Not NaNoWriMo: Superheroes World-Building
Nov. 1st, 2022 08:18 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
tuftearsI've poked around at a variety of projects and one I would *like* to get back to, but is on the backburner because I just don't "get" it enough, has been the concept of superheroes in space. That is, not 'low Earth orbit' or 'villain has a secret base on the moon' or anything like that, but a story about superheroes out there in the galaxy, visiting different places.
But I really do enjoy superheroes as a literature.
So, a couple of things that need to go together:
One. Superheroes. I can come up with individual heroes, but I'm not sure I adequately understand how to fit them together, or make them work. What are your favorite heroes, what do you like most about them? What do you think your heroes would do, given access to a starship and a map to Local Space?
Two. Galactic science fiction. Once you have cheap and convenient space travel, you usually also have abundant power, resources, and space. The individual power level of your average police-person, soldier, or armed warship goes up correspondingly, to a point where some fellow running around in tights punching people out from the shadows might seem more like a dangerous vigilante than an actual hero.
It feels to me like superheroes and villains might turn into... celebrities, consultants, or maybe they might confine their superpowered deeds to the frontiers where the general power levels are a lot lower.
Is the solution here, make the superpowered people more powerful, lower the generally available 'power level', maybe by way of some kind of apocalypse that forces people to turn to superheroes for help, while supervillains try to provide order "their own way"? Or go with the idea of celebrities, people famous for their own sake, and having powers simply enrolls one into a system where the question is how they use that power? What would *you* want to see?
Distance is also an issue, but one that can be solved with discreet application of technology. Star systems are, relatively speaking, entire states, so one can travel between "cities" -- planets, space stations, asteroid mining bases, that sort of thing, relatively quickly -- but going between systems without a convenient hyperspace gateway in the middle is going to Take Time (tm), in which the hero won't be available to solve crime in their normal beat. Contrariwise, villains probably rely on that same factor to elude pursuit-- things getting too hot in one system? Time to take a long trip!
Three. Superhero stories. This is possibly the biggest stumbling block. I like *reading* them, but I'm way less confident about writing one, especially one that involves multiple superheroes in a given sector of space. Maybe tell me about some of your favorite superhero stories, or things you *do* want to see, and things you *don't* want to see.
The most obvious story is, of course, some grave threat to all existence within a sector, but that's way too heavy-handed to me. I want to write stories that explore life in a galaxy that has some finite number of superheroes and villains, so they need to interact with one another, and existence can't be on the line every time, that just gets old fast. Stopping crime is the next obvious thing, I guess, followed by assisting in the wake of natural disasters. But what else do superheroes get up to?
Anyway, this isn't for a NaNoWriMo *this* year, but it could be for something next year!
But I really do enjoy superheroes as a literature.
So, a couple of things that need to go together:
One. Superheroes. I can come up with individual heroes, but I'm not sure I adequately understand how to fit them together, or make them work. What are your favorite heroes, what do you like most about them? What do you think your heroes would do, given access to a starship and a map to Local Space?
Two. Galactic science fiction. Once you have cheap and convenient space travel, you usually also have abundant power, resources, and space. The individual power level of your average police-person, soldier, or armed warship goes up correspondingly, to a point where some fellow running around in tights punching people out from the shadows might seem more like a dangerous vigilante than an actual hero.
It feels to me like superheroes and villains might turn into... celebrities, consultants, or maybe they might confine their superpowered deeds to the frontiers where the general power levels are a lot lower.
Is the solution here, make the superpowered people more powerful, lower the generally available 'power level', maybe by way of some kind of apocalypse that forces people to turn to superheroes for help, while supervillains try to provide order "their own way"? Or go with the idea of celebrities, people famous for their own sake, and having powers simply enrolls one into a system where the question is how they use that power? What would *you* want to see?
Distance is also an issue, but one that can be solved with discreet application of technology. Star systems are, relatively speaking, entire states, so one can travel between "cities" -- planets, space stations, asteroid mining bases, that sort of thing, relatively quickly -- but going between systems without a convenient hyperspace gateway in the middle is going to Take Time (tm), in which the hero won't be available to solve crime in their normal beat. Contrariwise, villains probably rely on that same factor to elude pursuit-- things getting too hot in one system? Time to take a long trip!
