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"Stardust, whose vast knowledge of interplanetary science has made him the most remarkable man that ever lived, devotes his abilities to crime-busting..."

Stardust the Super Wizard, Fantastic Comics #14

Most comics take place in a world ostensibly like our own. To keep up this milieu, major modifications to the world are only done to fictional locations, and often only to current levels of technology.

A person who controls weather will never make it rain in a place famous for drought. A person who can control fire will never stop brush fires or get a job at a power station. And a supergenius (such as Reed Richards of the Fantastic Four) who can whip up anti-alien parasite vaccines on command will never take a weekend to cure cancer (or even five minutes to find out what causes piss shivers). All potential solutions to real-life problems will only be done in novel (fictional) situations - useless. Status Quo Is God, and the status quo of the real world even moreso. It's the same reason you can't stop Hitler from starting World War II.

This is sometimes lampshade hung as making people "too dependent" on superheroes. You would think comic book citizens are already dependent on superheroes to defend them from supervillains, but apparently not. It's a good thing Louis Pasteur didn't feel this way.

This is essentially a device to make the world of the comic a relatable place. Because nobody has ever been able to relate to Star Trek or Lord Of The Rings. Even then Star Trek had tons of things the replicators and transporters should have been able to do which would have ruined the plot of half the episodes, necessitating a lot of Holding Back The Phlebotinum to maintain drama.

This also may be the result of conventions dating back to World War II. Writers and editors of the time felt it would be disrespectful to have superheroes solve world problems, since the next day would still see hundreds of soldiers fighting and dying over the same issues. Most comic books of the time focused on the characters' fictional universes. Some, notably Captain America, featured Allied heroes fighting in zero-sum games with Axis villains.

Sometimes the writers try to hide this implication behind The World Is Not Ready, or the necessity of a Masquerade. This doesn't really make sense in a traditional Super Hero universe, given that Reed Richards, the titular character for this trope, lives in Manhattan in a gigantic skyscraper in the shape of the number 4. He is not trying to keep out of sight. Furthermore, the official explanation of his wealth is that it comes from his patents; this makes it seems as if he's selling off minor trinkets while keeping the good stuff for himself, which is certainly not what the authors intended.

Newly-created Super Hero universes tend to avert this, especially if the writer is trying to make a geopolitical statement.

Oddly enough, this doesn't apply to supervillains.

See also Plausible Deniability.

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Examples:

