Topic: Contemporary Superheroics lecture, April 15th (Read 313 times)
FelicityBane Administrator Overseer member is offline
Joined: Aug 2004 Posts: 341 Location: Dallas, TX
Contemporary Superheroics lecture, April 15th « Thread Started on Apr 15, 2006, 10:54am »
[Speech given by Felicity Bane at the Steel Canyon branch of Paragon City University.]
Hello, I’m Felicity Bane.
[pause]
Hmm. That seems to work better for Johnny Cash. [Wait for laughter.] All right. Just a warning: I’ve been listening to nothing but the Clash and Audioslave for a couple weeks now, so I’m drunk on arena rock rebellion. Journalists: you have your headline.
A lot of you probably know who I am from the Statesman/Tyrant fiasco from a little over a year ago. To recap: evil-twin versions of the Freedom Phalanx, by use of portal technology, stole into this world and started causing all kinds of hell. Through some maneuvering I don’t have the clearance levels to find out about, Statesman got himself captured. Captured, not killed; typical supervillain behavior. Can’t just kill your enemy, have to leave him around so he remains dangerous.
Anyway.
Portal Corporation and the FBSA had tried a number of traditional attempts at rescue, utilizing first military and then superheroic forces. The results were disastrous. Losses per rescue team were total. Further, the Portal Corp/FBSA team had kept the whole situation secret so as not to send the populace into a panic and the criminal element into overdrive. But they could only expend so many men and women before people noticed.
Finally, someone at Portal Corp got a brainwave: this Myrmidon Agency, while small, had yielded impressive results in its short lifespan. No masks, no secret identities, no tights: just a small group of skilled people who thought laterally and fought like hell until the job was done.
So I got the call: put together a small strike team to rescue none other than Statesman his own damn self. Pick whoever you want, but tell nobody else what you’re up to. They made it perfectly clear the odds were against us, but as compensation we were allowed complete tactical freedom. In other words, “by any means necessary.”
We did the work and we did it well. Five of us in total: me, Cacophany, Eidolon, the Iron Giant, and Doctor Medica. Tyrant was killed, Statesman was rescued, and hey presto, you couldn’t turn your head without seeing us on the covers of magazines. I’m sure you all remember.
‘Course, it didn’t start there for me. No. This is an autobiography series on some of the best-known faces in modern superheroics, so by god you’re going to get some autobiography.
I’m local, like a lot of you; born and raised on the corner of Ennis and Dillon in Kings Row. That’s in the Gish, for you trust-fund types. I was a rotten kid living in a rotten neighborhood, raised by parents I only now realize were absolutely crushed by the stress of raising me and my sister. By 12 I was stealing cars with the Regents, and by 16 I was pulled into the Family to do really prestigious work, like parking some fat fuckers’ cars at the monthly Satriale poker game.
Not glamorous work, no, but a teenaged Irish dyke doesn’t get even that far without being something special. Sure, my lineage and gender meant I’d never get a button, but plenty of people do just fine in the mafia without ever being official. Exhibit A: Henry Hill’s crew.
I rose fast, mostly through sheer chutzpah and a willingness to do the shit work with enthusiasm. All that glamorous mafia shit you’ve read or seen, I probably did it; collecting on neighborhood lotteries, supervising security on this or that Family function, running chop shops, picking up Don Frost’s fuckin’ dry-cleaning. The Powers That Be saw I was good at scaring people who owed into paying up, and after a few years of that kind of work I was pretty well gagging for some more violent work. Psych majors, I await your analysis.
I got my chance. I had a certain panache and relish for taking people out, and more and more that became my central line of work within the Family. Partly I liked the work, I liked how primal it was, liked the adrenaline… but I knew the Family was never short on killers. I had to be something really special or I’d get stuck whacking shop owners for the rest of my days.
I volunteered for and got superhero work. No kidding. My last five years in the Family I answered only to Don Frost himself, taking out troublesome superheroes and other high-profile targets that ate normal Family enforcers for breakfast. This is Reason Number One most spandex types absolutely cannot stand me. I guess I understand, but really I don’t know what game they think they’re playing. Maybe they’re playing dress-up, but criminals, the smart ones, sure as hell aren’t. It’s business to them, and woe betide anyone who cuts into the bottom line.
I can say, without condoning those activities, that I was superb at my job. People were scared of me, and for once I had a rep built entirely on my work, rather than my gender or preference or other inconsequential trait. That may not sound like a lot, but I’ll tell you right now: Rep is everything. Money flows like water among these guys, so you have to get your status elsewhere. You can’t get it in nice clothes and nice cars, because they’ve all got those too. No, you get the rep by being the scariest motherfucker to ever come down the line, and I cultivated enough mystique that people just plain stopped messing with me. I was never seen when I did my work, and I never left any calling cards or any other bullshit like that, but people knew.