Three. Superhero stories. This is possibly the biggest stumbling block. I like *reading* them, but I'm way less confident about writing one, especially one that involves multiple superheroes in a given sector of space. Maybe tell me about some of your favorite superhero stories, or things you *do* want to see, and things you *don't* want to see.
The most obvious story is, of course, some grave threat to all existence within a sector, but that's way too heavy-handed to me. I want to write stories that explore life in a galaxy that has some finite number of superheroes and villains, so they need to interact with one another, and existence can't be on the line every time, that just gets old fast. Stopping crime is the next obvious thing, I guess, followed by assisting in the wake of natural disasters. But what else do superheroes get up to?
Anyway, this isn't for a NaNoWriMo *this* year, but it could be for something next year!
no subject
Date: 2022-11-06 05:56 pm (UTC)I had a similar problem in RPGs when I was playtesting a certain cyberpunk setting using Savage Worlds rules, and there was a skill for "Hacking," and in essence EVERYTHING (and EVERYONE) was "hackable," since this was a sort of hyper-cyber setting where everyone has chips in their heads, and every security robot and door and all that, so in practice all you need is a hacker to point at just about anything and reasonably have a near-50% chance or possibly even better to "hack" it in a single round. In practice, the gameplay was absolutely broken. Everyone in the party was opting to either switch off their head-link-ups or do without them entirely, because otherwise they were at theoretical constant threat that if they ran afoul of a HACKER, the guy could bypass all their skills and defenses and just go for their heads (and the only way to effectively DEFEND against a Hacker in that setting was to ... be a Hacker yourself). And whatever the problem was, the shooty guy can only so often say, "I shoot it" and expect to help, but odds were, the hacker could ALWAYS offer, "I hack it" with a reasonable chance of improving the situation.
"Magic" as a power is a bad idea. It's like having "power" as a power. Or, say, having a bunch of magic schools, and then calling one of the schools "Chaos," and having it essentially be, "Whatever cool stuff I want to be able to do at any given moment."
Re: Principled villains -- I feel like if you go that route, it has got to be more than just a Venture Brothers style Guild of Calamitous Intent. "We do bad things ... but with RULES!" Because then you have to wonder how and why they came about, how in the world it holds together, etc. More, it would need to be a competing cause. The Lawful League of Order and Universal Betterment (we work WITH the governments of these worlds), vs. the Vigilante Society of We Are Awesomer Than Everyone Else (we have superpowers, we're meant to use them, and the normies are behind the curve in evolution anyway, so we'll make a better world for tomorrow and everyone's going to like it ... OR ELSE). Effectively, the second society might well be a bunch of nasties, but at least their leadership makes a show of being for a "good cause." Even if your organization is riddled with hypocrites, you at least need a unifying (nominal) cause, or else it's just going to be anarchy, occasionally tempered by a strongman and his little fiefdom. (E.g., the best you'll get is something like mafia or yakuza, who will at least make NOISE about holding to standards, but will regularly violate them when it's convenient to do so and there are no witnesses.)
Or, hey, maybe "superpowered space yakuza" is good enough for the scope of a particular story. "Okay, so maybe those superpowered brats who feel entitled to vaporize anyone who disses them can run rampant on other worlds, but on THIS one, we've got a SYSTEM. Go home, hero. We don't need you here."
no subject
Date: 2022-11-06 07:12 pm (UTC)As far as villains who just want to wreck things go, keeping in mind the technology level is generally higher, if you get too many of the Powers That Be upset with you, even if they don't have powers, they will work to stomp on you because you're losing them more money than they'd spend getting rid of you. I figure on several significant organizations, but as I've been noodling over the plot and how it might go, I'm starting to think I might need to structure this as a series of settings.
So the MC winds up in setting one, with the lowest power level, at a time that she's struggling to find her footing and come to terms with actually having powers. She transitions to setting two, then three, and so forth, in an epic travel story, each setting has its own superheroes and villains, organizations, and politics. The MC takes along whatever lessons she's learned, and hopefully tools, resources, and allies and influence with organizations.
I'd definitely have to consider your points on organizations. The 'Awesomer' society might have clashes with the 'Lawful' league, but they're both nominally fighting crime/keeping the peace, just doing it in very different places. A recommendation from the 'Awesomer' society might make the MC start off with some prejudice from the 'Lawful' league as she moves into their territory, but she has to "move up in the galaxy" if she's going to accomplish her primary objective.