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Old 09-28-2018, 10:00 AM   #9
oneofmanynameless
 
Join Date: May 2012
Location: New Hampshire, USA
Default Re: Revolutionary Supers

Someone I know once posted on facebook a question of, "If you could have one super power what would it be and what would you do with it?" It got over a hundred replies, ranging from super power fantasies that were pretty admirable to pretty scary. However, with only a few exceptions the vast majority of answers were motivated by either personal gain or political convictions, and (again with only a few exceptions) the vast majority of people seemed to think of super powers as a "free pass" to break the rules (i.e. the law, social ethics, etc.)

The most common choices by far were:
1. Kill, mindcontrol, or otherwise eliminate the leaders of the opposing political party. Sometimes it was targeted at a specific very prominent individual, other times it was just the entire political party. This choice wasn't just common, it was fully the majority.
Now, you said you don't want to place them in a dystopia, in the real world instead. But I think this would lead to a dystopia very quickly, and if I follow the guidelines of Hero = revolutionary, Villian = status quo, then things are quite dystopic!
Villains would serve, and run, the major political parties, seeking to maintain their power and influence by any means necessary: be that things the parties already do like gerrymandering, to things that people will debate about whether they do like voter suppression laws, to outright tyranny like placing super powered "police" at voting booths to repel "undesirables". They would also spend a lot of time trying to protect the rich and powerful and keep the lower classes in their place, while delivering a narrative of "Noblesse Oblige" to try to win over the uneducated people. Note that this would genuinely work for a majority of people, or at least a very large minority. Enough that they would often be seen as Heros, not Villians.
On the other hand Heros would be consistantly painted as violent terrorists seeking to destroy the country. They'd be hounded by everyone and constantly on the run. While constantly trying to find ways to get their message of "democratic government of the people, by the people, and for the people," out to the people. They'd try to use their superpowers to gather evidence of the evil the villains are conducting, and maybe win over the congressmen and congresswomen that aren't fully villains themselves.

But even if you don't go the route of making the villains try to maintain the status quo and heros change it. Even if you let the heros try to maintain the status quo by defending the structural integrity of the political system while it's attacked constantly by super powered politically motivated vigilantes, things are going to get very dark very quickly.
2. Steal money or other valuables. This was a pretty large minority.
Mostly people chose stealth and infiltration powers for this: insubstantial or permeation to go through walls, teleportation to just go there and grab it, invisibility, impersonation, etc. The most creative individuals chose things like computer control for hacking internet finance hacking, or precognition for gambling and stocks. I feel like, just based on common sense, that would be more successful at getting away with it. But idk.
Trying to make these guys heros and have the villians protecting the money is pretty classic Robin Hood, although it could be more modern than that: there's at least one notable work of fiction in which the protagonists attempt to blow up the major banks in order to neutralize credit and give everyone a fresh start.
3. Acquire fame and success, especially social status. This was a slightly smaller but still large minority.
This isn't inherently villainous or heroic, so it's a good for making heros and villians that fall on both sides: you could have a hero using super powers to make it as a indie music star, fighting against big labels that try to rig the system and rob the artists; or a musician using mind control rather than talent to try to gain popularity and make money, brainwashing the masses into listening to their terrible music to fulfill their fantasies, at the expense of literally everyone but also the talented artists who actually deserve to be recognized (who might be the heroes fighting them.)
Most of these fantasies revolved around mind control in some capacity, but certainly not all of them: there were plenty of people who wanted powers that would let them invent wondrous inventions to get rich off of (could be good or evil depending on their methods, attitudes, and the effects of what they invent.) Some of them were outright altruistic: wanting their music to supernaturally heal peoples broken hearts.
4. Truly altruistic objectives, which were mostly too unique to the individual to catagorize. Out of more than a hundred answers there were only a half dozen or so in this category.
I don't remember all of them and they did not have any sort of unified objective. There were a couple people that basically said, "if I had super powers I'd have to go join the police or the fire department and become a superhero."
There was one person who wanted healing powers so that they could heal all their friends and family of all maladies and travel the world providing free guaranteed health care to whoever needed it.
Another person wanted weather control to fight climate change.
And yet another person wanted earth bending to provide free housing to people all over the world.
5. there was also one person whose objectives weren't really... like... villainous or heroic at all. They wanted computer control powers in order to make whatever video games they could imagine as easily as they could imagine them, not so that they could make a profit off of them, but so that they could then enter into them and thereby explore other worlds and lives. They said that there were alternatives to video game powers, such as book powers that let them enter into books or pull things out of a book, or something similar with board games, etc. But basically they wanted to use games to become a wizard in a tower apart from the world exploring the extents of their imagination without being confined by reality.
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