“The war’s over, leave it to the professionals”

It would have been so easy for the MCU to pretend that Captain America somehow solved all of Peggy Carter's biggest problems. Steve Rogers recognised her. Howard Stark trusted her. Phillips realised her potential in the SSR. The audience is well aware of her capabilities. Yet when the war ends, none of that seems to matter.

It’s not a stretch to read Agent Carter Season 1 as an exploration of the changing political value of women’s labour in a post-war America. One of the first characters we are introduced to is laid off from their factory job to make way for the men returning from the front. During wartime, her labour was an invaluable service that kept America running: essential. In peacetime, she is disposable.

She isn’t alone. We see through Peggy that it is not one factory, nor a specific ‘typically male’ industry, but an entire societal shift impacting office workers, vetrans and everyone in between.

Having served and practically ran oporations with the Strategic Scientific Reserve throughout the war, Peggy now finds herself relegated to administrative work while the men around her take credit, make the decisions and dismiss her experience. Her first interactions with her colleagues are filled with some pretty aggressive misogyny: full of male bravado, slut shaming, fabricated lies about how Peggy acted during the war (with particular focus on her romantic relationships), weaponised incompatence and nearly every trick in the book to dismiss her and her achievements.

It is clear that we are in a very different time for women from Captain America: The First Avenger. There, Peggy was underestimated, but she still occupied an important place within the war effort. In Agent Carter, the war is over, and so, too, it seems, is the institution's need for women like her. With the men back, the demand has disappeared.

This tension has been extensively explored by feminist scholars who show that institutions do not simply reward merit; they actively produce and police it through gendered assumptions about who counts as a legitimate worker. Joan Acker argues that organisations are built around an “ideal worker” who is imagined as fully available, detached from care (no children or dependents), and implicitly male. Peggy’s wartime success proves her competence, but peacetime exposes the fact that competence alone is not enough when the institution is structured to restore masculine authority. Rosabeth Moss Kanter adds another useful insight here: women in male-dominated settings are often treated as exceptions, highly visible when useful, but never fully allowed to redefine the norm, something proven very true for Agent Carter within the SSR.

Silvia Federici helps explain why this exclusion is so durable. Her work on the devaluation of women’s labour shows how work performed by women is often treated as natural, supportive, or temporary rather than as a source of authority. Agent Carter dramatises this logic. The shift, while portrayed as economic, is ideological; it restores the fantasy that power belongs to men by default.

What makes Agent Carter so refreshing is that it does not simply point at sexism and say “that’s bad” or “that’s mean”. It explores labour and the inequality of efforts through changing times. It dives into how inequality was used within the working class to manufacture stability, both socially and economically, at the cost of women.

Note: While this essay focuses on women’s labour through Peggy Carter’s experience, this wider pattern of labour being valued temporarily and then discarded has historically affected many marginalised groups, including racial minorities and disabled communities.

This is Essay #2 of 102.

Between now and the release of Avengers: Doomsday, I’ll be working through every corner of the Marvel multiverse, using each story as a starting point to explore a bigger question about politics, philosophy and what it means to be human.

If that sounds like your kind of thing, I’d love for you to join me.

Subscribe below to follow the countdown, receive every new essay in your inbox, and let me know your own thoughts in the comments. Whether you agree, disagree, or have a theory of your own, I’d love to hear it.

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If you want to learn more about the theories mentioned here, why not check them out? They should be available at your local library or through second-hand book sellers. They are both great reads that say far more than I can fit in this quick 600-word reflection.

1. Acker, J. (1990). Hierarchies, Jobs, Bodies: A Theory of Gendered Organizations. Gender & Society, 4(2), 139–158.

2. Kanter, R. M. (1977). Men and Women of the Corporation.

3. Federici, S. (2004). Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body and Primitive Accumulation.

This will forever be one of my favourite films in the MCU. It has everything that makes Marvel work at its best: action, drama, compelling relationships and genuine character development, all tied together with brilliant period aesthetics. The dynamic between Steve Rogers, Bucky Barnes and Peggy Carter is one of the strongest in the franchise, and even before the shield becomes an icon, the film gives us a hero worth believing in.

Although Iron Man was the first MCU film released, Captain America: The First Avenger is where most chronological MCU journeys begin. In many ways, it sets the moral tone for the next 102 stories. Before there were gods, aliens, multiverses or Infinity Stones, there was a simpler question: what makes a hero?

At first, the answer seems straightforward. Dr Erskine rejects the military's obsession with physical perfection, insisting that the super soldier serum should be given not to the perfect soldier, but to "a good man." Steve Rogers enters the film as a catalogue of deficiencies: asthma, poor eyesight, a body repeatedly judged unfit for military service. Yet every rejection becomes another opportunity to demonstrate courage. He keeps getting back up, and that persistence is what makes him stand out long before he ever becomes Captain America.

The grenade scene captures this perfectly. While the other recruits instinctively scatter, Steve throws himself onto what he believes is a live grenade. He expects to die if it means everyone else gets to live. But there is another person who moves towards the danger. Peggy Carter steps forward. It is a subtle moment, easy to overlook because Steve's sacrifice dominates the scene, but Peggy demonstrates the very same instinct. She does not run; she moves towards responsibility. If the film is asking what qualities make a hero, Peggy quietly passes the same test.

This is where The First Avenger becomes more interesting than a simple battle between good and evil. The film tells us that virtue determines who deserves power, but in practice, it shows us that institutions determine whose virtue is recognised. Steve is repeatedly rejected because his body fails to meet the military's expectations of what a soldier should be. Peggy is never considered for the serum at all, not because she lacks courage, intelligence or leadership, but because she is a woman. Both possess the qualities Erskine values, yet only one is recognised as a legitimate candidate.

This reflects what Michel Foucault argued about power. Institutions do not simply distribute power; they produce the categories through which power becomes legitimate. The military is not merely searching for a hero; it is deciding what a hero is allowed to look like (which in turn shapes the power structures of society). Steve only becomes Captain America because Dr Erskine interrupts that process of recognition and sees beyond a body the institution has already dismissed. But even that interruption has limits.

Political philosopher Iris Marion Young argued that injustice is often structural rather than individual, embedded within the assumptions of institutions themselves. Peggy possesses many of the same moral qualities as Steve, alongside years of military experience, strategic knowledge and professional competence. Yet none of these makes her eligible. Her exclusion is not a reflection of her character; it is a reflection of the institution's imagination.

Perhaps that is why the title of this essay is not What Makes a Hero? But is Good Good Enough? For Steve, goodness becomes enough only because someone in power chooses to recognise it. For Peggy, goodness is never enough because no one ever offers her the opportunity. Captain America: The First Avenger, therefore, leaves us with an uncomfortable truth: character may determine who deserves power, but institutions often determine who receives it.

As we move into Agent Carter, that question becomes even more compelling. What happens when someone has already proven themselves worthy, yet still has to fight to be recognised?

This is Essay #1 of 102.

Between now and the release of Avengers: Doomsday, I’ll be working through every corner of the Marvel multiverse, using each story as a starting point to explore a bigger question about politics, philosophy and what it means to be human.

If that sounds like your kind of thing, I’d love for you to join me.

Subscribe below to follow the countdown, receive every new essay in your inbox, and let me know your own thoughts in the comments. Whether you agree, disagree, or have a theory of your own, I’d love to hear it.

Subscribe now

If you want to learn more about the theories mentioned here, why not check them out? They should be available at your local library or through second-hand book sellers. They are both great reads that say far more than I can fit in this quick 600-word reflection.

1. Foucault, M. (1977). Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison.

2. Young, I. M. (1990). Justice and the Politics of Difference.

So... the Doomsday trailer just came out.

As a Gen Z Marvel fan, for my entire conscious life there have been different iterations of these characters and stories on the big screen. From pretending to be older than I was so I could go and watch Iron Man in the cinema, to binge-watching the Disney+ shows with my brothers after being sent home from university during COVID, these films have been by my side for as long as I can remember.

I have been the annoying friend who convinced everyone to go and watch some of the less well-received recent releases, and the person waiting every Wednesday for the newest episode to drop.

So, it is safe to say I am excited about this new wave of buzz around the MCU.

But what is really interesting to me is not just the spectacle. It is what these stories teach us about who we are as people. How these characters, worlds and conflicts have developed over time to reflect our changing thoughts and feelings about war, violence, power, identity and belonging.

Captain America asks what happens when morality conflicts with authority. Spider-Man explores the weight of responsibility and the painful process of growing up. The X-Men reveal how fear can create the very monsters we claim to oppose. The Avengers ask whether individuals can overcome their differences to build something greater together. WandaVision examines grief and the temptation to escape reality. Loki questions whether we are defined by our past or capable of creating a new identity.

Across these stories, the same themes emerge again and again: power and responsibility, identity and belonging, justice and inequality, technology and humanity, grief and hope.

These questions matter because superheroes have become one of the defining mythologies of the modern age.

Ancient societies told stories about gods, heroes and monsters to understand themselves. Today, we tell stories about people who can fly, bend time, travel between universes and save worlds. Yet underneath the spectacle, the questions remain the same.

What is a hero?

Like Odysseus, Achilles and the countless stories of lives told long ago, our idea of a hero has shifted and transformed to reveal very real things about ourselves.

• Who do we choose to idolise?

• Who do we want to become?

• What kind of world do we want to create?

• What is worth saving?

Perhaps the reason Marvel has endured for so long is not because we believe superheroes exist. It is because we recognise ourselves in them. So, alongside the ever-growing list of PhD work I have to tackle, I want to set myself a challenge: to watch all 102 stories I have compiled as potentially relevant to the multiverse that will be on show in Avengers: Doomsday.

102 stories.
102 essays.
One question:

What does Marvel teach us about being human?

Welcome to the countdown.

If this interests you, make sure to subscribe so you don’t miss any of the releases!

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Glossary

Here I will keep an updated list of every story in the challenge. I will add links as each essay is published, alongside quick notes about why I think each entry is relevant and what themes it explores.

If you want to join the challenge, rewatch the MCU, or fill in any Marvel knowledge gaps before Avengers: Doomsday, hopefully, this glossary becomes a useful guide.

