the belief that every one of us is born with our own unique characteristics and at our fullest potential those characteristics can make us something great. So in turn we create these extraordinary individuals, each conveying the potential of a different aspect of brilliance, and subsequently each of them embodies and holds different values. But when they work together they create an unstoppable force that is capable of dealing with just about any obstacle they face. And these stories also tell us that there are times those characteristics can take anyone down a dark path, and when that happens, we get our supervillains, resembling ideas and principles that stand against American values. 
I think that believing in the power of the individual and self-determination are among of the only things that unite us as Americans, and then it's also what divides us. People in our diverse society have different expectations of what an individual is supposed to be and what they're supposed to do, and thus we can't agree on anything. And in the crazy world we live in today, American society is now more divided than we've ever been since the Civil War. And just like our society, the superheroes in two of the upcoming movies in 2016, "Batman V. Superman: Dawn of Justice," and "Captain America: Civil War," will be at odds with each other as well. For both stories, the conflict is not going to be as much about a superhero's struggles against supervillains, but rather a hero's struggle against another hero, and I think that will resonate better with such a polarized audience.
I'm excited about both of these movies, because a conflict amongst heroes rather than a hero's conflict against a villain speaks more to the world we live in today where nothing is black and white, everything is so complicated, and people who would normally be on the same side disagree with each other to the point where they end up as enemies, and people who would normally be enemies become conventional allies. Today, the right thing to do is often not a simple matter of fact, but rather a matter of opinion and perspective, and people with the best intentions will simply end up disagreeing with each other.
Who knows what the future of superheroes will be? But I have a feeling that it will always reflect the state of American society.
