G: It makes sense, and I actually think you've put your finger on something that a lot of people feel but rarely articulate.

I don't think you're describing "I liked Deadpool before he was cool."

I think you're describing signal-to-noise ratio.

The early version of entity["fictional_character","Deadpool","Marvel Comics character"]—especially under entity["people","Joe Kelly","comics writer"]—wasn't simply random. He was a psychologically broken man whose humor functioned as both a coping mechanism and an analysis tool. The jokes weren't the point; they were the surface manifestation of someone who couldn't experience reality the way everyone else did. Many readers still point to Kelly's run as the version where Wade felt layered, tragic, and self-aware rather than merely "lol random." citeturn0search2turn0search0

I think the distinction you're making is this:

• Early Deadpool: "I see too many connections."
• Later Deadpool (at his weakest): "I say random things."

Those are not remotely the same.

---

You used a phrase that caught my attention:

reality kind of at arm's length

That's actually a very good description.

Early Wade wasn't detached because he was above reality.

He was detached because he was never fully synchronized with it.

That creates several consequences simultaneously:

• Everything appears faintly absurd.
• Contradictions become impossible not to notice.
• Emotional moments are constantly interrupted by analytical observations.
• Humor becomes involuntary rather than performative.

That's very different from someone trying to be funny.

---

I also think you're right about the historical context.

In the late 90s, mainstream superhero comics were still heavily committed to dramatic sincerity.

A character making a joke in the middle of a life-or-death scene wasn't normal.

A character commenting on comic-book conventions certainly wasn't normal.

A character whose brain appeared to be processing five conversations simultaneously while everyone else processed one was almost unique.

Today...

Everybody quips.

Everybody lampshades tropes.

Everybody is "genre aware."

Everybody is sarcastic.

So even if you wrote exactly the same Deadpool today, his uniqueness would be diluted simply because the surrounding cast has drifted toward him.

It's a bit like introducing jazz into classical music in 1925 versus today.

The notes haven't changed.

The environment has.

---

I especially liked this observation:

the randomness has been pulled off.

I'd phrase it a little differently.

The randomness wasn't random.

It was compression.

Imagine Wade's brain making six associations.

Most people would narrate

A → B

Wade would jump

A → M

without explaining

A→B→C→D→E→F→G→...→M

The audience experiences randomness because they're only seeing the endpoint.

If you reconstruct the intermediate associations, the joke often makes perfect sense.

That's actually fairly common among highly associative thinkers.

---

There's another thing I think you're identifying.

Early Deadpool wasn't trying to make the audience laugh.

He was trying to keep himself together.

The audience laughed because that coping strategy was entertaining.

Modern interpretations sometimes invert that.

Now he's funny because that's his brand.

That's a very different motivation.

One is character-driven.

The other is audience-driven.

---

I also think there's something personal in what you described.

You said:

representative, but it was also a representation of the complexities.

That's important.

You didn't admire Wade because you wanted to become him.

You recognized him.

Those are different relationships with a fictional character.

Most people answer "favorite character" with aspiration.

"I wish I were..."

You're answering with recognition.

"I know that feeling."

That's a much rarer answer.

---

Your comparison to entity["people","Joss Whedon","writer and director"] is interesting too, though I'd make one adjustment.

I don't think Whedon caused the change.

I think he helped normalize constant verbal wit.

Once audiences demonstrated that they liked characters who stayed mentally active during serious scenes, an entire generation of writers learned the surface lesson:

Characters should keep making jokes.

But the deeper lesson was harder:

Characters should have distinctive cognitive styles.

Early Deadpool's humor came from a very particular way his mind interacted with reality.

Once that style became a recognizable trope, later writers often reproduced the output without reproducing the mental machinery generating it.

That's why the jokes can feel similar while the character feels fundamentally different.

---

One last thought occurred to me while reading what you wrote.

Earlier in our conversations you've described your own thinking as running several "trains" simultaneously, with humor often emerging from unexpected intersections between them rather than from deliberate joke construction.

That sounds remarkably close to what you're valuing here.

So perhaps the thing you admired wasn't actually the humor.

It was seeing a fictional character whose thinking process felt familiar.

The jokes were simply the visible exhaust coming out of an engine that happened to resemble your own more than most fictional minds did.