All that ended. It had to. The loss of my sister did me in. A faction inside the Family had a long-standing deal with the Circle of Thorns. There’s a lot of fine print, but it boiled down to a humans-for-artifacts trade. Family enforcers – or, usually, their lackeys in the Skulls or Trolls – would swipe people who wouldn’t be missed off the streets and cart them to the Thorns for whatever the hell it is the Thorns do to people.
My sister was one of those people swiped. Total fluke; there’s no way on god’s green earth they would have fed my sister to the Circle if they knew who she was. But the Trolls have trouble forming complete sentences, nevermind asking for ID. Wrong place, wrong time. Rose was murdered, just one of thirteen victims that night.
[A beat]
Stupid, pointless horror. Whereas I was a wretched excuse for a human being, Rose was your genuine blameless soul. Lovely girl. Everyone who met her fell in love with her a little. Except, presumably, the Circle flunky that killed her. I later found out what ritual she’d died for: some obscenely ambitious and probably impossible conjuration that some dumbass mage tries once every generation and fails at spectacularly. For that, for a sum total of sweet fuckall, my sister spent her last days on earth in utter terror.
Stupid, pointless horror. Really a lot more common than you’d like to think.
A lot of the spandex set points to some tragic death in the family as their motivation for doing what they do. It’s enough of a staple that no one bothers to ask how you’d end up wearing tights and a codpiece after seeing your wife-daughter-son-husband cut down. Most people, they just put a gun in their mouth or find Jesus.
I’ll tell you what did it for me: finding out Rose died, and learning how, cut the cap off a decade’s worth of guilt and resulting self-loathing. All this shit that’d been building since I took my first life, all the stupid, pointless horror I had sown in the world, it came down on me. The grief I felt at the death of my sister was mockery.
This is what you’ve been doing to people all your life, it said. This grief, this pain, it was currency. You spent it on reputation. You spent it on nice suits. You spent it on cocaine. You spent it on booze. Now the misery’s come full circle and what can you do?
Not a goddamn thing.
I wasn’t very sane for awhile afterwards. Sane enough, though, to make an appeal to Back Alley Brawler to let me flip to the side of the light. Sane enough to know I wouldn’t get far with both the Family and their tame cops after me.
A little aside: While I give superheroes plenty of shit, him I’ll always respect. He shows his face. He fights in trenches; hell, he dug most of them. He worked his ass off on my behalf because he believed I could come out of the transformation all right… and no one else at the time had any reason to believe what he did about me. It’s because of him I’m here now, instead of laying at the bottom of the Port with two in the back of my head.
The rest – the formation of the Agency, all the work we did – is a matter of public record. We accomplished a lot in a short amount of time because we approached the city’s problems differently than the police or the superheroes did.
To recap the highlights: We put Countess Crey behind bars. Rooted a centuries-old conspiracy out of the Family. Halted the wholesale genocide of every single person on earth with a trace of Mu blood in them – a number in the hundreds of millions. Thwarted several Nemesis conspiracies. Blackmailed rogue government factions into submission. Fought off the Circle of Thorns assault on the citizens of Kings Row and facilitated their complete eradication from the neighborhood – an occupation that had lasted since the 1920’s. And, of course, the defeat and humiliation of the Praetorians culminating in the murder of Tyrant and rescue of Statesman.
I personally had a hand in almost all of these and other activities – planned most of them, too. And that list is only scratching the surface. I am not exaggerating when I say there isn’t a single street in any neighborhood in this city where I haven’t exchanged bullets or punches with some unsavory bastard. I’ve blown up Nemesis automaton factories. Tangled – successfully and unsuccessfully – with Malta operatives. Taken down feared and fearsome Rikti generals. Walked the rough-hewn tunnels beneath Kings Row and Astoria. Fought ungodly Rikti war beasts half a mile beneath the earth in the abandoned sewer network. Shaken the halls of Oranbega, the lost city, with bullets and fire. Burned Council abominations to cinders while they howled for my blood. Hell, I’ve even kneed Marrowsnap in the balls so hard he’s still limping.
Warehouses. Factories. Underground cities, caves, strongholds and bases. Stretches of abandoned sewers and subway tunnels. Speakeasies, casinos, corporate offices, the street right outside your folks’ house. Everywhere. Everyone. I fought them all and beat them all, and did it without the benefit of bulletproof skin or heat vision. You only have to look at me to know I paid the price for victory… and kept going anyway.
