10 KiB
Reed Richards is Not Useless
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Author: u/Ikacprzak *
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URL: https://www.reddit.com/r/rational/comments/7fhwgy/reed_richards_is_not_useless/
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Score: 19
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Created: 2017-11-25T20:51:35
Post:
So there's this thing in comics where no matter how rich or smart certain people are, they never use their assets to affect large scale improvements. Are there any works, comic or otherwise that have characters avert this such as Dr. Manhattan synthesizing lithium or Soviet Superman making a functional Soviet Union?
Comments:
u/ThorShield [+40] (3 hours later)
According to SMBC a rational superman should not fight crime. https://www.smbc-comics.com/?id=2305
u/phylogenik [+21] (23 hours later)
I think in settings where Superman's powers are incomprehensible and static and there regularly appear existential threats (in the form of Darkseid, Doomsday, General Zod, etc.) whose primary mechanism of defeat is "getting punched really hard" it makes sense for Superman to focus on honing his punching abilities, keeping keen his sense of justice and heroic responsibility, etc. If he stops to focus on mundane utilities and his punching skills falter the world is quickly forfeit.
In other settings, I personally disagree that transporting grain, plowing farmland, or cranking a generator are anywhere near the best applications of Superman’s powers.
u/Silver_Swift [+11] (2 days later)
I really don't like the message that comic is trying to convey. Superman is not obligated to dedicate the entirety of his time and energy to be maximally efficient at benefiting humanity. First of all because nobody is obliged to do that (good people are still allowed to have a life) and second of all because people need downtime to remain sane and maintaining the mental well-being of the most power being on the planet is kind of a high priority.
Also, there is absolutely no way the best use for supermans powers is to spin a dynamo all day long, even if you agree that unlimited energy is the best goal to strive for. Worst case scenario: just have him build and run a park of nuclear power plants and dump the waste products in the sun. He can keep the damage contained if a meltdown threatens to occur and if we run out of fissionables he can just pop over to an asteroid with a high uranium content and get us some more.
Edit: This was supposed to be a reply to /u/ThorShield's post.
u/VorpalAuroch [+30] Life before Death (an hour later)
The Fall of Doc Future
u/SvalbardCaretaker [+12] Mouse Army (13 hours later)
http://docfuture.tumblr.com/post/82363551272/fall-of-doc-future-contents
Link for the lazy. THE best/ultimate speedster depiction.
u/VorpalAuroch [+5] Life before Death (20 hours later)
Thanks, I was on mobile and lazy yesterday.
u/XxChronOblivionxX [+6] (7 hours later)
Seconding this. Best demonstration of that principle that I can think of.
u/ToaKraka [+19] https://i.imgur.com/OQGHleQ.png (3 hours later)
The trope page explicitly lists Alternate-Universe Reed Richards Is Awesome as the opposite of this trope. The latter page provides several examples of heroes that change the status quo.
u/ArgentStonecutter [+18] Emergency Mustelid Hologram (30 minutes later)
The principle was set early on that you couldn't have Superman winning World War II when World War II was actually going on. That established a trend that no matter what superheroes did it couldn't really have long term consequences.
I read that at some point Lex Luthor became President. Presumably he had a plan for using his super science to effect social change. What exactly happened there?
u/Goshawk3118191 [+12] (an hour later)
Lex has been president three times, as seen here - you can guess how it ended.
u/ArgentStonecutter [+12] Emergency Mustelid Hologram (2 hours later)
Red Son seems to be the only one arguably rational.
u/thrawnca [+9] Carbon-based biped (13 hours later)
How rational do you want? With This Ring leans in a rational direction, though not strongly, and certainly opposes the trope.
u/DangerouslyUnstable [+8] (18 hours later)
I'd argue that With This Ring is a very rational protagonist forced to live in a highly irrational setting.
u/phylogenik [+4] (49 minutes later)
I think most sci-fi would qualify, though oftentimes there the supergeniuses are unnamed entities in the past, or more “well-coordinated teams of engineers” and “international conglomerates of scientists” than singular individuals. I guess in those cases the progress itself is not shown unless the work is a space opera spanning centuries or something.