• With regard to the trope's namesake, in recent years Marvel have attempted to justify Reed Richards by making it a matter of cost — Reed invents machines and solutions too costly to recreate. Mr. Fantastic is only smart enough to build a flying car, but not quite smart enough (or too busy) to make it run on anything less complicated than comet gas or the pain of damned souls or whatever.
  • The Ultimate Reed Richards is even smarter, and consequently more useless. When he fights the Ultimate Sub-Mariner, he's invented a helmet that turns his every thought into concrete reality (yet still manages to lose!). Surely, even a scrap of such a device's technology could be put to immeasurable practical use.
    • The rationale/Hand Wave behind this is that everything he does is financed by the army, and most of his discoveries are consequently classified or reserved solely for their use, and he's mostly only allowed to work on projects that they request (or his own pet projects like holographic baby versions of Thor, Iron Man, and Captain America). Tony Stark, on the other hand, apparently invented the mp3, and is presumably funding lots of research on cancer, since he has an inoperable brain tumor.
  • In a recent plotline, Doom travels back in time to stop Reed from changing the world. The future-Four follow him, and Doom is forced to admit that the future is a paradise, and the only reason he wants to stop Reed is so that he can do it. Reed sends him to a alternate universe where all the heroes are dead, leaving future-Doom as the only superpowered being.
  • Hand Waved somewhat during the Mark Waid run on Fantastic Four, when one issue revealed that Reed does indeed make money off of his patents... by taking money from other corporations to delay releasing advanced products that would revolutionize whole industries overnight and likely destroy the world economy by putting millions out of work. For instance, he takes money from Revlon to delay the release of his cure for acne so they can continue to sell their own acne-treatments.
    • Which to this troper is verging on a Moral Event Horizon moment. Especially the acne cure bit.
  • And on the non-canon side, the premise of Steve Engelhart's Fantastic Four: Big Town is basically "What If Reed Richards weren't useless?"
  • A Running Gag in the 80s John Byrne run was that various characters would ask Reed why he hasn't cured cancer/created a super cleanser/perfected cold fusion/etc. His usual response was "What makes you think I haven't tried," followed by a short burst of technobabble explaining why he hadn't succeeded.
• Aversion: Rising Stars, created by J. Michael Straczynski, had one character declare herself ruler of Chicago, another destroys the coca fields in Columbia, and a third brings fertile soil up from beneath the desert sands of the Middle East at the cost of her own life, in an attempt to end the conflict centering around Israel.
• Marvel Comics's New Universe, published in the late 1980s, was possibly one of the first aversions, including such things as military use of supers and the complete and utter (accidental) destruction of Pittsburgh by a "hero" who was trying to get rid of his own powers. Interestingly, though, it started out as "The World Outside Your Window", trying to be more like the real world than the established universes.
• This trope was completely averted in the graphic novel Watchmen, where superheroes have been changing history for thirty years before the story starts. The plot revolves around the big changes (like America winning the Vietnam War, and Nixon halfway through his fifth term as President in 1986, electric cars), but there are literally hundreds of smaller and more subtle ones (prevalence of pirate comics), some of them only found hidden in the background of a single panel.
• The DCU seems to be moving away from this slightly in the wake of Infinite Crisis - socially, at least, the world in general has been shook up. However, it's too early not to expect the pendulum to swing back, when considering such past examples like every human being on Earth temporarily developing superpowers in an effort to fight an ancient, godlike destroyer of worlds after a heavenly host of angels stop World War Three in a ridiculously epic climax without any apparent changes in the political or religious climate of the world. Thank you, Grant Morrison.
  • Superman in general has often wrestled with the fact that he can't use his superpowers to simply force away wide-ranged problems plaguing humanity. Attempts to bring about world peace by disposing of nuclear weapons didn't fare too well in the fourth Superman movie or the premiere of Justice League. His attempt to cure starvation in third-world countries is detailed in the graphic novel "Peace On Earth." This results in An Aesop being that these are things that will only be solved when all of humanity chooses to solve them. There are often short-lived Alternate Universe depictions of him going too far in forcing humanity to follow his ideals to solve these problems, thus becoming a Knight Templar.