1. Captain America: The First Avenger - What makes a hero?

2. Agent Carter – Season 1: The Value of Women’s Labour

3. Agent Carter – Season 2

4. X-Men: First Class

5. X-Men ‘97

6. Captain Marvel

7. X-Men Origins: Wolverine

8. X-Men

9. X2

10. Blade

11. Blade 2

12. Blade Trinity

13. Spider-Man

14. Spider-Man 2

15. X-Men: The Last Stand

16. Spider-Man 3

17. Iron Man

18. Iron Man 2

19. The Incredible Hulk

20. Thor

21. The Avengers

22. Iron Man 3

23. The Wolverine

24. Thor: The Dark World

25. Captain America: The Winter Soldier

26. Guardians of the Galaxy

27. Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2

28. I Am Groot – Season 1 + 2

29. Daredevil – Season 1

30. Jessica Jones – Season 1

31. Avengers: Age of Ultron

32. Ant-Man

33. Daredevil – Season 2

34. Luke Cage – Season 1

35. Iron Fist – Season 1

36. The Defenders

37. Captain America: Civil War

38. Black Widow

39. Black Panther

40. Spider-Man: Homecoming

41. The Punisher – Season 1 (Frank Castle is in the new Spider-Man trailer)

42. Doctor Strange

43. Jessica Jones – Season 2

44. Luke Cage – Season 2

45. Iron Fist – Season 2

46. Daredevil – Season 3

47. Thor: Ragnarok

48. Ant-Man and the Wasp

49. Deadpool

50. X-Men: Apocalypse

51. Dark Phoenix

52. Deadpool 2

53. Deadpool & Wolverine (The whole chronological timeline has officially fallen apart here)

54. The New Mutants

55. Logan

56. Avengers: Infinity War

57. Avengers: Endgame

58. Loki – Season 1

59. What If...? – Season 1

60. WandaVision

61. Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings

62. The Falcon and the Winter Soldier

63. Spider-Man: Far From Home

64. Venom (In Spiderman: No Way Home, Eddie Brock makes a cameo in the end credits and leaves some symbiote behind, so it’s added to the list)

65. Venom: Let There Be Carnage

66. Spider-Man: No Way Home

67. Morbius (Thank Spiderman: No Way Home for this)

68. Madam Webb

69. Venom: Last Dance

70. Kraven the Hunter

71. Eternals

72. Hawkeye

73. Moon Knight

74. Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness

75. Ms. Marvel

76. She-Hulk: Attorney at Law

77. Werewolf by Night (A fun MCU watch, not sure how it links yet)

78. Black Panther: Wakanda Forever

79. Echo

80. Thor: Love and Thunder

81. Guardians of the Galaxy: Holiday Special

82. Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania (Some films I'm less excited to rewatch, sorry Paul Rudd)

83. Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3

84. Secret Invasion

85. Loki – Season 2

86. The Marvels

87. What If...? – Season 2

88. What If...? – Season 3

89. Agatha All Along

90. Daredevil: Born Again – Season 1

91. Ironheart

92. Marvel Zombies

93. Captain America: Brave New World

94. Thunderbolts*

95. Eyes of Wakanda

96. Wonder Man

97. Daredevil: Born Again – Season 2

98. Your Friendly Neighbourhood Spider-Man – Season 1+2

99. Fantastic Four: First Steps

100. Punisher: one last kill

101. Spider-Man: Brand New Day

102. Vision Quest

Then… of course DOOMSDAY

As of writing this, I have watched the first two episodes of season 3 and maybe about 8 minutes of the third. even so, this season it is clear that there is this exploration of what it means to be a woman in power, with both Rhenera and Alicent suffering from people acting against their word/authority for “their good”, dealing with incompetence (both weaponised and just disappointingly so) and generally treating them diffrent from a man in the same positions of leadership, despite all the knee bowing and sword swearing. In this, I am reminded of my interpretation of season one, and that is how exhausting it is to be a woman sometimes.

On social media, I see a lot about feminine rage. from the endless Spotify playlists to the A24 movies that revisit the idea nonstop. We keep being fed this “new” idea of rage. And while this is an interesting phenomenon and one for a later blog (why we put the feminine in rage) i wanted to explore something I see in a lot of content, specifically around women in powerful positions, and that is feminine exhaustion.

I’m defining (I can do that, this is my blog) feminine exhaustion as:

Before I go any further, “woman” and “feminine” are intentionally open terms here. I’m not interested in gatekeeping anyone’s gender or deciding who is “allowed” to relate to this experience. I also don’t think feminine exhaustion is exclusive to women. I suspect many marginalised groups experience similar forms of exhaustion, shaped by the particular expectations, prejudices, and systems they navigate every day. Those experiences deserve to be explored on their own terms, and I’d be fascinated to hear how people from those communities describe them. This post, though, is grounded in my own perspective, as a woman and as an academic.

Season One of House of the Dragon encapsulates this exhaustion brilliantly through its diverse cast of characters that span age and standing; it is truly a testament to the acting, particularly that of Emma D'Arcy and Milly Alcock as Rhenera, Olivia Cooke and Emily Carey as Alicent, Sonoya Mizuno as Mysaria, and Eve Best as Rhaenys.

TO BE BEYOND REPROACH

It doesn’t take a genius watching House of the Dragon to realise that Rhaenyra’s competence is questioned by the men around her. From the moment Viserys names her heir, her claim is questioned not because she lacks intelligence, political instinct, or capability, but because she is a woman. Despite her youth, she certainly shows more capability than the 2-year-old child who threatens to disenherit her. It’s the central tension of the series and, ultimately, the catalyst for the Dance of the Dragons.

What’s striking is that Rhaenyra is never allowed to simply be heir. She has to continually justify why she deserves to be there. Every decision becomes a test of her legitimacy. Every mistake becomes evidence that the realm was right to doubt her. Meanwhile, around her, men are afforded the luxury of mediocrity. Their failures are individual failings; hers are presented as proof that women should never have ruled in the first place.

This pattern extends far beyond the fantasy of Westeros. We see it in politics, entertainment and academia alike. The performance of movies is a prime example. Wonder Woman (2017) carried not only the pressure of its own success but the future of any more female-led superhero movies on its shoulders, something seen again in the recent Supergirl (2026) movie.

It translates to academia, Joan C. Williams describes this phenomenon as “Prove It Again” bias: the expectation that women must repeatedly demonstrate competence in ways their male colleagues are rarely asked to. Success is treated as temporary evidence, not permanent credibility. Every new project, promotion, grant application or leadership opportunity becomes another examination.

The numbers bear this out. Women now make up the majority of students in UK higher education, yet only around a quarter to a third of professors (depending on field) are women, illustrating the persistence of the so-called “leaky pipeline.” Large-scale bibliometric analyses of more than 1.5 million academic careers have also found persistent gender disparities in publication output, career progression and scholarly recognition across disciplines. Even the visibility of research is gendered: men self-cite around 56% more frequently than women (rising to approximately 70% in more recent cohorts), giving their work greater cumulative visibility over time. Studies of more than 25,000 university professors have also found that women participate in fewer international collaborations, one of the strongest predictors of citation impact and success in competitive grant funding.

None of these statistics suggests women are less capable. They demonstrate something subtler: women are often required to accumulate more evidence before they are recognised as equally legitimate.

This is also where the authority gap emerges. Rhaenyra is the heir from the first episode. That fact never changes. Yet almost every conversation she has begins with someone deciding whether they believe she deserves to be. Her authority is treated as provisional, forever waiting for confirmation. She isn’t simply expected to rule well; she is expected to prove that she can rule at all.

That, to me, is the first rule of feminine exhaustion: competence is never enough. You are expected to be exceptional simply to earn the benefit of the doubt that others receive by default.

TO BE RESPONSIBLE FOR THE MORALITY OF OTHERS

Rhyenera's character is the resilience to persevere as an individual, to have agency and credibility in your own achievements, despite the external view people place upon you. She represents the outsider/enemy of the patriarchy. Alicent, however, depicts the consequence of those who attempt to live within it. She becomes the bride, the mother and in turn responsible for the actions of everyone around her, at fault for their faults, responsible despite what little agency she has herself.

Throughout House of the Dragon, Alicent is expected to moderate the behaviour of the men around her. She apologises for them, excuses them, disciplines them, and attempts to contain the consequences of their actions. Viserys refuses to act, Otto manipulates, Aegon drinks and displays a character ill-fit for power, Aemond pursues vengeance, and Criston Cole repeatedly allows his emotions to cloud his judgment. Somehow, Alicent becomes the person expected to answer for all of them.

There is something deeply familiar about this expectation. Women are so often positioned as the moral centre of the spaces they inhabit: expected to de-escalate conflict, smooth over tensions, remember birthdays, comfort colleagues, mentor students, and somehow maintain the emotional health of an institution without ever being recognised for doing so. Success is invisible because it is expected. Failure is conspicuous because it is personal.

Just think of the connotations of a mother, perhaps a caretaker, warmth, an unconditional love and nurturing. Now think of a father: a creator, a visionary. Sam Muka looks critically at this genedered languege in academia and raises the example of Ruth Patrick and E.O. Wilson. Wilson called Patrick the “foremost authority on America’s river ecosystems and a pioneer environmental activist.” and yet it was Wilson styled the “father of biodiversity.” Was hesitation to syle Patrick a “mother” a kindness? if so why?

Academia has a name for this: academic emotional labour. Marcia Bellas argued that women disproportionately perform the relational work that keeps universities functioning, from mentoring and pastoral care to committee work and student support. It is work that is essential, yet frequently undervalued because it produces neither papers nor grants.

The evidence has only become stronger since. Macfarlane and Burg found that women professors consistently placed greater emphasis on mentoring, academic citizenship and supporting colleagues than their male counterparts. At the time of their study, women accounted for just over one-fifth of UK professors despite carrying a disproportionate share of these responsibilities. Numerous workload studies have since shown that women spend between 30 and 50 per cent more time on service work (including committees, mentoring and institutional administration) than men. They are also significantly more likely to undertake pastoral care, equality, diversity and inclusion work, and student support, despite these activities contributing comparatively little to promotion when measured against research output.

The tragedy of Alicent is that she has remarkably little agency over the people she is expected to control. She cannot stop Viserys from neglecting his family. She cannot make Aegon a good man. She cannot temper Aemond’s ambition or undo Otto’s political manoeuvring. What little agency she has herself is hard fought. Yet every one of their failings becomes, in some way, a reflection on her.

That is the second rule of feminine exhaustion: not simply carrying your own responsibilities, but becoming responsible for the morality of everyone around you.

TO BE CAREFUL FOOTED

The women of House Targaryen and House Hightower may be constrained by their gender, but they are also beneficiaries of immense privilege. They are noblewomen, born into wealth, political influence and legitimacy. They belong. Even when their authority is questioned, their place within the world is not. Mysaria is afforded none of the protections that come with birth. She is an immigrant from Yi Ti, a commoner, and, as far as we know, owns little beyond what she has managed to build for herself. She enters King's Landing without a powerful family name, inherited wealth or institutional protection. Every ounce of influence she acquires has to be negotiated rather than inherited.

This is perhaps most visible in her relationship with Daemon. Regardless of her intelligence or political acumen, she is repeatedly reduced to what she represents to the men around her: a mistress, a foreigner, a disposable woman whose value is determined by her relationship to a powerful man. Time and again she demonstrates that she understands politics as well as, if not better than, the nobles who dismiss her. Yet she is rarely afforded the credibility her insights deserve.

Mysaria rarely has the luxury of speaking plainly. She understands that information alone has little value unless it is delivered in a way powerful men are willing to hear. She survives not by possessing authority but by understanding authority better than those who wield it.

Academia has its own version of this careful footing.

One study of 19,952 university teaching evaluations found that women received significantly lower evaluations than men despite students achieving identical learning outcomes. The bias was driven primarily by male students and was particularly pronounced for junior women academics. Experimental studies have gone further still: when participants were shown identical lectures delivered by male and female actors, the "male" professor was consistently rated as more scientifically competent, despite the lectures being identical.

