I’m graduating next year. I used to be terrified of the idea of leaving this amazing bubble of customizable schedules, biking to anything you want or need and Baba’s burritos for every meal. I’ve come to terms with moving on from all those perks, but there’s one element of college that I don’t think I’ll ever have an easy time leaving behind.

The people.

I wake up every day with my best friends. I see people I enjoy at the CoHo or on the Quad daily. I can go out every night of the weekend and spend time with a different circle of people. And right now, I can walk to my friends’ places, and they’re in the same boat as me. We can talk about the same people and we have similar, easy reference points in our lives. That’s so damn hard for me to let go.

I’ve been thinking a lot about the friends I’ve made, and I’m imagining now how my relationships will evolve after college. Some people I’ll probably rarely talk to ever again (and that’s okay). Some people I’ll probably see every day of my life (also okay). Some people I think I’ll keep in great touch with, but I can see our friendship sort of fading away. And others I may only sort of talk to now, but who knows? Maybe we’ll be in the same city— in the same circles again— and we’ll deepen our bond.

And that lead me to think about which elements of our friendships lead to these different outcomes. I’ve realized that I have three different kinds of friends in college — three different levels, or layers, of friendships.

“Mutual Give-A-****” Friends

Mutually gaf’ing (as the youths say, and as my editor won’t let me say) is that first layer, both in the sequence that friendships progress and in the level of affinity you can have for someone. This is why the most common advice for making friends in college is to join a club or a group. If I meet someone at a party, and they know every word to Famous by Kanye West, or we strike up a conversation and they have an opinion about Views, the Life of Pablo and Coloring Book, I’m instantly a fan. Because you can only care about so many things, if someone has spent as much time as I have caring about that one weird random thing I like— that’s an easy connection.

And it doesn’t have to be a hobby or interest — it could also be a shared career path or a shared religious or cultural background. We’re not that unique but we’re also not that alike. We’re tribal. So these surface-level interactions, one where both parties can gush over their favorite sets at Coachella or how much they love Young Thug, have an important place in college. These friends are important because they’ll color your day-to-day, giving you a chance to feel like a happy busy-bee when you walk to class with someone who totally gets you when it comes to the Bachelorette.

Maybe you can invite them to watch the Warriors game with you, which will show you if they’re…

“Back-And-Forth Vibes” Friends

If you think about this chronologically, now that y’all established the fact that you’re both from the same town and hate the same people, the next layer is chemistry. I have friends that can make me bust up laughing by just a look — no words shared — because I know exactly what inside joke they’re applying to the situation we’re in. You need some inside jokes, some rapport, some chemistry for this. It’s not just having the same interests, it’s having similar or compatible styles. If two people are sarcastic, twisted misanthropes, they’ll hit it off way better than one Dark Prince and another ray of sunshine. Or not — maybe Ms. Positivity and Mr. I Hate Everything find a weird yin-yang that makes them both laugh.

These kind of friendships are the ones that can evolve from catching up at the CoHo in the middle of the day to actually going out at night together, or taking trips on the weekends. You like them enough that you’ll set aside social time for them, not just fit them in your in-between time during the middle of the week. These friends are important because they’re fun — they’ll take your mind off what’s stressing you, they’ll make the weeks fly by, and they’ll give you the time of your life.

As you get closer and closer to graduation, you realize that some of these friends are joyful, happy, indulgent… and others are integral, a part of your life, because they’re…

“Take A Bullet For You” Friends

In the real world, no one cares about your feelings. No one is obligated to relate to your struggle and no one is responsible for whether you overcome your obstacles or not. You’re on your own. So when you have friends that do care about your feelings, that are invested in your happiness, that would put their own energy into seeing you succeed — you have this kind of friendship. They have no obligation to anyone else’s happiness, but here they are.

These friendships are forged through shared experiences. There’s no way to know otherwise, because you only know the depths of your friend’s loyalty through actions and real life examples. This is why fraternities have a tough pledge process, because a tough process shows the pledges that they can rely on each other. The idea behind putting a group of individuals through artificial adversity is to push them to make real connections with each other, connections that are based in, “Remember that time when I almost got kicked out for doing something stupid but you covered my ass and took the fall?” and in “Remember when I had only three hours of sleep, just broke up with my girlfriend, and had two midterms to study for so you did the pledge project for me?” and not, “Yeah, he’s chill I guess.”

In general, I think it does take some uncomfortable situations, some moments of tension and some uneasy decisions to figure out that you have this kind of friend. Life isn’t just happy Instagram posts that get 300 likes. Life is also the awful events, the nights you fall asleep just waiting to get your day over with only to wake up with the same amount of self-doubt you already had. It’s the hard phone calls and the soul-crushing rejection emails and texts. Your other friends likely won’t know about all that. These friends are part of the reason you end up figuring it out, so you can get to those happy Instagrams. And, of course, those friends will be front and center in those posts, commenting heart-face emojis while texting you that you couldn’t have picked a worse picture of them.

And not every friend you’ll meet is the third type. That’s asking too much out of too many people. And that’s totally okay. You’ll also need the first two in your life. The majority of misunderstandings that I’ve had in my social life came because one of us thought the other was at a different level of friendship. And sometimes it got ugly. Ex-best friends are a thousand times worse than ex-girlfriends or ex-boyfriends. I’ve learned to simply be conscious and aware of where I’m at with my friends, and if I notice that some of them have blossomed into the next level, I’d be elated.

It’s not that just “placing” my friends, as if I was organizing my desk, that has made me happier. What’s really made me happier has been realizing where those friends are and then expressing gratitude for what they offer to me from their level. It’s when I give back to them — whether it’s having those endless conversations about why the Warriors are the best basketball team of all time, spending hours talking about nothing and enjoying every minute of it or actually just being there for them — that makes me realize that I can’t imagine college without them.

