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Comment by jgorn | Hacker News Reader

Simon Pegg expressed a similar sentiment in May of this year http://www.radiotimes.com/news/2015-05-19/simon-pegg-critici...

"part of me looks at society as it is now and just thinks we’ve been infantilised by our own taste... Now we’re essentially all consuming very childish things – comic books, superheroes... Adults are watching this stuff, and taking it seriously!”

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“Critics who treat 'adult' as a term of approval, instead of as a merely descriptive term, cannot be adult themselves. To be concerned about being grown up, to admire the grown up because it is grown up, to blush at the suspicion of being childish; these things are the marks of childhood and adolescence. And in childhood and adolescence they are, in moderation, healthy symptoms. Young things ought to want to grow. But to carry on into middle life or even into early manhood this concern about being adult is a mark of really arrested development. When I was ten, I read fairy tales in secret and would have been ashamed if I had been found doing so. Now that I am fifty I read them openly. When I became a man I put away childish things, including the fear of childishness and the desire to be very grown up.” - C.S. Lewis

People who go on about others not growing up perhaps need to look at themselves. Positioning themselves as better because they're 'adults' because everyone else is acting like 'children', they may find they never actually left high school and are trying desperatly to be the cool kids.

I am now curious. How do you determine that people "go on" about others not growing up versus people reflecting about their stage in life and how others seemingly, and sometimes quite objectively, have not? How does C.S. Lewis figure "critics treat 'adult' as a term of approval" and not as a fair and contrasting comparison to those that appear not to have attained a certain level of maturity that under "normal" circumstances one would expect them to?

A personal take is that adults are children that are better at hiding their asshole behavior.

I think there is some truth to this. Children can be extraordinarily vicious and unempathetic.

well said not sure why you got a dv

I haven't downvoted, but I could see how others might have. The CSL quote is a good one. It's important to maintain a certain child-like wonder in the face of encroaching adult jadedness. Unfortunately, non-quote part of the comment is pure spite. Nobody here is "going on" about how being more adult makes them better, but just in case someone did our commenter stands ready to psychoanalyze them as being stuck in high school and thus dismiss them in the exact same say s/he apparently resents superhero-comic fans being dismissed. "I'm rubber, you're glue" is just childish, which is not the same as child-like, and only drags the conversation downward.

The OP said "perhaps" they need to look at themselves - if that's pure spite a lot of NH readers are living in cloud cuckoo land.

"Perhaps" can be used to indicate true uncertainty, but often it's just a kind of weasel-wording used to avoid accountability for one's own words. How do you tell the difference? One way is to look at whether succeeding statements which build on the "perhaps" continue the uncertainty. Are phrases like "in that case" or "would be" present, or are such follow-ons stated with certainty? Perhaps the commenter was making a truly conditional statement. Perhaps s/he is just a cowardly asshole. Oh look, I said "perhaps" so we're all OK, right? Sorry, doesn't work that way. Sometimes deniability isn't so plausible after all. When you consider that same person's next comment, I think the reality of that "perhaps" is pretty apparent.

Sounds like he has been got at by some new "friends" - of course the oldest stories (The Illiad The Odyssey Gigamesh) feature super heroes.

If its good enough for Homer its good enough for me!

Super heroes? The characters from Greek legends are often deeply flawed. Achilles, the fleet-footed mankiller, may be a great warrior, but he is also the guy dragging the body of Hector, Patroclus' killer, around Troy out of revenge. Heroes (in the classical sense of the term) are very different from "heroes" as we understand it. They are larger-than-life figures, rather than embodiments of desirable qualities.

Iron Man is an alcoholic, Batman has some deep psychological issues, yadda yadda. Same thing.

Those are surface flaws, designed to give the appearance of wrongdoing. Despite how heavily Batman's internal struggle is emphasized, he never does anything less than noble. Contrast that to Achilles' treatment of Hector, which even in the context of ancient Greece is presented as being beyond the pale.

There is no objective reason to consider comic books as childish and James Bond has been a super hero since before that term was even coined. Heck look at the amount of beatings he take in basically any movie, yet he is rarely damaged at all.

Like in Die Another Day, where he's imprisoned and tortured for over a year? Or like Casino Royale, where he's tortured to the point that he loses the ability to have children? Or Skyfall, where he's shot and falls from a bridge and is so injured and traumatized that he's rendered unfit for duty and only allowed to return to the field thanks to M's override?

In Die Another Day he barely spends any time in hospital before he escapes, swim a mile or so then go to a fancy hotel and is back to his normal self after a quick shave and exposing a plot to blackmail him.

So I would crack this up to him being a super hero - not impossible to take down, but way more difficult that any real human could be.

As for the rest they are part of the reboot and I wasn't thinking of them, in fact I had forgotten they existed until you mentioned them.

Way to miss out on the past decade of Bond films, then?

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