Blog / How to Hero

How to Hero is a satirical guide to being a superhero, striving to cover all aspects of day-to-day superherodom and to give advice for any situation a superhero might find themselves in.

Starting in April 2017, the blog updates twice weekly with new topics, ranging from classic superhero staples like "Costumes" and "Codenames" to more specific situations like "Sharing Your Powers" or "Being Bitten by A Radioactive Animal." Each post features a blend of jokes mixed in with (allegedly) helpful advice and in-universe examples that serve to build the superhero/sci-fi/fantasy world in which How to Hero operates.

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How to Hero provides examples of:

• Action-Hero Babysitter: The Guide mentions babysitters who are secretly superheroes and advises them to stay with the children they're supposed to be watching and fighting crime some other time.
• The Adjectival Superhero: Heroes are cautioned not to call themselves "The Unbeatable Whatever" because that will just be seen as begging supervillains to try to defeat them.

• Alliterative Name: How To Hero seems to love this trope: Professor Paleontologist, Armored Atlas, Rambunctious Red-Light Runner, Pointlessly Polite Pick Pocket, Super Sprinkler...
  • This is the reason the Moon Men are called the Moon Men despite including both men and women.
• Almost Famous Name: Played with. How To Hero sometimes does this when creating parodies of famous superheroes, such as Hatman and Petey Parkour.

• Animal-Themed Superbeing: Wombat Wonder, Primordial Panther and Titanium Pig Man, among others, are all themed after the animals they take their names from.

• Badass Teacher: The guide recommends getting an active, or retired, superhero mentor.
• Bad Guy Bar: The guide suggests that if you don't know where the local supervillain bar is in your city then you're not doing your job right.
• The Bar Tender: The Guide mentions a bartending superhero who believes that sometimes supervillains just need someone to listen to them while they wipe they same spot of the bar with an old rag over and over again.

• The Beastmaster: The guide mentions heroes who can control animals or talk to animals in the entry on Animal Sidekicks
• Bruce Wayne Held Hostage: The guide's entry on "Kidnapping" talks about this. Superheroes who find themselves kidnapped are advised to rolls their eyes continuously until one of their allies rescues them.

• Bus Full of Innocents: The guide recommends saving a bus carrying an entire orchestra so they'll compose an epic theme song for you out of thanks.
• Butt-Monkey: The superhero, Professor Paleontologist (real name: Leon Von Iguanodon) tends to be the butt of many jokes as well as often being cited as an example of what not to do if you want to be a successful superhero.
• Cape Busters: The guide repeatedly reminds heroes that, at least at first, they're going to be hunted by the police because they're technically always committing crimes.

• Captain Superhero: Captain Thunder, Captain Warhead, Captain Patriot...

• Cool Starship: The entry on alien invasions has an entire paragraph instructing readers to work invasions to their advantage so they can secure one of these. Later entries introduce Dirty Denny's Starship Dealership.
• Crazy-Prepared: The guide's goal is to prepare superheroes for any kind of situation they might encounter.
• Crimefighting with Cash: The guide sometimes talks about the Billionaires with Issues™ type of superhero.

• Did You Just Punch Out Cthulhu?: At one point The Guide mentions a superhero whose day job is being a ballboy throwing a baseball at Cthulhu.

• Eco-Terrorist: The Guide mentions eco-terrorists as one of the many types of bad guys superheroes might have to fight.

• Evil Sorcerer: The guide features a few of these. Generally as nameless archetypes such as "dark mages" or "evil wizards." Potentially your local village mystic might turn out to be one.
• Exactly What It Says on the Tin: The post titled "How To Disguise Yourself as a Human When You are in Fact a Sentient Android" is a guide for androids disgusing themselves as human.
• Eye Beams: Various eye beams are mentioned by the guide at various points including lasers, fire, lightning, and even sweaters at one point.
• Fantasy Kitchen Sink: We've got werewolves, genies, vampires, witches, wizards, Greek gods, talismans, zombies, mermaids, eldritch abominations, ogre superhero teams. At this point it's safe to say that all manner of magical and mystical beings exist in the world of How To Hero. In fact, the guide's very first entry encourages readers to blackmail their local village mystic to gain superpowers.
• Faux-To Guide: The whole thing is this for people who want to be superheroes.
• Fun with Acronyms: The Bureau of UFO Tracking, Transporting and Studying, which can be shortened to B.U.T.T.S.
• Flying Brick: The guide refers to heroes like these as "flying tanks" because they can fly, have super strength, and usually possess some sort of eye beam.

• Green Thumb: The guide features a hero called The Photsynthesizer who is described as "The man who eats like a plant, likes taking pictures, and plays electropop music." It is suggested that readers team-up with him in the event of a zombie apocalypse due to plants' and zombies' age-old animosity.

• Heart Is an Awesome Power: The entry on "Lame Superpowers" is all about teaching heroes how to make good use out of their seemingly lame superpowers.

