The characters are, by their nature, archetypes that can serve different metaphors.

There are a lot of discussions where people will decide that James Bond is a superhero, because he's a larger-than-life hero who beats the bad guys by doing larger-than-life things. And I don't think that's a useful definition.

The metaphors exist for the stories.

It strikes me that the only reason to take apart a pocket watch, or a car engine, aside from the simple delight of disassembly, is to find out how it works. To understand it, so you can put it back together again better than before, or build a new one that goes beyond what the old one could do. We've been taking apart the superhero for ten years or more; it's time to put it back together and wind it up, time to take it out on the road and floor it, see what it'll do.

Dracula, if he could see modern corporations, wouldnt like them much. He took care of his people, at least as he saw it. They had very little freedom, but they had a protector.

I wanted to be a writer, but the idea of writing novels or movies seemed really intimidating. I never got more than a few pages into one.

What really matters is not how well a character fits a definition, but how strongly he or she resonates. Characters with strong, resonant ideas at their core will have more of an impact on the cultural consciousness than a character who's just an empty collection of attributes.