Despite numerous posts about superpowers, I've yet to properly make a bunch of superheroes. The Recursers and Nazarites and the various other characters in MRD and MRDVol2 and the campaign are in the vein of Superheroes, but still. I get so caught up in the worldbuilding, but there's value in having Superheroes that can be a bit more plug-and-play, so that's my intention here. You could build a Superhero universe around these characters, or adapt them for MRD, Marvel, or DC.
I'm considering making a collaborative superhero worldbuilding project if there's interest, these could be seen as the seeds for that. I was originally going to make several of these but only had time for two and only received feedback on one of them (which is a little discouraging but oh well...), so this post will just be the first and I'll maybe make it a series for the rest of them.
The idea is that they're a little more straightforward than the stuff I would usually do, and while they might homage traditional superheroes or tropes, as the sum of its parts it shouldn't feel like a Marvel or DC universe knockoff, but something original and thematically distinct, with an emphasis on progressivism and solving systemic problems vs. brute violence, reactionary action, and defending the status quo. Also a heavy emphasis on diversity, intersectionality, and globalism.
The format is reminiscent of a wiki article or those old superhero handbooks, with things like "Power Level", but instead of any numbers it's some abstract description, a parody of the idea. Some words might be bolded where those could be articles in themselves which could be hyperlinked.
The "wiki articles" should be written in a way to invoke the sense that there is more between the lines; feeling not like the cohesive narrative of one writer's vision but a living collaborative world developed by many creators over time under various corporate, economic, and creative constraints; an emergent pattern, a character arc or narrative conceit built around the noise and chaos and incoherence of a superhero connected universe not bound by the notions of fantasy or science fiction or horror or even itself.
First an Index of previous Superheroes-related posts:
Vision Serpent
Name: Len Levi (aka Veto Sanz)
Appearance: Unassuming size, light bronze skin tone, five o'clock shadow, tired and wise eyes, casually strong posture.
Costume: Lightly armored dark green serpentine body suit with red and yellow trim. Helmet reminiscent of a crested rattlesnake with a retractable lower face guard.
Powers and Skills: Wings of Saturim (Flight; Mildly Hypnotic); "Spiral Senses"; Master of the martial art Spiral Minding; Knowledge and gadgets of Saturim science and technologies.
Power Level: Just above human in most regards, but with a certain je ne sais quoi.
Biography: Trans-Masc (He/They) Mizrahi Jewish Mexican from Mexico City. Has a Ph.D in signal processing, where he developed a prototype Inverse Frequency Oscillation Device (IFOD), which had the potential to radically disrupt the telecom monopoly MegaXCom in Mexico and revolutionize communications across the world. Betrayed by their startup cofounder Gil Peretz in a corporate espionage showdown, just as the device was about to be destroyed and Len "disappeared" in a bodybag, instead he disappeared for real, teleported to another galaxy to serve the alien god Bright Mujo.
Serving in his Wave Palace overwatching the Saturim Civilizations, Bright Mujo personally educated Len in the sciences and technologies of the Saturim and their gods, modified them with the wings and Spiral Senses of the Saturim, and trained them in the martial art of Spiral Minding, incorporating the Wings and Spiral Senses to unique effect.
After an extended stay in the Wave Palace and after developing a complicated relationship with Bright Mujo, Len wished to leave, but Bright Mujo jealously would not allow it, and certainly not with the IFOD, nor the knowledge that went into making it.
To win their freedom, Len was tasked with telling a novel story profound enough to invoke a novel dream for Bright Mujo, the god of Memory, Patterns, Learning, and Nostalgia. After conceiving nights upon nights of stories and never succeeding, Len eventually resorted to generating stories from pseudo-random equations, mathematically derived poetry skat, inducing in Bright Mujo from his memory patterns a pseudo-novel narrative of his own free association. Bright Mujo accepted this partial solution, allowing Len to leave, but keeping the IFOD and the knowledge of how to produce it.
Returned to Earth, Len's startup was acquired by MegaXCom under Gil's leadership. Assuming the fake identity Veto Sanz, Len infiltrated MegaXCom, working to set right those harmed by the corporation both as Veto and as The Vision Serpent, while systematically instigating a boardroom coup. Complicating matters, just as Len was settling back into life on Earth and hitting their stride, Saturim agents reveal themselves, on the hunt for Len on behalf of Bright Mujo, seemingly reneging on their agreement.