• Hell Hound: The post "Going To Hell" discusses these, in particular Cerberus, three headed hound who likes music and playing fetch.
• Hoist by His Own Petard: There's a villain from the 60s named Lady Richter who could create earthquakes. Some historical reports claim that she met her demise when one of her earthquakes destroyed her hideout while she was still inside it.
• Humongous Mecha: Spider-Mecha, Nukeborg. The phenomenon is discussed in the post Giants
  • Combining Mecha: Discussed in the post Gestalt Consciousness
• Hunter of Monsters: The entry on Monster Hunters is pretty much against the entire idea of them, considering them to be committing Van Helsing Hate Crimes by default because of the factors listed in Our Monsters Are Different below.
• Immortal Life Is Cheap: The guide suggests sending immortal people into situations that would kill regular heroes.
• Instant Messenger Pigeon: The guide frequently mentions carrier pigeons as a viable form of contacting other people. At one point the author of the guide muses that if he had a carrier pigeon he would name it Carry the Pigeon. Carry would then go on to appear in a few other entries.

• Kid Sidekick:
  • The guide in general is very against the concept of bringing children with you to fight supervillains.
    "A child is the worst thing you can bring to a gun fight, even worse than a knife!".
  • Despite that there's an entry on them here.

• Logical Weakness: The guide often encourages heroes to take advantage of these when choosing which bad guys to fight or which threats to respond to.
  • From the entry on prioritizing: "Hydrokinetic superheroes (that’s people who can control water) or people who can turn their bodies into the form of water (like the form of an ice-unicycle or a bucket of water) should be sent to deal with fires or beached whales."
  • From the entry on starter villains: "Water powers beat fire powers; rock powers beat scissor powers which beat paper powers."

• Musical Episode: Amusingly enough How To Hero has one! It's the guide's entry on being trapped in a musical, and it's written entirely in rhyme.
• Names to Run Away from Really Fast: Killslaughter The Death Bringer, even though he's actually a superhero.
• Nice Job Breaking It, Hero: The entry on freak meteorological phenomena talks about superheroes attempting to help people with weather machines and claims that such attempts always end poorly. Apparently once one of them accidentally erased the sun.

• Our Gods Are Different: The Guide's version of Zeus steadfastly refuses to learn any language other than Ancient Greek. Because of this The Guide advises against getting into a car with Zeus, since he can't read any of the signs.
• Our Monsters Are Different: Collectively referred to as "Para-Folk" the monsters in the How To Hero universe are generally peaceful with just a few bad eggs giving them all a bad name. Discussed at length Monsters Who Buck Conventional Stereotypes. As a consequence, monster hunters are villains who commit Van Helsing Hate Crimes.

• Prank Call: The guide discusses prank calling supervillains in Dealing With Defeat.

• Red Eyes, Take Warning: The guide lists red eyes as a surefire indicator that someone is an evil clone.
• Red Is Heroic: Played with. The guide recommends that heroes who fight crime during the day wear red but only to disguise the blood that they'll no doubt be spilling.
• Required Secondary Power: The guide's entry on the side-effects of super strength mentions that if you're not also invulnerable, you're likely to get injured while testing out your powers.
• Ridiculously Human Robots: This post seeks to help robots pass themselves off as humans.

• Sci-Fi Kitchen Sink: Naturally, we've got robots and starships and time travel and superheroes galore.
• Secret Identity: Unsurprisingly the guide is very big on maintaining these.
  • The specific entry that deals with them is here, but many other entries talk about secret identities as well.

• Single-Task Robot: Drill-Borg 1.0 was invented to drill things.

• This Is a Drill: There's an entire entry on drills (not to be confused with the entry on drills).

• Totem Pole Trench: The guide mentions three kids in a trench coat while listing different types of superheroes that are made up of multiple individuals in Gestalt Consciousness.

• Tunnel Network: The guide recommends building a tunnel network on your superhero hideout for quick getaways. (They also suggest recruiting a team of prairie dogs to help you do it.)
• Underwater Base: The guide mentions that the superhero team Hero Force has an underwater headquarters where they host mahjong night for retired superheroes every Thursday at 3 pm.

• Weapons That Suck: At one point when discussing the pros and cons of having a retired superhero for a mentor, the guide mentions a new-fangled villain who has a giant vacuum that sucks up cars and compares them to an old-fangled villain who had a giant vacuum that sucked up horses and buggies and notes that the lessons learned from the older case are completely irrelevant to this newer case.

• Wild Child: The guide mentions that being raised by evil wolves is a common supervillain origin.

• Would Hit a Girl: Many of the villains mentioned in How To Hero are female, but that doesn't stop the guide from gleefully encouraging aspiring heroes to beat them up for the sake of justice.
• You Meddling Kids: In an effort to avoid bad guys swearing revenge on you the guide suggests that when a bad guy claims he would've succeeded had it not been for "you meddling kids" you should sit him down and explain to him all the flaws in his plan that would've prevented him from succeeding, even if you and your meddling friends hadn't interfered. The guide is confident that upon seeing their mistake the bad guy will declare revenge on themselves.

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