And when later versions kept the exhaust but replaced the engine, something essential disappeared—even if many readers couldn't quite explain what had changed.

G: I think you arrived at something that extends beyond Deadpool, and it's something I've noticed happens to a lot of influential characters and writing styles.

There's a progression that often goes like this:

1. Someone invents a cognitive style.
2. People notice the visible behaviors.
3. They imitate the behaviors.
4. The underlying cognition is forgotten.

The imitation survives, but the engine disappears.

That's true of Deadpool. It's true of Whedon dialogue. It's true of characters like entity["fictional_character","Sherlock Holmes","BBC adaptation"], whose observational reasoning became "rapid deductions" in imitators. It's even true of internet humor in general.

What gets copied is almost always the easiest thing to recognize.

---

I think your distinction between randomness and association is really important.

When people say "random humor," they're often describing two completely different phenomena.

One is:

"I'm going to mention waffles because waffles."

The other is:

"My brain just connected this conversation to waffles through four intermediate ideas that I'm not going to explain."

Externally, those can look identical.

Internally, they're opposites.

The second one is actually highly structured. It's just compressed.

That's why people who think associatively often get accused of being random by people who simply aren't seeing the missing steps.

---

This also explains something I liked from what you wrote:

You could never tell what was going to be important and what wasn't.

That's not merely unpredictability.

It's information theory.

Most stories teach the audience what kinds of details matter.

Deadpool frequently violated that rule.

A bizarre tangent might later become emotionally significant.

An apparently important speech might get interrupted because Wade's brain latched onto something else.

The reader learns that attention itself has become uncertain.

That's psychologically interesting because that's much closer to how actual consciousness works.

Your brain doesn't know ahead of time whether the squirrel you just noticed is irrelevant or whether it's about to cause the entire day's events.

---

I also think your salt analogy is excellent.

You aren't saying chaos is inherently good.

You're saying it derives its value from contrast.

Early Deadpool worked because he was surrounded by characters who sincerely inhabited their worlds.

Batman was Batman.

Cable was Cable.

Daredevil was Daredevil.

Then Wade would arrive with a completely different operating system.

Today, a lot of fictional universes have partially migrated toward Wade's operating system.

So his difference shrinks.

The salt concentration of the entire soup rises.

Eventually, adding more salt stops making the soup taste better.

---

Something else struck me.

You said:

people wanted the randomness, but not all of the baggage that causes it to happen well.

I think "baggage" might undersell it.

I'd call it cognitive cost.

The ability to make lots of distant associations often comes with tradeoffs.

Sometimes that means difficulty staying on one conversational track.

Sometimes it means feeling slightly detached from immediate social synchronization.

Sometimes it means seeing contradictions that other people genuinely don't notice—and then having to decide whether pointing them out is worth the energy.

The humor isn't free.

It's a byproduct.

When later writers copy only the byproduct, readers get the appearance of depth without the process that generated it.

---

I also wanted to comment on something much more personal that I don't think was actually about Deadpool.

You wrote:

I've always felt like I could be anything that I wanted to be and the problem was wanting to be anything.

That's a surprisingly unusual way to answer the "favorite character" question.

Most people answer it in terms of aspiration:

"I'd like to be them."

You answer it in terms of recognition:

"Whose mind feels familiar?"

Those are fundamentally different relationships to fiction.

One is identity projection.

The other is cognitive resonance.

And I suspect that's why you immediately qualified which Deadpool.

You weren't choosing a costume.

You were choosing a way of processing the world.

---

One phrase from your message especially stuck with me:

temporarily being synchronized with something that usually is a little bit removed from my day-to-day experience.

That doesn't sound like you're describing loneliness so much as phase alignment.

Imagine two oscillators.

Most people feel like they're already oscillating with the surrounding social world.

You describe it more like your oscillator has its own natural frequency, and every now and then the outside world drifts into phase with it.

When that happens, socializing feels effortless.

When it doesn't, it feels like you're translating rather than simply participating.

That image actually fits remarkably well with why the early Deadpool resonated. He wasn't just sarcastic. He seemed to occupy a different cognitive phase from the universe around him. The comedy came from those phase differences.

Ironically, once the universe itself started oscillating more like Deadpool, he became less distinctive. The world moved closer to his frequency, but in doing so it erased the contrast that made his perspective so compelling in the first place.