Because a year from now, I’ll be stuck in a cubicle wistfully scrolling back on my group chats, reliving every roast I’ve had to endure. And I’ll think back to college. And to this article. And cry. Good luck to the Class of 2016!
You can reach YINON RAVIV at ravivyinon@gmail.com

But now, I thought that I would explore this idea more in this article specifically involving Captain America: Civil War, released earlier this month, along with the implications I saw both in the film and a general trend among superheroes today with special attention to superhero feuds. Captain America, after forcing the audience to choose a side for most of the movie, ends relatively unresolved.

So. The marketing for this film basically invited the audience and the consumer to pick a side. Just look at the poster. There they are: two of the biggest Marvel characters facing each other, glaring endlessly into each other’s eyes. Each hero had their motives. Team Iron Man wanted to allow government regulation of superhero powers, and Team Captain America wanted the opposite. After watching the movie, and even during it too, I had to wonder: how persuasive were their arguments for each side? I knew I had a favorite (I’m team Captain America all the way), but even I couldn’t explain why I chose that side beyond my complete adoration of everything Captain America related. I even tried siding with Iron Man’s perspective and came to the  same conclusion: that I had no reasonable defense for either side.

I know that both characters are stubborn and that they constantly believe that they are in the right and have the best intentions. There’s nothing surprising about that. Those are some of the aspects I even love about their characters. But their mere stubbornness, which seems to be a prevalent theme in all superhero feuds, gets pretty boring and repetitive after a while. And it gets annoying when that’s all I see. The lack of creativity on the part of superhero writers, in regards to their inability to come up with a compelling argument for either side, stems from the fact that these feuds are marketable and typically commercially successful.

I guess it would make sense that the superhero industry would want us to pick a side based on our own preferences. We do all the work for them that way, getting into more arguments with our friends and fellow fans than the superheroes actually do in the movies and the comic books.

Similarly, this seems to be the case in Captain America: Civil War — the characters pick sides based on their own personal friendships and ties rather than whether they really support the government’s regulation over their powers or not.

The characters’ biases are the heaviest and most important factors in their decision, it seems. This interjection of our personal feelings over a professional and important decision sounds familiar. It sounds a lot like our American political system, doesn’t it? It makes sense that today’s media accurately reflects our current situation, even if that situation isn’t great. While politics isn’t our main focus, it is important to note its relation to comics because they are intrinsically tied to history and politics.

These topics seem to be just a handful of the various problems that the superhero industry faces by choosing to tackle the issue of feuds. But as an audience member, I’m personally insulted when the writers are unable to come up with a plot driven by more than a character’s stubbornness. Without three-dimensional characters, superhero feuds lack the emotional kick that I crave from movies.

You can reach MICHAEL CLOGSTON at mlclogston@ucdavis.edu.

Friends fight; that’s an undeniable fact. And superheroes, it seems, are no different than the rest of us in this respect. Batman v Superman and Captain America: Civil War are the latest examples of films in which the feuds are between superheroes as opposed to villains. Feuds between superheroes are usually just more intense and more powerful, and may end up causing millions of dollars in damage to their respective fictional cities. While these two films have gotten a lot of hype because they’re the most recent examples of superheroes fighting each other, and on the big screen no less, superheroes have been duking it out in the printed universe for a while now. The Fantastic Four fought Spiderman, Iron Man and Captain America went up against Thor and, recently on television, Daredevil went head to head with The Punisher. But why are these fights between superheroes interesting to us now?

The public seems to enjoy these superheroes basically punching each other in the face and making each other endure some form of suffering (I’m looking at you, Batman). One would think that it’s easier to have two established heroes fight rather than having to think of new villains and opposing forces. Thinking up a new character both in storyline and physical appearance is a lot of work. Another reason is that when superheroes are pitted against each other, they break the typical routine of the all-powerful hero versus the stereotypical villain in which the hero usually triumphs at the end of the day.

But what makes superhero feuds more interesting is the attachment to each of the characters and the interesting situation we face when two or more of our beloved superheroes go head-to-head in battle over what is often some form of moral quandary. The question is no longer when the hero will triumph over the villain, but rather when the fight will end. Because both parties usually have their own comic book series that have been extensively developed, the executives are extremely unlikely to kill them off in most situations. The fact is that all of the superheroes involved need to be shown to be just as powerful as the other and all of them need to be given moments when we can see said strengths and what makes them a true hero capable of battling an equal-footed opponent.

I should feel really bad and extremely torn at the fact that two or more of my favorite superheroes want to basically destroy each other. And I am. Kind of. I have found there is often some form of very unresolved aspect to superhero feuds: the ending or the resolution or lack thereof. Typically, plots have somewhat satisfying endings where the evil-doer is defeated and then sent to jail or killed. But because superheroes are far less likely to kill each other, their conflicts will usually arise from misunderstandings, mind control or disagreements over specific issues. But what often happens is that one bit of info will come out later in the plot and somehow miraculously fixes all their problems. This is a problem if you enjoy a good plot. The fact that two people who were basically about to kill each other team up in a matter of seconds makes me feel that the ending is at least just a little bit anticlimactic.

But where does this leave us now? I brought up the fact that superheroes fight each other on a few occasions and in various ways. I tried to explain why I found them to be at least somewhat interesting. And I talked about how the hype for their fight is far larger than their actual fight. So what’s the verdict on my first question? Maybe this is just what the superhero industry has given us. Or maybe this is just the superhero industry forcing us to make a decision for them.

You can reach MICHAEL CLOGSTON at mlclogston@ucdavis.edu.