In the aftermath of 9/11, the world didn’t just change—it refracted. Meaning fractured into weaponized symbols. Patriotism became a cudgel. Truth was bent to serve fear. And as explored in my previous essay, the media of the late 1990s and early 2000s saw it coming: the manufactured rebellion, the deleted identity, the hero recast as unaccountable enforcer. The Matrix, Transmetropolitan, Metal Gear Solid 2, and The Authority weren’t just stories—they were warnings. They understood what could happen when institutions fail, when narratives collapse, and when power goes unchallenged.
But not every story surrendered to that vision.
Some pushed back—not with ignorance or naivety, but with hope, earned and sharpened through trial. They refused to let fear dictate what stories should be. They looked at the same broken world and imagined something better. Not easier. Not prettier. Better.
These are stories that chose restraint over domination. Empathy over manipulation. Mercy over spectacle. They acknowledged that strength is seductive, that anger is justified, that control feels safer than uncertainty—but they chose differently.
Superman still believed in truth and justice, even when tempted by brutal efficiency. A summoner dared to break the sacred cycle that demanded her death. A hobbit carried despair into the heart of darkness and came back changed but unbroken. And one teenage boy, on an ordinary Wednesday afternoon, reminded us: “We can’t use the evil committed by others as an excuse to commit evil ourselves.”
This is not a rejection of the previous truths—but a refusal to accept them as final. The darkness was real. It still is. But these stories offer a different answer.
It doesn’t have to be like this.
What’s So Funny About Truth, Justice and the American Way?: Superman vs The Authority
“I heard a child tell his friend that he wanted to be in the Elite—Because it would be fun to kill bad guys. Fun to kill.”
By 2001, superheroes were angry.
They were brutal, untethered, and efficient. They operated above governments, beneath oversight, and they didn’t bother with moral nuance. They didn’t rescue—they corrected. And in Warren Ellis and Bryan Hitch’s The Authority, they did it with flash, finality, and a healthy dose of contempt. These weren’t heroes. They were sovereign weapons in capes. They took what Superman had always refused to become and made it cool. As The Elite later declared in their manifesto—a speech that could have been torn from The Authority’s own playbook:
“We do not believe in nations. We do not believe in treaties or boundaries or classes or politics. There are the good guys, namely us, and there are the bad guys, namely anyone who treats anyone else like trash to further their own petty aims. You asked for us, world. And now you got us. Be good, or we’ll blow your house with a fifty-megaton, clod-seeking, cluster bomb. Love, Us.”
It’s the same logic that fueled post-9/11 American foreign policy: if we declare ourselves the good guys, then our violence must be righteous. The Authority’s global-scale interventions, done without accountability or consequence, mirrored the fantasy that some problems are best solved with a well-placed boot to the teeth.
And then—six months before the towers fell—came What’s So Funny About Truth, Justice and the American Way?
Published in Action Comics #775 in March 2001, it wasn’t a reaction to the tragedy. It was a pre-emptive refusal to surrender Superman’s ideals to the coming cynicism. A warning that there would be pressure to become cruel—and that holding the line would matter more than ever.
The story opens with the world already turning against him. Jack Ryder lays it out plainly:
“Superman? That would have been great—‘Enough monkey business, guys. I’m taking you and your terrorist chums downtown for a spanking—’ And then, three months later, it would happen all over again. The world is sick and broken, Kent. People want someone to fix it, not hand out slogans and bandages. The Age of Supermen is over. Viva the Elite.”
This is the core of the story’s conflict. Superman hasn’t changed—but the world has. The Elite represent a new ideal: fast, loud, violent, final. They do what he won’t, and they enjoy it. And for a terrified world, that feels like justice. As Jonathan Kent tells Clark, about if even Smallville is rooting for The Elite:
“Some folks. Mostly loud and angry ones. Others just scared. They look outside and see revolving doors on prisons, government corruption, maniacs hiding in the desert, children… well, what happens to children these days… gets anyone’s blood up. Sometimes, ‘Truth, Justice and the American Way’ just doesn’t make them feel better. They want easy answers. Quick results.”
