One of the latest crazes on social media, perhaps just Facebook specifically, has eaten up a lot of my life over the past while. It started innocently enough after reading the following post (which I’m sure you’ve all seen by now)
“I intend to fill Facebook with comic book heroes to fight the saturation of negative images, videos, and just for fun! Give me a like and I’ll assign you a character.”
Curious as to how my friends view me, I liked the status and promptly received a private message from my buddy Alberto with a picture of Magneto. The message said:
“Hahahahaha only cause you’re good and slightly evil”.
Well shoot, that’s me in a nutshell.
One thing I didn’t like about the idea though, was that these comments were all in private messages. I thought to myself, “well, that’s no fun” and posted the status to my wall, promising that no matter how many people clicked the like button, I would find and post a superhero or villain that matched their personality and tag them in it for the world to see. Why not? Seemed like a fun way to spend an hour or so.
As of the moment I’m writing this article, nearly 60 people have commented, and you bet your ass I took the time to make sure each and every one got a character tailored to their specific personality traits…at least as I viewed them.
Some were easy, like my cousin who went to law school: Daredevil, duh. Or my slightly redneck and ultra-Canadian childhood friend—who better than Old Man Logan; the nature loving, and plaid-covered Canucklehead himself? I have a friend who I’m always speaking to in quotes from the Simpsons, and boom, we have Radioactive Man. My buddy Sean is a scruffy-looking, smooth-talking French-Canadian, so Gambit seemed like a perfect fit, and my pal Murphy, a ginger-haired descendant of Irish immigrants got Banshee, and so on and so forth.
But what really got me about working my way through my vast and normally useless repository of comic book knowledge was two things:
- As much as comic fans love to wax poetic about the deep and nuanced characters in their cape books, on the surface, almost all of them have a few consistently definable traits that never change.
- Real human beings have this as well.
Spider-Man is a good soul, Lobo is heavy metal personified, Carol Danvers and Steve Rogers are blonde-haired, blue-eyed ‘Muricans, but they’re the best kind of American. Real people are like this too; we all have layers and depth to our personalities, but for the most part, people know us as “that funny dude”, or “the guy who has spent years studying micro-biology”, or “the scrappy chick with the red hair”, and with 70+ years of a genre to draw from, there’s an Avenger or an X-Man that matches you. Of course, this works on the flipside too, but nobody wants to be compared to Toad or the Blob.
Also, this is the most fun I’ve had with social media in ages, and a welcomed break from the usual slew of motivational memes, workout updates, and beach selfies. So I encourage you, if you’re reading this and aren’t an anti-social media zealot, to copy that message and try it out. Trust me; it’s good fun seeing yourself through the prism of a comic book super villain (or hero, if you’re one of THOSE types).
