Human Augmentation In Superhero Stories

Yesterday I got into this debate about the concept of human characters granting themselves super powers or cybernetically enhancing themselves. One guy pointed out how he didn't like that the heroic characters would often have powers forced onto them and would be kind of depressed about it (Victor Stone, Ben Grimm just for a few examples) whereas it seemed that the few times this was done on purpose the character was a villain (MCU Red Skull, MCU Abomination). I argued that Ben and Vic's stories were examples about the dangers of toying with forces beyond your control as Reed and Silas Stone (Vic's father) did respectively.

Anyway, I just wanted to get people's opinions on this. Are there stories were superheroes give themselves powers on purpose? What did you think of those stories? Would you like to see more of them?

Captain America got his powers on purpose.

The usual problem with intentionally obtaining powers is how to keep them relatively exclusive. Hence the prominence of experimental prototypes and lost formulas. Iron Man seems to be the only guy who deliberately keeps enhancing himself... and apparently he was designed explicitly as an inversion of all default sixties heroic tropes, being an industrialist plutocrat with ties to the military. The other guy I can think of is Steel. And, in a way, Batman. Basically, while voluntary transhumanism is strongly discouraged, powered armor and gadgets seem to get a free pass, and they functionally do just as well.

Still, I wouldn't mind a story where some doctors deliberately guinea pig themselves with, say, potential cures for brittle bone disease or hemophilia, and end up superpowered as a result. Even if the means to perfectly replicate it are lost, it sends a positive message that medical development is beneficial and it's okay to continue the research. And in the meantime, the doctors can go around punching out bad guys whenever necessary. All in all, the idea is to have a localized exaggeration, as a display of potentially mass-produced lesser-yet-more-realistic benefits. Kinda like the Planeteers flying around in a solar-powered jet, only with a better excuse for not sharing the technology in-universe.

And eventually Social Justice Warriors start whingeing about how you're trivializing real world problems by having fictional characters try to address them in their fictional worlds.

An unsurprising outcome, to be sure, but perhaps not quite on the nose. The thing about real world problems, particularly regarding medical developments, is that they do find solutions, but they frequently start off as hit-or-miss improvisations, involve tons of sheer luck, and the greatest difficulty is in figuring out how to make them safe and reproducible... which is exactly how freak lab accidents function in comics, only with the results being superpowers rather than effective cures. In real life, one can acknowledge the existence of Timothy Ray Brown without it being considered trivializing HIV. If anything, it's all the more inspiring.

Basically, the resonating message is "yes, these great things can happen, now help us make them happen more often". As much as it is inevitable for social inequality complaints to crop up, this particular statement is decidedly not a fantastic aesop.

You say all that like it'd stop them.

Fuck, it wouldn't just be SJ Ws who'd call this trivializing real problems. There'd also be people like Garth Ennis using this "trivialization" as "proof" that superhero comics are moronic tripe for babies who poop hard in their diapers and inferior in every way to comics about antiheroic burly leatherdaddies.

edited 2nd Jun '15 6:58:58 PM by ElkhornTheDowntrodden

Thread bump.