    • The beginning of the animated movie Superman: Doomsday lampshades this, as it shows Supes unsuccessfully trying to cure cancer; he comments how odd it is that, even with all of Kryptonian technology at his disposal and all of the unbelievable things he's done, he's never been able to help Earth beyond "being its resident strong man". Of course, his immediate reaction to every threat the movie throws at him after that is "hit it with my fists until it stops moving", so maybe that's his own fault.
    • Averted completely in the classic for all the wrong reasons Imaginary Story "Superman Red and Superman Blue", in which Superman is duplicated into two identical Supermen. Not only does this provide a handy solution to the Silver Age "Lois or Lana" Love Triangle, but the extra free time and the fact that two Supermen are working together allows them to solve all of humanity's problems, by among other things building a device that eliminates evil. The issue of free will is never brought up.
    • Explored in the series Superman: For Tomorrow, where at one stage Superman intervenes in a nameless Third World country, in the throes of civil war. Using his super speed etc, he flies in and removes all the weapons etc from either sides armies. There's a Dramatic Pause as the people register their shock and realisation of this...and then pick up rocks and continue fighting. "Hate will find a way", seems to be the message.
    • That plot is lifted directly from Captain Atom #22 and #23, published in 1988, in which Cap intervenes in a Central American civil war by disarming both the Soviet-backed Communist government and the American-backed rebels. Needless to say, they continue fighting with rocks, sticks, shovels, kitchen implements, etc. Lampshaded when Nightshade (Nightshaded?) tells Cap "Guns don't kill people—people do!"
    • One seems to recall, that only time Supes has succeeded in making an utopia out of the world, was in The Red Son... A communist utopia at that.
    • One recent storyline had him simulate what the world would be like without him. It turns out to be identical to ours, right up to the point where some guy writes a comic about a guy in tights called "Superman".
  • Batman is at least partly an aversion, as Bruce Wayne regularly pours his millions into charity and humanitarian causes, but this troper has read at least one excellent fanfic pointing out that Bruce's obsession with dressing as a bat and beating up the criminals infesting Gotham may have distracted him from using his family fortune and extensive business empire to save Gotham City through social and economic reforms.
    • This trope is used to justify Barbara "Batgirl\Oracle" Gordon remaining wheelchair-bound despite the ready availability of possible cures in The DCU: she doesn't want to receive special treatment and therefore dishonor public servants who were disabled in the line of duty; either a cure becomes available for everyone, or she stays in the chair.
  • On one occasion, Green Lantern Kyle Rayner gets phenomenal cosmic powers. Among the things he does with them is help him draw his comic strip better. Oh, and hand out customized food packets to starving people in Africa.
• Lampshade hung, and almost subverted in James Robinson's Starman, where the original Starman (the title character's father) dedicated his later years to turning his cosmic rod into a more general energy source that would revolutionalise the world. Although a visitor from the future claimed his success led to him becoming a scientific hero on the level of Einstein, it never actually happened in The DCU.
• The graphic novel The Death of Captain Marvel (the Marvel Universe's Mar-Vell, not the better known Fawcett/DC one) hung a lampshade on this by claiming that every (mortal) sentient race has a disease similar to cancer, and that none of them have ever found a cure for it. Furthermore, when Rick Jones appeals to the superheroes who are scientists and doctors to find a cure for Mar-Vell's cancer, they find themselves uncomfortably realizing they could have made this kind of effort beforehand for others.
  • In a What If based on this story, Mar-Vell got his cure. And it created a contagious form of cancer that nearly wiped out humanity. And the Kree, and the Skrulls, ending their war.
• The fictional African nation of Wakanda in Marvel Comics is, due to a surreptitious abundance of Unobtainium as a natural resource, a first world nation. This does not extend to any other part of Africa we see, though this is probably why writers don't show that very much. Although to their credit from fairly early on they attempted to justify it by having the Wakandans have a policy of isolation that goes back centuries.
  • Don't forget, the Wakandans have also cured cancer but are holding out on the rest of the world. Sorry, Mar-Vell!
  • Back wend a good writer (Christopher Priest) was on the book, Wakanda only became super-advance after, Ulysses Klaw attack Wakanda killing hundreads and King T'Chaka. And this was done by sending children to study in Europe and The U.S. and taking what they learn back (kinda like what Japan and China did)
    • Umm... do I have to say it?