These findings help explain one of the most replicated concepts in organisational psychology: the leadership double bind. Women who demonstrate competence are frequently judged as less likeable, while women who prioritise warmth are judged as less competent. There is no perfect performance, only different penalties. Unsurprisingly, research has found that women working in male-dominated environments engage in significantly greater impression management and communication regulation, continually adjusting their tone, language and behaviour to avoid social sanctions.

That, to me, is the third rule of feminine exhaustion: constantly editing yourself, not because you are unsure of who you are, but because you know exactly how the world will respond if you do not.

Each woman carries a different burden, but all four share the same underlying labour: they must continually earn the authority that the men around them inherit by default. Rhaenyra teaches us the exhaustion of having to be exceptional. Alicent, the burden of carrying everyone else’s morality. Mysaria, the constant calculation required simply to survive. Different women, different circumstances, the same invisible work.

Perhaps that is why House of the Dragon resonates so deeply. Beneath the dragons, the succession crises, and the political intrigue lies something profoundly familiar: the exhausting reality of navigating a world that demands women continually prove, justify, soften, anticipate and accommodate.

No wonder we’re exhausted.

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REFRENCES

Bellas, M. L. (1999). Emotional labor in academia: The case of professors. The ANNALS of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, 561(1), 96–110. https://doi.org/10.1177/000271629956100107

Eagly, A. H., & Karau, S. J. (2002). Role congruity theory of prejudice toward female leaders. Psychological Review, 109(3), 573–598. https://doi.org/10.1037/0033-295X.109.3.573

Macfarlane, B., & Burg, D. (2019). Women professors and the academic housework trap. Journal of Higher Education Policy and Management, 41(3), 262–274. https://doi.org/10.1080/1360080X.2019.1589682

Moss-Racusin, C. A., Dovidio, J. F., Brescoll, V. L., Graham, M. J., & Handelsman, J. (2012). Science faculty’s subtle gender biases favour male students. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 109(41), 16474–16479. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1211286109

Muka, S. (2018, April 19). (Pro)Creating Science: The Parenting Metaphor, Gender, and Scientific Memory. The New Inquiry. The New Inquiry

Williams, J. C. (2014). Double Jeopardy? Gender Bias Against Women in Science. UC Hastings College of the Law, Center for WorkLife Law.

In preparation for watching Supergirl (2026) tomorrow, made only more exciting by the horrible reviews from disgruntled men on TikTok and Letterboxd, I wanted to revisit Superman (2025), which, if you can cast your mind back, was also met with many scathing reviews from anti-immigration and far-right groups that seemingly missed the entire point of the Superman story since 1938, weaponising “comic accuracy”, often incorrectly, I might add, to defend anti-immigrant agendas.

Now this is going to ruffle some feathers, but Superman is by all means a refugee. Just as Paddington Bear, The Doctor of Dr Who fame, and Prince Caspian of Narnia. And while there is still some longstanding debate on whether we recognise a “climate refugee” (if you can call the total destruction of a planet from overmining a “climate” related emergency) Kal-El fled a planet in fear of death, unable to return to it, on pain of death, which by Article I(2) of the 1969 OAU Convention is very much within the realms of the definition.

“every person who, owing to external aggression, occupation, foreign domination or events seriously disturbing public order in either part or the whole of his country of origin or nationality, is compelled to leave his place of habitual residence in order to seek refuge in another place outside his country of origin or nationality.”

But this post is not about the validity of recognising a fictional character as a refugee or not. Don’t take it from me, take it from DC themselves, who recognised Superman’s refugee connections in a Tweet on World Refugee Day 2018.

No, this post is about a more specific aspect of the media's representation of refugees, one that Paddington Bear, The Doctor, and Prince Caspian all share: refugee exceptionalism. The need to be exceptional as a refugee in order to be deserving of the same respect and acknowledgement of rights as non-refugees.

TO BE EXCEPTIONAL

While the film starts three minutes after his first lost battle, there is still no denying that Superman is the embodiment of something exceptional. After all, he is what Luthor spells out as a “Super… man.”

But what does that mean?

Well, if we draw it down to a matter of ability, the first few lines of text in the movie tell us that of the metahumans on Earth, Superman is the most powerful. In media, he is the template, the archetype of the modern superhero: an unmatched combination of flight, super strength, invincibility, and lasers, to name but a few. He has become the cookie-cutter for powerful characters, with iterations such as Ikaris (Eternals, 2021), Homelander (The Boys, 2019–2026), and Omni-Man (Invincible, 2021–ongoing) all, ironically, copying the Man of Steel to show just how easily absolute power can be corrupted. Even DC’s own Shazam (Shazam!, 2019) shows how, in a child’s imagination, the idea of a superhero is Superman.

Enzo Ferrari famously said, “Ask a child to draw a car and, certainly, he will draw it red.” For Ferrari, of course. I might add: ask a child to imagine a superhero, and chances are it’s Superman.

In this instance, we can think about what stories are pushed into the light of anti-refugee rhetoric. Recently, with the World Cup, it has been all the stories of players at the top of their sport who were once refugees. The UNHCR frequently uses celebrities with familial ties to refugee crises. We take an interest because they are renowned. Their fame and ability, therefore becomes a platform for recognition.

If we draw it down to character, we can see this exceptionalism in play within the fight between Superman, the Justice Gang, and the Kaiju that only seems to be called “Thing” in the news reports that follow. While Guy Gardner is revelling in the creative ways he can fight the creature, Hawkgirl is brutally attacking it without hesitation, and Mister Terrific is using drones to blow it apart from the inside, it is Superman who flies around trying to ensure not even a single squirrel is caught in the crossfire.

I have noticed this demonstration of character is another aspect widely used to defend the rights of refugees. The example of Mamoudou Gassama comes to mind: a Malian refugee granted French citizenship by President Emmanuel Macron after scaling four floors with his bare hands to save a four-year-old dangling from a balcony in Paris. More recently, in the 2025 shooting at Bondi Beach, it was Syrian-born Ahmed al-Ahmed and an as-yet unnamed refugee known only by the initials AB who intervened and tackled the weapons out of the attacker’s hands, receiving international praise in the aftermath.

This character, this drive to save one’s fellow man despite fear, these incredible feats of bravery are characteristics that really latched onto people with David Corenswet’s Superman. The ideas of hopecore, of wanting to be a better person, a better man, rang through many viewers.

Ability and character are good things and should be recognised and praised. But the danger arises when exceptionalism becomes the foundation for who we deem valid and entitled to rights and refuge.

TO BE SEEN IS TO BE FEARED

With exceptionalism, however, there is also visibility. And where there is visibility, there are trolls on Twitter nitpicking at every aspect of your being for their own gain, whether personal malice or part of a wider political agenda.

The film barely needs to stretch into fiction here. In his interviews with Lois, Superman is asked directly about public distrust and social media:

Lois: People on social media are suspicious because you are an alien, yes?

Superman: Yes. I’ve been very honest about that. From the beginning. I come from a planet called Krypton. Which is gone now, by the way. Destroyed. Along with all of my history. My parents. They sent me here as a baby to save my life.

This suspicion and hate then manifest more visibly as the story progresses. We see Lex Luthor go on podcasts and talk shows, spinning paranoia, turning public opinion against Superman, and feeding a wave of distrust. It doesn’t matter what Superman has actually done; the fact that he is not from here is enough to make people panic.

This creates a worrying problem: exceptional people inspire exceptional acts.

Superman: No one read me my rights.

Flag: Courts decided those rights don’t apply to extraterrestrial organisms. Therefore, at this point, Superman, you don’t have any rights to read. The government is very well aware of the potential limitations detaining you, so we’ve outsourced your confinement and your interrogation to PlanetWatch.

It is becoming more and more clear that the human rights we have become very comfortable with are not as stable as they appear. In the UK, since the 2024 election, both the Conservative and Reform parties have committed to repealing the Human Rights Act (HRA) and to pulling the UK out of the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR), framing it around efforts to “stop the boats”.

This was once considered an extreme position, beyond what would be politically comfortable. Yet increasingly, it is framed as a normal and even necessary response. This is where the logic of exceptionalism becomes dangerous. Once rights begin to be framed as something that must be earned (through contribution, usefulness, or exceptionality), they stop functioning as rights.

The narrative of exceptionalism shown in Superman (2025) is therefore one that treads a dangerous line. While ability and character should absolutely be recognised, and demonstrations of bravery and skill rightly praised, they should not become the basis on which we assign rights, recognition, or basic human dignity. That distinction may sound simple when written out like this, but in the present moment, it feels increasingly brazen.

I wish, upon writing this conclusion, I had a more uncomplicatedly aspirational or compelling hopecore answer to offer. Perhaps the popularity of this film, or the sincerity of the response it has generated, might point toward a more generous politics of belonging. But that in itself does not resolve the central issue.

Exceptional people should be recognised as exceptional, but that distinction cannot become the mechanism through which rights are assigned. Because once rights are made conditional on merit, usefulness, or exceptionality, they cease to function as rights in any meaningful sense at all.

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The Purge franchise has never been one to shy away from political themes, slathering its movies with them as thick as the white paint landlords use to cover damp growing in your bathroom.

I kind of like that about these films, though. There is something refreshingly shameless about a movie that refuses to pretend it is not making a point. Not every political message needs to be delivered with the subtlety of a whisper; sometimes it arrives wearing a mask, holding a baseball bat, and shouting about structural inequality.

I’m sure everyone knows the premise by now: in a fictional United States, one night a year makes all crime legal. It is a horror setup, yes, but it is also a really convenient way of asking what happens when violence is made policy, and the people most exposed to it are already living with the least protection.

This film is especially interesting to me because it overlaps so neatly with the question of consent. Not just in the abstract, philosophical sense, but in the very practical research-methods sense: can vulnerable people actually consent to research in a meaningful way, or are they simply responding to the only option available to them?

That is the question this post is really about.

$5000 and the Price of Risk

In the fictional timeline where crime, a housing crisis, and opioid epidemics are out of control, a pilot study is proposed to help “deal” with all the socio-political antagonists. This pilot takes place on Staten Island and offers participants $ 5,000 to stay on the island, with a tracking device implanted in their arm so their behaviour can be monitored.

While paying participants in research is not inherently unethical, in fact, in most experiments, participants are compensated for their time, for travel, for the inconvenience or as a thank you.

But the amount, $ 5000, is staggering. Even for a 12 hour experement, it is an astronomical amount of money, equalling around $417 per hour. Not bad for staying in your homes for a night. Within the context of the film, it is transformative. Characters explicitly frame it as life-changing, enough to override hesitation and minimise perceived risk.

This is where the concept of undue inducement becomes critical. As discussed by Ezekiel Emanuel and colleagues in their framework for ethical research, valid consent requires that participation is voluntary, not shaped by offers that are so attractive they impair judgment.

The issue is not that participants are irrational. It is their circumstances that make the offer disproportionately powerful. Economic vulnerability narrows the field of “reasonable” choices, making acceptance the most viable option.

In that sense, the study is not simply compensating participants. It is leveraging inequality to secure participation.

And that has direct implications for consent. If declining the offer carries a meaningful cost (like everyone around you being 5k richer come morning), then agreeing to it is not entirely free.

Informed Consent: Disclosure Is Not the Same as Understanding

The film makes a point of showing that at least some participants are told that violence (including murder) is a possibility. But it also makes it clear that this information is not uniformly understood.