And Clark hears it.
He’s not immune to the temptation. He knows what it would take to be like them—what it would cost. In one of the story’s most vulnerable moments, he voices the temptation plainly:
“So is Black right? The best way to fight demons is to become one, because it’s fast, easy, and there isn’t a moral code to measure up to anyway?”
And this is what makes the story powerful—not that Superman defeats the Elite, but how he does it. He fights them on their terms, publicly, brutally. And he wins not by going further than they do, but by showing the audience what it would look like if he did. He lets the world see what it would mean if Superman stopped holding back—if he used their logic. And the world recoils.
Because Superman’s power isn’t his strength—it’s his restraint.
He doesn’t take over the world because he could. He doesn’t burn down dictatorships because it would be easy. He doesn’t kill Manchester Black and his team, even when they practically beg him to. Because he remembers the line. And more importantly, he chooses to honor it.
And yet—he still feels the pull.
That’s the brilliance of the story. Superman acknowledges that doing things the Elite’s way would be easier. Would feel good. Would be popular. But he doesn’t yield.
The temptation is real. But so is the refusal.
And in the moment of truth, as Black realizes he’s lost—not just the fight, but the argument—he rants:
“So long as a heart beats in my chest, I’ll come after you, you poncy twit! If you think this is over, you’re living in a bloody dream world!”
And Superman answers—calmly, without venom, and with complete certainty:
“You know what, Black? I wouldn’t have it any other way. Dreams save us. Dreams lift us up and transform us. And on my soul, I swear… until my dream of a world where dignity, honor and justice become the reality we all share–I’ll never stop fighting. Ever.”
In a year when so many stories began rewriting morality as cruelty with better branding, Superman stood in front of the world and said no.
No to shortcuts.
No to spectacle.
No to the seductive power of righteous violence.
And yes to hope, even when it hurts.
Superman: Birthright vs. Transmetropolitan
“You watch what happens, the next time someone tries to co-opt that symbol. People know now. It stands for courage. It stands for hope. It stands for Superman.”
If Transmetropolitan is a story of righteous fury, then Superman: Birthright is a story of righteous restraint. Both are deeply political. Both rage against corruption, cruelty, and the way power distorts truth. But where Spider Jerusalem burns with hatred—at the world, at himself, at the people he’s trying to save—Clark Kent remains something far more dangerous: hopeful.
Birthright was published in the aftermath of 9/11, during an era when fear had been federalized, and every narrative felt like a weapon. The comic doesn’t hide from this—grifters selling “preparation kits”, government paranoia, and drone surveillance are all explicitly referenced. But instead of surrendering to cynicism, it re-centers Superman in the post-9/11 world by making him the outsider who saves us from ourselves.
He’s not a native son of Earth, but he’s not a detached god either. Birthright redefines Superman as an immigrant hero—not someone hiding where he came from, but someone offering it. Krypton is more than a dead planet. It’s a culture, one Clark chooses to share. He brings the best of his world to this one, not as an imposition, but as a gift. And when Lex Luthor begins using propaganda to portray Superman as the vanguard of an alien invasion, Clark responds not with denial, but by leaning deeper into his heritage—not as a threat, but as a contribution.
This isn’t assimilation. It’s integration.
Superman doesn’t suppress his difference to fit in—he celebrates it. He refuses to eliminate his identity for the comfort of others. He values what makes him different, and offers it as a strength to the world he now calls home. In a time when American culture was turning on immigrants and weaponizing otherness, Birthright offered a defiant counter-message: that identity isn’t a threat, it’s a gift. That the future isn’t built by erasing differences—it’s built by embracing them.
But this isn’t a story of softness or wide-eyed idealism. Birthright’s Clark is angry. He has a temper. And he doesn’t suppress it—he uses it.
Nowhere is that clearer than in the moment he confronts a gun dealer responsible for arming a pair of teen shooters.
The man stands in a shop adorned with Confederate flags, wearing a T-shirt bearing the logo of the infamous white nationalist website, Stormfront. Hate isn’t just implied—it’s named. Superman doesn’t walk away. He walks in.