I love this post so much - not just the actual text of the post, which I can obviously tell goes hard even though I'm exactly one of those folks who don't have comics as a touchstone, but its implied stance towards fiction that you make explicit here: "I mean yes it's good to make things accessible where you can, but part of getting into these big superhero universes or weird fiction or things like that, is learning how to embrace the inscrutability, to not be afraid to not understand and to be willing to learn, to feel the undercurrent of the thing and just come along for the ride." What an excellent way to put it. Fuck the wiki-ing impulse dog. Tbh it may even be fair to say that the sharpest forms of this lend themselves to an "anti-worldbuilding" (at least a certain sort of worldbuilding-as-totalizing-practice) argument. I'm reminded again of Zedeck Siew's post about nerd taxonomizing and the need for things or a world to fit into neatly ordered boxes before you can engage with them.
ReplyDeleteYeah rereading the above, I think I put the point in the worst possible way, but you divined much of what I was trying to say anyways. Sorry, I was pretty tired when I wrote that. I meant something like the "encyclopedist's approach" to worldbuilding - which def can be fun! I'm not even gonna front, I still like combing old favorite settings for lore reasons and I'll prob never stop. Noisms' response to Zedeck's post did hit on something important when he suggests that the tension between the paired impulses is where Real Ultimate Power grows, at least where games are concerned, though I realize that I am basically just the "speculative anthropology or historical research" brand of loser that he talks about. Tbh the taxonomizing drive lives there too - I joked about it at the time, but something like the abrus seed post + Truth-In-Blood is certainly born out of a tradition of thinking about African art that ultimately dates back to the colonial archive, which is not to say that it's icky evil but worth noting. I feel like there's a pressure in worldbuilding to make cultures seem thematically coherent (to Western eyes) - partially thanks to issues of space and the fact that your readers aren't going to spend 8 years looking at documents and artifacts from your culture and building up a holistic view, but there's problems even beyond that. The Weberian rationalizing quest is far from universal - purposeful ambiguity (what a gamer might call a fruitful void…or something similar, I forget the exact term) is a core element of a lot of Cent. Africa's intellectual production. I'm not sure if I'm making sense here, but I think that a lot of popular worldbuilding best practice or strategies for adding verisimilitude to a project actually work to undermine realism. I strongly suspect that at least part of the impossible-to-shake feeling of inauthenticity that stalks the work of even the most well-intentioned designers who try their hand at Afrofantasy (it feels like I'm picking on them at this point and MAYBE I AM but Paizo's recentish Mwangi Expanse book is an excellent example) is due to their inability to divorce themselves from the desire to encyclopedize. That's just one, kinda small facet of the larger issues of ignoring continental worldviews in favor of an African skinsuit that we talked about earlier, ofc….but it's present. This all reminds me of the character of the Priest of Ungit in Till We Have Faces (cold take I know but Lewis' best) -
Delete"Much less does it give them understanding of holy things. They demand to see such things clearly, as if the gods were no more than letters written in a book. I, King, have dealt with the gods for three generations of men, and I know that they dazzle our eyes and flow in and out of one another like eddies on a river, and nothing that is said clearly can be said truly about them. Holy places are dark places. It is life and strength, not knowledge and words, that we get in them. Holy wisdom is not clear and thin like water, but thick and dark like
blood."
The Priest, much like the Fox with his "Greek wisdom," had a part of the truth - certainly wasn't just wrong and I think that this was one of the places where he was extremely right. Psyche and even Orual come to respect his position:
Delete"'The Priest has been with me. I never knew him before. He is not what the Fox thinks. Do you know, Sister, I have come to feel more and more that the Fox hasn't the whole truth. Oh, he has much of it. It'd be dark as a dungeon within me but for his teaching. And yet ... I can't say it properly. He calls the whole world a city. But what's a city built on? There's earth beneath. And outside the wall? Doesn't all the food come from there as well as all the dangers? . . . things growing and rotting, strengthening and poisoning, things shining wet . . . in one way (I don't know which way) more like, yes, even more like the House of — '
'Yes, of Ungit,' said I."
There's a sense of loss in the short description of the new Priest of Ungit/Aphrodite Hellenizing the House of Ungit. Orual does note that he never could match the deep well of power that the former Priest possessed. A lot of worldbuilding has never even set foot in the dark of the House.
"but I think that a lot of popular worldbuilding best practice or strategies for adding verisimilitude to a project actually work to undermine realism."
DeleteEXACTLY!
The real world is full of idiosyncrasies and inexplicableness; things not conforming to our artificially constructed categorical theories which are often just post-hoc rationalizations; things that don't add up. Many of these carefully constructed worlds that aim for "realism" feel artificial because they lack these qualities. And these qualities, I do think they can be consciously produced, but they tend to accrue much more organically when they're epiphenomenal, cultural, social, free-associated; that's part of the magic to me of superhero continuities, real world mythologies, and other scifi/fantasy settings.