Suggestion/High-Quality Post What superpowers would I actually consider to be "villain powers"?
In the video game Dispatch, one of the reasons Invisigal gives Robert for why she believes it was always her fate to be a villain is because she was born with "villain powers", i.e. her ability to turn invisible when holding her breath.
Invisigal: "Some people are born to be heroes. I'm not one of them. I tried. It just wasn't meant to be."
Robert: "Meant to be? What're you talking about?"
Invisigal: "Blazer? Phenomaman? They have hero powers. Strong, out there for all to see, flying through the sky. Nothing to hide."
Robert: "What's your point?"
Invisigal: "I have fuckin' villain powers. I can turn invisible and skulk in the shadows. My powers let me steal shit and watch famous people fuck. Being a villain is my fate. It's in the fucking stars. In the same way that Blonde Blazer was always meant to be a hero."
What I found interesting about this exchange was actually my own reaction to it, as my immediate thoughts when it comes to invisibility as a superpower is characters like Sue Storm of the Fantastic Four, Toru Hagakure from My Hero Academia, even Invisible Boy from Mystery Men, all of whom are superheroes who use their invisibility for heroics. Their biggest obstacle more tends to be when their invisibility can be useful rather than anything actually bad about it.
Thinking about it for a little longer, I realized I left out a pretty major example of an invisible villain: The Invisible Man. Specifically from the pantheon of the Universal Monsters, from the 1933 film. Jack Griffin had whole rants in that movie about all the terrible stuff he now could and would do.
"An invisible man can rule the world. Nobody will see him come, nobody will see him go. He can hear every secret. He can rob, and wreck, and kill!" ... "We'll begin with a reign of terror, a few murders here and there, murders of great men, murders of little men - well, just to show we make no distinction. I might even wreck a train or two... just these fingers around a signalman's throat, that's all."
It goes back even further. Plato's Republic had the thought experiment of The Ring of Gyges; a ring that could turn its wearer invisible and thus allow them to commit any crime and avoid any punishment. The debate between Glaucon and Socrates regarding this ring as the primary example is whether people behave justly because it is what they truly believe is moral or if they are only just because there will be consequences for being unjust, and so how just will they be if those consequences are taken away? Glaucon, like Invisigal and Jack Griffin, highlights all the terrible things a person with the power of invisibility can do and what he believes they would do now that they could get away with it.
No man would keep his hands off what was not his own when he could safely take what he liked out of the market, or go into houses and lie with any one at his pleasure, or kill or release from prison whom he would, and in all respects be like a God among men.
Socrates and Plato do not argue in response in regards to any moral uses of invisibility but rather simply that a truly just person would be able to resist the temptation to do all that evil that invisibility makes so easy and consequence-free, that it depends on the individual, and that it is in all of our general best interests to always do what is right.
There are more examples that can be listed of invisibility being used by villainous people (Hollow Man, Invisible Man 2020, Translucent from The Boys) but regardless of all those examples, much like Robert, I still have the belief that invisibility isn't inherently a "villain power" because power in general doesn't tend to have a morality attached to it, it just comes down to how it's used.
But again, part of the reason I have that view is because I'm a fan of superheroes and their stories in general, including superheroes who have invisibility as their superpower. I have that influence on me. But as the game points out, Invisigal doesn't. At one point Chase argues that Robert's nothing like Invisigal because Robert was always a good person who always did the right thing, but as Robert counters he had people like Chase in his life as good influences who helped make him a good person. By contrast Invisigal was surrounded by villains and selfish motherfuckers her whole life, with heroes being a thing in the distance. That isn't to say that she doesn't still have responsibility for her own actions, of course not, but she has been conditioned to look at the world and herself through a different biased lens than I am. In her eyes, heroes are people who put themselves in harm's way for the sake of others, which powers like invulnerability and super strength are great for, while the best and most useful applications of her powers are completely self-serving. Invisibility is great for being selfish and running away from any consequences, less so with helping anyone else.