Early in the experiment, there is a notable lack of participation. People stay indoors, treat the night as uneventful, and assume they can collect their payment without engaging in risk. This behaviour suggests that many participants interpret the experiment as something they can passively endure rather than actively survive.

This gap between disclosure and understanding is central to debates around informed consent. As outlined in Principles of Biomedical Ethics, consent requires not just information, but comprehension. Participants must grasp the nature, likelihood, and severity of risks in order to make a meaningful decision.

If participants underestimate those risks or believe they can opt out of them through minimal engagement, then consent becomes ethically unstable. The film does not show outright deception. Instead, it shows something more subtle and arguably more common: insufficient understanding.

And in research ethics, that distinction matters very little. Consent that is not fully informed is not fully valid.

Paid Participation: Incentivising Behaviour, Not Observing It

The experiment escalates when participants are offered additional money for “further participation.” At this point, the study crosses from observation into intervention.

Participants are no longer simply being monitored; they are being encouraged to act, with financial incentives tied directly to escalation.

From a methodological perspective, this introduces significant bias. Behaviour is no longer spontaneous; it is shaped by reward structures. What is being measured is not how people behave under certain conditions, but how they respond to incentives.

Here, the design actively contaminates its own data.

From an ethical perspective, the issue is even sharper. Participants are not just exposed to risk; they are paid to increase it. Harm becomes a variable that can be amplified through compensation.

At that point, the study is no longer examining behaviour. It is engineering it.

And that distinction fundamentally undermines both its ethical and scientific legitimacy.

The Right to Withdraw: Consent That Cannot Be Revoked

One of the most basic principles in research ethics is the participant’s right to withdraw. Individuals should be able to leave a study at any time, for any reason, without penalty.

In The First Purge, this principle is effectively nonexistent.

The $5000 payment is contingent on remaining for the full duration, creating immediate pressure to stay. More critically, once the experiment begins, withdrawal becomes practically impossible. The island is contained, violence escalates, and leaving is impossible with the closure of all bridges and exits.

A right that cannot be exercised is not a right.

What the film presents is a form of locked-in consent, an agreement that cannot be meaningfully revoked once conditions change. Participants may have consented at the outset, but they are not able to reassess or withdraw that consent as the situation deteriorates.

Which raises a fundamental issue: consent is not a one-time event. It is an ongoing process. And in this experiment, that process is systematically denied.

TAKEAWAY

It does not take a genius to realise that the ‘Purge’ is not an ethical experiment; in fact, that is kinda the point. But what it does reveal, perhaps more effectively than it intends, is how fragile the concept of consent becomes under pressure.

The franchise has always leaned into a kind of consequentialist logic: one night of violence is acceptable if it produces stability for the other 364. What I am arguing here is not about whether that logic holds. It is that even as research, the experiment fails on its own terms.

The participants are selectively recruited, the incentives are disproportionate, the risks are not fully understood, and the right to withdraw is effectively removed.

The fact that the ethics of this experiment are so poor is not incidental; it is part of the point. It exposes the bias, the political pressure, and the predetermined outcomes that sit behind the study. These are aspects deserve their own post to fully get into.

But for now, what matters is this: good research is not just about what you are trying to find out, but how you go about finding it. Ethics is not an afterthought or a bureaucratic step; it is what makes research legitimate in the first place.

And it is worth remembering that this has not always been guaranteed. From anthropology to medical trials, when ethics is overlooked it gives way to exploitation, bias, and harm disguised as knowledge.

Which is, perhaps, the real horror story.

Thank you for reading! This blog is intended as a way to engage with the literature and themes I encounter in my research in a more accessible, reflective format. It allows me to process ideas and share insights without subjecting readers to the full scope of 1.5 years of research.

If this piece resonated with you, I encourage you to explore the literature that inspired it (some references are listed below). Please note that this blog offers only a surface-level introduction, there is only so much a couple of thousand words can capture. Think of it as a precursor to more in-depth journal articles to come.

Please, join the conversation. I would be fascinated to know how your research or experience resonates in pop culture!

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[1] The Belmont Report (1979)

[2] Emanuel, E. J., Wendler, D., & Grady, C. (2000) - What Makes Clinical Research Ethical?

[3] Blackburn (2003) - Ethics: A Very Short Introduction

One journalist and documentary maker whose work I have admired for years is Simon Reeve. Much of Reeve’s work focuses on borders, geopolitics, and the uneven realities of globalisation. His documentaries frequently reveal stark juxtapositions of power and freedom—inequalities and paradoxes that exist in places separated by little more than a few inches of concrete or a stretch of water.

A striking example appears in one of his documentaries on the Mediterranean when he visits Ceuta. Now, many might not know much about Ceuta: a small Spanish enclave on the northern coast of Morocco. Although geographically located in Africa, Ceuta is politically part of Spain and therefore the European Union. It is one of the only land borders between Europe and Africa, and as a result, it has become one of the most fortified and politically sensitive borders in the region.

What does any of this have to do with some zombie thriller (or zombie-adjacent for those zombie purists)?

The connection lies in a paradox visible throughout Reeve’s visit.

In the forests near the border, Reeve speaks with migrants who have travelled thousands of kilometres to reach this point. Many are waiting for an opportunity to climb the imposing fences separating Morocco from Spanish territory. Some have attempted the crossing multiple times. Some have been injured doing so. Others speak about friends who were not as fortunate. Yet despite the risks, they remain there, waiting for a chance.

Meanwhile, Reeve himself is able to cross borders with relative ease. With a hop, skip, and a short boat journey, he can move freely between countries.

The difference between him and the people he interviews is not intelligence, ambition, or moral worth. Instead, it lies in a small booklet he carries: a passport.

More specifically, a British passport.

Migration scholars often describe this disparity as citizenship stratification or passport inequality, the global hierarchy that determines whose mobility is facilitated and whose is restricted. Sociologist Ayelet Shachar famously described this phenomenon as “the birthright lottery”, arguing that citizenship functions like inherited property: it distributes life chances based largely on the circumstances of birth.

In this sense, the difference between Reeve and the migrants outside Ceuta can be described as an accident of birth.

Curiously, one of the most striking cultural explorations of this idea does not come from a political documentary or a migration study, but Danny Boyle’s thriller 28 Years Later (2025).

Perhaps this is because the story is set in the United Kingdom. The film allows viewers to imagine a reversal of familiar assumptions: a country normally associated with global mobility suddenly becomes isolated from the world beyond its borders.

Within this fictional scenario, we see three perspectives: those who lived through the collapse, those who were born into the isolation that followed, and those who encounter the quarantined territory from outside.

Seen this way, the film becomes something more than a post-apocalyptic thriller. It becomes an allegory about borders, containment, and the uneven distribution of mobility in the modern world.

Within this scenario, the circumstances of birth determine everything.

Those born inside the quarantine inherit isolation and supposed doom. While those born outside inherit mobility and security at their sacrifice.

PART ONE: RAISED BY IT

Most public discussions about refugees begin with rupture. War breaks out. A government collapses. A famine spreads. A disaster strikes.

Suddenly, people are on the move.

Images of displacement, crowded boats crossing the Mediterranean, long lines at border crossings, sprawling camps, have become the visual shorthand for what migration scholars call forced displacement.

Yet focusing only on movement risks missing something crucial. Refugees do not enter a neutral global space once they leave their homes. They enter a world where mobility is already unevenly structured. Migration scholars increasingly describe this as a global mobility regime: a system of passports, visas, carrier sanctions, border enforcement practices, and diplomatic hierarchies that determines who can move easily and who cannot.

In other words, the conditions of mobility are not created by the crisis alone.

The legal architecture of refugee protection, anchored in the 1951 Refugee Convention and administered globally by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, recognises the right to seek asylum from persecution. But the ability to exercise that right depends heavily on the capacity to reach a territory where protection can be claimed.

This is where passport inequality becomes visible.

Refugee crises reveal how mobility is already stratified. Individuals fleeing violence encounter borders structured by visa restrictions, surveillance technologies, airline liability rules, and geopolitical alliances that privilege certain passports while constraining others.

Recent conflicts illustrate this dynamic clearly. In the Syrian civil war, for example, years of sanctions, economic collapse, and diplomatic isolation significantly reduced the mobility options available to many Syrians long before they attempted to flee. Even when protection rights formally existed, reaching a territory where those rights could be exercised often required extraordinary risk.

In 28 Years Later, characters such as Dr Kelson, Jamie, and Isla embody a society caught at precisely this point of rupture. They remember the collapse triggered by the events of 28 Days Later, when institutions and infrastructure disintegrated almost overnight.

Yet what resonates is that their situation is not simply a catastrophe, but containment.

Britain in the film has not merely collapsed; it has been sealed off from the rest of the world. The borders surrounding it function less as lines of governance and more as barriers of quarantine.

The film exaggerates the logic of geopolitical quarantine, but in doing so, it foregrounds a question central to contemporary migration debates: What happens when passport inequality becomes so extreme that it turns an entire population into a contained one?

PART TWO: BORN IN IT

If the first generation experiences crisis as rupture, the next generation experiences it as inheritance.

Many displacement situations do not resolve quickly. Refugee studies increasingly refer to protracted displacement, contexts where temporary protection regimes persist for years or decades without durable solutions such as return, integration, or resettlement.

In these contexts, displacement becomes generational.

Children grow up within political and legal systems designed for temporary emergencies, but which gradually become permanent features of everyday life. Scholars often describe this dynamic as the temporary–permanent paradox: arrangements intended to manage short-term crises become long-term structures shaping entire lives.

The generational perspective in 28 Years Later reflects a similar logic.

Spike, unlike the older survivors, has never experienced a Britain connected to global systems of trade, travel, or governance. The quarantine is not a historical rupture for him. It is simply the world he was born into.

This distinction matters.

For those who lived through the outbreak, isolation represents the loss of a previous life. For Spike’s generation, isolation defines the limits of the imaginable future.

In migration research, generational displacement often produces precisely this shift in perspective. Those born into constrained mobility regimes do not necessarily frame their lives around exile or loss. Instead, they navigate the political and institutional structures that already define their environment. Spike’s situation, therefore, reflects something deeper than the survivalist conditions of a zombie apocalypse. It reflects how citizenship and borders shape opportunity across generations.

The issue is not merely whether someone can cross a border.

It is how birthplace determines the scale of the world available to them.

In Spike’s case, the difference is stark: just fifty kilometres across the English Channel lies a society that still participates in global mobility networks. Yet that world is functionally unreachable.

PART THREE: THE OUTSIDERS

The final perspective in 28 Years Later comes from those positioned outside the quarantine.

If the first generation experiences catastrophe as rupture, and the second generation experiences it as inheritance, outsiders encounter the crisis primarily through the lens of containment.

From the perspective of the soldiers stationed around the quarantined United Kingdom, the island has become something more than a country in distress. It is a zone that must be monitored, controlled, and prevented from spreading the infection beyond its borders.

Within the context of the film, this concern is entirely understandable and defensible. The Rage virus represents a genuine threat, and the quarantine exists to protect populations beyond Britain’s shores.

Yet containment also shapes perception.

Distance reduces the complexity of a society to a single defining characteristic: danger.

