How To Properly Inject Politics Into Your Story
Disclaimer: This post may contain affiliate links, meaning I get a commission if you decide to make a purchase through my links, at no cost to you.
You’ve heard it before. It’s one of the most famous slogans in the history of superheroes. The tagline repeated over and over and over again, repeated and retooled with every new iteration and reboot.
“With great power, comes great responsibility.”
No, not that one.
“Truth, Justice, and the American Way.”
No, not that one either. And not the Better Tomorrow version either.
“You won’t like me when I’m angry.”
Nope.
The quote I was looking for was:
“I’m tired of Woke Marvel/DC injecting their political agenda into comics.”
You can expect this to be repeated without fail by grifters and their fans over and over and over again nearly any time something new comes out. Or not. It doesn’t even take a Female Thor or a She-Hulk TV show to get random idiots complaining about how “woke” or “political” superheroes are.
It happens all the time. They don’t have to bother asking if superheroes have gone too woke because they’ve already pre-decided the answer was yes. From the “female Avengers” scene in Avengers: Endgame to Jon Kent kissing a boy to, and I swear I am not making this one up, X-Men 97 having Morph be nonbinary, everything is just too “woke” for their fragile little minds to handle.
Ultimately, the claim that superheroes have gotten too political, or too “woke”, is a BS claim by people who just disagree with the alleged “agenda”. In reality, the people making the claim are always far right goons (oh, I’m sorry, I mean “centrists”) for whom such staunch progressive concepts as “equal rights” is so triggering for them that they need to escape into a genre that they don’t realize has been championing equal rights for longer than heat vision has been a thing. It’s only “political” to them because they don’t agree with the message (even when there is absolutely no message).
But I’ve spent way too much time talking about these superhero-hating grifters as is. Let’s talk about the broader claim on its face. Because these very same grifters, when they do actually create their own fiction, do inject their political agendas into their story at the expense of the plot, characters, or overall writing quality.
You see, along with rejecting their grievances as bad faith (because they are), I also reject them conceptually. I reject the claim that writers shouldn’t inject their politics into their story. I think they should. An author should put a piece of themselves into their work, or else it risks becoming a hollow, empty shell.
In fact, I think it’s vitally important that you “inject your politics” into your story.
But, obviously, there’s a right way and a wrong way to put politics into your story. Assuming you’re like me and you’re writing superhero fiction that you want to be enjoyed by as many as possible, you don’t want to be heavy handed with your messaging. Even though the anti-woke crowd is lying when they say this or that book is too preachy, it’s definitely true that you don’t want to be too preachy or heavy handed with your message. You’re not writing a political essay, you’re writing fiction. And you want to make sure your message is topic and core, not locked in the minutiae of the moment or focused on what’s big that day.
How do you make your message subtle, but relevant? How do you ensure your political messaging is evergreen? What does “politics” even mean, and what politics should you stay away from?
Let’s take a look at how to properly inject politics into your story.
What is “Politics”?
It sounds very silly to ask what politics is, but we do need to understand what we’re talking about before we can even discuss how to properly inject politics into your story.
When we think “politics”, we think of politicians and political institutions and political parties. We think of Democrats and Republicans, we think of coming elections, we think of candidates and policies.
Leave Congress, the President, and the Supreme Court out of it. Leave the Border Wall, the Green New Deal, and Medicare For All out of it.
I don’t care whether you agree with him or not, nobody wants to see Spider-Man turn directly to the reader and tell them to vote Democrat.
“Politics”, as I’m defining the word for this context, is the broader ideologies and philosophies that lead to our political beliefs.
We don’t just choose what we support and oppose in a vacuum. There’s a reason that people who support lower corporate taxes are also likely to oppose abortion rights for women, or why people who support LGBT rights also are more likely to want guaranteed healthcare.
Now that doesn’t mean you have your character tell the reader to support utilitarianism or deontology or whatever ethical system you subscribe to. But it does mean that you put that front and center in your world and your setting.
I think Eric July is a garbage writer, but if there’s one thing I can respect about his Isom title, it’s that he saturated his book with his ideology. Every hero character is some self-made success story in business, characters like Goodyng are the idea privatized emergency services alternative, and there’s a romanticization of ranch life over the entitled city dwellers (except for those making high-powered deals in the boardroom). Sure, he’s a raging hypocrite who is one of the loudest voices in the anti-woke “Woke DC/Marvel is ruinin’ muh comics with their politics!!!!11111” space, but as far as his own work goes, from the Christianity to the value of selfishness over heroism, it’s all him on that page.
I respect that. If there’s something I hate in superhero fiction, it’s not the promotion of ideologies that differ from mine. It’s that empty “I’m too afraid to offend anyone but I want to look like I have something to say, so my message will be that both sides are bad in some vague, ill-defined way and that the real problem is that we just need to COMPROMISE” garbage. Spineless and toothless.
