Superpowers are useless
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Very few people have as large of a gap between how smart they are and how smart they think they are. Alan Moore thinks he's really, really, really smart and insightful.
Not even sure why I'm giving this argument the time of day, but to break it down a bit...he's weirdly assuming everyone has super powers in his scenario it seems. If you're the only speedster in the region, you can find a job a whole lot more interesting than pizza deliver. Supply and demand. Personal currier for the richest of the rich comes to mind, if we're just going standard delivery jobs. You'd be able to set your price, too.
And, even if everyone had super powers...well at that point they would be useful too, because the way cities were built and such would adapt to the new super powers. In his speed example, having a car would be impractical. If everyone had superspeed, things would adapt to where, even if it's now comparatively 'normal,' it's still useful.
Hilariously, you could make Moore's same stupid argument for anything. Cars? How are cars useful? What are you going to do...commute to the office?! Deliver goods?! How is that useful? No. Boring can still be useful.
TL;DR: Alan Moore is retarded.
Everyone behind the show Sherlock, and their fans, are a great teaching tool for what "dumb people writing what they think smart people are and thinking they are smart too" is.
hey, the 80s one was awesome.
There are plenty of fine Holmes adaptations. The one most commonly called just Sherlock, because that's its name, is not one of them.
Well, I'd argue there is one point to this: will, discipline, and integrity are some of the real super-powers that actually make anything else worth having. A useless shmuck with super-speed would probably go around doing party tricks and running fast for delivery. But then again, if he's lazy, he may just drive a car because it's easier.
A hero is not what powers he has, but who he is as a person.
Unfortunately, since Alan Moore is a degenerate communist, he doesn't believe that people can be heroic at a deep and fundamental level because of how shit of a person he is, which informs how shitty he thinks everyone else is.
An easy way to test this is to point out a hero that seems like a joke, Aquaman being a classic, and then see who treats it as a joke versus who finds it terrifying. Because they are both revealing their own creativity in how they'd use it with their reaction.
There’s room for a story where an evil Aquaman learns how to command bacteria and viruses.
It was a stretch, but he was able to induce a STROKE in someone by doing this.
Fucking hell, brain eating amoebas under his control would be a gruesome interrogation technique.
Whenever Batman gets someone else's powers, he becomes 1000% scarier.
Meanwhile, Batman also notes that Plastic Man may be the most dangerous mutant on Earth, he just doesn't realize it because he's a goof-ball. Also, Booster Gold has literal future tech, but isn't actually that great, and is kind of a bumbling egomaniac.
Frank Miller, of all people, was one of the only people who truly GOT how deadly Plastic Man could really be.
The one good line in All-Star Batman and Robin:
"If he wanted to, he could kill us all."
Not to mention that one Elseworlds story where Batman got a Green Lantern ring...
Well, you won't find me disagreeing. And, as someone else said, we that's why we have super hero stories, not super power stories.
But Moore's statement that powers - i.e. enhanced abilities or potential - are useless is still nonsense. Sure, a loser could waste those powers...but would still be vastly more powerful than a loser without powers. It's still what you do with them at the end of the day but, dang, super powers would never be anything to sneeze at, especially if most people don't have them. A unique, powerful loser is still going to have a huge leg up on even a dedicated, disciplined non-powered person...at least in specific fields. Now, that's not to say they'd win - the Punisher, Iron Man, Batman, and other non-powered characters are popular for a reason - but they'd still have a technical advantage.
Again, agreed. Again, Moore was talking about the powers themselves though. Heroes are great, but this topic seems to be about dissecting the powers themselves, which are unrelated to how heroic someone is.
Yes, but I think the issue here is just general smug, and Subverting Expectations™. I'm not sure he's even thought through the argument logically or ideologically. He's basically just being edgy. Everyone likes the idea of super powers, so Moore wants to shit on them. Pretty funny, really.
It's definitely that.
Say what you will about My Hero Academia, but I have always loved All Might for this reason.
He is a prime example of upholding the ideals of Superman.
It helps that All Might is more proudly American - despite being Japanese both in- and out-of-universe - than characters written in modern American stories.
From what I have seen, it is because All Might is how most Japanese people see Americans: Big, loud, obnoxious, and in your face. But when the chips are down and you need a hero, they will bulldoze over everyone in their path to be the hero and save the day. And quite frankly, they are sadder when they arent like that.