International relations scholars often describe this dynamic through the concept of securitisation, developed by theorists such as Ole Wæver. Securitisation occurs when political actors frame an issue primarily through the language of threat and protection, allowing extraordinary policies, such as militarised borders or emergency containment measures, to become both legitimate and expected.

Importantly, securitisation does not require the threat to be imaginary. Rather, it highlights how security framing can shape how societies interpret events and prioritise responses.

In the case of quarantined Britain, the security logic is clear: preventing the spread of the virus requires strict containment. But over time, that logic begins to define how outsiders imagine the territory itself.

Britain becomes less a society and more a problem space.

The survivors become victims of oversimplification.

The soldiers stationed along its borders understand it largely through briefings, warnings, and stories about the dangers within. Their knowledge of the place is mediated by the institutions responsible for containing it. This results in characters like Erik, who approach the surviving "natives" with arrogance, judgement and perhaps condescension, fed by a narrative and worldview that situates his way of life as better, as him as the moral, intellectual or social better.

Yet moments of direct encounter reveal how incomplete that perspective can be.

Perhaps the funniest scene in the film is when the Swedish soldier attempts to impress Spike by showing him a photograph of his girlfriend on his phone. We get a satisfying commentary on the aesthetics of a consumer society from a child raised distinctly outside of it. The moment is humorous, but it also reveals the profound cultural distance produced by decades of isolation.

This is where the film’s allegory reconnects with the politics of borders more broadly. When separation persists long enough, it shapes not only movement but also understanding. Populations begin to imagine one another through the limited narratives available to them—stories mediated by distance, institutions, and the policies that maintain the separation.

Borders, therefore, function not only as physical barriers but also as epistemic boundaries, shaping what populations know or believe they know about one another.

They shape how societies see each other.

And once those perceptions harden, the structures that created the separation in the first place become easier to accept as permanent.

CONCLUSION

There is a quiet discomfort at the heart of 28 Years Later.

As a society, it seems we are eager to fool ourselves into thinking the plights of those across our borders, those in war zones, refugees, and victims of political violence, could never happen to us. Maybe because maybe we are professionals with years of education and expertise like Dr Kelson, or simply beneficiaries of an accident of birth.

What makes 28 Years Later such a compelling allegory is that it reverses a familiar hierarchy. The United Kingdom, historically one of the most globally mobile societies, becomes a sealed territory whose citizens cannot leave.

The survivors are trapped regardless of skills, ambitions, and identities. It all matters less than the geopolitical status of the place they were born. This is the unsettling logic at the heart of passport inequality. The fictional quarantine in 28 Years Later pushes this logic to an extreme. Yet the underlying principle is real.

In a world structured by unequal mobility regimes, the difference between freedom and confinement can ultimately come down to something remarkably arbitrary. The place someone happened to be born.

An accident of birth.

Thank you for reading! This blog is intended as a way to engage with the literature and themes I encounter in my research in a more accessible, reflective format. It allows me to process ideas and share insights without subjecting readers to the full scope of what is now, 1.5 years of research and counting.

If this piece resonated with you, I encourage you to explore the literature that inspired it (some references are listed below). Please note that this blog offers only a surface-level introduction (there is only so much a couple of thousand words can capture). Think of it as a precursor to more in-depth journal articles to come.

Subscribe now

Please, join the conversation. I would be fascinated to know how your research or experience resonates in pop culture!

[1] Ayelet Shachar (2009) The Birthright Lottery: Citizenship and Global Inequality

[2] Alan Gamlen (2021) The Global Mobility Divide

[3] David Scott FitzGerald (2019) Refuge beyond Reach

[4] Editors - Issa Touma, Malu Halasa, Zaher Omareen (2020) Displacement: Global Conversations on Refuge

[5] Ole Wæver (1995) Securitization and Desecuritization

Placemaking, alike vernacular, is a term that is fundamental to my research yet is quite possibly one of the hardest-to-define, yet most mundane, words I can think of.

The Oxford Dictionary defines it as “The action of ringing the changes on two bells in a way that makes room for a third” and regards it as an obsolete word since 1872, which is as frustrating as it is irrelevant. Yet the Cambridge Dictionary has no definition at all, so… point to Oxford, I suppose.

Wikipedia, however, has proven to outshine both with an explanation that at least resembles the definition I have been working with:

Placemaking is a multidisciplinary approach to planning, designing, and managing public spaces that highlights community involvement, human-centred design, and the development of meaningful, functional, and attractive environments.

While placemaking covers a variety of methods and scales, it is distinguished by improving urban vitality and reinforcing place identity by prioritising people over physical structures.

So what does this all have to do with The Martian, a science fiction movie about a man stranded alone on a planet with no public spaces, no community, and certainly no urban vitality to reinforce identity?

Well, that is where my research comes into play.

Much of urban theory (placemaking included) was developed with a very particular type of place in mind: Western cities in the Global North. Streets, squares, parks, neighbourhoods, infrastructure, density. But increasingly, we are forced to ask how these theories translate to contexts far beyond those conditions. What does placemaking mean where there are no permanent buildings? Where the “city” is a temporary camp? Where the community itself is displaced?

If we want to understand placemaking more broadly, we need to think about it in contexts where people are marginalised, displaced, or forced into environments never designed to become places at all.

If we start with the idea that placemaking is about “reinforcing place identity through prioritising people”, then it becomes quite obvious quite quickly that Mark Watney, the self-proclaimed “space pirate” stranded on Mars, spends most of the film doing exactly that.

Mars may be an empty planet, but Watney does not survive by simply existing in space.

He survives by making a place.

PART ONE: WHAT IS GIVEN AND WHAT IS TAKEN AWAY

At the start of the film, we see what is given.

The habitat, the equipment, the vehicles; everything is designed for the mission. Every object has a purpose tied to scientific experiment, exploration, and data collection. The environment is controlled, planned, and functional. It is an engineered space.

But crucially, it is not a place. It is infrastructure. It exists to support a project, not to support a life.

This distinction is important because many institutional environments on Earth operate in much the same way. Refugee camps, disaster relief zones, military installations, and research stations are designed as logistical systems. They prioritise efficiency, safety, and manageability above all else.

Shelter is provided. Water is provided. Food is provided.

But the spaces themselves are rarely designed with the expectation that people will actually live there.

They are designed to function.

In humanitarian planning, this is often deliberate. Camps are laid out in grids for easier surveillance, easier distribution of aid, and easier management of large populations. The architecture is temporary by design. Permanence is avoided because the assumption (or perhaps the hope) is that residents will not remain long enough for permanence to matter.

In other words, they are spaces built around an institutional horizon rather than a human one.

Mars, at the start of the film, is exactly this kind of environment. The habitat is not a home but a temporary outpost. The rovers are not vehicles for daily life but tools for exploration. The mission is structured around scientific goals rather than human rhythms.

Then the storm hits.

In the chaos of the evacuation, Watney is struck by debris and presumed dead by the rest of the crew. The mission leaves Mars, and suddenly, the carefully designed infrastructure is stripped of its original meaning.

The mission is over.

The experiment is over.

What remains is survival.

And this is where placemaking begins.

Watney’s priorities shift almost immediately. The scientific objectives of the mission become irrelevant; the habitat is no longer a research station but a shelter. The rover is not an exploration vehicle but a lifeline. Every object around him is reinterpreted through a new lens: not what was this designed for? But how can this help me live?

The built environment has not changed, but its meaning has.

Space becomes place.

Placemaking, in this context, is not about beautifying a city square or designing an attractive street corner. It is about survival. It is about transforming a hostile, indifferent environment into something structured, navigable, and meaningful enough for a human life to continue within it.

PART TWO: PoTaYtO

Once the immediate shock of survival passes, Watney begins the slow process of transforming the Martian habitat from infrastructure into something closer to a home.

The most obvious example is the potatoes.

Quick side note. These potatoes may be what started this blog: the desire to link research and academia to pop culture, when at school we were asked (as an extracurricular, mind you) to look into the science behind these potatoes and other fruit and vegitables to come up with a presentation about which vegitables would still be edible and which would be poisonous if grown on mars. 10 years later, and here I am talking about those same potatoes.

It is safe to say they left an impression.

In the film, Watney realises he can grow food using the crew’s remaining potatoes, Martian soil, and, rather less glamourously, his own “fertiliser”. It is a moment played partly for humour, but it is also deeply symbolic.

Agriculture is perhaps the oldest act of placemaking humans have engaged in. To cultivate land is to claim it, to invest it with labour and expectation, to transform an alien environment into something productive and familiar. For thousands of years, the act of farming has been the foundation of settlement.

Farming is not just about food.

It is about time.

Planting potatoes means believing you will still be alive when they are harvested. It establishes what phenomenologists and philosophers like Husserl, Heidegger, and Merleau-Ponty term as temporal horizons, the ability to imagine yourself existing in the future.

So Watney is not simply growing food, He is establishing a relationship with the environment around him.

The habitat becomes more than shelter; it becomes a place where things grow. That growth represents hope, or at least an expectation of a future, but also control. In a situation defined almost entirely by uncertainty, the potato farm becomes something predictable.

It is an act of agency.

It is an act of agency witnessed across displacement contexts, from the establishment of shops and markets, as seen in Al Zaatari [1], to young adults selling their rations (the only thing they have) to buy a phone [2].

Placemaking, just like planting, is an investment in tomorrow.

It says: I expect to still be here.

This may sound pessimistic, but it is also profoundly human. in these environments of indefinite temporariness, where time becomes something to control and manage, it is an act of agency, a choice made by the individual not just for them.

PART THREE: PANIC AT THE DISCO

If potatoes establish the future, disco establishes identity.

Watney’s only entertainment on Mars is the music collection left behind by his crewmate Commander Lewis, which happens to consist almost entirely of disco.

For most of the film, Watney complains about it relentlessly. But he still listens to it. Again and again.

Music, humour, and storytelling might seem trivial in comparison to oxygen levels or food supplies, but they are essential elements of placemaking. Culture anchors identity within space. It reminds people of who they were before displacement and who they still are despite it.

But culture also does something else: it resists reduction.

In emergency environments, people are often reduced to statistics. Camp populations are counted, managed, and categorised through systems designed to measure need and distribute aid efficiently. While these systems are necessary, they can also flatten the complexity of human life.

Cultural practices disrupt this reduction.

In refugee camps, music, food, storytelling, and humour reintroduce individuality and social identity into environments that are otherwise organised around management. In camps such as Domiz in Iraq, researchers have documented residents decorating shelters, painting murals, opening barbershops, and organising football tournaments. None of these activities is essential for biological survival, but they are essential for maintaining dignity and social belonging [3].

Watney’s disco problem operates in much the same way.

Listening to music, complaining about it, joking about his situation, and recording video diaries all serve to maintain a sense of personhood. He refuses to become simply a stranded astronaut awaiting rescue. Instead, he narrates his experience, turning survival into a story.

These small cultural practices anchor identity within space.

Without them, Mars would remain purely hostile terrain.

With them, it becomes something closer to lived space.

CONCLUSION:

While we suspend disbelief to watch Matt Damon become the most resourceful space pirate imaginable, it is worth remembering that the environment he navigates is not as alien as it first appears.

