Why Do The Voters Let Vigilantes In Red Underwear Do Whatever They Like?
How To Write Superhero Settings, Part One.
Why doesn’t Batman kill the Joker? That’s a bad question. Why doesn’t the GCPD kill the Joker? The police kill people all the time. Wait, that’s a bad question. Why doesn’t anyone on the entire planet kill the Joker?
Superhero settings do not naturally make sense. In a centralized democratic republic, law enforcement isn’t going to be handled by self-appointed vigilantes in red underwear. If a city has an all-out cape battle every week, people are going to move away. The setting isn’t broken. It’s easy to suspend disbelief as long as you don’t look in the wrong place. But it’s cracked.1
On the other hand, superheroes are cool! Superhero stories are great! I write superhero stories! Allowing that some people will want to be superheroes if they’re a thing, because they’re awesome, why does anyone else tolerate them? Why do the cops tolerate them? Why does the army tolerate them? Why do the voters tolerate them?
Why do people let these superheroes do this?
There are two answers I’ve found for that question: Either they don’t want to stop them, or they can’t.
1. Law And Order: Superheroes
If they don’t want to, this implies some pretty specific things about the system. Specifically, it implies one of two things.
First option: Everyone supports the status quo where the superheroes do whatever they feel like and they don’t want to change it. Since people are very rarely happy with any status quo, this will be rare. Since superheroes often knock over buildings and people want someone to blame, this will be very rare. You can write a story with Option #1 without running into problems if you’re good at what you’re doing, but it’s very hard to produce an internally-consistent world this way. If Commissioner Gordon likes Batman and tries to avoid any police interference with his activities, great! If the NYPD thinks of the Avengers as “the big guns for crises we can’t handle” they will tend to feel grateful, not furious. But that’s only if you pick what stories to tell very carefully. In the real world, heroes would (for example) “fail to find” the loot and then get caught with sixteen crates of death rays, marked bills and Egyptian cat statues. This will produce public demand for change, and you need the supers to have extraordinary pull to stop reform.
Second option: Capes are well-integrated into the law enforcement (e.g. Super Supportive)2, operating in the role of SWAT teams or their own autonomous branch doing their thing, the way the state troopers aren’t the city police or the FBI. This is plausible, but cuts off a lot of possible stories. Your cool, independent protagonists are now Part Of The System. They have to do paperwork. They probably receive salaries. Their secret identities are now at risk. It’s realistic, but you can’t do the “scrappy underdog” thing nearly as well.
This gives us the first self-consistent answer: The superheroes are one part of a well-functioning system, incorporated as one part of the law enforcement system. The heroes are integrated into the system, for better and for worse.3
If the authorities can’t control the superheroes, though, that’s a different issue.
2. How Super Is Super?
Some superheroes are bulletproof. That is, bullets from a handgun or a Thompson submachine gun or an AR-15 rifle will bounce off the hero’s chest. These heroes can, with great difficulty, punch through a brick wall.
We have guns used as sniper rifles for killing people on the other side of brick walls. We use them for that because they are underpowered for their original intended use, which was as anti-tank guns. We made much better guns for killing tanks, but those ended up underpowered, too, so we stopped using them. If we want to kill tanks, we normally use precision guided missiles, fired from helicopters or drones. We could strap bigger explosives to the missiles if we ever wanted to, but we normally don’t.
Your hero’s immune to all bullets, heat, explosions, kinetic energy in any shape or form? Great! Is he immune to mustard gas? Drowning? Cyanide? Acid? Does he need to breathe, at all? What if we bury him in cement? Can he lift a multi-ton weight dropped on him by a crane? Physics permits a lot of ways to stop people who can’t be killed, and a super has to be immune to all of them to avoid destruction by a sufficiently incentivized modern army.
I’m talking about this as “what if the cops try to call in the army to help them arrest the heroes for vigilante activity,” but this works just as well as “what if the cops try to call in the army to stop the supervillains.” Indeed, this will come up more, because supervillains regularly cause problems, and the cops regularly don’t stop them before the heroes do. In order to have a world where the authorities are forced to go the superheroes, hats in hand, to ask for help with supervillains, the US armed forces have to be unwilling to stop or incapable of stopping the supervillains via drone strike.4 This is a problem because we are good at drone strikes, so the supervillains need to be really, really strong.
This produces Answer Two for the fork, the Superman answer: They can’t, and the reason they can’t is because humans are totally powerless against superhumans, who have all the military force in the setting. You can’t write most stories about superheroes like this. They don’t need shelter. They don’t need food. They can be incredibly rich if they ever bother using their powers to make money. You can write good Superman stories, but fewer than with a more human-level protagonist.
3: Brains Are What Matter.
Let’s look for a moment the way Batman stories handle the puzzle - uh, not the Batman stories are the page, the ones in my head.5 Ignore the eternal status quo for the moment and pretend for a moment that all these stories are taking place in a fifteen-year period between Bruce Wayne first donning the cowl and Batman retiring.
Why does he become Batman? Because the police are corrupt. Why are the police corrupt? Why, because Batman was created in the aftermath of Prohibition and the Depression and so this was just writing the world outside the writer’s door. The police were corrupt. Why don’t the police don’t arrest Batman when he beats up a respected community leader who everyone knows is a mobster? They try, but they can’t. Batman is sneaky and wears a mask and runs away really fast! Later in his career, Gordon ends up in charge and manages to accomplish some reforms and so the answer shifts over to “Gordon is sabotaging the investigation because he knows Batman’s a good guy.”