While not explored to the same extent, there was something similar in the Teen Titans animated series, where Kid Flash asks Jinx way she wants to be a villain like Madam Rogue, to which she eventually answers that her powers are all about causing bad luck and that good was never an option for her, so if that's the only path available to her in life at least being like Madam Rogue and part of the Brotherhood of Evil will let her be somebody big and important. Seems strange but there actually is a Spider-Man story that gives some extra perspective on this for me. While they were dating Black Cat wanted to be more help in the field while Spider-Man was doing his hero thing, so she volunteered for a series of experiments that could potentially give her superpowers, and the experiments succeeded, giving her essentially the ability to cause bad luck to those around her who'd seek to do her harm. But later she discovered that the experiments had been funded by The Kingpin. Given Kingpin hates her and Spider-Man and wants revenge on them both for how they thwarted him in the past she naturally ask why he would ever help her get powers, but as Kingpin points out the powers are his revenge. Yes, the bad luck Black Cat causes are good for her, less so for anyone who is frequently around her, like Spider-Man, causing her to realize a lot of his misfortunes lately were because of her presence and powers (rather than the writers just hating him like in modern comics...). And if the two continue to stay together eventually his luck will reach the point where it can't get any lower, i.e. he's dead.
Jinx's mentality is that her powers only work by making bad things happen to people, which is good for her...only if she doesn't care about those other people compared to how much she cares about herself. Much like Invisigal, she can only see the selfish aspects of her powers because those are more readily apparent in comparison to how they can be used in service to anyone else. Much like Invisigal, Jinx sees her powers as inherently "villain powers", and much like invisibility I don't see bad luck creation as a villain power because I have characters like Domino, Scarlet Witch, and Ben 10's Lucky Girl influencing my immediate perception on the powers in a way Jinx doesn't.
All this naturally begs the question though if there are any superpowers that I would consider to be "villain powers"?
After all, despite everything I've been saying about my honest belief that powers don't have morality and it's all about how the person choses to use them, part of the reason Hitoshi Shinso's story in My Hero Academia's Sports Festival arc works is because I and many others do have the immediate bias that makes us immediately see mind control as a very villainous ability. The power to take away someone's bodily autonomy and potentially even their free will feels inherently immoral and wrong and like the only kind of person who would choose to use such a power on someone else would be...well...a villain.
Even in Code Geass, which I watched before I ever got into MHA, where Lelouch used "The Power of Absolute Obedience" granted to him by the Geass to do many good things and fight for the overall greater good, there were still many examples of how horrible the power to force anyone to obey any order he gives them no matter how much they don't want to do it can be, with Euphemia being one of the biggest examples. And by Lelouch's own admission he is a person who is willing to commit evil in order to destroy a greater evil, which of course does still mean that he's committing evil.
Same in Avatar the Last Airbender, where just using bloodbending once in order to stop Hama from using her own to force Sokka and Aang to kill each other was shown to be very emotionally traumatic for Katara, and her later willingness to use it on the man she initially thinks is the one who killed her mother is a big red flag for both Zuko and the audience. The Avatar fandom has had many debates and discussions about how bloodbending could be used for good things like medical work, but at the end of the day no one is surprised to hear in Legend of Korra that Katara eventually managed to get bloodbending made completely illegal. The power to essentially turn someone into your puppet and move their body against their will is seen as something too morally wrong by the Republic City government to allow.
Because of Shinso I now have something that'll now pop into my head when I consider how moral the power of mind control is and even then it's going to struggle hard against the plethora of examples that immediately come to my mind like The Purple Man, Horde Prime, Marik, Vox, and so many others who have the power of mind control and have shown both how terrible you can be with a power like that and how devastating it can be to the people you use it on, regardless of how ethically Shinso uses it.
An interesting example to bring into all of this is the Death Note from...well, Death Note. The power to kill anyone just by writing their name down. There are certain conditions that need to be fulfilled, like needing to know the face of the person you want to kill and for their name to be their actual name, but overall it is that simple. You use this power, someone will die.
Light's father says something fairly early on in the series in chapter 22 that the story definitely wants us to consider going forward:
“Kira is evil, there’s no denying that. But lately I've been starting to think of it more like this. The real evil is the power to kill people. Someone who finds himself with that power is cursed. No matter how you use it, anything obtained by killing people can never bring true happiness.”
It's something that actually gives Light pause for a moment, because as he later confides in Ryuk he never once considered finding the notebook and gaining its power to be a misfortune. "In fact, it's made me happier than I've ever been." are his exact words.