But I’m not telling you all this so you’ll give me a merit badge. Or applaud me. No. Though this lecture series is meant to be autobiographical, I haven’t told you all this shit about myself just so I could yank my crank in front of thousands of impressionable girls. I’m telling you where I come from. I’m giving you context for what I’m about to say, so you know I’m someone who’s been there, done that and that I’m not just some limp-wristed academic who’s never gotten closer to a brawl than a movie.
I tell you all this so that when you hear the rest of what I’m going to say, you won’t dismiss it – or me – out of hand. A lot of people, reputable and not, have gone to a lot of effort to discredit or dismiss me. They’ll say I’m just a thug. Or that I’m biased. Or I have a grudge. They’ll say anything they possibly can to discredit me without addressing anything I’m about to say.
But the plain simple truth is I’ve been where the supers have been. I’ve seen what they’ve seen. There is no dirty secret in this city I haven’t been privy to, and there’s many more I know that even the supers do not. I’ve got the chops as well as anyone alive.
So understand that I am completely serious when I say: we don’t need superheroes.
By itself it’s not a new statement. Not unique. So I’ll go one further: the continued existence of superheroes as we know them is actively dangerous to the growth of this city and its people.
Superheroes hold us back.
At first blush the mythos is appealing. People from all walks of life somehow rising up from the crowd to flamboyantly stifle efforts to ruin our way of life. That “way of life” phrase is key – the earliest superheroes almost always employed nationalist symbolism and naming schemes, to unify their image in the public’s mind with that of an emerging superpower. You’ll think I’m referring to America alone; do me a favor and google “Axis Kommando” when you get home tonight. It might open your eyes.
People could get behind a single brightly-garbed soldier for Truth, Justice, and Et Cetera because they felt that person stood up for them, and that America was still, somehow, absurdly, an underdog in the world arena. One lone figure against a horde of faceless evildoers, all bent on sullying a pure way of life. Strikes a powerful image, doesn’t it? Powerful enough you might catch it on a movie poster around the city.
Oh, that’s right, you will. For a movie called Lone Hero.
It’s nothing new. Warring nations have always found use for PR figureheads in their psy-ops campaigns.
But after the war, as before it, people had to get on with their daily lives. And most cities, still hung over from the Industrial Revolution, had rotten cores. Who would protect our values from the depredations of Italian immigrants and worse?
We come full-circle to the Family. While the Five Families in NYC were basically sane and saw fit to create a clandestine syndicate, the Paragon Families were so drunk on a New Money high that they got flamboyant. Really flamboyant. Our city’s superheroes, fundamentally changed by the epic scale of the second World War, decided to fight criminals much as they’d fought Axis troops.
To my eyes, that’s where the sickness began. While most other cities pursued what to me is the logical course of action to fight entrenched, clever enemies – sustained investigations utilizing law enforcement officials at all levels of government, stiffening penalties for tertiary crimes to coax felons into confession, and so on – Paragon turned the matter over to its self-appointed gods.
There’s a number of prominent theories for why this city made that decision. My favorite is that Paragon felt a bicoastal rivalry with a new and bustling burg called Hollywood. A mythology was born in California: crime and romance and war writ large. But those Hollywood folks were only pretending. In Paragon City, we were living it.
I want to float you a concept called “narrative politics” – some of you may have heard of it. The essence of narrative politics is that people will ultimately vote for who they think will provide them the better real-life “story.” This isn’t a conscious maneuver on part of the public, except maybe for the two states who elected cast members of Predator to governorship. We go where the irony, humor, or melodrama is. National policy as meta-story. Headlines as daily soap opera.
You can see where I’m going with this. While some laws have been bandied about to restrict, license, or otherwise keep tabs on supers – like we do for every other fucking law enforcement agency in the land, and we should – the basic truth remains: we let a bunch of super-powered people who refuse to tell us who they are enforce laws for us whenever they’ve got a spot of free time.
“We have to protect ourselves,” they say. “We don’t want to put our loved ones at risk!”
Well, chum, that risk doesn’t seem to stop cops and national guardsmen from wearing fucking nametags to work. Welcome to the risk-reward dichotomy of the adult world. Guess what? You don’t get to be called “hero” if you don’t put your neck out there in a very real way. Risk to life and limb isn’t enough; in this city, just going to work every day is a risk to life and limb.
How’d we find ourselves in such an absurd situation?
I’ll tell you how: we let our entertainment get away from us. It rules us. Enslaves us. Asks for our worship. So enamored are we with our icons that we send dozens of soldiers and heroes to die to rescue just one, namely Statesman. In no other city in no other nation on earth would this be seen as a rational course of action.
