Something I have been thinking about quite a bit lately is how to make a great female superhero. I wanted to make such a character, as someone to contrast with Chris and his superhero personae. It was recently kicked into high gear when Nikki and some of the other girls I follow on twitter got into a discussion about why exactly superheros hide their identities from friends and families even though it makes their friends and families hate them. I could easily rattle off close to a dozen canonical reasons why superheros do this. While the practice makes intuitive sense to me, the canonical reasons for these practice didn’t seem very satisfying to the group, or myself either. This was my clue that if I wanted to make a really great female superhero, I would first have to unravel the traditions of superherodom that were distinctly male. Only then can I start putting together some new traditions to make what I think will be a unique and thus hopefully interesting super heroine.
After some thought I think I hit upon the important underlying aspect of the secret identity rules. There’s an idea, that a stable society requires and is built upon some members of the society taking actions, which the rest of society can’t tolerate, and as a result they become ostracized from the society. This to some degree is hardcoded into our dna. So the person taking the action, knows that they do it at the cost of becoming a pariah, and have accepted the cost. Superheroes are sort of the ultimate expression of this. When they put on the costume, they give up the idea they will ever have a normal life.
So now to tie it back to why they don’t tell friends and family what they are. In this context “society” means friends and family. So they can’t really tell them what they are doing, even though they kind of would like to. But they don’t because it wouldn’t be responsible, in that in doing so, you will have forced them outside the societal structure with you, and they aren’t super human so what exactly are they going to do then? Its kind of selfish in a way. The hero chose to step outside the structure so he could protect them, but the people he would tell can’t really do that. Plus he’s taking on the responsibility in the first place so that he can create a world where the people he loves don’t have to worry about the crap he fights against. Telling them might actually be counter productive to his goal, because he would be making them worry about the exact thing he is trying to prevent them from worrying about. I personally now believe any reason above this that a hero gives for cloaking his identity is merely him justifying his position which he already reached by instinct. An instinct put in their position I would probably follow. I would at least realize it was retarded, but I would still follow it.
In a related note, a super hero will be more likely to tell another super hero their identity, because they both under a similar burden. Its a secret they want to share with someone, and they don’t have the same instinctual aversion to telling this other hero, even though from a risk/reward position, telling them is stupider then telling a true friend. But human instinct isn’t rationale.
I hope I explained this all well enough for you to understand Nikki. I don’t know why this took so long to write really… the words were being very elusive on me. I’ll make another blog entry to wrap back to the female superhero part of this.