On a strange note, I saw the same thing with the pokemon "Braviary"
I haven't seen Pokemon, so I'm not familiar - is it just the bald eagle resemblance, or is there more to it?
Braviary looks like an eagle, but in the anime, it is explicitly stated to have extremely high loyalty to it's friends and family, and can always be counted on to fight no matter how difficult the situation.
What he's said here is one side of a debate (the losing side).
They never debate. This is somebody who is so used to only strawmanning the other side that he forgot that they can ever be right. And what you've done is steelman his other side, which shows immediately how dumb his take is.
It's not about intelligence, but echo chambers. If he thought his dumbass view would be questioned he'd put a little more thought into it. Speed is useless because you'd burn up from air friction. Invisibility is useless because you'd trip over your shoe - still dumb, but at least actually attacking the power instead of the strawman of stupid uses for it.
Basically he's Le Reddit personified.
As I said to another response, I think even the people calling him retarded are giving him too much credit. He's not having a debate, even a one-sided one. He's just being edgy and Subversive. "People like super powers, so I'll say they're dumb." Really not sure it goes too much beyond that. He's just Deconstructing things.
I don't think he's even thought some of this through enough to think about whether he's being questioned or not. And if he did think about being questioned...well, all those people are just Chuds, right?!
Now, admittedly, I myself might be a tad uncharitable here, but I do think he's just doing surface level, 'does it sound vaguely cool and edgy?' stuff. He's not making an argument at all, even a bad one. He's just saying super powers suck.
-Superpowers are useless
-Creates literal god character
-gets beaten by super smart secret king because (dumb) reasons
-SEE!!!!
I hate Writers™. Which, similar to Experts™ versus experts, are completely different than writers, who I have no problem with. But, yeah, fuck Writers™. Smarmy pricks.
The obvious speedster job is assassinations and trafficking. You could traffic all the cocaine in South America in a day.
This is generally why you have "super hero" comics, not "super power" comics.
If I didn't know that this was that insufferable idiot Alan Moore, I would have thought it's a mildly amusing stand up comedy routine.
The world he envisions is as banal and boring as his monotone voice. There certainly wouldn't be military applications to somebody who could incinerate something just by looking at it. Oh no, we'll just have that guy soldering plumbing joints as a tradesman.
Remember X2, where Nightcrawler sliced through all of the Secret Service at the White House and almost stabbed the president in about 30 seconds? The fundamental dynamics of power would change when the richest men in the world and the most powerful armies can't stand up against an illiterate preteen from a favela in Brazil.
I think if superpowers were real, the world would be a much more frightening place. How bad would be in direct proportion to the number of people that had them and how much more powerful those gifts made them from normal humans. The one thing it wouldn't be is boring.
Lol but we shouldn't do anything about them because they're nice people like the gays! X men is so retarded.
The human race would likely not survive if a significant percentage had super powers. We would be stuck at a subsistence level because the highest level of organization would be warbands under the guys with the strongest powers. They would be literally invincible and would rape and murder at their discretion.
Pretty sure that was one of the points Cauldron made in Worm
Don't think about how much damage some individual can do today vs 100 years ago then.
Two people with manual labor jobs could blow up an office building. A few more could take down a skyscraper. Five people in a Chinese virus lab disrupted global trade and killed many people.
I think this is the undercurrent behind the New World Order. The elites, as you explained, are terrified of individual people having power. And the force multipliers from technology only grow daily.
What to do is a real question. We can't have people with gene printers making super viruses (and it's not that hard to do) without totally changing society to isolate people. We also can't have lizard pedos controlling everyone's thoughts with brain microchips and/or Google search.
Probably the best solution is to spread out to all the planets, but that's maybe too far off.
I don't want to belie the complexity of the topic, but the potential for these things to happen is normally low. For instance, it's been possible to assassinate people by kamikaze ever since the advent of powered flight, even the most powerful people, but it's only happened a few times because of layers of social, professional, and informational constraints. As our culture falls apart, granted, some of those constraints will fall away as well.
While its not considered in the same genre, DBZ is a great example of how "superpowers" can literally change the fundamentals of every aspect in life.
Goku is a literal retard, but can farm massive fields because he has super strength, speed and flying. His whole race was just a smidge stronger than others and had beam powers and a kaiju berserker mode, so they were able to conquer galaxies to the point where they got genocided out of fear of their capabilities.