• Another subversion in yet another out-of-mainstream examination of the comic book hero: in the Squadron Supreme miniseries, resident genius Tom Thumb devises and sells effective personal force shields, 'rehabilitation' (read 'brainwashing') devices, limited-lethality stunning weapons and various other amazing devices as part of the 'Utopia Project' wherein he and his fellow Supremes try to create an ideal society. He was unable to find a cure for the cancer that was killing him, however, so instead he developed a form of suspended animation through which the terminally ill could be kept indefinitely until a cure is found. In the end, every one of his inventions proves to have some catastrophic flaw in it, or else is rejected by society after the Utopia Project goes south.
• Another Wildstorm example. In Wildcats 3.0, the leader of the titular superhero team, sought to use the advanced extra-terrestrial technology that belonged to his creators to change the world. The limitless batteries alone caused quite a stir.
• Yet another aversion, the comic Invincible has a character, Atom Eve, who was initially a part of a teenager superhero team, but later decided that it would be better to use her matter transmutation power in a more practical way, such as helping the people suffering from famine in Africa by turning their drought-ridden land into fertile fields.
• Also averted in the Wild Cards Shared Universe novels, where the existence of Xenovirus Takis-A victims (especially the grotesquely deformed 'jokers' - superpowered 'aces' actually have less of an impact) radically alters the course of history in a variety of ways (but not quite to the point of being unrecognizable). On the other hand, the work of "Mechanic" type supers generally can't be duplicated by others, and are sometimes "dummy devices" powered by their creators.
• Exception: In White Wolf's Superhero Table Top RPG Aberrant, "Project Utopia" is dedicated to using the new superheroes for the betterment of mankind, including greening the sahara, patching the hole in the ozone layer, getting rid of pollution, inventing new technology, toppling dictators, etc.
• Subverted in the Wild Storm comic Planetary, in which the villains are a thinly veiled version of the Fantastic Four, and the Reed analog purposely keeps their discoveries and inventions from the world for personal gain.
• Averted in the "Change Or Die" storyline of the Wild Storm comic Stormwatch, in which a team of superhumans attempts to radically change the world, by (for example) creating a nanotech-powered oasis in Nevada capable of producing food, energy, medicine, and nearly anything else people would need without limit.
  • Stormwatch's successor, The Authority, lampshaded this trope in a different way. One arc, "The Nativity" explicitly asks the question "Why do super-people never go after the real bastards?" The Authority, like the Stormwatch superhumans, did devote their time to solving the problems of humanity; The Engineer in particular. She developed a cure for leukaemia and spent her spare time developing renewable energy. The Authority are also pretty thorough about addressing the crimes perpetrated by humans rather than superhumans - such as totalitarian regimes. However, this backfires: they are accused of presenting "unfair competition" for medical and industrial companies, and blamed for mass redundancies. Moreover, after the Coup D'Etat storyline The Authority become the unelected government of the USA, which, all things considered, was a tad hypocritical of them. Not that they were squeaky-clean heroes to begin with...
• Homage comics "Ultra" had the Cowgirl using her powers to build canals in Africa. On the other hand, the "fighting bad guys" aspect was less effective, as the heroes had to follow agency protocols.
• Subverted, I guess, by the recent Thor relaunch, which has seen Thor helping a medical camp in Darfur and berating his fellow heroes for failing to do anything about Hurricane Katrina.
  • Virtue (Ethan Edwards) currently uses his healing powers to help the sick in Africa after its pointed out that he can help more people with this then by just being another superhero.
    • Albert Destine tried to use his healing powers to stop the Black Death, but was unable to do so.
• Lightly averted in GURPS International Super Teams, the "house campaign" for superhero roleplaying in GURPS: the presence of superpowers stimulates research in numerous directions, and by the 1960s blasters and powercells with high energy densities (among many other technologies) have resulted. Furthermore, contact with an alien species during the 1980s has resulted in humanity gaining a stardrive before the end of the 20th Century.
• In the Iron Man movie, Tony Stark's power cell is stated as being able to generate 3 gigajoules per second of energy - which is, of course, 3 gigawatts of power generation. This is about as much power as produced by the largest man-made nuclear reactor and about 15 times the power of a Nimitz-class aircraft carrier (and two and a half times the power required to travel through time). He uses it for flying robots.
  • Earlier in the movie, the trope is averted: Stark mentions that his company produces crop-growing and medicinal technology.
  • He also says that he wants to get the company back on examining how to make the technology available to everyone, so it's not like he's literally holding out on them just so he can have his flying robot all to himself. He just wants some reasonable safety precautions to make sure that every terrorist in the world doesn't wind up with their own flying robot, first, which the movie shows us is a pretty damn reasonable worry.
