this post was submitted on 05 Jun 2024
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Seriously, this kind of stuff is what makes most superhero movies/content so dumb. When they're getting tossed through buildings and causing literally trillions of dollars of damage every fight, while magically not hurting innocents or getting the world pissed at them, it completely removes it from any chance of being even realated to the real world.
Some of the best super hero content is great specifically because they at least attempt to keep things grounded in mortal reality. Unfortunately, the only one I can think of right now that exemplifies it well is the blatantly obvious The Boys.
Hopefully others know of way more/better ones. I know some content creators understand this problem, so there has got to be more than a handful.
I think this is what The Incredibles does very well. It throws you into a world with super heros, makes you think they're cool, then shows you what would actually happen to them when they start "saving" people and smashing up infrastructure. Probably one of the best super hero movies out there.
Yeah except in the modern day they'd have been protected by good Samaritan laws. It makes sense in those circumstances but basically what happened was the heroes getting sued and prosecuted for moving a non-responsive to the side of the road to avoid them getting hit by traffic.
That sounds ridiculous but that's literally an example from China where they don't have those protections. People suing helpful bystanders and arguing that them helping is them taking on responsibility.
Now granted, making 9/11 look like a scheduled demolition (don't crack wise conspiracy nuts) well stretches beyond what those exemptions might be able to cover, BUT, the heroes could get leniency if they can prove that they were trying to take the fight out of the city but the villain was refusing to be taken away from where they could harm civilians.
Man of Steel supes would have a hard time pulling that one off but the actual big blue boyscout would have ZERO trouble getting any legal consequences mitigated this way due to his outstanding record of public service outside of the fights. He probably ASKS the judge to bring the charges to create an opportunity to issue a public apology whenever something like this arises.
“Mr. Sansweet didn't ask to be saved. Mr. Sansweet didn't want to be saved. And the injury he received from Mr. Incredible's ‘actions,’ so-called, causes him daily pain…”
It’s this scene—dark as the implications may be—that really drives the point home.
Nah lmao. If the daily pain is so bad he can just kill himself again. And if he doesn't wanna die anymore, then good job Mr Incredible.
Or Hancock lol
The whole plot of the Captain America Civil War movie was built on the impact of collateral damage. For another franchise, The Watchmen movie was full of super hero atrocities and even the destruction of entire cities.
Ehh, I'd say the MCU largely ignored the problem and barely scratched the surface in Civil War. Though The Watchmen did a pretty solid job, given the crazy power levels of some of them.
I mean, Watchmen is a criticism of the superhero genre.
It deliberately goes against established tropes.
Only the subject got dropped in favor of a personal drama between heroes. Honestly, they low keyed made Zemo the good guy.
The best superhero stories always have personal drama that parallels the high stakes battles. Also, the cause of the Zemo drama was what again? It was all about fallout from collateral damage.
The boys is much better at it
I don't know about better, but certainly more relevant to current events. You would not get The Boys without the disastrous social impacts of Trumpism.
I really like Marion G. Harmon’s Wearing the Cape series for this. Hero teams are governmentally regulated, and state or federally mandated, and have to work with local authorities whenever possible, often acting as first responders specifically regarding super villain events. They’re required to plan and mitigate collateral damage. Heroing is literally their job and they have standard and on-call hours, as well as patrols and the like.
Socially heroes and villains are treated kind of like celebrities, and there are sort of unwritten rules about no killing, and no going after civilian identities or people’s families outside of costume as that’s grounds for both villains and heroes to look the other way regarding the aforementioned “No killing” rule.
With the knowledge that villains are hard to impossible to fully stop, emphasis exists on imprisonment and rehabilitation, and over the course of the series some villains and heroes end up changing sides.
There’s one hero in the series who is a federal agent with the ability to replicate clones of himself and is embedded in most hero teams, as well as being secret service, generalized security, and informant as all clones have the knowledge of the rest. Nobody he works with outside of the President of the U.S. even knows how many of him are out there.
On top of this, besides the typical hero teams, there are more “B grade” teams that are not specifically super heroes but act as emergency responders and construction crews for both hero events and fights as well as generalized incidents, and things like heroes without borders that act as global humanitarian aid on a volunteer basis, similar to Doctors Without Borders.
Vigilantes are frowned upon, and can end up liable for crimes as they’re not sanctioned to use their powers to fight.
It’s a very interesting series, and deals with a lot of “real world” consequences of super heroics, including long term injury and death, PTSD and other trauma, and the impact of things like super powered terrorism and extremist groups, as well as anti-super sentiment.
——
Besides that series, I’d also recommend the web serial “Worm” by Wildbow (John McCrae), but that one’s a doozy, both in terms of content (it only goes from bad to worse and things never really get better) and length (it’s absurdly long, maybe equivalent in length to 15-20 full length novels, broken up into fairly long chapters and sections).
Dang, you've definitrly sold me on that. I'm going to have to check it out. and Worm. Bad to worse sounds quite accurate in a mortal world with sups. lol
Worm is exactly the kind of chaos that would exist with supers. Attempted mitigation and control, but those with selfish interests and villains often coming out on top, much like those in power and wealth in the real world. WtC has a lighter perspective to tell its story, but Worm is straight up “what if the most horrible person you can think of could also kill with a glance/touch/etc. With no consequence?” And worse. Here there be monsters, quite literally, and humanity is losing the battle.