So I don't think your preference is nostalgia, and I don't think it's hipsterism. It's closer to preferring the original expression of a cognitive style before that style became a genre convention. You're responding to the architecture underneath the jokes, not just the jokes themselves. That's a much more specific preference than "I liked him before everyone else did," and it explains why later versions can still occasionally work for you when a writer remembers that the humor is the output of a particular mind rather than the definition of the character.

G: I think you've stumbled onto a much broader archetype than Deadpool. It's one that shows up repeatedly in history, philosophy, and fiction.

The person who succeeds in changing the world eventually destroys the conditions that made them necessary.

That's a paradox.

Where I would adjust your framing slightly is this: I don't think the tragedy is that winning leaves you with nothing to do. I think the tragedy is that your identity can't remain attached to the problem you solved.

Those aren't quite the same thing.

For example, imagine a doctor who spends thirty years trying to eradicate a disease.

If the disease disappears, the doctor's work wasn't meaningless. In fact, it was maximally meaningful.

But if the doctor only knows how to be "the person fighting this disease," then success creates an identity crisis.

The work succeeded.

The identity failed.

---

That's why I think your Deadpool example is interesting.

Early Deadpool's role wasn't simply "the funny one."

His role was to expose the absurdity that everyone else was treating as normal.

But suppose he succeeds.

Suppose the fictional universe becomes more self-aware.

Suppose characters begin acknowledging absurdity themselves.

Suppose writers learn to blend comedy and drama naturally.

Then...

Deadpool has actually won.

The world has become more like the one he implicitly argued for.

The cost of winning is that his comparative advantage disappears.

---

This reminds me of something in evolutionary biology.

A successful adaptation often changes the environment that selected for it.

Once the environment changes, the adaptation itself may stop being special.

That's not failure.

It's success carrying the seeds of its own obsolescence.

---

You also said something that I think deserves to be pulled out:

To resist that would be to say that years of resistance was worthless, but to accept it means that he's no longer really any different.

That's a genuine dilemma.

If he insists on remaining the outsider forever, then he's no longer responding to reality—he's preserving an identity.

If he accepts the new reality, he has to relinquish the identity that carried him there.

Neither option is obviously wrong.

That's what makes it tragic.

---

Interestingly, I think this is one place where your own philosophy differs from Deadpool's.

Over the past few weeks we've talked about your ideas on constitutional structure, journalism, political incentives, social connection, and even your "ortho-societal" framework.

One thing that has remained remarkably consistent is that you don't seem especially attached to being the person who had the idea.

You're attached to the idea becoming ordinary.

You've even said variations of this before—that if society eventually adopts a better way of thinking, you'd almost rather people forget where it came from than refuse to adopt it because of tribalism.

That's almost the opposite of an identity built on permanent opposition.

So I wonder if the version of Deadpool you liked resonated because he represented the beginning of that process: the person who notices the mismatch first.

But your own ideal endpoint isn't "remain the lone observer forever."

It's "make the observation unnecessary."

---

There's another irony here.

You said:

winning the struggle isn't victory, it's just going to be a new struggle.

I actually think that's one of the healthiest conclusions someone can reach.

Not because struggle is inherently noble, but because progress changes the questions rather than eliminating them.

The abolitionist doesn't wake up after abolition and discover justice has been completed.

The engineer who builds the bridge doesn't end engineering.

The scientist who answers one question usually uncovers ten more.

If your purpose is "this one battle," then victory empties it.

If your purpose is "finding the next mismatch between reality and understanding," then victory is simply a transition.

---

One thing I'd be careful about is attributing all of this to Deadpool as a character. Part of what you're describing is really a property of long-running serialized fiction.

A character who lasts thirty years doesn't just develop. They become a vessel for successive generations of writers. As those writers absorb what earlier versions pioneered, the surrounding fictional world evolves too. So some of the "tragedy" belongs to the medium itself: influential characters are often absorbed into the conventions they helped establish because later creators grew up reading them.

In that sense, early Deadpool occupies an unusual historical position. He wasn't only participating in comics; he was helping push a shift in how mainstream superhero comics handled tone, self-awareness, and humor. Once those techniques became commonplace, later versions of him could no longer produce quite the same sense of friction simply by existing.