In the parlance of our times, the tail is now wagging the dog
The first reaction a lot of you will have will be to tell me all the good superheroes have done for us. All the catastrophes averted, all the calamities halted, all the wrongdoing corrected. And I say fine, sure, these people in brightly-colored spandex certainly flew in and punched these other people in brightly-colored spandex until they stopped being bad… until the next time.
What you don’t see is the intricate web of intelligence-gathering and information brokering that leads up to one guy punching another. A vast network of people with no abilities other than intelligence, perseverance, and a calling to do what’s right despite the costs. They do the footwork. They make the deals. They piece together vast, esoteric puzzles, boil great complexities down to “go hit these guys in this warehouse ‘till they all fall down” for journeymen superheroes; no small feat in itself.
They do the real work. Superheroes, sure, provide overwhelming force to ensure victory. But that doesn’t mean we need them. We only use them because they’re cost-effective; why send in 30 guys in SWAT gear when you can just send in one guy who’s more than happy to get shot at for some glory?
But we don’t need them, and we can do better. We have, in fact, stagnated and grown complacent. Superheroes are a band aid, not a prevention. But our society has grown so enamored with them, so completely worshipful of them, that we cannot imagine a world that runs any differently… even if most of the rest of this very same country gets by just fine with minimal spandex presence.
They give us a reactionary mentality. A reactionary mentality results in something like Eastgate. Or Baumton. Or Venice. Or Overbook. Tragedy strikes, weep, send in the supers, feel better about ourselves. Don’t do anything to prevent catastrophes like that from occurring again. Just react when they do. Straighten the flag up. Reset status quo. Collect glory and paycheck.
It makes me sick.
What we have here is a disconnect in values. Superheroes approach the “fight” as having something to do with higher morals, doing the “right thing,” or possibly just servicing their own egos; criminals, for the most part, don’t give a fuck about any of that. They’re trying to get by. Sure, you’ve got your Nemesis and Malta and so on, but for every world-spanning mastermind you have a million thugs living heist to heist. Their investment is personal and vital; it’s tied to their very survival. Superheroes, meanwhile, are mostly dabblers motivated by a “higher calling” with little grounding in the world around them. None of them have to do what they do, they just choose to.
Hence our current stalemate. Well, no more.
All right, Bane, you say. We’ll go this far with you. But if you’re going to tear down our whole system, what would you suggest goes in its place? It’s a common argument and one that drives me bonkers – as if watchdogging and criticizing were not viable activities in and of themselves. But I’ll humor you.
Many of you know of the Neighborhood Watch in Kings Row. If not, I’ll summarize: the Neighborhood Watch is an organization set up and run by normal citizens who have proven again and again that they are perfectly capable of keeping their own neighborhoods safe. Because our laws are arranged to cater to the masked set, these good people are forced to assume masks and codenames for themselves, even though their identities are now open secrets to the residents of that neighborhood.
I understand their motivation. Kings Row has long been viewed as a “launching pad” for superheroes angling for more prestigious work in Steel Canyon and beyond. None of them have much of a personal investment in the well-being of the neighborhood, which is why it remains a slum after all these years. After all, turning a neighborhood around takes a sustained effort and a shitload of hours from people who actually care what happens there. People who’ll stick it out through good times and bad. People who can take the long view.
Like my friend and current Master Agent of the Myrmidon Agency, Froststorm. Otherwise known as Amelia Sands to the kids she tutors every day after school, or as the chief brain behind the annual Kings Row festival. She’s your age – and is actually applying to go to school here – and already sees the wisdom in taking care of the city’s most ignored youth.
The children are our future, the cliché goes, and Frosty knows better than anyone in this room how true that is. Cause and a effect in a kid’s life is so big, so definitive, so wholly consuming. She knows. And she won’t see kids forced to make the choices she had to.
She’s here, actually. I’d point her out, but she’d probably kick my ass later. Anyway, that’s her.
[Point Frosty out.]
Another example. She’s here tonight, too: Parvati Ranjan. Chances are you’ve seen her… she’s pretty hard to miss. You might’ve read about the attack on her and one of her shelters, and the subsequent aversion to the bombing of another shelter in Skyway.
Here’s a woman who wants for nothing. She has her youth, her health, her beauty, her wealth, friendship, and love. She could easily retire in her mid 20’s and live luxuriantly for the rest of her days. Or she could have stuck with her old career: spokesperson for the UNSDI’s superteam, traveling the glove and speaking with high-powered dignitaries.