Every time a regular person is shown in the series, its shown just how useless they are at anything compared to the main cast where even the weak joke characters like Yamcha or Krillin are able to run circles around anyone at basic jobs.
Ironically, it even manages to show when super powers are useless. Hercule is consistently able to show that charisma and charm are equally important to the battle as anything super, and many times they would have been lost without his backup and power (money).
Yamcha and Krillin didn't even start out as "weak joke characters".
Krillin was more or less equal to Goku when they first met, though Goku was a little tougher because of his adventure with the dragon balls and "Emperor" Pilaf. What really changed their dynamic was when Goku started learning chi power crap, plus the fact that every time a Saiyan gets beat down, it gets stronger and tougher by nature.
Yamcha was Goku's first legit threat, and he nearly killed Goku in their first fight (iirc, it's been a little while).But neither one of them knew about the Saiyan mechanic I just mentioned, which is how Goku was able to come back and beat Yamcha's ass. The same went for Oolong, though he's a shapeshifting perv, rather than a strongman/fighter.
It's just that between being a Saiyan (and getting his ass kicked a LOT as a kid), Goku started to outstrip the rest of them pretty fast even before he went away for formal training (before the fight with Piccolo.)
It was only in Z they became jokes because by then, well, they were, compared to even a Goku who has yet to really become an insanely OP sub-god.
I know, I was comparing their "endgame" personas. As in, Baseball Yamcha and Cop Krillin.
Guys who realized they were outgunned in terms of galaxy ending threats, so they retired to be the biggest possible fish in a smaller pond.
Heck even Videl who just learned the most basic possible moves was able to fight crime like a literal superhero before she became a housewife.
It's not about the powers themselves, but how the HEROES consistently choose to use those powers for good rather than evil.
The Boys isn't about superHEROES. It's about everyday assholes with super powers.
I suppose someone should point out to Mr. Moore that there are decades upon decades of books which describe the exact ways in which these "useless" capabilities would be put to use besides grilling hot dogs or delivering pizzas.
This comes off as if he's trying to talk someone out of using powers if they had them but grasping at straws as for reasons why, trying to frame it as if their lives weren't changed and they'd still be dependent on mundane jobs and traditional transportation. The notion of transcending these things is what makes these powers appealing to begin with. It's like trying to talk a bird out of using its wings because everything they need to survive is on the ground.
Remember the day my darlin', when spring is in the air, and the bald-headed birds are whispering everywhere and you see them walking southward in their dirty underwear, that's the Tennessee Bird Walk
Sorry, but you triggered THAT brainworm, so I thought I'd share.
This is a terrible take.
If I had Dr. Manhattan's superpower (to vaporize people) I can assure you I would not find that to be "useless"
Horrible example super speed is extremely OP. In reality cool superpowers would end up in combat related positions, special forces, bodyguards, mercenaries.
Mind control, illusionists, telepaths would be used in any corporate or state work.
Invisibility would be useful in every industry.
I like his works but this is clearly the separation of artist from the art (And has been since the 1980's) for me.
I think somewhere behind the wiccan veneer that seems to be a sense of guidance for him there is a taut mind that manages to thrash out complicated stories worthy of contemplation.
But at face value it some seem a little contrite.
I'm fairly sure there was a what if superman comic that tackled this.
Where Krypton still exists, but a few kyroptonians like superman were sent to other planets due to thinking the planet would be destroyed.
So because of that fact, superman, and others evacuated like him, become the weakest people on krypton when they get there to see it for themselves.
They become the weak human types that they themselves did the saving of back on earth. Because it's the sun near earth that unlocks their powers, but native kyrptonians evolved to use their own sun for theirs, which is different somehow, to gain their powers. I forget which is which but one is yellow and one is red or some other color, it's been decades since I read it. This just reminded me of it.
It was an extremely boring what-if that I bet only exists because the editor at the time knew it'd be boring and kept saying no, but was hounded by someone who thought they knew better, and wanted to see the story work. It didn't.
At the time a little known comic series called The Electric Warriors sold more than it, so we never got more than just the one what if off shoot.
Funny how this guy can literally publish child porn where a 10yr old girl gets graphically raped (Providence #6)... and still be a Leftist hero.
Meanwhile, if you watch anime where a schoolgirl has skirts higher than her ankles, YOU'RE all the pedos.