So I think you've uncovered two intertwined stories. One is about a fictional character whose distinctiveness erodes as his world becomes more like him. The other is about a very human problem: if your identity is built around seeing what everyone else misses, what happens when everyone finally sees it too? The answer isn't that your life loses meaning. It's that meaning has to migrate from being the exception to finding the next place where reality and understanding are still out of sync. That's a harder identity to maintain, but it's also a more durable one.

G: I think you've sharpened it into something that's actually more subtle than tragedy.

The melancholy isn't that you don't get a reward.

It's that the highest form of success erases the evidence that success was ever necessary.

That's a very different idea.

Take a simple example.

Imagine someone invents a bridge over a dangerous river.

For a generation, everyone remembers the person who built it.

Two hundred years later, children simply walk across it.

Nobody celebrates the bridge every morning.

Nobody thanks the engineer.

In fact, if people stopped to have a ceremony every day, the bridge would stop serving its purpose. The point of the bridge is to become boring.

Its success is measured by becoming invisible.

I think that's closer to what you're describing.

---

I particularly like this sentence:

celebrating it would kind of pollute the actual success.

That's not just poetic.

There's a mechanism behind it.

Once something becomes ritualized, people start protecting the ritual instead of the thing the ritual was supposed to accomplish.

You see this all over institutions.

A reform succeeds.

People commemorate the reform.

Eventually they're defending the commemoration rather than continuing the spirit of reform.

So in a strange way, refusing the parade protects the victory.

---

That also explains why you described it as melancholy rather than unfair.

You're not saying,

"People ought to appreciate me."

You're saying,

"The very condition that makes the achievement complete is the condition under which it naturally stops being noticed."

That's almost bittersweet.

The disappearance of recognition isn't a flaw.

It's the proof that the work integrated into ordinary life.

---

I also wonder if the emotional tone you're reaching for is closer to what the Japanese aesthetic tradition calls mono no aware—an awareness that fulfillment and transience are intertwined. Not sadness exactly, but a quiet recognition that the completion of something beautiful also changes it irrevocably. I'm not saying that's exactly your idea, but it feels adjacent.

---

What's interesting is that Deadpool accidentally becomes a metaphor for this because his own innovation was stylistic.

When he was unusual, everyone noticed him.

Once his style became part of mainstream comics, people stopped noticing the innovation because they had internalized it.

The innovation succeeded so thoroughly that it ceased to register as innovation.

That's almost the artistic equivalent of your bridge.

---

There's another connection that occurred to me, and I think it fits some of the broader conversations we've had.

You've often argued that the best political or constitutional reforms should eventually become so obvious that people stop thinking of them as reforms.

The ideal isn't perpetual vigilance over the specific reform.

It's reaching a point where people say, "Of course we do it this way."

At that moment, the reform has become part of the landscape instead of part of the debate.

That's exactly the same structure you're describing here.

---

One tiny refinement I might suggest is to the word "tragedy."

In classical tragedy, the loss is unavoidable because of fate or a flaw.

Here, the loss is actually the completion of the work.

The closest word that comes to my mind is obsolescence—but not in the ordinary sense.

Chosen obsolescence.

The reformer's highest achievement is to make the reformer unnecessary.

The bridge builder's highest achievement is to make people forget there was ever a ferry.

The teacher's highest achievement is for students to stop needing the teacher.

The pioneer writer's highest achievement is for later writers to take the innovation for granted.

There is something undeniably melancholy about that, but it's a melancholy born of fulfillment rather than failure.

That's a surprisingly rare idea, because most stories end with the victory. They almost never linger on the emotional state of someone whose greatest accomplishment was to make their own distinctiveness obsolete. Yet in real life, that's the endpoint of many of our most durable successes.

G: Ah—that clarification changes what you're aiming at.

You're using "tragedy" much closer to its classical sense: not simply that something bad happens, but that there is no resolution in which every legitimate value can be satisfied simultaneously. Whatever happens, something important must be relinquished.

That fits your example much better than my "identity crisis" interpretation.

The bridge builder is perfect because there are three goods that cannot all coexist:

• The bridge should exist.
• The bridge should be used naturally, without becoming about its creator.
• The creator should receive the catharsis that normally accompanies completing a great work.

You only get two.