But she doesn’t do the jetsetting thing, and she doesn’t laze about the house all day. In fact, she works harder than anyone in this room, myself included. And for who?
People that most would consider the most-reviled citizens of the city: the homeless. And not just homeless, but also those perverted by Rikti mutations into the Lost. She sees the value in any human life, knows personally the cost and reward of the road to redemption, and knows… in a way no globe-trotting Freedom Phalanxer ever could… what it means to save one life written off by everyone else.
I myself have begun volunteer work at one of the Lost shelters, running security and generally making sure everyone feels safe. It’s exhausting work… and I don’t know if I’ve found as much satisfaction anywhere else, except maybe in Frosty’s after-school programs.
Both could use volunteers. If you want to be something besides an oxygen bandit on this planet, you could do a lot worse than to help either of them out. Best part? You don’t even have to get bitten by a radioactive animal.
(More...)
« Last Edit: Apr 15, 2006, 12:12pm by FelicityBane »
FelicityBane Administrator Overseer member is offline
Joined: Aug 2004 Posts: 341 Location: Dallas, TX
Contemporary Superheroics lecture, April 15th « Reply #1 on Apr 15, 2006, 10:54am »
(Cont'd.)
Fine, Felicity, you say. You’re telling us that doing charitable works helps everyone. That’s not exactly news. What about the more proactive among us?
I’ll tell you I already laid out a template for proactive change. It’s called the Myrmidon Agency. The MA doesn’t believe in status quo. The MA does not believe we exist in the best of all possible worlds. The MA does not think reactively. The MA does not believe that all you can do is react after some asshole unleashes horror on the world. The MA does not believe that the best we can do is reset the world to resemble what it was before the horror, because the MA does not believe that what the world was before was good enough.
Not that I’m telling you guys to get guns and start shooting up the town vigilante-style. It might feel great, but I can tell you that’s just catharsis talking. You’ll feel better, maybe, but the world won’t be any better for your actions.
You have to pick your targets, and you have to think laterally. Me, for instance. I retired from the MA but due to my gifts and inclinations I felt I had the power to do something about Astoria’s situation. Here’s how we approach the situation:
First, assess the problem.
In this case, Astoria’s absolutely overrun with the restless dead and the people who seek to abuse or enslave them to whatever purpose. Older and greater power still lies under the place, and the interests of the warring factions there are so tangled that simply beating a bunch of them up won’t solve the problem.
Second, figure out why this problem persists.
Usually, this means figuring out who benefits from the sustained misery. With Astoria, a sustained and decades-old criminal conspiracy has kept Astoria just the way it is, and all the parties involved get something out of it. As criminals are mostly businessmen, it’s easy enough to figure out that if you remove what they get out of it, or make it not worth their time, their involvement evaporates.
Third, gather your strength, allies, and knowledge.
I can’t stress this enough: Know every angle before you pursue your goal. Leave your mind open to the idea that you don’t know everything that’s going on, because you won’t. Find people whose talents and connections don’t overlap too much with your own. Find people who are going to disagree with you. You want as much perspective as possible, because chances are the situation you’re addressing is pervasive and hard to root out, and will require more than one approach.
Four, act. But act laterally.
You gain nothing by wading into a situation without knowing it fully ahead of time. By the time you step into action, you should already have the conclusion locked up. Don’t let whomever opposes you see the net wrapping up around them until it’s too late for them to do anything. Be tidy. Be fast.
Five, don’t gloat. Don’t posture. Get the job done.
Most of the “villains” in this town are as wrapped up in the drama of their lives as heroes. They take unnecessary risks and act stupidly for the purposes of being flamboyant and “memorable.” Approaching these people with a grim workmanlike demeanor means, 9 times out of 10, you’ll win out simply by being more efficient.
In fact, I’ll go you one further and give you an assignment. Perez Park. Why is it the way it is? At the heart of the city, with as much power as the city has to wield, we can’t clean it out and make it safe for tourists and businesses again? Why is that, exactly?
Solve the problem in any way you see fit, within the bounds of the law. I’ve even given you a place to do so: felicitybane.com went live yesterday morning, with a forum in place to handle any of you who want to get on there and hash it out and make plans. I’ve posted the main text of this speech, along with similar writings from others covering the spectrum of opinions about social change in the superhero era. I’ll include some documentation and theories on why your assignment – again, that’s Perez Park – remains the way it is. Some people are not going to be happy about what I post. Fuck ‘em.
Go. Read it. Inform yourself.
Then get the fuck out there and do something.
Q&A in the bar across the street at midnight. See you there.
« Last Edit: Apr 15, 2006, 12:11pm by FelicityBane »
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