“The boys said they bought those weapons from you,” Superman says, in a voice that drips with righteous anger. “Wh–? Where’d you—? I—I don’t sell to kids! That’s a black market! I don’t know what you’re talking ab—” “I can hear your heartbeat,” Superman replies. “You’re lying.”
“One minute ago, I saw a little girl screaming because she was staring down the barrel of a gun. She was nine, and she will remember it for the rest of her life.”
Then he picks up a pistol, and aims it directly at the man’s face.
He fires.
Then, with calm precision, catches the bullet mid-air, just inches from the man’s face.
“Now, you will too.”
When the police arrive, they find rifles bent around the dealer like restraints, the rest of the stock destroyed by heat vision. Superman doesn’t presume to act as judge and jury, he stops the threat and hopes that society will make the right choice, as to what to do with the dealer.
This isn’t a departure from Superman’s values—it’s a return to them. This is the original, Golden Age Superman—the “champion of the oppressed” who in his earliest appearances stood up to slumlords, war profiteers, abusive bosses, and, famously, the Ku Klux Klan on the radio.
Where Spider Jerusalem rages until the world bleeds, Superman doesn’t need to shout. He shows. He teaches. He makes evil feel what it’s done—and then leaves the truth for the world to see.
And at the heart of all this righteous power?
Clark Kent.
Because the real triumph of Birthright isn’t in the cape. It’s in the notebook.
Lex Luthor, with all his political manipulation and cultural gaslighting, is not undone by Superman’s fists. He’s undone by Clark’s words. By the investigation. The interviews. The truth laid bare—not with lasers, but ink. The world doesn’t believe Luthor because Superman said so—they believe him because Clark Kent proved it.
It’s a quiet ending for a loud book.
But it matters.
Because in the end, Birthright doesn’t just redeem Superman—it reaffirms Clark. It shows that even in a world of terror alerts and misinformation, a journalist can still change the world. Not through anger. Not through fear.
Through hope. Through truth. Through difference, integrated and celebrated.
Final Fantasy X vs. Metal Gear Solid 2
“Now is the time to shape your stories.”
Both Final Fantasy X and Metal Gear Solid 2 are stories about inheritance: the systems we’re given, the lies we’re told, and the cycles we’re expected to preserve. Both begin with protagonists who believe in the stories around them. Both end with those stories shattered. But where Metal Gear Solid 2 spirals into epistemological dread, Final Fantasy X finds a different answer: meaning isn’t lost. It’s something we make.
MGS2 tells us that truth is always being edited, context always manipulated. In its bleakest moments, identity is little more than programmed behavior and historical noise. Raiden, like Tidus, enters a world he doesn’t fully understand—and finds out he’s a tool, not a hero. His journey ends in a kind of freedom, but it’s cold, ambiguous. There’s no certainty. Only the hope that maybe he can build something new from the wreckage.
Final Fantasy X, by contrast, acknowledges the wreckage—and says: build anyway.
Tidus isn’t a destined hero. He doesn’t belong in Spira. He has no lineage, no prophecy, no inherited power. And that’s what makes him dangerous to the world he’s dropped into. He has no reverence for Yevon, no fear of questioning holy tradition. He sees the hypocrisy instantly because he’s not been trained to accept it.
Where the rest of the party begin as believers—polite, reverent, exhausted—Tidus is the irritant. He questions the cost of sacrifice. He refuses to accept pain as noble. And slowly, the others start to see it too.
No one more than Yuna.
She begins as the classic archetype of noble sacrifice—humble, soft-spoken, willing to die to give the world a little more time. But as the truth unfolds—Yevon’s corruption, the lie of the Final Aeon, the endless recycling of death—Yuna breaks the pattern.
She chooses life. Not ignorance. Not fantasy. Life.
“My father… I loved him. So I… I will live with my sorrow, I will live my own life! I will defeat sorrow in his place. I will stand my ground and be strong. I don’t know when it’ll be, but someday, I will conquer it. And I’ll do it without… false hope.”