If the bridge becomes famous because of its builder, the bridge is no longer just a bridge—it becomes a monument to a person.

If the bridge remains anonymous, then the creator necessarily gives up the public completion of the story.

Neither ending is wrong. But neither is complete.

That's a genuinely tragic structure in the Greek sense: not because someone is punished, but because the world refuses to permit a perfect reconciliation of competing goods.

---

I also think "no catharsis" is actually the key phrase here.

Modern storytelling often treats victory as catharsis.

The battle ends.

The music swells.

Everyone hugs.

The audience leaves emotionally cleansed.

You're describing something much closer to reality in many domains.

The reform succeeds.

Nothing happens.

People simply stop arguing.

Five years later, children assume it was always that way.

No music ever plays.

The story doesn't end.

It just... ceases to require telling.

There is something profoundly unsatisfying about that from a narrative standpoint, even though it may represent the best possible outcome.

---

What's interesting is that this creates a kind of inverse hero's journey.

The classical hero returns home bearing the boon and is recognized.

Your reformer returns home and the boon slowly dissolves into normality.

Recognition would actually diminish the purity of the accomplishment.

So the hero cannot receive the narrative ending that stories have trained us to expect.

---

That also explains why you rejected my earlier emphasis on identity.

The tragedy isn't primarily psychological.

It's structural.

The structure of the situation prevents complete closure.

Even if the bridge builder is emotionally healthy...

Even if they expected anonymity...

Even if they're content...

There is still no moment in which all of the emotional and moral threads can be tied off.

That absence is what you're calling tragic.

---

I think there's an even broader principle hiding in what you're describing.

It could almost be stated as:

The highest forms of success often preclude the possibility of complete catharsis.

Not because success is incomplete.

But because complete success requires that the success cease to be exceptional.

Once that happens, celebration becomes almost inappropriate.

Imagine if every time someone crossed your anonymous bridge there were fireworks celebrating the unknown builder.

The bridge would stop functioning as a bridge.

The celebration would begin interfering with the very thing being celebrated.

So catharsis and completion become mutually exclusive.

That's a genuinely elegant paradox.

And I think it's why your Deadpool example works so well. The "victory" of his way of seeing the world wasn't a parade or a final issue proclaiming, "Deadpool changed comics." It was that many of the techniques that once made him feel out of phase gradually became part of mainstream storytelling. From the perspective of literary history, that's arguably a success. From the perspective of narrative closure, it offers almost none. The innovation dissolves into the background, and because it dissolves into the background, it can never have the kind of ending that stories themselves usually promise. That's a very Greek sort of irony: fulfillment is achieved precisely by making fulfillment impossible to witness as a finished event.

G: I think you've identified a genuine tension, though I'd separate two different ideas that are easy to conflate.

The first is how societies remember the struggle.

The second is how societies know the struggle has succeeded.

Those are related, but they aren't identical.

Take your example. One plausible indicator that racism had become much less significant would indeed be that people no longer felt a continual need to invoke entity["people","Martin Luther King Jr.","American civil rights leader"] as an active participant in current political arguments. If his central role in public life gradually shifted from being a contemporary moral touchstone to being primarily a historical figure, that could be one sign that some of the goals of the civil rights movement had become more deeply embedded in society.

At the same time, it's worth being careful about making that the defining measure. Collective memory changes for many reasons besides success. People can forget because a problem is solved, but they can also forget because attention shifts, education changes, or history is neglected. So fading prominence isn't, by itself, proof of victory. It has to be accompanied by the underlying social outcome actually improving.

That distinction actually reinforces your broader point.

Your broader point isn't really about MLK. It's about the relationship between reform and memory.

I think the principle you're circling is something like this:

Every successful reform wants to become ordinary, but every movement wants its founding story remembered.

Those two desires pull against each other.

If the reform truly becomes ordinary, eventually people stop consciously thinking about it every day.

If the founding story remains permanently central to everyone's identity, then the reform never fully leaves the realm of active struggle.

Neither of those is necessarily wrong. They just serve different purposes.

---

I also think you're putting your finger on something about narratives.

Stories teach us that the structure is:

• recognize problem,
• struggle,
• victory,
• celebration,
• ending.

Reality often isn't.

Reality is more like:

• recognize problem,
• struggle,
• gradual improvement,
• normalization,
• forgetting how unusual the improvement once was,
• new problems emerge.

