If real people got powers, do you think they would all become corrupt, evil psychopaths?
Watchmen was a pretty good depiction of this as well.
Someone with literal godlike powers would probably lose touch with human concerns eventually. People who put on masks and start fights with criminals are deeply unwell.
They aren’t paragons of society. They’re deeply fucked up people.
If people had superpowers, vats of trauma and ego issues, and megacorps wanted to wrangle it for profit and control… absolutely yes.
This would totally happen in the US and other countries. 100%. No doubt.
It’s been proven that power corrupts humans and just recently even
in a medical / biological waythat empathy is lost.https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/social-empathy/201909/power-blocks-empathy
So, absolutely.
Nah, I think itd be 60% good people but the worst 10% would be in power pretending to be better than those good enough people
Isn’t it about the same in the series?
Yes. They just dont even cover most people
The Boys is barely even satire, they pull so much from reality.
I used to think it was over the top for expositional purposes. Used to.
The only thing stopping Homelander from going on a rampage, killing tens of thousands of people and seizing control of the world is that he cares what people think about him. He wants to be loved, not feared.
He kills innocent people but he does it discreetly or when it looks like he can justify his actions.
But can you imagine an absolute piece of shit like Stephen Miller getting super powers? He’d be far, far worse.
This is one of the only issues I have with the show… Homelander’s leash appears to be super hamfisted in, or in general it makes little sense why corporate has so much control with so little relative power. Lots of people in that world have powers, and it would be total anarchic chaos in reality.
They haven’t told us yet how Vought controls Homelander.
They’ve reiterated over and over again. They’ve even explained it very explicitly in the episode where he went down to the lab where he was kept. He needs to feel loved. I don’t know how you’ve missed such a main plot line.
Isn’t that like his entire arc? He slowly realizes his leash is only as strong as he believes it to be
In the comics Vaught does have a real fail-safe against Homelander.
The realistic thing about The Boys is that it isn’t a world where normal people get superpowers, it’s an evil company making superheroes into celebrities for profit.
It’s not a direct comparison, but look at what happens to people that have money and power in our society. They become evil monsters. I think superpowers could have a similar effect. Although getting money and power requires you to be a monster already on some level, I don’t think suddenly gaining superpowers would have the exact same effect.
You’ve identified the key, though, right there: “suddenly gaining” is the problem.
You know how caterpillars form themselves a coocoon, & then inside it they are essentially reduced-to-biological-slag, & … smashing themselves against the sides of their coocoon, unable to escape the process, they are re-formed into something that we call a moth or butterfly?
The process has to make someone’s character match their “powers”.
Which is what we, globally, rejected.
Want a gun?
Who says you need to become competent to respect others’ lives ( any species ) AND you need to become competent to respect just how destructive-of-life guns are?
Just provide money, & in many jurisdictions, you’ve now got a gun!
( & people wonder why there were around 700 mass-shootings in the US of A, a couple years ago, in a single year )
IF the process of gaining superpowers forced evolution-of-character, THEN it shouldn’t be a problem.
IF the process of gaining technological superpowers-over-nature/ecology isn’t forcing character-evolution to equivalent degree,
THEN expect the whole human-evil dimensions … narcissism/machiavellianism/sociopathy-psychopathy/nihilism/sadism/systemic-dishonesty/displacing-considered-reasoning-for-ideology/displacing-objectivity-for-ideology/etc to opportunistically wield technology for their-faction’s supremacism.
IF the good have difficulty being machiavellian, but the evil don’t, THEN the evil win, right?
Natural Selection.
Same with ALL those dimensions.
That is why having the spine to make authority only available for the accountable+responsible is a requirement, of true civilization.
We haven’t done that, & we may not allow it to happen.
Universe has no obligation to allow us to survive this-century, though: The Great Filter is an actual thing, & our “entitlement” is just our unconscious-ego’s fantasy.
Toddler-character with nukes isn’t infinitely-viable.
Universe corners such idiocy into exterminating itself.
That, too, is Natural Selection.
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No, it’s much more interesting than that.
It’s an accurate representation of Garth Ennis being mad about having to work with superheroes despite not liking that at all and being a bit of a petty bitch with a bit of a dudebro sense of humor that, frankly, we all overrated at the time because when you were a teenager in the 90s you thought Preacher was hilarious and much smarter than it is, and it got to his head a bit.
And then it’s an accurate representation of Eric Kripke who was very much the right age to have gone through that, taking the material and going “well, that Trump guy sure was a thing, huh?” and “aren’t you kind of over all those MCU movies, also?” because superheroes in film were at the same point in 2019 than they were in comic books in 2006.
Don’t be the teenager we all were in the 90s and assume that “edgy and mean and over the top” is the same as “smart and realistic”. It’s not.
I’ll say that the show is at least less callous than the original material and it’s at least trying to be political, which makes it slightly more plausible and internally consistent than Ennis’ HR complaint of a comic book. Hollywood has a history of taking this edgelord crap (see also: every single Mark Millar adaptation) and making it palatable by applying the same mainstreaming and dumbing down that kills every Alan Moore adaptation. Turns out if the original material isn’t that smart to begin with that’s actually a good thing to do.
