The Haiku Diary

Day fourteen: A Not So Super Hero

A Not So Superhero

  

Power not so great

Character such a big jerk 

This Superzero

@ScienceFiction is at it again. A new challenge anyone can take, writer or reader, fan of SciFi in all its variety.

The new challenge is to give a Superhero description on 2000 characters or less. The point here is that this Superhero shall not be so super.

There is already a bunch of entries, some quite inventive. This challenge brought an interesting question: How do you build a character? Before writing any story, you are supposed to know part of the settings, i/e the world it is set in, the characters that will evolve in… The closest I know – and am comfortable with – in term of character profile is the good ol’ D&D and other RPG player character sheet. Well, while it goes well with a Superhero profile, I will need to use something else for more straight-lined regular character profiles. I took a quick look and asked my good friend Google. I found some interesting tools for writers there… I will need to deepen my search at some point…

Back to the not so super hero… This prompt brought me to think to some of the anime/cartoons/series I recently saw, or remember… There is a bunch of friendly superheroes with not really great abilities… or supervillains with funny powers…

One interesting character see his powers getting reduced… probably due to his age advancing, but no one really knows why. In Tiger&Bunny, Wild Tiger has a power that basically gives him surhuman strength for five minutes. The power is already limited in time, but along the anime episodes, this time span is getting shorter… With his fluctuating power he fumbles quite a lot. He could be pathetic, but he has other redeemable qualities which makes him an interesting, funny and attaching character… even with his declining power.

This is one type of not so superhero. Then, I got reminded of these two maggots in Larva (a funny though sometimes disturbing cartoon figuring two undetermined maggots, one yellow and the other one red… my kid loves them). They revised the Spiderman theme, as is done in numbers of cartoons. One of the maggot got bitten by a spider, and overnight he becomes spider-maggot, literally spitting cobwebs (due to the nature of the character, there are no hands or any other fancy body parts). Its companion, another larva, wants to become super also and looks for the spider to get bitten. He succeeds and transforms overnight. His power however his not to spit cobwebs. In his case, they come up from the other extremity of his body. A bit crude, I admit, but this makes him equally a super-larva… This is a bit of an embarrassing power.

Aside the declining and embarrassing powers of superheroes, there are also the sometime surprising powers of supervillains. I am thinking about the employees of the Flander’s Company, an enterprise specialised in providing nemesis to Superheroes. They are the bad guys. This is a French webTV series really funny. The characters are quite interesting, and the settings gives a lot of possibilities. Among these supervillains, some have funny powers. The head of R&D, for example, can manipulate for a short time the space-time continuum to bring other versions of himself in a combat situation. This gives a multiplication effect that overpowers his opponent. The only issue is that he runs his power on caffeine, therefore he his always hyper on the substance…

There are other interesting bad guys at the Flander’s Company. You can meet in almost every episodes a bunch of aspiring supervillains with ridiculous and always laughable powers. Imagination has no limit when creating a character, it seems…