Power And Philosophy

How I used the superhero genre

Superhero stories are, in some respects, the ideal form for fictional philosophical thought. You want to discuss strength, put a superstrong character. Quickness, a superspeeder.

Wisdom is trickier, because you can declare a character strong by fiat, and likewise with quick, but making a character wise requires him to say wise things, and even do wise things, but even there you can do things.

You could, if you liked, put up a serious argument that Gyges, in the works of Plato, is the first supervillain. A gadget-based supervillain, with a magical ring that makes him invisible. Thus allowing Plato to discuss action without constraint.

Good and evil can be discussed with much more ease, though they have the same problem as wisdom. The actions actually have to be good and evil. As clearly as if you were setting up a problem for philosophical discussion. (Obviously, as clearly ambiguous if the problem is to be about ambiguity.)

Of course, pulling against this is the tendency of the genre, which is for fun action and adventure -- sometimes absurd action and ill-thought-out adventure -- and not so much philosophy.

We end up with such farces as plot lines that feature annihilating entire universes filled with trillions (septillions? nonillions?) of planets whose populations equal, or surpass, those of Earth -- but not all the stories in all the comic books change who holds what political office on Earth.

Or dozens of amazing inventors who match or exceed Thomas Edison in skill, but who never change the technology of their world. I suppose that you could argue that Edison was a superhuman inventor, and even a fairly high-powered one, but even inventors who produced one significant invention have made radical changes in the world. (And the Fantastic Four is allegedly funded by Reed's patents.)

Or the alternate universe where, we are assured, morality has been flipped. The heroes are all villains, the villains are all heroes -- the oft-defeated heroes -- and the organization of heroes is the tyrannical government of the world.

Look, I can see the charm of setting a superhero team -- or a lone superhero -- up against an evil opposite, and I can also see the charms of overthrowing a tyranny, but the worlds do not work. Any more than the Manchinean heresy worked, and St. Thomas Aquinas's argument against that works against this trope, too.

I tackled this one.

Writing the story demonstrated the downside of starting with a theme. You have to develop more, especially given that these characters need backstory, a history of heroes and villains fighting. I wrestled with it for a time, but one day I was generating characters for a superhero RPG, and one of them became the superheroine Sanddollar.

She acquired the name Helen soon after. Then I had to create a backstory, and work on the mirrored world. It took some thought, after creating a character who was big on mediation between two things -- because if she supported one, her reflection could obviously support the other -- to realize that the reflection obviously was big on conflict.

Others were easier. Arrogance to humility, humility to arrogance, honesty to theft, concord to violence --

The setting worked itself out without much work on my part. Sanddollar, as a superheroine, required a seashore location. Then I had to work out how to depict a mirrored world despite the way it did not work -- and then show it not working.

I forget where I got the inspiration for the villains from, it just sort of sprang out developing the mirrored world, and how that came about with timing such that it could show the mirrored world's failure.

In order to provide the variety of superpowers needed for the genre, I gave them a metaorigin¹ they didn't control and just had to live with. Then I downplayed it because it's backdrop, though it does tie into the speculation about the villains.

The one easy thing was the plot. I needed the details, but once I put in how the worlds were related, I just sent Sanddollar and the others of her world in, to see how the mirrored world worked and failed to work, and do what they could.

Incidents had to be created, of course, but when you morally invert all the characters in a setting, especially when you have characters so clear cut as superheroes and supervillains, and what you want is to show how the morally inverted world actually acted, the incidents suggest themselves.

And thus I finished Through A Mirror Darkly. Available at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Apple Books, Smashwords, and Everand.

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