I’m sorry, but John Galt, the Scarlet Pimpernel, and the Comte de Monte Cristo are not super heroes. In a world with super villians, I’d personally be extremely interested in seeing to it that I was never tarred with the same brush. Compared to what the “average citizenry” could do to you if they decided you needed to be gone, the super villians are a joke.
John Galt, Francisco d’Anconia and Ragnar Danneskjold never had secret identities. (Well, Francisco nicknamed himself “Frank” while he was working for Reardon.) They used their own names, and they didn’t go around wearing a mask and an improbable spandex costume and calling themselves “The Black Avenger”. Nor is it necessary to hide out in order to interact with “the common man”, an epithet that anyone with any sense should reject wholesale.
Spiderman was a special case, because, in addition to being a superhero, he was a public criminal, a situation, I might add, that he got himself into by being a vigillante. Using your initial stupid mistake in order to justify your ongoing stupid mistake does not count as improving matters. Two wrongs don’t make a right . . . although they may sort of cancel each other out, rendering pretty much anything you do null.
Futility is actually a common superhero theme. Ever wonder why?
I’m sorry, but John Galt, the Scarlet Pimpernel, and the Comte de Monte Cristo are not super heroes.
That is true. But in my post, I spoke of the advantages of “an alter ego for the action hero in comics and other modern fiction.” Those advantages obtain whether our hero is merely very talented or endowed with a strength that borders on the godlike.
In a world with super villians, I’d personally be extremely interested in seeing to it that I was never tarred with the same brush. Compared to what the “average citizenry” could do to you if they decided you needed to be gone, the super villians are a joke.
I’m not sure the above doesn’t count as a good reason to have a secret ID (or several of them).
John Galt, Francisco d’Anconia and Ragnar Danneskjold never had secret identities. (Well, Francisco nicknamed himself “Frank” while he was working for Reardon.) They used their own names, and they didn’t go around wearing a mask and an improbable spandex costume and calling themselves “The Black Avenger”. Nor is it necessary to hide out in order to interact with “the common man”, an epithet that anyone with any sense should reject wholesale.
I don’t know. When John Galt applied for a job at Taggart Transcontinental, did he list his real name and his actual home address in Galt’s Gulch? As for the term “common man,” I don’t see why it can’t serve a purpose on occasion. I had a teacher once who told the class that everyone is “super.” I wondered what value “super” had as a word if there were no non-super people.
I had a teacher once who told the class that everyone is “super.” I wondered what value “super” had as a word if there were no non-super people.
Sidebar:
I"m not sure if you have seen “The Incredibles”, but your comments here touch on the evil deed that the super-villian was trying to achieve in that movie. Syndrome (the villian) was trying to turn everyone into supers so that no one would be super (or more competent than anyone else).