marycatelli | Entries tagged with genre: superheroes

Was pondering how few origins there were for superheroes in my high fantasy world. Then I remembered that I had actually had another: gadgeteer. Mind you, with magical gadgets. There are clockpunk ones, but clockpunk needs something magic to make the springs hold enough power.

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So what problems come with the powers? There have to be some or there is no story.

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There's one advantage of the erratic, one-of-a-kind nature of superpowers.

There's fewer questions about the advance of knowledge.

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If the powers are (more or less) personality based, then evil powers will stem from evil people.

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Training supers would be fun. Especially if they were few (and thus you were stuck with what you had), or if their powers were dependent on their personality.

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The kid sidekick. The trope of the Golden Age that has perhaps taken the worst beating. Possibly because adolescent boys are no longer considered the chief audience.

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Supers are unique. Or at least belong to a small and probably interrelated group, who all have (more or less) the same origin.

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One fun and fairly frivolous question is of powersets.
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One important -- and much neglected -- issue in world-building is the generation of the next generation. And in superhero stories, that has to mean whether powers are inheritable.

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There's an issue closely related to the problem of change in superhero stories, and that's of sturdiness of world-building -- or flimsiness. (Also a high fantasy problem.)

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A couple of reflections on personality-based powers from discussions I've been in recently:

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One thing that a world's history really matters in is how much time they have had to analyze superpowers.

Even in the basic sense of categorizing them as types and by strength.

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Dramatic code names and the distinctive costumes are part and parcel of the genre. It's hard to hit enough tropes to make it superheroes if you don't include them. But they are really hard to world-build. And probably have the most variation.

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Where do you get your powers from, when you get them?

This is perhaps one of the greatest questions of super world-building. It can influence or even determine politics. It can implicate metaphysics. It can raise grave questions in ethics. It can box in theme.

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One of the big changes in any super world would be legal -- especially given the popularity of fighting/committing crimes with powers.

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If you decide to write your own superheroes, and escape the behemoths of Marvel and DC, in a contemporary-ish setting -- I urge you to make it an alternate history.

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A useful image when thinking of genre: a wall. It looks like paintballs hit it and splattered, but as you get close enough, you see that center is in fact where the dots cluster. Those are the works that cluster to the center of the genre.

If you look at the very center of the superhero genre, you will see:( Read more... )

There's some characters who come to help our heroine.

They need a motive.

Perhaps I was spoiled earlier, since she was "helped" by a woman clearly mad and certain that she was helping her victims and was a wonderful person for doing so. But these people with all their flaws, are not mad. They are also, while super, neither heroes nor villains.

And what's most important, the heroine would not just accept their help. The madwoman established that there are those who wish her ill, and she wants to know their motives. Were they heroes, she might just accept it, but she knows they are not.

A superhero story takes place with overt superpowers.

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There are two characters who are overly zealous for the rules.

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Mary Catelli's Erraticly Updated and Exceedingly Ill-Organized Journal

being chiefly about the written word

Entries tagged with genre: superheroes

hero by stuff

problems of powers

knowledge is power

evil people, evil powers

personality power and the police

super side

super special

super sets

super sons and daughters

philosophy of flimsy

personalities of power

superscales

supersuits and sobriquets

supers and the source

sense and supersensibility

supers and setting up the setting

supers and setting

motive in the moment

alternicity and the superhero

idiocy needed