  • Also, before he builds the miniaturized generator, the only previous use of the technology was an enormous model that barely produced enough electricity to power the Stark Industries complex, and was generally considered a dead end design kept around only for PR reasons.
  • In the comics, it is Hand Waved that since most of Stark Tech goes to the Goverment or SHIELD it takes years for them to reach civilian hands (pretty much Truth In Television).
• In the Harry Potter novels, the Ministry of Magic keeps the existence of wizards secret from muggles because, as Hagrid puts it, "They might want magical solutions to their problems." It never seems to occur to any wizard to ask, "Well, why not?" In the muggle world, wizards could become simply one more category of useful, respected, highly-paid professionals...Or on the other hand it could go horribly wrong.
  • The reverse is also true - wizards are apparently completely mystified by such things as elevators, telephones and computers, despite having their very own (magical) version of radio and the odd impossible purple omnibus. And not one of them, not even the two major characters that were born/raised in the muggle world ever considered a non-magical solution to their Evil Wizard problem, such as, for the sake of argument, a frikken ''sniper rifle.''
    • In the Dresden series, it's pointed out that it would be fairly trivial to kill any wizard with a scoped rifle. Its effective range is greater than a wizard's anti-technology field, and the bullet outruns its own sonic boom, leaving the wizard no time to prepare his death curse, a sort of magical mutually assured destruction. Presumably it'd be even easier to take out a Rowling wizard, since they have to speak their spells aloud and lack the automated defenses of the Butcher universe.
    • And they do exactly that in Fate Zero, the prequel to Fate Stay Night. With no less than a scene that had this particular gunbunny troper drooling at the gear and tactics. Ah, it's good to be a muggle.
  • The Wizard world has access to a potion that can regrow bones. Muggle medicine would be infinitely grateful for that alone, and, judging by the novels, most potions are concocted from naturally-occurring components. Although certain potions are dangerous, or could become dangerous in the wrong hands, wizard ethics are just as fragile as a regular Muggle's, so keeping the knowledge to themselves is unbelievably selfish and negligent.
  • Wizards also have their own diseases, their own weapons etc. and they can't fix their own problems any faster or more efficiently than the Muggles, or at least so is implied. They might be able to regrow bones, but they also have Dragon Pox.
    • Who's to say that muggle medicine can't come up with a Dragon Pox vaccine? The two together should still be stronger than the two seperate.
• Magic in Mahou Sensei Negima is also kept hidden behind the usual Masquerade, preventing mages from exposing their identities and openly using magic to help people. Starting with the Tournament Arc, one character leads the Mahora scientist faction in a coup to expose magic to the world and thus force the mages' hand. The idea of being able to use magic to help people proves quite seductive to some characters, and even Negi has some trouble justifying his opposition...
  • To be fair, the magical community there is dedicated to making the world a better place and helping humanity, just not out in the open. Of course, that just brings up the question of where were they when any war ever happened and feeds back into the Mahora scientist faction's idea that they would be more effective if outed.
• Magician scientist Zelda Spellman from Sabrina The Teenage Witch tried to make a machine that would somehow, using de-ionisation and the Hanta virus, to process dirt into edible protein pellets and end the suffering of millions. When the first prototype blew up she became frustrated and quit trying, blaming her disinterest on a lack of electricity in the poorest areas... Yeah, right.
• Doctor Who spends a lot of time deciding what can and can't be changed with alien technology and time travel. Particularly in season 2 episode "School Reunion," where the Doctor has the chance to change the universe to whatever he chooses. Rather than bring back his people, eradicate disease or make resources infinitely plentiful, he listens to Sarah Jane when she says "Things just have to end." They wouldn't if you CHANGED THE FRIGGIN UNIVERSE!
  • Ten has developed a habit of talking about time being "in flux". When it's in flux, it's possible (read: he's allowed) to change things. Otherwise, it's a no-no. Time seems to be conveniently in and out of flux whenever the plot demands it, which is nice.
  • In the wonderful fanfic "People Used to Dream About the Future," he is convinced to do this. Unfortunately, what he does is wipe himself out of existence, undoing everything he's done or not done. And it's implied heavily this is the world we have today, if you believe what the story's narrator says, that is...
