Any point in secret identities?
- Thread starter Replica Picard
- Start date
Who do you mean by that description? My first thought when I hear "costumed athlete type" is folks like Batman, Captain America, and Hawkeye, and they absolutely can and do take on supervillains.
Well, at any rate, how we define Wyatt isn't a big deal. Whether or not Johnny Storm's college roommate falls under someone's definition of "regular" or not, can we agree that if guys like him can handle the dangers of a superhero's world, someone like Lois Lane can too?
What we got to look forward to with the Daniel Radcliffe Moon Knight is one Superhero with THREE secret identities.
I guess we finally get to see if he is England's Fred Savage.
Oh.
https://cosmicbook.news/daniel-radcliffe-moon-knight-marvel
Daniel says that he is not Moon Knight.
Bah!
I guess we finally get to see if he is England's Fred Savage.
Oh.
https://cosmicbook.news/daniel-radcliffe-moon-knight-marvel
Daniel says that he is not Moon Knight.
Bah!
We should be wary of injecting too much realism into the analysis of superhero stories. 90% of superheroes are basically human beings with some special abilities and a bullet would be enough to kill Cyclops or Hawkeye, but still they go toe-to-toe with villains with the power to level a city. It's frankly ridiculous that your average cops-bad guys' shootout leaves behind more corpses than a battle between Avengers and Masters Of Evil. And Daredevil it's another good example. He has fought so many times with superbeings that they hit him repeatedly in the head that he should now suffer from chronic traumatic encephalopathy, instead he is ready every night to face the bad guys again!
I believe that Garth Ennis illustrates perfectly the concept in The Punisher Kills The Marvel Universe
I believe that Garth Ennis illustrates perfectly the concept in The Punisher Kills The Marvel Universe
That's the point some continue to miss: he was not Gwen, Lois Lane, Iris West Allen or pre-Captain America-trained / Captain Marvel-merged Rick Jones. Not in the slightest. Some insist pushing the silly notion that a civilian knowing gives them some sort of advantage, when it does not. Supervillain attacks are not the equivalent of a virus, and you cannot social distance yourself away from someone (or a group) who will hunt and exploit/kill you because he knows who you are in relation to a superhero. The civilian cannot protect themselves against the 2...10...50 people, or entire planets filled with a superhero's enemies. All the reason the civilian and costumed life should be separate. This cannot be that difficult to understand.
Masters would have been better than a character who was not seen to be a risk in the eyes of his superpowered friends.
Of course, there's no more realism in your average cop show, or any action series/movies in general. For instance, most bullet hits aren't instantly lethal unless they hit a vital area; conversely, just being "winged" in the shoulder can be debilitating for life rather than just something you can shrug off like most action heroes do. And then you have things like CSI where the forensic scientists are direct participants in the investigations and arrests, which is completely unethical because of the conflict of interest and loss of objectivity that it creates. (Both TV versions of The Flash are guilty of this too, but not because they're superhero shows, just because they're cop shows about forensic scientists.) Then there's the ridiculous ease with which cars explode in action shows/movies, something that rarely happens in real life, at least not with modern designs that protect the gas tank from impacts -- and even so, it's far harder to make gasoline explode than fiction suggests (which should be easy to realize when you think about what an intricate mechanism a car engine needs to ignite gasoline and how easy it is for that mechanism to fail).
People like to single out SF/fantasy for its lack of realism, but the truth is that more "grounded" genres take just as many liberties with everyday realities.
Exactly. There are good arguments to be made about how secret identities are dramatically or metaphorically interesting, but arguments in their favor on the basis that it's more realistic don't hold much meaning for me. Does anyone actually care about that level of realism?
I would say the evidence points to no. It might be unrealistic that Wyatt Wingfoot and Alicia Masters aren't targeted more often by the Fantastic Four's enemies, but readers never cared. It might be unrealistic that Sue Dibny and Linda Park could live a safe normal lives even though everyone knew their husbands were in the Justice League but, again, nobody cared. Readers don't care about this stuff in the same way they don't care that genetic mutation can't actually give someone optic blasts.
I thought it was the arguments against secret identities that were more realistic. Realistically, disguises are rarely that convincing, especially to people who know you well. Realistically, surveillance, facial recognition, and forensic science are at the point where it would be very hard to keep anyone's identity secret from the authorities. Realistically, you put people in more danger by hiding things from them, not less. Realistically, lying and tricking your loved ones and controlling their access to information about you is a form of abuse, not love.
There's always room for realism in fantasy stories, as long as you keep in mind what "realism" actually means. It doesn't mean an exact recreation of reality; it means an artistic style that conveys the impression of reality, which isn't at all the same thing as actually being real. It's like the old joke: "The key is sincerity. If you can fake that, you've got it made."
