That sounds like telling someone to just get over it

How do we categorise people who were bullied and called weird as a child for having autism and now have a trauma reaction to the word?

I must make two honest confessions to you, my Christian and Jewish brothers. First, I must confess that over the past few years I have been gravely disappointed with the white moderate. I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro’s great stumbling block in his stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen’s Counciler or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate, who is more devoted to “order” than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice; who constantly says: “I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I cannot agree with your methods of direct action”; who paternalistically believes he can set the timetable for another man’s freedom; who lives by a mythical concept of time and who constantly advises the Negro to wait for a “more convenient season.” Shallow understanding from people of good will is more frustrating than absolute misunderstanding from people of ill will. Lukewarm acceptance is much more bewildering than outright rejection.

Superhero movie good. Rich man bad. Rich man say superheroes bad. Rich man wrong. Leftists watch movie, agree with rich man. Silly.

She then goes on to describe how many of her “gods” were killed by their capes. The same thing that happened to Syndrome.

Syndrome is special. He built himself rocket boots as a ten year old. I’m a grown adult and I can’t do that! He doesn’t get his ass beat by the Omnidroid due to a specialness deficiency. He gets his ass beat because he invented an AI specifically designed to learn how to fight supers, and then had it fight him. He did a bad thing and the bad thing hurt him. He got leopard face’d. “I didn’t think leopards would eat MY face, says supervillain who trained leopards to eat faces.” There’s nobody in the movie who can solo the Omnidroid. Not Bob, not Frozone, not Syndrome. The Incredibles beat it with teamwork, love, and trust. Syndrome tells his teammate that love makes you weak and he can’t be trusted.

The counter to Syndrome’s argument is that power didn’t make him a superhero. Syndrome says “Oh, I’m real. Real enough to defeat you! And I did it without your oh-so-special powers.” Syndrome thinks being a “real hero” is about being strong. Selling his technology to rich people isn’t going to turn everyone into a hero. Syndrome, and all other billionaires, are unheroic because of their awful personalities. Powers aren’t what makes the difference.

You know who doesn’t have powers and is awesome? Edna. Edna Mode is most certifiably, 100% special. And it’s all in her personality.

Here the supes are suppressed by the government, not a societal issue. They are presented as being accepted in the past, in a world without intervention

Not true. The government shut down the superhero program because of public pressure. The catalyst was the suicide jumper that Bob saved. But around that time there were a lot of incidents of property damage and lawsuits that made it too expensive for the government to have superheroes, because of what the people were doing.

You’re missing the line right before Helen says “everyone’s special, Dash” - “But Dad always told us our powers are nothing to be ashamed of; our powers make us special!”

That exchange is part of an ongoing argument between Bob and Helen about how to raise their children. Bob wants to teach the children a sense of superiority, Helen wants them to fit in. Bob’s desire to see himself as better than others is something he slowly overcomes over the course of the movie. He can’t defeat Syndrome until he gets over that mindset, stops trying to do everything alone, and accepts help from the people he loves. Helen directly says in the cake/rubble scene that Bob is projecting his ego onto Dash.

In that scene, Dash is showing us that Bob’s misunderstanding of heroism is tearing his family apart and affecting his children. He’s already hurt one child with his idea that heroism is about superiority, and now he’s hurting another. We see Syndrome say the same thing as Dash so that we understand Bob needs to overcome this thinking to prevent Dash from growing up like Syndrome.

It’s really good writing.

Superheroism isn’t about being better than everyone else, it’s about helping people. That’s Bob’s arc and it’s the message of the entire movie. Everyone who says the movie is about better people being told to be equal to everyone else is misunderstanding it as badly as Syndrome does. The movie is about kind people being told to let others suffer.

Look at the way our society treats climate activists, or Black Lives Matter, or communists. We’re told to sit down and shut up. Stop trying to help other people who are in danger. Just be a cog in the system and let the health insurance company sentence people to death. Don’t rock the boat. Don’t make waves. Don’t cause drama. Look what they’re doing to Luigi.

Superheroes are a metaphor for leftists.

The Incredibles flies over people’s heads as being aggressively conservative.

Superheroes are a metaphor for minorities. There’s the immigrant experience in constantly moving house, the queer experience in hiding who you are, the neurodivergent experience in being told not to stick out in school.

The villain is a capitalist billionaire who wants to appropriate a minority’s culture without understanding what it means. If you’re an indigenous minority you’ve been through that.

There’s a scene where the mum has a talk with her kids about treating authority figures they’ve been trained not to fear as threats to their lives. That talk is familiar to any black family in the USA.

There’s a struggle between parents and their children about how to navigate assimilating into the majority culture while retaining their own identity. Many immigrants go through what Dash and Violet did.