Hating Nazis is apparently just as bad as hating Jews.
I do something like what July did in my own still unreleased main series, SWITCH and the Challengers Bravo. One of my main characters, Animalady, is among the last of an alien race that was driven off her native planet and has sought asylum on Earth. Rather than fearmonger over them, Herald City has welcomed them with open arms and given them an entire abandoned neighborhood shopping center to use as a home and community space while they adapt and assimilate into Earth culture. In real life, I am incredibly pro-immigration and know that, among other things, there is a lot of fearmongering over asylum seekers and immigrants in general that leads to migrants of any kind being treated as some sort of disease to be cured and not people that want to join our community. You can see how my real life beliefs shaped what I put to paper.
It was so subtle that I didn’t even realize this connection until years after I designed her backstory.
Now, in neither story do the characters turn to the reader and talk about how great libertarianism or immigration is. Instead, we incorporate that into our characters and our setting. A successful rancher whose sister works as a megacorp executive. A superhero who, along with her people, sought and received asylum and works to better how her kind are received.
Whether you agree or disagree with the “message”, there’s something to be said and some piece of the author in our respective stories, and that gives both some kind of soul.
Ultimately, my point is to not be preachy, but to not be afraid to leave something of yourself in your work.
That’s “politics”.
Make politics important to your characters….NON-POLITICALLY
If you want to properly inject politics into a story that is actually a story and not a political text, you need to make politics important to your characters and not just to the momentary situation. Otherwise, you can just make anything important to your characters, like sloths or the toilet paper manufacturing process.
The way to do this is to make politics something that’s important to your characters in general, but make politics important non-politically.
What I mean by that is don’t just make politics important to your character by making your character into politics, the way they might be into sports or video games. Otherwise, they’ll just be butting in with random political opinions that have nothing to do with any other facet of their lives, the way that one family member at Thanksgiving always manages to turn the conversation toward how much he is disgusted by trans people despite never having met one in his life.
No, the political opinions and ideologies have to have come from or meaningfully affect their day to day lives in a way that they wouldn’t be able to escape by just turning off the news and becoming apolitical.
Allow me to use my prequel novel, SWITCH and Blue Eagle: A Superhero Sidekick Novel, as an example. My main character Switch and his father Blue Eagle have different ideas about crime reduction, prison reform, and public safety. Switch is a lefty, believing in social programs, rehabilitation, and public infrastructure investment to address the root causes of criminality and help turn around those who slip through the cracks. Blue Eagle is more of a tough on crime conservative, the type who would vote for Reagan, and believes criminals should be taken down with the appropriate force as allowed by law and that overwhelming force is the best deterrent to crime.
I made sure to have at least a handle on their political beliefs and put it into the story because they are relevant to my characters due to their chosen profession. Both of them are superheroes. Public safety and prisoner rehabilitation aren’t just curious political interests to them like, say, gender affirming care or abortion. They directly affect their day to day experience as superheroes protecting the public and putting away criminals and supervillains. It directly affects them, and their ideologies affect their approaches to superheroism. Blue Eagle will treat anyone who breaks the law as a criminal because he believes crime is an individual choice, while Switch might work to get a person help instead if he feels the system has failed them.
And those differing political stances on the topic of public safety lead to differing thoughts on how to be a superhero. And what does this lead to?
Conflict!
Organic conflict that, while may be rooted in different political beliefs, is instead about something more fundamental to themselves. It’s a family of superheroes who disagree on how to be superheroes.
Get off Your soapbox
In the last section, we looked at how to inject politics into your story in a way that compliments it by putting the characters and setting first. Now, we want to look at what to avoid, which is having the entire story grind to a halt to put the politics first.
For this example, I want to use a story whose name I’ll keep to myself, but was the inspiration for this article.
It was a superhero story written by a woman whose political beliefs were….goosesteppy. I know because she told me exactly where she stands on the issues in a private message. Despite her claim that she was neither left nor right, I got red flags when she referred to gay people as “the homos”.
And she made sure to inject her “wonderful” ideology into her “wonderful” story. And you know what? That’s fine. I’d rather her work reflect her values than it be some pandering, soulless mess–Okay, here’s where “her superhero story” stops being that and starts becoming “her angry rant into the void”.
Because what she did was constantly stop the story to have the first person narrator give us “his” opinions on certain things. For example, multiple paragraphs about a gay black man that works at his hardware store that can’t be fired due to the risk of a discrimination lawsuit, even though this employee routinely comes in wearing sexually inappropriate clothing and has once destroyed an entire warehouse full of inventory with a forklift he was not licensed to operate. This character has no dialogue, no interaction with the main character, and no actual role in the story.
In another part of the book, there is a paragraph or two about how airplane hijackings were effectively eliminated by allowing passengers to carry guns without any checks or restrictions whatsoever. This section came about by mention of an airport that the characters flew into. At no point does a scene take place at this airport or on the plane, nor does a hijacking occur.
