this post was submitted on 05 Jun 2024
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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.
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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)