A Fanboy’s Letters
Interesting e-mails re “A Fanboy’s Notes: the Morality of Power” below.
Reader/Gaming Buddy Greg Pearson writes:
…in regards to Unqualified Offerings’ superhero/villain post, the answer to that question would be Wildstorm’s The Authority by Warren Ellis (another entry on my three best comics of all time), which is based on exactly that premise. True, Ellis and his successor writers are a rather more sympathetic to the Authority’s ultra-liberal agenda than UO will undoubtedly be happy with. On the other hand, even though the authors find the team’s goals laudable, the end result ends up pretty similar to that discussed in the blog.
A page describing the Authority series, which is on UO’s list of comics to get to, is here.
Neel Krishnaswami writes:
I’ve actually played a game with this premise, and the characters do not greatly resemble super-villains (or conventional superheroes). The reason for this is that in the standard genre setup, a character can either support or oppose the social order. Supervillains threaten the social order with their diabolical plots, and superheroes protect society from them. However, this is a false dichotomy: it doesn’t admit the possibility of convincing people to change society and creating new subcultures.
For example, my character was a superintelligent monster. Her response to being the object of hatred wasn’t to lash out at society. Instead, she began designing biological treatments to make radical alterations to the body as easy and cheap as putting on makeup. Her reasoning was that people, given this new capability, would make use of it, and that subcultures would form in which her own bizarre appearance would be typical.
Her powers were very comic-book, but her plans are not. “Give people new capabilities to let them increase social diversity” is a credo that’s basically impossible to describe as evil, but it doesn’t accept the existing social order as desirable or worth preserving.
It seems like the important factor in Neel’s campaign was that it was the people’s own choice to avail themselves of the new powers available - they weren’t imposed on them.
And your Talking Dog writes:
…freelance do-gooders acting to advance their own agenda (rather than battle specific bad-apples) are probably best classified as “villains”.
Of course, your opinion is clearly the product of your cowboy American “rugged individualist” upbringing, and shows the defectiveness and inferiority of the American way of life, and its intrinsic ad hoc-ness and disorganization.
Thus, in the superior Euro-Justice League, the spirit of transnational collectivism and the good of all prevails at all times, ahead of the vigilante piffle Americans have come to admire.
A typical mission would consist of (Note: character names are simuultaneously translated bureaucratically from English into Italian, French, German, Spanish, Portuguese, Finnish, Swedish, Danish, Greek, Dutch, Esperanto and Arabic; Euro-comic books are much longer this way, but at least they are only be priced in Euros, pounds, and Danish and Swedish krona) such characters as: Common-Man (like Superman, he too is an escapee from Krypton with superpowers, but he has renounced the use of them in the interest of neighborliness); Tall Dark-haired Woman (a cousin of Wonderwoman from whatever Greek island that chicks like that come from, but she prefers a more businesslike attire, and feels that since truth is all subjective anyway, there’s no need for the stupid lasso); Flying-Mammal Man (like the other guy, except he is officially resident of Monaco, so that his fortune is not otherwised excessively taxed so that he can still afford the decent gadgets, which he, of course, devotes solely to the common good) and Cousteau-man (unlike that other water-borne guy, he REFUSES to exploit innocent sea horses to get around, preferring to hitchhike on French submarines). These Euro-heroes go on critical, world-saving missions, mostly serving international criminal summonses and warrants on notorious international criminals, so that NATO (or the anticipated European defense force) troops have an appropriate legal basis to bring these evildoers to Euro-justice.
I already have the comic books 1, 2 and 3 (Euro-Justice League serves an international warrant on Radan Karadzic, EJL serves a Spanish warrant on Augusto Pinochet, and EJL serves a Belgian warrant on Ariel Sharon.) I eagerly await the “Euro-Justice League repossesses Shimon Peres’ Nobel Prize” and the “Euro-justice League serves a French information subpoena on Henry Kissinger” books; I’m told the last two are scheduled to come out later this year as the culmination of Denmark’s EU presidency.
You know, with American lone-wolf vigilate “super-heroes”, one wonders why anyone needs villains!
Indeed!
