An Exchange: Have Superheroes BUT with Supervillains

[herolee10]

This is a topic that I've actually had friends discuss with me about; but imagine this; IF we could have actual Superheroes present within the world; whether it be they be like the ones from the Marvel or DC Universe, but with the ONE condition being, that for the heroes to be present within our own world, super-villains would then need to exist as well (e.g. perhaps to balance things out; yin and yang), would you still want superheroes to come about?

 

[Dark Phantom]

That's a vague question because we don't even know the relationship the hero and villain would have. Are we talking about a world such as depicted in the 90s Batman animated series? It's a world where the yin and yang exist, but Batman almost always manages to save the lives that a villain like the Joker would put in harm's way. The interesting thing when you re-watch the series as an adult, you begin to understand how tame it is compared to the standards of the genre of today. Bruce Timm and Paul Dini gave the illusion that these villains were murderous monsters to uninitiated, but with their fresh eye they managed to invoke a little bit of empathy for the villains.

A world in which heroes and villains coexist as you describe would be a lot closer to Nolan's vision of Batman if anything else. Death, paranoia, and anarchy would be more prevalent in society. Although there has been a lot of destruction in the Marvel cinematic universe, you don't get the sense that the world is really negatively affected by this rise of meta-humans. If superheroes and villains existed in our world, which no one would be able to control, then there would be fundamental changes to the way governments and society would function. It would probably be not for the better.

Basically you'd have the ending of Watchmen, instead of the alien squid uniting the world together, it would be the relationship between superheroes and villains. We'd all be so deathly afraid because we would be like flies to them.

 

[herolee10]

That's a vague question because we don't even know the relationship the hero and villain would have. Are we talking about a world such as depicted in the 90s Batman animated series? It's a world where the yin and yang exist, but Batman almost always manages to save the lives that a villain like the Joker would put in harm's way. The interesting thing when you re-watch the series as an adult, you begin to understand how tame it is compared to the standards of the genre of today. Bruce Timm and Paul Dini gave the illusion that these villains were murderous monsters to uninitiated, but with their fresh eye they managed to invoke a little bit of empathy for the villains.

A world in which heroes and villains coexist as you describe would be a lot closer to Nolan's vision of Batman if anything else. Death, paranoia, and anarchy would be more prevalent in society. Although there has been a lot of destruction in the Marvel cinematic universe, you don't get the sense that the world is really negatively affected by this rise of meta-humans. If superheroes and villains existed in our world, which no one would be able to control, then there would be fundamental changes to the way governments and society would function. It would probably be not for the better.

Basically you'd have the ending of Watchmen, instead of the alien squid uniting the world together, it would be the relationship between superheroes and villains. We'd all be so deathly afraid because we would be like flies to them.

Given our real world context, I guess yeah; one way that I'd go with is saying that if we were to have the likes of Nolan's Batman present, only with someone like Heath's Joker having to be present as well in response; would people still be up for it such; then again, it could also be on how the DCAU had gone about it, if we were to have the JLA from that genre and have supervillains from that universe as well present in our own, where huge scale and deadly super battles can take place in any of our cities.

 

[Edguy]

Having a villain with Manhattan/Phoenix-kind of powers would suck a lot.

 

[The Question]

I think it's a silly question. If the technology to give people super powers existed, it would inevitably be abused. It could be used to help people, and possibly most uses of it would be altruistic, but super villains of some kind would be an inevitability.