There’s no naivety in that vow. She isn’t asking for a miracle. She’s rejecting a system that asks her to die so others can delay their own end. In a world where hope has been mechanized and sold as religion, she chooses a version that’s harder—but real.
And when the moment comes—the final battle, the confrontation with Sin, with Yevon, with the cycle itself—it’s Auron, the ghost of past defiance, who crystallizes the stakes:
“Now! This is it! Now is the time to choose! Die and be free of pain, or live and fight your sorrow! Now is the time to shape your stories! Your fate is in your hands!”
That moment is the anti-Patriot message. Where MGS2 presents narrative as something imposed from above, FFX offers story as choice. Not inherited. Authored.
Even the game’s melancholy ending—Tidus fading as the dream ends, Yuna giving her final speech to a grieving world—doesn’t undercut the hope. It reaffirms it. Yuna’s journey doesn’t erase loss. It accepts it—and still presses forward. Spira is free, not because someone imposed order, but because the people chose to break the cycle.
MGS2 ends with a whisper: maybe you can be something. FFX ends with a vow: you can. But you’ll have to fight for it. You’ll have to grieve. You’ll have to build. You’ll have to hope without guarantees.
It’s a quieter story than MGS2.
But in its way, it’s braver.
The Lord of the Rings Trilogy vs. The Matrix Trilogy
“There’s some good in this world, Mr. Frodo… and it’s worth fighting for.”
The Matrix told us the world was a lie.
That everything we see and touch has been manufactured to keep us docile, obedient, and numb. The only way out is to wake up—to unplug, to resist, and ultimately to destroy the system from within. It is a story about rebellion born from despair, and a future that only exists through total deconstruction of the present. Love, sacrifice, meaning—these things may exist, but only as fragile sparks in the endless machine. The real world is cold. Wet. Mechanical. It offers no comfort, and no beauty.
The Lord of the Rings, released just two years later, offers another vision of resistance—and another world worth saving.
Middle-earth is also at war. It, too, is ruled by a distant, inhuman forces of control—Sauron watches from the east just as the Matrix’s programs do from the shadows. The Eye replaces the code. The towers are still rising. The armies still march. But here, the answer is not technological transcendence. It’s not detachment. It’s not the realization that reality itself is a trap.
It’s a story of holding on.
Of enduring.
Of doing the impossible not because it will succeed, but because it must be attempted.
Neo becomes a god. Frodo becomes a shell. Neo shatters systems. Frodo bears them. He fails. He breaks. And that failure doesn’t erase his worth—it defines it.
Because in The Lord of the Rings, the question isn’t “can I save the world?” It’s “can I keep walking?”
And no one embodies that answer more than Samwise Gamgee.
Late in The Two Towers, Frodo nearly gives in. He is consumed by the Ring’s weight, by the death and darkness that stalk every mile of their journey. And Sam speaks—not to convince him they’ll win, but to remind him why it matters.
And in doing so, he delivers the beating heart of the entire trilogy:
“It’s like in the great stories, Mr. Frodo. The ones that really mattered. Full of darkness and danger, they were. And sometimes you didn’t want to know the end… because how could the end be happy? How could the world go back to the way it was when so much bad had happened?
But in the end, it’s only a passing thing… this shadow. Even darkness must pass. A new day will come. And when the sun shines, it will shine out the clearer.
Those were the stories that stayed with you. That meant something. Even if you were too small to understand why…
But I think, Mr. Frodo, I do understand. I know now. Folk in those stories had lots of chances of turning back, only they didn’t. Because they were holding on to something.”
Frodo: “What are we holding on to, Sam?”
Sam: “That there’s some good in this world, Mr. Frodo… and it’s worth fighting for.”
That speech is not a rejection of pain. It’s not a denial of evil. It’s an act of faith—the belief that goodness is real, even when we can’t see it, and that fighting for it means everything.
In The Matrix, resistance is cerebral. Detached. The act of a chosen one who rewrites code with his will. In The Lord of the Rings, resistance is physical. Communal. It’s a fellowship. It’s an old man lighting a beacon. It’s a woman facing down a wraith and saying, “I am no man.” It’s a gardener, carrying his friend up the side of a volcano.
