The Tragedy of the Super-Man is a superhero story in progress by Strix Obscuro.
In the distant future, mad philosopher Andro Madax rules the world as its unquestioned tyrant, but does so through exotic technology stolen from his brilliant daughter Era. Tired of her father exploiting her inventions of his own ends, Era builds a time machine to gather a team of the greatest heroes of each age to help overthrow Andro.
Of course, the heroes from the different eras all have different philosophies, and Era's own intentions are not quite benevolent, and thus Era must unite the team first.
This story contains examples of:
- Affirmative-Action Legacy: The Pluribus, the mystical force that gave Believer her powers, grants powers to a new champion every generation, and thus gave powers to Proud, a black woman, in the seventies, and Populi, a woman of Southeast-Asian descent, in the present day.
- Amazonian Beauty: Grassfed stands at nearly seven feet tall, and is extremely muscular.
- Ambiguously Christian: The Believer's ancestors were "praying Indians", though whether she shares their faith is anyone's guess.
- Blue-and-Orange Morality: Doctor Dolly was driven close to madness after being tortured by a supervillain, then served as a sidekick for a gun-toting antihero for a while, then hung out with a team of supervillains, and then Gyta tried to "fix" her. Consequently, her moral compass is all over the place.
- Cassandra Truth: The Believer has precognitive abilities, but nobody ever seems to accept that any of her visions might be meaningful.
- Conqueror from the Future: Mytoco wants to take his army into the past to conquer the universe even earlier. Of course, this would likely damage the time stream, which is one of the reasons Gyta's trying to stop him.
- Conspiracy Theorist: The Obsidian Mirror, being an expy of The Question, sees conspiracies everywhere.
- Darker and Edgier: The Bleeding Edge, a Modern team, are based on anti-heroes from The Dark Age of Comic Books.
- Deliberate Values Dissonance: The heroes have all been pulled from different eras in time. Some of the ones from the older periods have some difficulty adjusting to the sensibilities of the future.
- Died in Your Arms Tonight: The Eleemosynary gained his powers when he tried to save a dying Auronian woman and caught her disease while cradling her in his arms. Luckily for him, Auronian viruses can turn regular humans into superheroes.
- Eagleland: The Coalition of the Willing, a Bush-era team whose members include the Decider, Miss Underestimated, Charm Offensive, Surgical Strike, and Turd Blossom, are very much a Type 2 example.
- Egopolis: Andro Madax's center of power is the mega-city Madaxia.
- Even Evil Has Standards: The Modern, Bronze, and Silver-Age villains are all disgusted with the Nazi and Fascist villains from the Golden Age.
- Expy: This story, being a send-up of the history of superhero comics, has many of them:
- The American Standard is an expy of Captain America, with his wartime partner Infantry being an expy of Bucky.
- The Believer is an expy of Wonder Woman.
- Perihelion is an expy of Superman.
- Thoth is an expy of Batman.
- Grassfed is an expy of She-Hulk.
- Populi is an expy of Kamala Khan.
- The Reactionary is The Comedian.
- The Protectorate are based on The Authority.
- The Obsidian Mirror is an expy of The Question.
- The Iridian Infiltrator is an expy of Martian Manhunter.
- The Mighty Flame is an expy of Astroboy.
- The Eleemosynary is an expy of Samaritan.
- Free-Love Future: Polyamory and pansexuality are common in the 51st century, as Grassfed and Believer discover when Gyta flirts with both of them.
- Funetik Aksent: Grassfed, being partly an expy of Rogue, has a Southern accent.
- Good Is Not Nice: The Protectorate's mission is "to protect the world from itself", which should give you some idea of their attitude towards the world they've sworn to protect.
- Grey Goo: Brittle is made up of hundreds, if not thousands, of tiny, self-replicating nanomachines. He is well aware of the dangers of this, and has programmed counter-measures to prevent the little things from consuming everything, but his components occasionally manage to outsmart him.
- Hidden Elf Village: The Believer hails from a tiny village in the Blue Hill are of Massachusetts that's barely changed since the Colonial days.
- Meaningful Name:
- Andro Madax is named for Imre Madach, the playwright of The Tragedy of Man.
- The Italian team Black Library is named for fumetti neri ("black comics"), Italian crime comics from which they draw inspiration.
- Mission from God: The Believer believes that her precognitive visions are divinely-inspired.
- Nano Machines: Brittle's body is composed of thousands of tiny machines all coming together in a vaguely humanoid form.
- Omnicidal Maniac: Killpath seeks to kill everyone.
- Polyamory: Believer, Grassfed, and Gyta end up in a relationship with each other.
- The Primadonna: Euphony calls herself "the Vocal Queen". As the nickname suggests, she has a healthy ego.
- Punny Name: Killpath, one of the Modern villains, is a play on the Hebrew Qlipoth.
- Super-Intelligence: Both Andro and Era Madax possess superhuman intelligence, though it manifests itself in different ways. Andro is capable of intuitively understanding almost any technology, but has limited creativity. Era can build almost anything she can imagine, but can't explain in detail how her creations work.
- Super Serum: The original American Standard got his powers from a super-serum. Unfortunately, the side effects ended up killing him after WWII ended.
- Torture Technician: Velvet Ant is a supervillain whose specialty is torturing people.
- We ARE Struggling Together: The various heroes have split themselves into different factions because of their conflicting ideologies. And then there's the Caucus, Proud's team, which includes representatives from various sixties and seventies movements, all trying to find some common ground.
- Wide-Eyed Idealist: Era's powers essentially run on her sheer optimism and faith in the power of invention.