u/None [+17] (2 hours later)
I mean, Schlock Mercenary is pretty good about this. Near the beginning, a scientist/engineer develops effective FTL teleportation. This sets off massive upheaval as the monopolies on the clunkier FTL is overturned, teleportation blockers and teleportation blocker blockers are developped, obseleted superweapons become viable now they can be easily teleported around, etc.
u/Law_Student [+5] (a day later)
With This Ring is superb and all about this.
https://forums.sufficientvelocity.com/threads/with-this-ring-young-justice-si-story-only.25076/
u/pleasedothenerdful [+3] (6 days later)
Any sign of completion on the horizon? I went through it like a year ago, but SV is a godawful place to host something that size, and I could never figure out how to just get a link to the latest update emailed to me when it posted, so I didn't keep up.
u/Law_Student [+1] (6 days later)
It seems to still be going strong. it took me a couple weeks to read through it all doing nothing else, and I skipped much of the Grayven storyline for the main one. I just caught up to the present in the story today myself. As for how to get a link mailed to you when it updates, register a username and set a watch on the story only thread. I believe he posts every day.
u/clawclawbite [+1] (an hour later)
Abberant, the white-wolf superhero RPG setting has the world in the middle of a super-science wave. It has super efficient car engines and such at the trendy new thing.
u/DCarrier [+1] (11 hours later)
Girl Genius comes to mind. Though that's less that mad scientists' inventions catch on and more that there's just so many mad scientists that their inventions are everywhere. Still, the entire city of Paris was controlled by one guy, who seemed to make it a pretty impressive city.
Fallout Equestria had a lot of social change from the inventions they had during the war. But the megaspells ended up making it all moot. I imagine the original Fallout series was similar, but I've never actually played.
u/DTravers [+1] (15 hours later)
Still, the entire city of Paris was controlled by one guy, who seemed to make it a pretty impressive city.
The Castle of Mechanicsburg would like a word with you...
u/DangerouslyUnstable [+2] (18 hours later)
Or, it would, if it weren't caught in a frozen time bubble. I still read that comic but I honestly don't know how to feel about it. It doesn't seem that the authors have any long term plot plan and are just writing an they go. It's still fun though for now.
u/DTravers [+2] (18 hours later)
It doesn't seem that the authors have any long term plot plan and are just writing an they go.
Kind of. From what I've gathered, they know how it's going to go overall (I knew Agatha was going to go to Paris and then London after Mechanicsburg, for example) but the details are up to them. For example, Kaja's LiveJournal talked about how Sturmhalten would feature ghosts.
u/whomightub3 [+1] (7 days later)
Are we talking about the same grandfather-paradox-manipulation series? Where we follow around the female protagonist on the n-th leg/cycle of a doomed world, and she needs to find out exactly what she needs to change. But only the reader really understands this, and she thinks she can still fix it? It was kind of underlined in the very beginning of the series.
u/DTravers [+2] (7 days later)
...probably not. Why, what are you talking about?
u/whomightub3 [+1] (8 days later)
That's the one! Seriously, you didn't know about that? The Muse of Time is some kind of terminator, Van Rijn captured it and used it to advance tech. Currently, the Wasp cult is growing out of control, the time bubble has allowed entry of some kind of unholy timeless beings, the time bubble itself is containing Agatha's self-replicating not-100% obedient mini-spark-clanks. It's all right there. Girl Genius is more "Reed Richards is Useless and Helps Murders Everyone. But it's Okay, it Was Borked to Begin With."
u/DTravers [+1] (8 days later)
...No, I didn't know a about any of that. I know that there's the unholy extra-dimensional horrors trying to get in, and the time travel with Agatha (who was seeking apparently Moloch) that will need to be resolved, but I didn't know it was a looping timeline. Unless you meant a cycle in the sense of Sparks building empires and causing chaos?
u/VorpalAuroch [+1] Life before Death (20 hours later)
They have characters they know will show up and have since well before it went online. For example, it will eventually go to Skifander; we know this because three named characters in The Works are visibly Skifandrian.
u/DCarrier [+1] (23 hours later)
Mechanicsburg is impressive too, but it's a much smaller city, so it doesn't really seem like the same scale.