I could go on and tell you about the eleven consecutive paragraphs about the importance of traditional gender roles after the main character bets a government agent that he can sleep with his female partner, or the entire conversation with a foreign tribal chief on how an adult marrying a teenage girl isn’t objectively wrong but merely a Western cultural taboo, but I think you get the point. Much like I stopped this article dead to talk about this book, it repeatedly stopped the entire story dead to talk about its political agenda.
Time after time after time, the story paused entirely to the main character’s (and totally not the author’s) point of view on various hot button issues of the day. And the problem isn’t that she expressed viewpoints that I vehemently disagreed with. It’s that they rarely, if ever, affected the protagonist’s day to day life, made him reflect on his relationships or identity, or created meaningful conflict with the other characters.
If you want to write a political essay, write a political essay. That’s fine, even if what you have to say would make a Klansman tell you to cool it with the bigotry. But if you’re writing a story with plot and characters and all that, you cannot have it just be a vehicle to deliver your political message.
Remember that at the end of the day, your readers want to see how your superhero defeats the supervillain. No one wants your hero to stop and explain why we should or shouldn’t provide children with free education.
Don’t treat your own beliefs as sacrosanct
The last big piece of advice I’ll give is to not treat your own views as sacrosanct.
Poke holes in them. Challenge them. Show where the other side has a point. Don’t be afraid to explore their blindspots and failings.
And be willing to laugh at yourself.
Marvel’s Civil War event did a surprisingly good job at this. Neither Captain America nor Iron Man truly ever had a monopoly on whether the Superhero Registration Act was good or bad.
In the main Civil War miniseries, that is. Ignore the individual character’s books.
In Civil War, both the pro-registration side and the anti-registration side brought valid points to the table in regards to the Superhero Registration Act.
The pro-reg side was correct in that letting untrained teenage vigilantes run around in masks with powers that make them comparable to human nukes with zero accountability or regulation was just a disaster waiting to happen.
The anti-reg side was correct in that having the superheroes act as official law enforcement and under the command of the government was a potentially dangerous consolidation of state power, and having their identities be public was a violation of privacy and a clear danger to the friends and family of superheroes, including those who weren’t aware of their dual lives.
Now, the story had mixed reactions due to a lot of questionable decisions in the story’s execution, but my focus here is how to properly inject politics into your story and I think Civil War did it quite well. There were no soapboxes. Both sides had strong points. The politics were directly relevant to the characters because the SHRA would fundamentally affect how superheroes operate.
The only thing they didn’t do was laugh at themselves.
So again, I’ll use SWITCH and the Challengers Bravo as an example on what to do. Man, I’m really leaning into using a WIP to explain writing concepts way too much, but let’s go.
I made Switch an open leftist. He’s 16, he sees what’s going on with how criminals are treated and how the justice system works, so of course something like that is expected. His views aren’t that far off from my own.
But I didn’t feel comfortable just making him “me”. So I decided to have some fun at his expense.
I made him the only person in his friend group into politics. He himself is very politically active, but no one else wants to hear about it. He often doesn’t defend his views very well or says something flat out dumb. Cue his friends quite justifiably making fun of him.
And you’re supposed to side with them in the interaction, even if you side with him in his ideas.
Final Thoughts
The idea that superhero fiction shouldn’t be political is a line touted by the anti-woke grifter community to rile up their audience of pathetic losers who for whom white Spider-Man is the one bastion of their identity they have left.
But it’s BS. Superhero stories should be political. They always have been.
That said, there are do’s and don’t’s. Pitfalls to avoid. You need to know how to properly inject politics into your story.
Remember that “politics” isn’t who you’re voting for in the next election. It’s your core beliefs regarding the ideal world we should strive to create, and then having your characters work toward making their world look like that. A story that doesn’t do this risks being a story that says nothing, a soulless husk of words lacking passion or meaning.
And these political beliefs and underlying ideologies shouldn’t exist in a vacuum. They should be directly relevant to what your character does or who they are. And you should use this to drive conflict in some way.
Remember to avoid having them just stand on a soapbox. Don’t just have your protagonist stop and tell the reader, completely unprompted, what to think about this or that. Even if everybody agrees with you, that’s not what they signed up for when they chose your book to read.
And don’t forget not to consider yourself or your ideas sacrosanct, even if you do ultimately consider them correct in your writing. Don’t strawman. Give the other side strong points. Challenge your hero’s ideas and have them self-reflect. And make fun of your beliefs, or at least people who represent them.
Oh, and lastly, be unapologetic for having the ideas that you have and letting your world reflect them. Defend your beliefs. You don’t have to have political debates with your detractors, but you should stand up for your decision to let the product of your mind be the product of your mind.
For exciting superhero fiction written by me, be sure to check out the BLUE EAGLE Universe!