Why don’t the police just catch the Joker, even if they don’t investigate the mob? Because Batman is much smarter than they are, and can quickly gather and interpret information to come to the correct conclusion faster than the trained professionals. Batman is Sherlock Holmes, and they’re Lestrade.
Is Batman’s fighting ability important to this narrative? Nah. Batman has to be able to fight to get into fight scenes, but not to make him being better at catching villains than the cops plausible. If Batman solves all problems by calling the cops on them, it’s a slightly different genre, but if every once in a while in a tough fight the cops show up to bail him out, that is... fine? Sometimes Gordon gets to be the cavalry.
This gives us a third answer to the puzzle: The authorities are largely incompetent6 and the protagonists sideline them. This is true of a lot of Batman stories! The problem with it is that it, again, limits the stories you can tell. Either the police are incredibly dumb or your protagonist needs to be a brilliant investigator, and brilliance enough to beat a full organization of people7 is hard to write.8
Batman also offers us a fourth possibility, as we covered above. The authorities in Batman: Year One aren’t just inept, they’re evil. Often enough, the corrupt cops are the people Batman is fighting. We make the question of “can the authorities control the supers” the plot.9
The fourth answer is: The authorities themselves are the enemy. They’re opposed to the protagonists. This is the normal way to write supervillain-protagonist stories, but go back far enough and you’ll see it in hero-protagonist stories. Who does Zorro fight? The problem with this is that a lot of heroes, a lot of authorities and a lot of voters won’t accept it.
So, there are six options for writing an internally-consistent superhero setting:
Don’t.
The heroes are basically the equivalent of cops or FBI agents, incorporated into a system that functions enough it hasn’t been replaced yet.
The authorities are totally powerless against supers because you have an extremely high-powered setting.
The authorities are basically incompetent and the protagonists succeed by being smarter than them.
The authorities are the antagonists and the protagonists are the plucky outlaws.
Be smarter than me and come up with a clever solution I haven’t thought of, then send me a link.
I really like Shamus Young’s analysis; this is a great essay I strongly recommend.
Super Supportive is one of the most coherent superhero settings I’ve encountered, at the price of not really being a superhero setting - everything has fairly realistically shaken out into a form that includes almost no hero-villain fights.
This is the answer I go with for the setting of the Tragedy of the Titanium Tyrant, in which the superheroes start out independent but illegal, and steadily shift over to filling a SWAT role. The inevitable future - assuming nobody blows up the planet - is that they end up integrating into existing SWAT teams, because combined arms warfare works much better than dividing your supers into completely different organizations than your Guys With Guns.
Easiest way to make them unwilling: If you have harmless villains who steal money but carefully avoid hurting people, the Air Force might not care enough to drone strike them.
Key elements shaping the setting: Batman: The Animated Series, Batman: Year One, Batman: Black and White.
At least compared to the protagonists.
From G.K. Chesterton’s The Mirror of the Magistrate:
“Ours is the only trade,” said [the detective], “in which the professional is always supposed to be wrong. After all, people don’t write stories in which hairdressers can’t cut hair and have to be helped by a customer; or in which a cabman can’t drive a cab until his fare explains to him the philosophy of cab-driving. For all that, I’d never deny that we often tend to get into a rut: or, in other words, have the disadvantages of going by a rule. Where the romancers are wrong is, that they don’t allow us even the advantages of going by a rule.”
“Surely,” said Underhill, “Sherlock Holmes would say that he went by a logical rule.”
“He may be right,” answered the other; “but I mean a collective rule. It’s like the staff work of an army. We pool our information.”
“And you don’t think detective stories allow for that?” asked his friend.
“Well, let’s take any imaginary case of Sherlock Holmes, and Lestrade, the official detective. Sherlock Holmes, let us say, can guess that a total stranger crossing the street is a foreigner, merely because he seems to look for the traffic to go to the right instead of the left. I’m quite ready to admit Holmes might guess that. I’m quite sure Lestrade wouldn’t guess anything of the kind. But what they leave out is the fact that the policeman, who couldn’t guess, might very probably know. Lestrade might know the man was a foreigner; merely because his department has to keep an eye on all foreigners.
Or, more commonly, a subplot.
7. The heroes are not general crime-fighters, but have a distinct mission which their powers are specialized in. Commonly seen in magical girl stories, because "only magic can fight magic" is an easy rule for the audience to accept. The heroes may or may not be able to cooperate with law enforcement, depending on the nature of the threat.
E.g., in Miraculous Ladybug, Ladybug can't share her secret identity because anyone she tells might get possessed by an akuma, but in Sleepless Domain the enemies are mindless monsters and the city openly supports and markets the girls because they're desperate for more heroes.
7) The polity is fragmented: country-scale governance doesn't exist in a strong sense, each city is mainly on their own, with the police also doing some of the role of the army - and tracking down superheroes is not generally the best use of local resources.
8) Superheroes and/or supervillains have the support of some fraction of the population - maybe some ethnic group, some sub-class, or some community. Fighting them is a political problem, not just an issue of ressources.