Much of the Mars landscape in The Martian was filmed in the deserts of Jordan, the same country that hosts two of the most studied refugee camps in the world: Zaatari Refugee Camp and Azraq Refugee Camp.

This does not mean the film is about refugees, of course.

But the visual parallel is difficult to ignore.

Mars in the film appears as an empty desert scattered with temporary infrastructure designed for a specific mission. Survival depends on improvisation, adaptation, and the ability to make meaning within an environment never intended to be lived in permanently.

In this sense, Watney’s story is not as alien as it first appears.

Across the world today, hundreds of millions of displaced people are living in environments originally designed as temporary emergency responses, with little infrastructure within a harsh and hostile environment. Camps built for short-term crises often remain in place for decades, a temporary permanent paradox. Entire generations grow up within them.

Like Watney, residents must learn to survive within systems not originally designed for ordinary life and like Watney, they make places anyway.

These acts of placemaking are not simply aesthetic choices. They are acts of agency. They are ways of reclaiming control, establishing identity, and projecting a future in circumstances defined by uncertainty.

Watney waits on Mars, knowing rescue may take years. Many refugees wait in camps without knowing if rescue will come at all. But in both cases, survival depends on the same thing.

Humans cannot live in space alone.

We have to make places first.

Thank you for reading! This blog is intended as a way to engage with the literature and themes I encounter in my research in a more accessible, reflective format. It allows me to process ideas and share insights without subjecting readers to the full scope of 1.5 years of research.

If this piece resonated with you, I encourage you to explore the literature that inspired it (some references are listed below). Please note that this blog offers only a surface-level introduction—there is only so much a couple of thousand words can capture. Think of it as a precursor to more in-depth journal articles to come.

Subscribe now

Please, join the conversation. I would be fascinated to know how your research or experience resonates in pop culture!

[1] Al Waer, H. (2022). Al Zaatari Refugee Camp: the reassertion of a cultural identity. From Boundaries to Belvederes: framing the edge, 34-39.

[2] City of Thorns by Ben Rawlence (2016)

[3] Refugee Republic (2014) Jumpstarting a new existence in an emerging city. Everyday life in a refugee camp.

Episode 5 was extraordinary and I did say there could be a part two to my blog on this show…

The events surrounding the Trial of the Seven (and the flashbacks woven through it) crystallise a theme that has quietly structured the narrative from the beginning and will undoubtedly reverberate through future seasons: the burden of others’ sacrifice.

Sacrifice is, of course, common in fantasy. Knights swear oaths. Blood is spilt for honour. Characters fall to preserve dynasties or ideals. But what distinguishes this episode is not the spectacle of sacrifice. It is what happens afterwards.

The narrative lingers not on death, but on survival.

The question becomes less “Who will give their life?” and more unsettlingly: “Who must live with it?”

Ser Duncan the Tall has always been defined by his stubborn decency. He is not politically sophisticated. He is not strategically brilliant. He does not pursue glory. What he possesses instead is moral clarity; a commitment to fairness, to protecting the vulnerable, to keeping his word even when it costs him.

In this episode, that clarity becomes heavier.

Through flashbacks and consequences, we are reminded that Dunk did not become who he is alone. He was shaped by the sacrifices of others: time given, risks taken, protection offered, faith extended when it was not rational to do so. His knighthood, his moral code, and even his survival are not self-generated achievements. They are inheritances.

And inheritance is weighty.

Watching this episode, I found myself thinking less about chivalry and more about the quieter forms of inheritance; not of land or title, but of time, labour, faith, and endurance. The burden of sacrifice is not confined to knights and battlefields. It exists in lecture halls, libraries, and family kitchens. It exists in the hours parents give, in the mentors who invest in us, and in the lives we study as researchers.

Sacrifice is not always tragic. But it is always formative.

And it demands a response.

Part I: Inheritance and the Sacrifice of Time

Sacrifice is often imagined as dramatic: a life given, a body placed between danger and another. But most sacrifice is quieter. It takes the form of time, the most finite resource anyone possesses.

In A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms, Ser Duncan’s moral code is not self-created. It is cultivated. Someone trained him. Someone corrected him. Someone believed in him before he had proof that he deserved belief. His honour is an inheritance. And that inheritance is made of hours.

Time is the clearest form of sacrifice because it cannot be returned. As sociologist Pierre Bourdieu argues, social reproduction occurs not only through economic capital but through investments of time, habitus, and expectation. Families do not merely pass down money; they pass down structured possibilities. Educational success is scaffolded by unseen labour: shifts worked, opportunities deferred, anxieties absorbed.

Money can be repaid. Objects can be replaced. But hours once given are gone. To give time is to give life in fragments.

In virtue ethics, particularly in Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, character is formed through habituation within relationships. No one becomes virtuous alone. Moral dispositions are cultivated by models, corrections, encouragements, and by others who invest attention and care. Virtue, then, is not self-authored; it is inherited.

When I consider my own academic trajectory, I cannot disentangle it from my parents’ surrendered time. Their labour created the conditions for my study. Their sacrifices were not singular heroic acts but sustained commitments: incremental, repeated, ordinary.

And precisely because they were ordinary, they were immense.

To recognise that my present rests on their surrendered hours creates something deeper than gratitude. Gratitude is too soft a word. What I feel is closer to inheritance: a sense that my opportunities are composed partly of time they will never reclaim.

Modern academic culture often privileges narratives of individual merit. The “self-made” scholar, the disciplined intellectual, the exceptional candidate. But such narratives obscure relational foundations. Achievement appears as a personal triumph rather than a collective investment.

Recognising inheritance destabilises that myth.

And that inheritance carries weight. To squander what others gave feels not merely imprudent but ethically wrong. To underuse an opportunity feels like misalignment with the sacrifices that enabled it. The burden is not imposed externally; it emerges internally, through memory.

Ser Duncan’s honour operates similarly. His decency is not spontaneous moral genius. It is cultivated through mentorship and trust extended to him when he was vulnerable. His survival is inseparable from others’ risks. What he carries is not merely his own reputation but the residue of sacrifices that made him who he is.

To inherit time is to inherit obligation; not contractual, but ethical.

Part II: Studying Suffering and the Weight of ‘Researcher’s Guilt’

If inheritance were only about parental sacrifice, the burden might be straightforward: work hard, succeed, honour them. But the complexity deepens when what one studies is suffering itself.

My research engages with communities experiencing structural injustice and material deprivation. I analyse narratives of constraint, endurance, and systemic harm. Their stories become chapters, arguments, publications. My professional advancement is intertwined with their lived difficulty.

This produces a sort of “researcher’s guilt.” While not a clinical category, adjacent concepts are well established. Litz et al. define moral injury as the distress that arises from perceived participation in, or benefit from, morally troubling systems. Though initially developed in military psychology, the concept has expanded to contexts where individuals experience ethical dissonance within institutional structures.

In academic research, the troubling system is structural inequality itself. Universities reward publications. Funding bodies reward impact. Careers are built on knowledge production, including knowledge about suffering. The researcher may not create the injustice studied, yet they may benefit from its existence.

The distress does not stem from direct wrongdoing but from complicity in structures that convert suffering into professional capital.

While I write, cite, and present, the individuals whose experiences ground my analysis continue to navigate the realities I describe. Their vulnerability becomes data. Their testimony becomes evidence.

This is the case for, dare I say, most research. This tension is not unique to my field. It is, in many ways, inherent to research itself. We seek to understand the world’s problems in order to address them, but that pursuit depends on their existence. Cancer research requires patients. Conflict studies require war. Poverty research requires deprivation. Knowledge advances because suffering is present. The uncomfortable truth is that entire disciplines are structured around realities we would ultimately prefer did not exist.

The success of our research is its redundancy.

Here, Miranda Fricker’s concept of epistemic injustice sharpens the concern. To wrong someone as a knower by misinterpreting, oversimplifying, or appropriating their account is a distinct moral harm. The risk in research is not merely misrepresentation, but epistemic extraction: benefiting from others’ knowledge without adequately recognising them as epistemic agents.

This concern intersects with Sandra Harding’s standpoint theory, which emphasises that knowledge is socially situated. Researchers often analyse communities from positions of relative structural advantage. Awareness of this asymmetry is not optional; it is methodologically necessary. To pretend neutrality is to ignore positionality.

The burden, then, deepens. I inherit not only my parents’ time but also participants’ testimony; their emotional labour, their trust, their willingness to articulate painful realities.

Part III: Am I Just the Bad Guy?

The question becomes unavoidable: how do I carry this ethically? without collapsing into guilt or retreating into defensiveness?

Moral injury literature suggests that repair requires acknowledgement and reorientation toward values. The aim is not self-condemnation but integration. The ethical tension must be named without allowing it to paralyse action.

In research terms, this means refusing both extremes. On one side lies detached objectivism, the pretence that intellectual analysis is morally neutral. On the other hand lies immobilising self-doubt, the belief that benefiting from research proximity renders scholarship inherently exploitative.

Neither position is sustainable.

The burden must instead be transformed into responsibility.

This begins with epistemic humility: recognising participants as co-producers of knowledge rather than mere sources. It requires writing with care, resisting sensationalism, preserving complexity, and refusing to reduce lives to illustrations of theory. It requires explicit positionality, acknowledging asymmetry without surrendering legitimacy.

It also requires acknowledging one’s own labour. My parents’ time created a possibility; it did not write my dissertation. Participants’ testimony enables analysis; it does not, by itself, produce an argument without sustained intellectual work.

The burden of sacrifice must not become a narrative of unworthiness. It must become a narrative of responsibility.

Here I return to Ser Duncan.

He does not attempt to repay what cannot be repaid. He embodies it. His courage is not guilt-driven. It is fidelity-driven. He acts in ways consistent with the values invested in him.

For the researcher, bravery is quieter but analogous. It means confronting uncomfortable findings. It means resisting institutional pressures to commodify suffering. It means continuing the work carefully and critically, without romanticising hardship or appropriating it.

The burden is not a verdict.

It is a reminder that scholarship is relational.

Conclusion

The Trial of the Seven reframes survival as inheritance. To live in the wake of sacrifice is to carry what others surrendered. Ser Duncan the Tall models a way of carrying it; not through repayment, and not through paralysis, but through fidelity.

In my own life, I carry two intertwined inheritances: the time my parents gave so that I could study, and the testimony of those whose suffering grounds my research. Both create ethical weight. Both expose asymmetries of power and benefit.

Moral injury, epistemic injustice, and standpoint theory help name the discomfort. But naming is only the beginning. The task is to transform burden into responsibility; to live and work bravely, not out of guilt, but out of deliberate acknowledgement.

Sacrifice cannot be undone.

It can only be honoured in how we proceed.

And perhaps that is the real lesson: inheritance is not something we repay. It is something we carry forward.

“You can’t say that anymore.”

It’s a phrase we hear constantly, often muttered in frustration, sometimes wielded as an accusation or mark of moral superiority. It usually appears when something old collides with something new: a joke that no longer lands, a line that once drew laughter but now produces silence, a scene that feels suddenly uncomfortable. Rewatching The Fast and the Furious franchise with my brother, I found myself thinking it more times than I expected.

