I sort of pride myself on the diversity of topics or characters which I write about. I think this is sort of represented in who or what I tag in my posts as I have tagged diverse people or things like Captain Planet, the ancient Greek hero Theseus, Happy Harbor, Asteroid M, Mike Tyson, Donald Duck, Space Cabbie, and Captain Canuck (who I have actually managed to tag twice.) Today though when thinking about my other blog post on the environment I was thinking about Captain Canuck and Captain Planet. I also thought about G-Man topic from a couple of weeks ago about villains whose monikers begin with Doctor, and it got me to thinking how uninspired most captain names are. It seems with a lot of characters they take whatever they are protecting or interested in and just put Captain in front of it, and just like that they have their name (especially so if there is alliteration to go along with it.)
I was also thinking about this week of course about the unrest occurring in Libya. An observation which I made to a friend is Colonel Ghadafi's rank. He is the leader of the country, and has been for some time. I guess when he overthrew the government all those years ago, he decided to keep his title for some weird reason (though he seems to have a weird reasoning behind a lot of his actions.) In being a mostly authoritarian ruler of a country with no real constitution he could call himself any title he wanted, but still likes Colonel. In doing so he is outranked militarily by all the generals in his country's armed forces. When you apply this same idea to the comic book characters there is even less reasoning behind it. Captain for most militaries in the world (except for the navy element) is not a very high rank when it comes to officers (though in police it means something a bit more prestigious) , but all these characters choose it for some reason. Captain has a more generic meaning, buts its usually meant to have the same overall application, a captain is in charge of a sports club or a work team, but has little responsibility beyond that. I suppose in an even more generic sense captain can just mean "master of" but this for me is even less reason to use it as a name. There are a few Captains that are actually military (America and Atom for instance) but a lot are just regular run of the mill characters with an uninspired name.
Maybe that is the reason for so many captains. Comic books often need a lot of generic heroes or villains to fill in stories with generic powers and backgrounds, so why not a generic name to go with it?
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