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Let it out.
Challenge #11: In your own space, Talk about your favorite trope, cliché, kink, motif, or theme. Leave a comment in this post saying you did it. Include a link to your post if you feel comfortable doing so.
Much as I love superpowers, I've grown fairly tired of them reaching the "blow up the sun" level. "Destroy a skyscraper" has largely gotten pretty dull, too. "Knock over a bicycle" is getting there, and "crush a soda can" is more my speed these days, because the overarching tropes of "superpowers as externalizing metaphor for character's internal condition" and "superpowers as a pain in the ass" are some of my favorites, especially when they overlap. It's a lot easier to get that when the character have "crush a soda can" capacity.
When you're destroying skyscrapers left and right, it's hard to deescalate and tell smaller, less bombastic stories. Not impossible, but hard, because if you can destroy skyscrapers, you're generally going to have to bend to the status quo held by the publishing house or TV network and avoid using those powers proactively to change things permanently for the better, which can stress suspension of disbelief, or raise genuine questions like why you're not actively going out changing things.
This isn't to say it's not fun to read about destroying skyscrapers, and there aren't good stories to be told about why people don't go out and do such things with all the power at their command. More that I've read a lot of the former, and I'm tired of having a hard time finding other stories, and while the latter is fun too, it's generally not what I'm looking to read, either.
When it's at "crush a soda can" levels for pretty much everyone who has superpowers, especially in fic, there's a lot of room to play with their internal lives and self-perception, methods of navigating society when you're at a distance and removal from those around you, and how the characters hold themselves when an aspect of their personality manifests in an externalized manner. It's a wonderful tool for fic to dig into canon, especially if it's a canon where superpowers are fairly inappropriate. Which isn't something that's ever stopped fandom.
For reasons I don't understand, the "Alternate Universe - Superheroes/Superpowers" tag is applied to universes where superheroes and/or superpowers are an established part of the canon, like Marvel movies. It makes finding the sort of things I'd like to read hard to find - or, in the case of something like MASH where a character is all but stated outright to have superpowers, the same problem from the opposite direction. In any case, it's not the superhero part that I'm after, or even the "super" part of the powers. Just the powers, especially when they're used as a narrative device that's made even more delightful when they're a real pain in the ass.
Much as I love superpowers, I've grown fairly tired of them reaching the "blow up the sun" level. "Destroy a skyscraper" has largely gotten pretty dull, too. "Knock over a bicycle" is getting there, and "crush a soda can" is more my speed these days, because the overarching tropes of "superpowers as externalizing metaphor for character's internal condition" and "superpowers as a pain in the ass" are some of my favorites, especially when they overlap. It's a lot easier to get that when the character have "crush a soda can" capacity.
When you're destroying skyscrapers left and right, it's hard to deescalate and tell smaller, less bombastic stories. Not impossible, but hard, because if you can destroy skyscrapers, you're generally going to have to bend to the status quo held by the publishing house or TV network and avoid using those powers proactively to change things permanently for the better, which can stress suspension of disbelief, or raise genuine questions like why you're not actively going out changing things.
This isn't to say it's not fun to read about destroying skyscrapers, and there aren't good stories to be told about why people don't go out and do such things with all the power at their command. More that I've read a lot of the former, and I'm tired of having a hard time finding other stories, and while the latter is fun too, it's generally not what I'm looking to read, either.
When it's at "crush a soda can" levels for pretty much everyone who has superpowers, especially in fic, there's a lot of room to play with their internal lives and self-perception, methods of navigating society when you're at a distance and removal from those around you, and how the characters hold themselves when an aspect of their personality manifests in an externalized manner. It's a wonderful tool for fic to dig into canon, especially if it's a canon where superpowers are fairly inappropriate. Which isn't something that's ever stopped fandom.
For reasons I don't understand, the "Alternate Universe - Superheroes/Superpowers" tag is applied to universes where superheroes and/or superpowers are an established part of the canon, like Marvel movies. It makes finding the sort of things I'd like to read hard to find - or, in the case of something like MASH where a character is all but stated outright to have superpowers, the same problem from the opposite direction. In any case, it's not the superhero part that I'm after, or even the "super" part of the powers. Just the powers, especially when they're used as a narrative device that's made even more delightful when they're a real pain in the ass.
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