What began as a nostalgic marathon quickly became something closer to an archaeological dig. Watching these films in sequence (well… not quite. We somehow watched Fast & Furious before The Fast and the Furious, only returning to the original after 2 Fast 2 Furious, like some fever-dream flashback caused by whoever approved this naming convention) felt like flipping through a cultural time capsule. The street racing, the cars, the explosions, and the increasingly implausible stunts remain, but the language, gender politics, racial representations, and sexual norms shift noticeably from film to film.

Moments that once passed without comment now provoke winces: casual slurs, hypersexualised portrayals of women, throwaway sexist jokes, and laddish bravado that feels both dated and deeply revealing. It’s not that the franchise suddenly became offensive; it’s that we have changed. Or, perhaps more accurately, what we publicly accept has changed.

That’s what makes long-running franchises so fascinating. They don’t just entertain; they archive. They preserve the moral atmosphere of their moment. They capture what a culture finds funny, admirable, acceptable, or invisible. When those moments accumulate over decades, they offer a rare longitudinal snapshot of social values in motion.

Rewatching The Fast and the Furious becomes more than nostalgia. It becomes cultural analysis. A way of tracing how ideas about masculinity, race, gender, sexuality, and power evolve, and where they stubbornly refuse to.

“You can’t say that anymore” is not simply a critique. It is a historical observation. And, as with all historical observations, it demands speculation.

Part I: Masculinity, Power, and the Performance of Cool

In its earliest form, The Fast and the Furious is saturated with a hyper-masculine ethos: emotionally reserved, physically dominant, heterosexual, risk-seeking, aggressively competitive. This is a world where men prove themselves through speed, violence, and emotional silence. Vulnerability signals weakness. Intimacy threatens authority. Tenderness is feminised and therefore suspect.

This vision of masculinity did not emerge in isolation. It reflects a specific cultural moment shaped by late-20th-century neoliberal restructuring, post-industrial economic anxiety, and the aftershocks of Cold War geopolitics.

By the late 1990s and early 2000s, Western masculinity was undergoing profound destabilisation. Manufacturing industries had collapsed. Stable working-class labour had eroded. Male breadwinner identities were fracturing. Simultaneously, feminist movements, LGBTQ+ activism, and shifting family structures challenged long-standing gender hierarchies. Men were increasingly unsure of their social role, economic value, and cultural authority.

Sociologists often describe this period as a “crisis of masculinity”, not because men were suddenly oppressed, but because traditional masculine scripts no longer guaranteed status, security, or meaning. As the ground beneath male identity shifted, popular culture responded by amplifying exaggerated performances of dominance.

Hypermasculinity became compensation.

In this context, street racing offers more than adrenaline. It provides symbolic restitution. Cars become prosthetic power; mechanical extensions of potency, autonomy, and control. Speed offers transcendence from economic precarity. Danger becomes proof of worth. Where structural power feels unstable, embodied dominance restores coherence.

Dominic Toretto’s early character embodies this logic. His authority is not institutional; he rejects the state, the police, and corporate hierarchy. His power comes from physical competence, loyalty, fear, and moral absolutism. He governs through charisma and capacity. In a moment of institutional distrust, he represents sovereign masculinity: self-legitimating, self-contained, unaccountable. This reflects a deep suspicion of formal authority common in late-90s countercultural masculinity, a reaction to corporate conformity, bureaucratic alienation, and state surveillance.

Brian O’Conner’s arc reinforces the same structure. His initial position within law enforcement is framed as a constraint. His evolution requires rejecting bureaucratic masculinity in favour of subcultural authenticity. Freedom is not rule-following; it is allegiance to a masculine code defined by risk and loyalty.

The films thus stage masculinity as performance: a carefully constructed choreography of dominance, competence, restraint, and control. This performance reassures audiences unsettled by economic uncertainty, shifting gender roles, and cultural pluralism.

But performance has consequences.

The same cultural conditions that produce hypermasculinity also shape how women are positioned, how desire is framed, and how language circulates. Masculinity is not isolated; it structures the entire moral order of the narrative.

If masculinity in the early films depends on dominance and hierarchy, then language becomes one of its key means of enforcement.

Part II: Language, Slurs, and the Moral Recalibration of Speech

Perhaps the most jarring moments in early Fast & Furious films arise not from spectacle, but from language. Casual homophobic slurs, misogynistic jokes, racialised slang, and derogatory banter circulate freely, framed as humour, bonding, or toughness.

These lines are not incidental. They are structurally connected to the masculine ethos described above.

In hypermasculine cultures, language is a mechanism of hierarchy. Insults are not random; they regulate status. Slurs feminise, marginalise, or symbolically expel those who deviate from the dominant script. They function as boundary markers: this is what we are, and that is what we are not.

In early-2000s media culture, this logic was broadly permissible for three reasons.

First, ironic detachment dominated public discourse. Harmful speech was shielded by humour. “It’s just a joke” operated as moral insulation. Irony stripped language of historical context and allowed speakers to disavow responsibility for its effects.

Second, amplification was limited. While feminist and LGBTQ+ movements were active, they lacked the algorithmic force of social media. Marginalised voices struggled to scale critique. Cultural producers faced little immediate accountability.

Third, linguistic aggression was normalised as masculine bonding. Insult signalled toughness. To object was to risk feminisation or exclusion. Silence maintained belonging.

In other words, the language of early Fast & Furious is not separate from its masculinity — it is an extension of it. If dominance is the organising principle of the male hierarchy, then speech becomes one of its enforcement mechanisms.

Part III: A Change in Gear

Over the past two decades, that moral economy has shifted.

Activism, scholarship, and lived testimony reframed language as performative rather than merely expressive. Words do not simply describe; they enact. They include or exclude. They normalise or stigmatise. They shape material realities.

Digital platforms accelerated this recalibration by amplifying marginalised voices and increasing reputational risk for public figures and studios. Harmful speech became instantly visible, globally circulated, and publicly contested. Accountability moved from institutional gatekeepers to networked audiences.

As public consciousness expanded, cultural permission narrowed.

The relative disappearance of slurs and overtly derogatory banter in later instalments of the franchise is not merely random sanitisation. It reflects a broader transformation in how societies understand dignity and harm. When speech is recognised as structurally connected to inequality, tolerating it becomes harder to justify.

This does not mean hierarchy disappears. The franchise still relies on physical dominance, spectacle, and power. But the linguistic tools that once reinforced exclusion become riskier, both morally and commercially.

The phrase “you can’t say that anymore”, therefore, captures more than generational irritation. It marks a shift in the perception of the relationship between speech and harm. What once felt like harmless bonding is now understood as participating in a larger system of marginalisation.

Backlash emerges precisely because language reform feels like status recalibration. When dominant groups lose the ability to casually deploy hierarchy-enforcing speech, it can feel like a loss of freedom. But historically, marginalised groups endured verbal violence without recourse. What appears as a restriction often represents delayed recognition of unequal power.

Language reform is therefore not merely about words. It is about who is entitled to define the social order.

And that is why rewatching feels disorienting.

The early films reveal a world organised around dominance; in masculinity, in gender politics, in speech. Later films soften some of those edges, not because the franchise discovered new ethics in isolation, but because the culture around it recalibrated what dominance could look like and what speech could justify.

“You can’t say that anymore” is not just nostalgia colliding with progress.
It is the sound of hierarchy being renegotiated in real time.

Conclusion: Pop Culture as Moral Archive

Long-running franchises function as cultural sediment. They accumulate layers of belief, fear, aspiration, and anxiety. To rewatch them is to excavate not just narrative evolution, but moral history.

The Fast and the Furious does not simply chart bigger explosions and more implausible stunts. It charts the renegotiation of masculinity, the recalibration of gender politics, and the moral narrowing of what can be said without consequence. It reveals how dominance was once performed, how hierarchy was linguistically enforced, and how those mechanisms have since been softened, reframed, or made more accountable.

The early films offered hypermasculine certainty in a moment of economic and cultural instability. Later films offer relational masculinity (family, grief, loyalty) in a culture more comfortable with emotional visibility. The language evolves alongside it. What once passed as bonding now registers as exclusion. What once felt normal now feels dated.

“You can’t say that anymore” is not just a complaint. It is evidence of movement. It marks the boundary between what a culture once tolerated and what it now recognises as harmful. That boundary shifts because power shifts. Because empathy expands. Because visibility changes who gets to define the rules.

But the story does not end with moral progress.

If the early 2000s were defined by hypermasculine performance as compensation for instability, and the 2010s by the softening of that performance into relational vulnerability, then a new question emerges: what happens when traditional masculine scripts erode faster than new ones solidify?

Today’s so-called “male loneliness epidemic” may be one answer. As economic precarity persists and older models of authority continue to dissolve, many men find themselves without clear scripts for belonging, intimacy, or status. The performance of dominance has been publicly problematised. Emotional openness is encouraged, but not always socially scaffolded. The result can be confusion rather than liberation.

That tension deserves its own examination, its own conversation.

For now, what Fast & Furious makes clear is this: pop culture is not trivial. It is diagnostic. It captures how we imagine strength, how we police speech, how we stage gender, and how we adapt when those scripts stop working.

Rewatching is not just nostalgia.

It is a confrontation.

We are not only seeing who the characters were.
We are seeing who we were — and who we are still trying to become.

To make a crude yet, I feel, fair parallel: A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms is to A Game of Thrones what Rogue One is to Star Wars.

It is a story set within a universe of dragons, White Walkers, and prophetic ravens, but stripped almost entirely of the mystic or supernatural. The magic fades into the background, and what remains is something far more intimate and, paradoxically, more powerful: humanity. Just as Rogue One stepped aside from Jedi and destiny-driven heroes to tell a story about ordinary people driven by the universal need for freedom, purpose, and justice, A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms gives us a Westeros that feels recognisably, frustratingly human.

We already know what happens before and after this story through The House of the Dragon and A Game of Thrones. We know the wars, the betrayals, the political machinery, and the eventual collapse. Yet here, we are given something smaller: a vignette. A fleeting, grounded snapshot of life inside a much larger historical narrative. In doing so, the story achieves something rare — it transforms epic fantasy into social realism.

I should preface this by saying that I am only on episode four, and am yet to see what happens in what will inevitably be a brutal and pivotal story arc through the Trial of Seven. I feel somewhat like the opposite of a formal media critic (who envyably gets to watch everything early). I am avoiding spoilers and instead sitting with the emotional texture of what I’ve seen so far. While waiting for a watch party I’ve organised — and repeatedly delayed — with friends, I’ve found myself reflecting on what is, to this point, the most human iteration of medieval fantasy I’ve ever encountered.

While there is much we can see of ourselves in Ser Duncan the Tall — his insecurity, decency, and quiet resilience — and while Lyonel Baratheon embodies a confidence I deeply admire, it is Raymond Fossoway who has lingered with me. Specifically, his knighting.

“Any knight can make a knight.”

We’ve heard this before in this universe, but here it lands differently. It crystallises into a single word: emancipation. And it draws a striking parallel to something very real — education.

ANY Knight Can Make a KNIGHT: Emancipation, Education, and the Right to Self-Determination

“Any knight can make a knight.” At face value, the phrase seems procedural. A technicality of tradition. But beneath it lies something profoundly radical: identity can be bestowed, transferred, and transformed. One human being can fundamentally alter the social position of another.