Middle-earth is not less grim than the Matrix. It is arguably worse. But it never asks us to transcend it. It asks us to tend it. To shepherd it. To leave it better than we found it.
Even Aragorn’s kingship isn’t a victory of blood or conquest—it’s an act of stewardship. And Frodo, in the end, doesn’t return to the Shire to rule or to bask in peace. He leaves. His wounds are too deep. His sacrifice doesn’t end in triumph, but in passing. The world is not reset. It is inherited.
The Matrix closes with a truce, but the war never feels over. The system still stands. The illusion still flickers. In The Lord of the Rings, the war ends. And a new world is born—not perfect, but possible. Where the Matrix ends with stasis, Middle-earth ends with inheritance.
One story tells us the world is false, and that freedom lies in seeing through it.
The other tells us the world is flawed, and that freedom lies in choosing to protect it anyway.
And in the end, it’s Sam’s words that ring truest—not just for Frodo, but for us:
“Even darkness must pass. A new day will come. And when the sun shines, it will shine out the clearer.”
Interlude – Wednesday Afternoon
“We can’t use the evil committed by others as an excuse to commit evil ourselves.”
Buried in the pages of 9-11 Vol. 2, one of DC Comics’ benefit anthologies published in early 2002, is an eight-page story written by the late, great, Dwayne McDuffie It’s never been reprinted. It’s called “Wednesday Afternoon.” No explosions. No flag-draped superheroes. Just a teenage boy, his girlfriend, and a neighborhood arcade.
It’s September 12, 2001. Virgil Hawkins—teenager, superhero, and Black boy from Dakota City—is sitting in a neighborhood arcade, trying and failing to take his mind off the world.” He’s joined by his sometimes-girlfriend Freida, whose fear and anger have started to harden into something more dangerous. She wants retaliation. Someone to bomb. Anyone.
Freida: “So when do you think we’re going to bomb them?”
Virgil: “Bomb who?”
Freida: “I dunno. Them. The bad guys. Somebody.”
Virgil: “I guess after we figure out how to do it without hurting innocent people.”
The story doesn’t flinch from the national mood. There’s an itch for retaliation, a desperation to do something, even if no one’s sure what that should be. Freida wants strength. Virgil wants justice. Both are terrified, and neither of them is wrong. McDuffie lets the contradictions live.
Virgil: “I’m angrier than you are. I’m not used to being helpless. If I knew how to get to the people who caused all this pain, I’d climb on my trash can lid, fly over and take the bastards out myself. But what if to get Luthor, I had to kill some of his family? Or some of the people who live nearby? Or not so near? There’s a line there. I’m just not sure where to draw it. With power, comes responsibility. We can’t use the evil committed by others as an excuse to commit evil ourselves.”
That line is the thesis of the story. And it’s a direct rebuke to the atmosphere of the time—a moment when collective grief was being sharpened into vengeance, and people like Mr. Akkad were being targeted simply for existing in the wrong skin at the wrong moment in history.
It’s Mr. Akkad who says the quiet thing out loud:
“Fear didn’t bring me to this country. Hope did.”
And then the bricks come.
Two white boys, one waving an American flag, the other with a baseball bat, shatter the arcade’s front window. They chant “USA!” as they smash the cabinets. Akkad begs them to leave. Instead, one of them pulls a gun.
This is where Virgil acts.
Not as a symbol. Not as an ideal. But as a person. A kid. Scared. Furious. Trying.
He disarms the attacker with a precision burst of electricity and stares the boys down.
“I got half a mind to fry the whole bunch of you right where you stand. But today, I’m trying to use my whole mind.”
He could hurt them. He doesn’t. And when it’s over—after the handcuffs click and the sirens fade—he doubts himself anyway.
Virgil: “All that yang I was talking before and the first thing I do when there’s a problem is resort to force. I’m full of it.”
Freida: “Full of mercy. Not such a bad thing.”
The story ends not with a speech, but with a broom.
Virgil, still in costume, helps clean up the broken glass. Not because it will fix anything. Not because he’s forgiven the world for what it’s become. But because it’s what he can do right now.