Realism is not so much about conforming your fiction to the limits and problems your characters would face in reality as it is about acknowledging those limits, nodding to them to give your story a plausible texture while you work around them. Since what you're doing is still fiction, it still needs to play out as an entertaining story and thus have certain unrealities to its structure. The surface layer of realism just helps mask that artificiality and sell the illusion. It's like writing hard science fiction -- if you acknowledge enough real science in explaining the fanciful stuff, it helps sell the illusion that it could actually work. Not enough to hold up to a real scientific analysis, of course, but enough to feel believable in the moment so that the audience is willing to suspend disbelief until afterward. The facade of reality is convincing enough that you have to go back afterward and dig deeper to find the artifice.
It's really more about making the superheroes less manipulative douchebags.
Nope.
So superheroes should just completely isolate themselves and never interact with other people? That's pretty much the only way to keep the people around them from being in danger, because whether they know who the hero is or not, as long as they are associated with them, then they're in pretty much the same amount of danger. Technically they should probably not interact with people in their civilian life either, since there's always the chance the bad guys will found out who they are, or even if they don't find out, there's still a threat since they could end up as a pawn in a supervillains schemes.
They actually just reshowed the Mythbusters where they tackled this during a marathon last month. They tried to get a car to explode just by driving it off a cliff, they tried a bunch of different ways, but the only time it actually exploded was at the very end, when they specifically rigged the car to explode on impact.
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I remember an episode of an '80s action show -- I think it was The Dukes of Hazzard, but there were so many -- where they did the standard beat of a car driving off a cliff, and the car blew up in midair well before hitting the ground. I always figured the charge went off early and they didn't have the budget to reshoot it, so they just used the footage they had. It didn't make any sense, but then, that made it only slightly more nonsensical than the usual explosion-on-impact cliche.
It's been my experience that the people that find superheroes to be manipulative douchebags set out to do so. Approach the concept with an open mind, and you'll be much happier.
The Power Rangers approach to secret identities makes no sense, since the villains always know the heroes' identities anyway, so it's not like it makes them any safer.
In Denzi Sentai Megaranger, which was the basis of Power Rangers in Space and seemed to be something of a response to Power Rangers (since its characters were high schoolers), the Megarangers actually kept their identities secret from the villains for most of the season, and as soon as the villains discovered their identities in the climactic arc, their homes were attacked, their families were put in danger, they were expelled from school for fear that it would be attacked, and they had to go into hiding. It was intense.
But do they? As I said:
And even in the cases of those with superhero identities, fans didn't seem to have issue with the one or two civilians who did know the secret, like Tom Kamalku with Hal Jordan or Pete Ross/Lana Lang (pre-Crisis for the former, post-crisis for the latter) with Superman.
Well, isn't the old Claremont X-Men set-up kind of like that, too? They had weird quasi-secret identities. Most of them didn't wear masks, they were all perfectly fine calling each other by their real names or changing into costume in public, and they didn't really care when the villains knew who they were. But at the same time, the general public thought Xavier's school was just a regular school.
(And, backing up my earlier point, the people who insist that not having secret identities makes no plausible sense have not, traditionally, had issues with the X-Men set-up.)
Thinking about it, it also mirrors the set-up in a lot of urban fantasy, where all those who do have the true knowledge of the way the world works (including most of the antagonists) know the hero's deal, but the general public doesn't...
But they were hiding being mutants. Most Power Ranger teams have less need to hide anything from the general public -- although I guess the high school teams need to keep it from their parents and teachers (which raises questions about Zordon, Tommy Oliver, and Gosei being willing to recruit underage soldiers). And Time Force had to hide being from the future. (That was pretty much the only PR series that used the fairly common Super Sentai trope of most or all of a Ranger team being of exotic origin -- aliens, time travelers, an isolated ancient tribe, parallel-Earth inhabitants, angels, etc.)
The handling of secret identities in the original Kamen Rider was a lot more ridiculous, though. The Riders' true identities were always known to the evil organizations they fought, yet they kept their identities secret from their allies in the fight against the evil organizations, even though they participated actively in the fight in both their civilian and Rider identities, so there was no reason to hide it. I mean, keeping it from civilians is one thing, but keeping it from your own partners in the fight seems counterproductive as well as pointless. Ultraman does this too -- both the Ultramen I've seen are members of monster-fighting military organizations, which makes it seem like dereliction of duty to hide their Ultraman powers from their superior officers, and pointless given that aliens are routinely aware of their powers. It's not even clear why they feel the need to hide, although episode 2 of Ultraman Dyna seemed to indicate that the transformation device wouldn't activate if there were witnesses, or at least if the bearer was trying to show off his powers rather than use them selflessly (it wasn't made clear which).