In a world rigidly organised by bloodlines and inherited power, this idea is quietly revolutionary. Knighthood is not merely a title — it is legitimacy. It grants social mobility, legal authority, and moral recognition. It changes how the world sees you and, crucially, how you see yourself.

This is precisely what education does in our own world.

For individuals born into poverty, structural barriers often make upward mobility feel mythical. Where you are born, the wealth of your parents, the quality of your schools, and the expectations placed upon you determine far more than raw ability. Poverty narrows possibilities. It compresses imagination. It tells people, explicitly or implicitly, that certain futures are not meant for them.

Education interrupts this narrative.

It does not merely provide knowledge or vocational skill. It confers legitimacy. A qualification signals that you belong in certain spaces, that your voice carries authority, that your aspirations are valid. In effect, education knights people into social participation. It allows individuals to step into rooms, professions, and conversations that would otherwise remain inaccessible.

Like knighthood, education functions as a gateway to self-determination.

Without it, identity is often dictated by necessity. People become what they must in order to survive. With it, they gain the freedom to choose who they wish to become. This is why education has always been politically charged. It redistributes power by redistributing agency.

Raymond’s knighting scene encapsulates this perfectly. He does not suddenly become more capable in that moment. His skills, temperament, and character already exist. What changes is recognition. Someone in authority acknowledges his worth and, through that recognition, reshapes his destiny.

This is emancipation in its purest form: the transfer of possibility.

Education operates on the same principle. A teacher who believes in a student, a mentor who opens a door, a scholarship committee that takes a chance — these are all modern acts of knighting. They declare: you are not confined to the story written by your birth.

And yet, as with knighthood, the right to bestow this transformation is unequally distributed.

Any KNIGHT can make a Knight: Legitimacy, Bias, and the Politics of Education

It would be naïve to believe that the only thing limiting people in life is education. Of course, the issue is far more systemic and nuanced. Poverty is not merely a deficit of knowledge or qualification; it is a web of economic instability, housing insecurity, healthcare inequality, racial and gender discrimination, geographic isolation, and political neglect. Education alone cannot dissolve inequality, just as knighthood alone cannot dismantle Westeros’ rigid class hierarchy. But what both can do is expose how power distributes opportunity, and how legitimacy is granted, withheld, or rationed.

Even within knighthood, there exist clear levels of status. A hedge knight of no renown, no lineage, and no patronage will struggle to enter the lists, as we see with Ser Duncan. His skill, integrity, and courage mean little without recognition. Meanwhile, lords and princes have their knighthoods — and their places in tournaments and life — handed to them, regardless of merit or even desire. Prince Daeron’s resentment highlights this perfectly: status can feel as burdensome as it is privileged, but privilege nonetheless remains privilege.

Yet, Ser Duncan shows us something essential: knighthood is not defined by ceremony but by conduct. He behaves like a knight long before anyone formally recognises him as one. His honour, restraint, and compassion precede his title. The knighting merely ratifies what already exists.

Yet society does not function this way.

In Westeros, it is not enough to act knightly — one must be recognised by the institution of knighthood. Legitimacy flows downward from power. Those who control titles control identity.

Education works in this very same way.

In theory, learning is what matters. In practice, certification from approved and reputable institutions carries the true weight. A self-taught individual may possess extraordinary skill, but without formal credentials, their knowledge often lacks legitimacy. Degrees, diplomas, and institutional endorsements function as social gatekeepers. Not all degrees carry equal weight. Not all schools open the same doors. Not all learning is valued equally. A qualification from an elite institution confers authority, confidence, and social mobility far beyond that attached to underfunded or lesser-known establishments. Two individuals may possess equal intelligence, work ethic, and curiosity, yet their life trajectories diverge sharply based on where — and under whom — they learn.

Any KNIGHT can make a knight.

Education, then, becomes not just a ladder, but a sorting mechanism.

And like knighthood, legitimacy flows downward from power. Those who already occupy elite positions decide whose credentials matter, whose knowledge counts, and whose voices are worth hearing. Educational institutions do not merely transmit knowledge — they curate belonging. Admission processes, funding structures, standardised testing, and cultural capital all shape who gains access. These systems frequently reflect and reproduce existing inequalities. Students from affluent backgrounds arrive equipped with advantages that extend far beyond academic ability: private tutoring, stable home environments, social networks, and familiarity with institutional norms. Meanwhile, students from impoverished communities contend with overcrowded classrooms, underfunded schools, food insecurity, and chronic stress. Even before the race begins, the starting lines are miles apart.

When elite institutions confer legitimacy, they are not merely recognising talent — they are validating privilege.

This mirrors Westerosi knighthood with uncomfortable clarity. Those born near power have vastly greater chances of recognition. Those born far from it must overcome extraordinary odds merely to be seen. Thus, emancipation through education becomes conditional.

This is the central tension: education is framed as a universal ladder, yet its rungs are unevenly spaced. Access is filtered through economic, cultural, and social bias. As a result, education risks becoming not a tool of liberation, but a sophisticated mechanism for preserving hierarchy.

Feudalism Makes the Knight...

Perhaps, then, the deeper question is not simply who gets to be knighted, but what we recognise as knighthood in the first place.

Ser Duncan forces us to confront an uncomfortable truth: virtue, wisdom, and competence often exist outside formal recognition. His conduct embodies everything knighthood claims to represent, yet his legitimacy remains fragile because it does not conform to inherited standards of status. In this tension, we glimpse a larger problem — not just of access, but of definition.

Education suffers from the same limitation.

Western models of education have long privileged particular forms of knowledge: written over oral, abstract over embodied, institutional over communal. Academic authority has historically dismissed lived experience, indigenous knowledge, manual skill, emotional intelligence, and local wisdom as secondary, informal, or insufficiently rigorous. In doing so, it has narrowed not only who is allowed to learn, but whose knowledge is allowed to matter.

Yet there are beginnings of change. Within academia, movements toward decolonised curricula and participatory action research are attempting to rebalance these hierarchies. They seek to recognise communities not merely as subjects of study, but as producers of knowledge. They challenge the assumption that expertise must flow downward from institutions, instead proposing collaborative, reciprocal models of learning. This is not a revolution, but it is a start.

If emancipation through education is to become meaningful, it must involve more than widening access to existing systems. It must also involve expanding what counts as education itself. Just as knighthood should not be reduced to ceremony, knowledge should not be reduced to certification.

Perhaps the most radical possibility is this: that by recognising multiple ways of knowing, we might finally begin to recognise the full humanity of those who hold them.

And in doing so, we may discover that the world already contains far more knights than we have ever been willing to see.

Today’s science fiction is tomorrow’s science fact.

Isaac Asimov understood this well, not because stories predict the future, but because they reveal how we imagine it.

Long before technologies arrive or policies crystallise, we rehearse them in fiction. We stage our fears, our hopes, our ethical trade-offs. We try out futures before we live them. Popular books, blockbuster films, prime-time shows, and long-running franchises aren’t just entertainment; they’re mirrors. They reflect what we fear, what we normalise, and what we slowly begin to accept as inevitable.

Stories do more than distract us for a couple of hours. They shape how we see the world.

They influence what feels heroic, what seems necessary, what looks tragic, and what becomes expendable. Over time, they train our instincts. When surveillance is always shown as reasonable, when sacrifice is framed as noble, when displacement is treated as sad but unavoidable, those ideas start to feel natural, long before they appear in policy documents or political speeches.

We’ve always done this. Think of the heroic myths of ancient Greece, repurposed in times of war. Or the enduring romance of the damsel in distress. Or the way national stories get rewritten during moments of crisis. Across time and culture, stories shape who we are and who we want to be.

From anxieties about artificial intelligence in Mission: Impossible, to shifting attitudes toward policing in Brooklyn Nine-Nine, to the language of security, threat, displacement, and sacrifice that runs through the Marvel Cinematic Universe, pop culture absorbs the political debates of its moment. Stories give shape to problems we are still learning how to name. They allow us to feel our way toward positions before we reason our way there.

This blog takes that seriously.

Pop Culture as Parable reads popular media not as escapism, but as moral storytelling: stories that help us think through power, responsibility, fear, and belonging. Not because films and television offer clear answers, but because they create emotional worlds where our assumptions get tested. Simplified, exaggerated, and dramatic, but revealing.

Parables don’t explain. They provoke. They linger. They stay with us because they resist easy conclusions. They let us approach difficult questions sideways, when direct political debate might trigger defensiveness or fatigue. In this sense, pop culture is one of our most important modern parable-makers, staging our collective anxieties, contradictions, and moral experiments again and again.

Just as Homer, Shakespeare, Austen, Dickens, and Tolstoy once did.

The idea for this project grew out of my academic research. I’m a PhD researcher studying time, agency, and power in refugee camps. Much of my work focuses on waiting: enforced immobility, suspended futures, bureaucratic uncertainty, and the slow erosion of autonomy that shapes everyday life in displacement.

Waiting isn’t just boredom or delay. It’s a political tool. It controls movement, limits choice, and quietly reshapes what people come to expect from life.

As I began this research, I was struck by how familiar many of these dynamics felt. Not because I could relate to them personally (I can’t), but because I had already encountered them in stories. The logic of containment, surveillance, sacrifice, and moral trade-offs appears again and again in popular narratives, from dystopian sci-fi to superhero blockbusters.

The idea that security requires exclusion.
That safety demands sacrifice.
That some lives must be suspended so others can move freely.
That certain suffering is tragic, but necessary.

These ideas were emotionally familiar to me long before I saw their real-world consequences.

That gap — between the extremity of lived suffering and the familiarity of its narrative framing — is what this blog explores.

Why does mass displacement feel both shocking and strangely normal? Why do border deaths provoke outrage and resignation at the same time? Why does prolonged uncertainty seem cruel in individual cases but reasonable when scaled up to systems and institutions? Popular culture doesn’t create these contradictions, but it rehearses them. It gives them narrative form. It makes them emotionally manageable.

Reading pop culture as parable helps us see how political ideas become normal. It lets us examine how power is made to feel necessary, how violence becomes inevitable, how care turns conditional, and how certain lives quietly become disposable. Stories don’t just reflect the world; they train our instincts.

At the same time, they also create space for resistance. Many narratives challenge the very ideas they seem to promote. They expose the costs of security, the cruelty of waiting, and the fragility of moral certainty. They allow us, briefly, to imagine otherwise.

This blog sits in that tension.

It’s an attempt to slow down the stories we consume quickly. To pause over scenes that pass in seconds. To ask what kinds of worlds these narratives assume, and what kinds of futures they quietly prepare us to accept. It’s also an experiment in thinking in public, tracing how ideas take shape, shift, and sometimes fall apart.

Expect weekly 1,500-word essays using a single film or television show as a way into questions of displacement, conflict, and global immigration politics, alongside more personal reflections on positionality, uncertainty, and what it means to think through these questions as a young PhD student. Some posts will be more theoretical, others more narrative. Some will linger on a single scene; others will trace patterns across entire franchises.

No specialist knowledge required.

Just curiosity — and maybe a willingness to overthink Fast & Furious like an English teacher who’s had far too much coffee.