Virgil: “You know what we’re going to do now?”
Freida: “What?” Virgil: “The best we can.”
The final panel closes with a quote from Gil Scott-Heron:
“From time to time, the darkness comes along, to terrorize the weak and challenge the strong.”
It’s one of the clearest moral statements published in superhero fiction in the wake of 9/11.
No fantasy. No punching terrorists through windows. Just a kid refusing to let his pain become someone else’s injustice. A hero who feels like hurting someone—and doesn’t.
In a world that asked for fury, Wednesday Afternoon offered mercy.
The Dream and the Choice
These weren’t stories about a better world already won. They were stories about the fight to believe in one. And more than that, the fight to believe in each other.
None of these heroes deny how bad things are. They don’t look away from horror. They don’t pretend sorrow isn’t real. They don’t offer easy answers or platitudes. What they do offer is harder. Stranger. And, in times like these, more radical:
They offer mercy.
Superman refuses to kill—not because it’s easy, but because it’s tempting. Because it would feel good, and he knows it. And still, he chooses restraint. He chooses hope with teeth.
Yuna walks away from sacred martyrdom. She could have followed tradition. Could have died like her father. Instead, she breaks the cycle. She chooses life, even when it hurts.
Samwise Gamgee carries his best friend up the side of a volcano, not because he thinks they’ll make it—but because it’s what must be done. He’s not the chosen one. He’s not the strongest. He’s just kind. And he never stops walking.
And then there’s Static. Virgil Hawkins. A teenager watching his country begin to eat itself. Scared. Furious. Capable of violence—and choosing not to. Cleaning up broken glass with his hands, not because it fixes anything, but because it’s what he can do right now.
These stories don’t say “everything will be okay.”
They say: You still have a choice.
And that’s what hope is. Not a feeling. A discipline. A decision made in the face of failure. A refusal to let sorrow curdle into cruelty.
In the early 2000s, when American pop culture was pivoting toward fear, surveillance, suspicion—these stories held the line. They didn’t offer escapism. They offered resistance through belief. In each other. In doing better. In saying, we don’t have to be like this.
And maybe that’s why they didn’t become the dominant mythos of the time. Maybe that’s why The Authority got more imitators than What’s So Funny About Truth, Justice and the American Way? Maybe that’s why Final Fantasy X is remembered for its romance, not its refusal to die for religion. Why people quote Frodo’s weariness, but not Sam’s answer. Why Wednesday Afternoon was never reprinted.
Because kindness doesn’t market like rage.
But that doesn’t mean it wasn’t real.
These stories dreamed of something better—and they made that dream visible. Not as prophecy. But as invitation.
To try.
To fight.
To believe in each other, even now.
Even here.
Even still.
Postscript – The Return of the Idea
The superhero never really goes away.
But it’s worth noticing *when* they come roaring back.
The Great Depression gave us Superman. The Second World War gave us Captain America. After 9/11, we got Sam Raimi’s *Spider-Man*—a film steeped in loss and responsibility, that became a global megahit not just because of what it was, but because we *needed* it. We needed something good. Something brave. Someone who could still say, “With great power comes great responsibility,” and *mean it*.
And now, in a time when the world is again flirting with fascism—when cruelty is rebranded as strength, and fear sold as truth—we’re seeing it again.
Hope, once more, wears a cape.
James Gunn’s *Superman* has only been in theaters a little over a week as I write this, and already, the reaction is unmistakable. That first trailer? It had people in tears. The movie itself? It’s hit like lightning. Not for its spectacle, but for something far rarer—*reassurance*. A vision of a world where kindness is strength. Where compassion isn’t naivety. A reminder that we don’t have to give in to despair. That we can *still* be good.
Maybe that’s why these stories keep finding us in our worst moments. Not because they’re fashionable. But because they remind us who we wanted to be—when everything else felt like it was falling apart.
And if you’ve made it this far, I hope you take one thing with you:
It was never the powers that made the hero.
It was the *choice*.
Christopher “Dante” Greer July 2025