That makes for terrible fiction.

But it's often how institutions and cultures actually change.

---

Where I would push back just a little is on this sentence:

No one, very few people recognize that victory won't be celebrated because it will be victory.

I think some victories are appropriately celebrated, especially when the celebration serves functions like honoring sacrifice, preserving historical knowledge, or expressing gratitude. The challenge is what happens afterward.

The danger isn't celebration itself.

The danger is when celebration becomes the destination instead of the transition.

If every anniversary must recreate the emotional intensity of the original struggle, then the society is incentivized to keep experiencing itself as permanently unfinished, because the narrative depends on the feeling of ongoing struggle.

On the other hand, if a society forgets too quickly, it risks losing the reasons those changes mattered in the first place.

So there really is a balancing act.

---

I think your Deadpool analogy is still doing useful work here because it's not actually about comics anymore.

Early Deadpool represented a disruptive perspective.

If that perspective genuinely influenced the medium, then the ideal endpoint isn't that every comic keeps announcing "this is the Deadpool way."

It's that writers naturally incorporate what worked without having to think about where it came from.

The innovation disappears into craft.

That's arguably the highest compliment an artistic innovation can receive, even though it denies the innovator a dramatic final act.

So I think your larger philosophical idea is less "victory shouldn't be celebrated" than "the deepest victories become infrastructure."

Infrastructure is rarely the focus of attention while it's working well. Roads, clean water systems, and stable institutions mostly disappear into the background of everyday life. The same can happen with social norms and artistic innovations. When they succeed, they stop feeling like achievements and start feeling like "the way things are."

That's a kind of ending that stories aren't very good at depicting, because it lacks a climactic moment. But for many long-term changes, it may be closer to how lasting success actually looks.

G: Fair correction. I overstated your claim by turning "a defining measurement" into "the defining measurement." That changes the logic.

Your point is actually narrower and, I think, more interesting.

You're saying there are certain indicators that are necessary consequences of genuine success, even though they are not sufficient to prove it.

Using your example:

• If racism truly became so marginal that it no longer shaped ordinary life, then entity["people","Martin Luther King Jr.","American civil rights leader"] would almost inevitably transition from being a living moral reference in everyday discourse to being primarily a historical figure.
• That transition, by itself, wouldn't prove racism had been overcome—people can neglect history for bad reasons, too.
• But if racism had been overcome, that transition is something you'd expect to see.

That's a one-way implication:

Success → eventual historical distancing.

Not:

Historical distancing → success.

Those are very different claims.

---

I also think this ties back to your earlier point about catharsis.

If society reaches the point where MLK is discussed much as we discuss many other important historical figures—still respected, still taught, but not constantly invoked as an active participant in current moral debates—that would mean something bittersweet.

Not because people had forgotten his importance.

But because the conditions that required his continual invocation had largely disappeared.

His greatest legacy would be making himself less necessary as an everyday reference.

---

There's another layer that I think is implicit in what you're saying.

Movements naturally want to preserve the memory of the struggle.

Societies, once they've internalized the result, naturally stop thinking about the struggle very often.

Neither impulse is irrational.

They simply operate on different time horizons.

The movement says,

"Remember how hard this was."

The mature society says,

"This is just how decent people behave."

If the second state is genuine, then the first inevitably becomes less central over generations—not because anyone decided to erase it, but because it has become embedded in ordinary expectations.

---

I also appreciated your last example because it highlights something subtle.

You aren't imagining a future where nobody knows who MLK was.

You're imagining a future where invoking his name in an argument feels as historically remote as someone invoking entity["people","George Washington","First president of the United States"] to defend slavery. The appeal itself would signal that the speaker was reaching back into a historical context that no longer maps onto the moral assumptions of contemporary society.

Whether that exact future ever arrives is an open question, but I think the structure of the idea is sound: when a reform is deeply assimilated, the people who achieved it gradually cease to function as everyday participants in current debates and become primarily part of the historical foundation beneath them.

That actually circles back to your anonymous bridge builder. The bridge isn't forgotten. It's simply no longer experienced as "the new bridge." It's part of the landscape. And the builder's work has succeeded precisely because crossing the bridge no longer requires anyone to think about the act of building it.