If real people got powers, do you think they would all become corrupt, evil psychopaths?

  • glitchdx@lemmy.world
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    19 hours ago

    Depends on who gets superpowers, and how such powers are acquired.

    The broad strokes of The Boys makes some degree of sense if we start with the premise that some megacorporation controls the manufacture and publicity of all supers. However, if supers can come from other sources, then what limitations are we putting on the premise?

    I am of the opinion that most people are inherently good. Most people are also inherently stupid and cowardly, but keep in mind that these circles on the venn diagram are independent of each other despite some overlap. However, if given an opportunity to choose between helping and hurting, without any fear of repercussions either way, most people would choose to help.

    There’s a popular quote: “power corrupts”, which is a shortened version of “absolute power corrupts absolutely”. I think this quote misses something fundamental: “power attracts the corruptable”. In a world without gods, no one I’d ever trust to be one would ever actively make the choice to become one unless it was forced on them somehow.

    If superpowers were distributed more randomly, then the odds of us getting a superman instead of a homelander improve greatly. Still a dice throw though.

  • dil@lemmy.zip
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    23 hours ago

    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

  • boolean_sledgehammer@lemmy.world
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    1 day ago

    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.

  • GrayBackgroundMusic@lemmy.zip
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    1 day ago

    One hundred percent. If you liked that show, then you might like the Wildcards series or Aberrant rpg.

    Have you ever seen someone poor get a lot of money and they go from being a normal person to a psychopath? Not everyone does, but enough do that you can notice. Being rich is a super power irl. If you’re a billionaire, you can crash a 100k car and just go get another one. A middle class person cannot comprehend having a 100k car.

    There’s a reason the phrase “fuck you money” exists.

  • Corporal_Punishment@feddit.uk
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    2 days ago

    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.

  • AlecSadler@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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    2 days ago

    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.

    • 4am@lemmy.zip
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      2 days ago

      I used to think it was over the top for expositional purposes. Used to.

  • Modern_medicine_isnt@lemmy.world
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    1 day ago

    Nope, cause pharmaceutical company would produce a drug that you take for a short time and never need again. Not enough profit. And they would have no actual control over the superheros. In the boys, all of the sups seemed to care what the public thought of them so much, they would do what the corp wanted. In reality, the ones who didn’t care would outnumber the ones who did. And they would just kill whoever they wanted, and threaten to kill others to get what they wanted. Kinda like the oligarchy we have today, but with far less constraint, and no need to even try to hide things like being pedos and racists and such.

    • Fredthefishlord@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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      1 day ago

      In reality, the ones who didn’t care would outnumber the ones who did.

      That’s not true. Most people care about public perception. From dictatorships to narcissists to normal people

      • Modern_medicine_isnt@lemmy.world
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        21 hours ago

        There are certainly people who do. But I think they are the minority. They do sort of bunch up though. So if you are one, you probably don’t realize you are the minority.

        • Auli@lemmy.ca
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          21 hours ago

          I’d say theybare the majority. Dictators care about their prescription. And look at all the people online trying to sell their public image.

          • Modern_medicine_isnt@lemmy.world
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            5 hours ago

            Dictators care about how they are perceived because they used skills in manipulating how they are perceived to get into the position they are in. Making it a self selecting group. But when you change “how” they get there to simply be that they were given superpowers at birth, you remove the self selection. So now it is just a random sampling of the population, which in my opinion skews toward not caring as much about how they are percieved if they don’t need to.

  • je_skirata@lemmy.today
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    2 days ago

    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.

  • herseycokguzelolacak@lemmy.ml
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    1 day ago

    The comic series, yes. The TV started similar, but I think it has been very gradually Marvelizing. S1of Boys was fairly loyal and realistic.

    • madcaesar@lemmy.world
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      21 hours ago

      Season 4…was…absokutr garbage 1 was solid I enjoyed 2, 3 was fun because of soldier boy… Then the finale was like wtf… And the season 4 is some of the worst television ever made holy shit…

  • Godort@lemmy.ca
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    2 days ago

    No. I don’t think The Boys would be an accurate portrayal.

    I think it would be much worse. Like apocalyptic.

  • MudMan@fedia.io
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    2 days ago

    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.

    • prole@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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      1 day ago

      It’s an accurate representation of Garth Ennis being mad about having to work with superheroes despite not liking that at all

      I’m slightly confused… Are you suggesting that Jeff Ennis, the creator of The Boys, previously worked alongside actual superheroes?

      Edit: Oops, Garth*

      • MudMan@fedia.io
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        1 day ago

        No, no, Jeff Ennis worked as an actual superhero briefly in the 1970s you’re thinking of John Ennis, who created The Boys as a musical in the 90s, but he was mad about his working conditions.

        • felbane@lemmy.world
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          11 hours ago

          No, no, John Ennis was the guy who wrote the play Boys Boys Boys after working as a roadie for Mötley Crüe. You’re thinking of Jed Ennis, who published the first blog called The Boys back in 1848 before the web even existed.

  • magnetosphere@fedia.io
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    2 days ago

    I like how Vought is (among other things) so much like American professional sports organizations, the NFL in particular. I could definitely see supes being handled that way.