HeyJaredSuperhero Ethics
Exploring ethical questions from Superhero movies and TV shows, sci-fi, and everything else geeks love
- Indexed episodes, last 90 days
- 12
- Latest publication
- Sep 22, 2026
- Audience
- Checking…
- Earliest in this view
- Jul 7, 2026
Latest episodes
Profiling (opens the original)
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Every time you size someone up by their demographics, whether at a poker table or a police stop, you’re profiling them, and it’s worth asking why. On Superhero Ethics, Matthew Fox and Paul Hoppe dig into the different flavors of profiling, from the ways poker players read opponents to the much higher stakes of police profiling on the street.They trace how casinos and comic book movies lean on the same shortcuts, and where those shortcuts turn into real harm. Paul explains why the MIT Blackjack T
I Quit: Sometimes You Don’t Have to “Do This All Day” (opens the original)
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On this episode, poker player and co-host Paul joins Matthew Fox to argue that quitting isn’t a moral failure, it’s a skill; one poker forces you to practice on every hand and superhero movies almost never reward. They test the idea against Steve Rogers hanging up the shield and Tony Stark’s gamble on Ultron.Paul walks through deliberately quitting the MCU and a Mets season gone bad, Matthew explains how fatherhood rewired what counts as quittable, and both admit to a guitar habit revived a litt
The Odyssey: Myth on Film (opens the original)
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Would you cheer for a hero who tricks a Cyclops but never sleeps with a witch? Classics professor Adam Kemezis joins Matthew Fox to dig into how Christopher Nolan's Odyssey reshapes Homer's most cunning warrior for a modern audience, and what gets lost when three thousand years of moral complexity gets smoothed down to relatable and redeemable.Kemezis, who teaches Greek and Roman mythology at the University of Alberta, and Fox work through why the movie's Odysseus loses his cunning and his affai
Dolly Parton and 9 to 5 (opens the original)
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Dolly Parton let the world underestimate her for fifty years, then spent that underestimation as leverage every single time. Days after her death, comedian and "Make Me a Nerd" host Mandy Kaplan joins host Matthew Fox to talk about what she meant to them, using the workplace revenge fantasy "9 to 5" as the way in. They cover the movie, the songs that came out of it, and the choices Parton made with the fortune she built.Kaplan explains why she spent seventh grade being called "Dolly Parton" agai
Lanterns and the Ethics of Adaptation (opens the original)
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“Lanterns” so far is more cop drama than cosmic weirdness, and comic book historian Jessica Plummer isn’t convinced the trade was worth it. She joins Matthew Fox to dig into the first two episodes of HBO Max’s new John Stewart and Hal Jordan series, working through what an adaptation owes its source material and where reinterpretation turns into replacement.They get into the show’s stripped-down approach to Green constructs, John Stewart’s rewritten comics backstory, and why the human sheriff mi
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