• While Mega Man mostly averts this trope, as in the Mega Man X & subsequent series the world has been radically changed by the advances Drs. Light, Wily & Cossack made in robotics, space travel actually seems to take a large step backwards between the original & X series from which it apparently never recovers. Most of the levels in MM 3 take place on mining facilities on the moons of Saturn &/or Jupiter & in MMV on the Game Boy, Mega Man travels across the solar system fighting Wily & the Stardroids. In X all we get is a couple of orbiting space colonies & an elevator tower, most of which end up destroyed, MMZ has a space colony-sized Kill Sat that also blows up & ZX has no space travel at all. In Legends it gets a little better, with a new Kill Sat & something that's either an artificial planetoid or a terraformed Moon, but it still appears nobody's tried to get beyond Earth's orbit in all this time. Sadly a case of Truth In Television, as little progress has been made in manned spaceflight since the Apollo missions & it is unlikely that much more will be made in the lifetime of any human alive today.
• Averted in the comic Invincible Iron Man v4 05, where Tony Stark buys a company that sells soft drinks solely because they have vending machines everywhere in Africa and he wants to use them to sell Retrovirals and later the AIDS vaccine.
• In the first run of New Warriors, the titular team decides to use their powers to resolve a civil war in 'Trans-Sabal.' They only manage to make matters worse and receive a resoundingly righteous ass-chewing from Henry Peter Gyrich upon their return.
• Averted in Death Note: Light Yagami, the brightest student in Japan, aspires to be a detective until he gets distracted by the little matter of creating a Utopia and becoming a god. The series goes on to subvert this trope by having Light's day job be with the police team working to bring him to justice.
• Averted in the comic The Boys, where the government employs a group specifically to keep the 'capes' in line. Of course, Garth Ennis is a bloody minded bastard and the supes get up to all kinds of mischief anyway.
  • The Boys is a weird one, as it turns out that superheroes really are useless. When The Seven try to avert the comics' version of 9/11, they fuck it up catastrophically.
• Mentioned explicitly (though not by name) in the Tabletop RPG GURPS, with the "Gadgeteer" advantage, which allows characters to invent new gadgets more easily. While Gadgeteer allows characters to make gadgets for themselves or to solve problems that arise during an adventure, in order to sell their gadgets for money (or even outfit their teammates with gadgets) they must purchase additional advantages which cost more Character Points.
• Averted multiple times in the Whateley Universe. Jobe Wilkins, the son of supervillain Gizmatic who is the king of his own Caribbean country, has almost cured dysentery. He's 14, and he has already come up with a far more effective vaccine for dysentery that is predicted to save 600,000 to 800,000 lives a year. Oh, and he tested the vaccine on convicts back home in his country.
• Completely Averted in Miracle Man by Alan Moore and then Neil Gaiman: After defeating the big bad, the super heroes do take over the world and make it a Utopia.
  Jobe: "If the end doesn't justify the means, you're working on the wrong problem!"
• Justified in the case of the Atom's shrinking technology: Ray Palmer wanted to commercialize it, tried to commercialize it, and had to abandon the hope because everything exposed to the reducer exploded upon re-expansion. Only Ray himself could use it to both shrink and grow, owing to a unique energy within his body.
• Sylar of Heroes has the ability to see how things work. This has been shown to apply to the human brain, and therefore should apply to other organs, and even complicated machines. He never thinks to try to use his powers to earn a Nobel Prize in something.
  • Of course, Sylar is a textbook example of With Great Power Comes Great Insanity, so he may not be the most logical person to discuss.
• In one episode of Law And Order-bear with me a second, okay-a mysogynist modifies a commercially available machine pistol from semi-auto to full-auto, turning it into a highly efficient killing machine. He uses it to shoot a group of female med students, killing 15. He pleads out by about 0:35, and in a brutal subversion of Not So Fast Bucko, Jack McCoy decides to go after the pistol's manufacturer for knowing their product could be easily modified and not doing anything about it. (It's mentioned that the gun has been used in a hundred-odd crimes in a few years, and in every case but six the gun was modified.) 15 counts of negligent homicide, and the city of New York wins. While everyone except the defendant is celebrating, the judge goes "Hold it!" and delivers a directed verdict of "Not Guilty", due to the people basing their case on emotion rather than fact. Immediately followed by an Author Tract, in classic trope style, about how the problem can't really be solved by putting people in jail. Also doubles as a Wall Banger, since if the original verdict had held, it would've heralded the start of a new age of corprate accountability, leading to widespead change in the L&O'verse. Can you say Status Quo Is God?

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