It’s an absolutely incredible series and I’ve read the whole thing twice at this point, but it’s often very depressing, and the bad can be really bad.
If you want to read Worm there are web scrapers online that can convert it to an ebook format for easier reading, rather than needing to browse the parahumans site.
It's on library Genesis. No need to reinvent the wheel.
Thanks, had no idea. I initially read it so long ago that “shadow libraries” weren’t much of a thing (if they existed at all yet?) and actually wrote my own scraper in Python to download it.
Worm is one of the few works I've seen with a lengthy, and justified, trigger warning list. For all the authors works, really. Heavy on bio-horror.
https://booktriggerwarnings.com/Worm_by_John_%22Wildbow%22_McCrae
The ending paragraph for Worm hits HARD, and I don't recommend reading the epilogue immediately after it for that reason (it's really more of a prologue for the sequel anyway)
IIRC Marvel has handwaved this through an actual government agency who's job is to fix shit quick. Department of Damage Control IIRC, very steeped in realist humor, and I mean actual school of realism not cult of "wahmenz in super hero movies is unrealistic!"
I would say it was commendable, but they ignore it completely when convenient and Civil War barely even scratched the surface of the concept in an actually story-impacting way.
It was a private company (owned partially by Wilson Fisk and Tony Stark) in the comics.
Invincible handles consequences pretty well.
One example: At one point Atom Eve uses her powers to turn an empty lot into a playground. But it turns out
spoiler
the lot was empty because the ground was unstable. So the playground collapses and injures several people.Yea, Invincible is better than a lot in at least approaching the topic, though I didn't include it because the Global Defence Agency Cecil directs fixes things on a supernatural level. They magically fix up all sorts of things and magically make convincing cover stories, like the house blowing up like a freaking nuke as just a gas leak and the like.
Still nice that they're covering the topic, at least. It's so, SO much worse in the shows that just ignore it. Invincible does a good "meet in the middle": It's not really any big plot point of the show, but they also don't ignore the problems.
To their defense, the MCU kind of made a whole movie addressing exactly that, back when it was still really good
Yea, but I'd argue one movie out of 20+ is only as good as the dumb throwaway lines like, "Hey! We shouldn't fight here!" then proceeds to do nothing to move the fight...
Watch The Boys, it addresses collateral damage.
“Fuck supes”
Yea, The Boys is good shit, at least if the crassitude doesn't throw people off.
George R. R. Martin edited a terrific series called Wild Card that is really well grounded. The premise is an alien virus that gives people random mutations and some of them are horrific (the Jokers) but some get fantastic powers (the Aces).
It's pretty gritty and 'realistic' like they really go deep into how the various powers would realistically affect people and be used.
I really liked it up until
Tap for spoiler
one of the authors decided that ALL of the abilities and powers were all just forms of telekenesis , really sucked all the fun out of it!This is also addressed in Hancock (2008).
Chronicle probably doesn't exactly fit your description, but is an attempt at a more grounded look at superpeople.
Ohh Chronicle, haven't heard of that one. Going to have to check it out.
I mean, most decent superhero movies I see acknowledge inner city chaos to be bad. As soon as a horrible villain starts throwing fireballs, they’re trying to get civilians out, save people amidst chaos, etc.
There’s maybe another conversation to have on property damage; I think there’s not much story there due to the way insurance works. To us, these chaotic battles happen every summer, but in these worlds they’re rare freak occurrences - just like earthquakes.
Nah, that greatly depends on the universe. For an example of handling it badly, watch ... basically any of the DC universe live-action movies.
They're so bad that Batman regularly mercs people. Y'know, Batman. The guy who canonically takes issue with killing even violent terrorists actively killing others, let alone Security Guard #28201...
Superman gets thrown through buildings, uses laser eyes through buildings, etc, etc, and I shouldn't have to explain how Superman also takes issue with harming at least innocents. They might mention it, but then go on to have the city fight anyways with virtually none of their fighting actions indicating any reluctance...
I do NOT give them points for adding a throwaway line of, "You big meanie! We shouldn't fight in the city!"
I’m vaguely aware of that, but that’s also why I never really lined up for Zack Snyder movies on release. He has a uniquely ignorant take on those heroes.
I don't know if I'd call him ignorant (maybe willingly so) but more of the typical Hollywood dudebro that likes spectacle more than ... basic logic. Such a terrible lot of "creators"...
But Snyder is an artiste! 🙄😒
"Sorry I let Dr Evil detonate a nuke in the city centre. Wouldn't want to cause a mess"
The Avengers went into this. The United States government went after them after they saved NYC for the destruction caused while saving NYC, and then eventually arrested all of them. It pissed me off quite a bit, considering the alternative was the enslavement of humanity. Short-sighted, power hungry politicians...
Invincible and One Punch Man to some extent.
The infinity saga at some point has this as a topic I believe, too.