Teen Titans philosophy

Although Teen Titans is primarily an action cartoon, it features a noticeable amount of postmodern aesthetics. Heavily influenced by modern Japanese anime art style and humour, its ironic self-referential humour is in fact nothing new. It is, rather, part of a larger movement in general entertainment.

Self-referential humour and existential questions is a very common technique used to entertain in Teen Titans, one of the examples being the episode “Transformation”, when the story centered around Starfire is being narrated by another nameless man, who is another omnipresent participant in the episode. On other occasions our heroes discuss what would happen to them in certain life-or-death situations – although we never forget that they combat galactic threats on a weekly basis. The nature of Jump City is in itself rather undefined and like the definition of postmodernism itself, notoriously self-referential and almost surreal. A somewhat modern, tentatively futuristic metropolis, like much postmodern entertainment, refers to nothing in the “real world”. Even the Titans’ home – the giant T – is defined only as a “dorm”, although it really is nothing of the sort.

In the academic field of philosophy, postmodernism is considered much more dangerous, because if say, a terrible crime is committed, if it is not objectively grounded, why does pursuing justice matter? It is also another thing to say that if something is not objectively grounded in words or actions, what is it grounded in? An example might be found in the episode “Detention”, where the Titans are trapped in a different world, while at the same time the “objective reality” of Jump City remains in the present of the fictional Teen Titans universe (throughout the duration viewers watch the episode). And in case you think this was an episode where the fate of Jump City hang in the balance, it was in fact a very humourous episode for fans, where the Titans tirelessly pursued their enemy through the artificial universe with a background duet sung by Japanese pop artists Puffy AmiYumi. In typical irony, the Titans themselves were immensely frustrated with their predicament and found themselves in often life-threatening danger throughout the episode.

Self-referential cartoons are often popular because they make hardly any effort to take themselves seriously, and this often allows fans to fully appreciate and sympathize with the characters. For if there is no objective world to be represented, and real meaning cannot be found simply within the episode’s script, it remains for the characters to carve out a sensible reality out of their absurd world. Which always makes for good entertainment.

… Holy shit, did I just write all this about a freakin’ cartoon? What have I been smoking…? ;-)