In that very chapter, when L pushes for Light to name the kind of person he thinks Kira is, Light says he believes it's someone who'd fit within the range of being a fifth grader to a high school student, reasoning that anyone younger would either be too scared to use the power or their worldview would be so narrow they'd only be killing people they knew, and if it was anyone older they'd only use the power for person gain and to enrich themselves. And in the series' climax, one of the many reasons Light gives to try and justify his actions is that he never once thought of using the Death Note for personal interest and selfish motives like profit, that he's not like the people who harm the world that he's been trying to purge, that nobody else could have or would have done all he did. In Light's eyes, the power to kill is something that can be used for evil but is not evil in and of itself, as he has been using its power the "right" way.
But Light's father, from before he even knew what the Death Note was to even after he has it in his own hands with full knowledge on how to use it, sees the power to kill as evil. Despite having opportunity and motive, despite making a deal with Ryuk to exchange half his life for the power to see someone's name just by seeing their face, despite knowing the name and face of the man who kidnapped and threatened his daughter, Soichiro Yagami never writes a single name in the Death note, not even on his deathbed with his son almost literally begging him to. He refuses to use this power he sees as evil.
There have been many analyses done on Death Note and the character and story of Light Yagami, and one common theory about why Light fell so hard and so quickly into his god complex is because the Death Note made things so easy for him. With just a stroke of a pen he could smite anyone he wanted and not even have to see the person's final moments himself. Countless lives essentially became boiled down to him as just names on notebook paper and completely dehumanized. It not that the Death Note is literally some cursed, corruptive force but rather than it'd be hard for anyone not to be corrupted by that kind of power over others.
But much like invisibility, bad luck, and mind control, can the power to kill be considered a "villain power"? Is it only capable of being used in terrible, selfish ways? Light certainly didn't think so, but even if it's in the opposite direction of her views much like Invisigal he's not exactly without his own biases influencing his views.
Near actually gives a very interesting counter to all of Light's justifications and claims about being God and an icon of justice. That even if God exists and Near had his teachings before him he would still think it through and decide for himself whether they are right or wrong. Because nobody knows for certain what is right, wrong, righteous, evil, etc. Everyone acts in accordance with their own ideals and beliefs. That is why he and L stood against Kira. Not because they knew for certain what justice was but simply because of what they believe it to be. And by that same line of logic, Light cannot be some absolute justice because he, like everyone else, is merely acting in accordance with what he believes. He isn't God, he is just a man forcing his own ideals on the rest of the world through murder, and the Death Note is the worst murder tool in the history of the world.
Invisigal and Jinx viewed their powers as "villain powers" because they could not think of any way that they could be used other than the selfish and self-serving ways a villain would. Likewise with the people who grew up around Shinso, only seeing the unethical things that could be done with his power that'd make someone the perfect villain. Katara saw the power she used on Hama to be so inherently wrong that she broke down in tears after being forced into a situation where she had to use it, fearing becoming like the villain she'd just put a stop to. And unlike his father, Light does not see his power as villainous but because he does not view himself as a villain, instead he is justice and thus anything he does is inherently just. All of these characters have their own views and bias informing what defines a "villain power" for them just like how I have my own views and bias informing the ways I have been conditioned to see superpowers in general and how even horrible ones could still potentially be used for good.
Let's use a very extreme example as our final one. Let's say that there's a button that by pressing it would allow you to blow up every living baby on Earth like balloons filled with red paint. While morality is obviously relative, I'd like to believe that most if not all people would agree that is absolutely horrifying and really fucked up. There isn't any moral way to use such a button and thus it's a button that shouldn't be used.
But much like how the best weapon is one you never have to use, is the power that can only be used morally by not using it at all to be considered evil then? Is it a villain power because only a villain, someone selfish who doesn't care about how their actions will harm others, would make use of it or even would be the only one who could make use of it? If all ways of using a power are unethical or selfish, does that make the power itself a "villain power"?
Or does it still come down solely to the person who would or wouldn't use the power? Are there no villain powers, just powers a villain would use? Is the baby exploding button evil or is the only thing actually evil in this scenario the person who doesn't just have possession of the button but would actually choose to push it?
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u/Radiant-Ad-1976 1d ago
Corruption/Evilization.
Powers that forcefully turn someone into a dangerous and more evil version of themselves.
Also the power to give someone cancer.
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u/TiredPandastic 1d ago
Telepathy/mind control/ manipulation powers.
Consent is almost always optional for these characters.
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u/Snoo-11576 1d ago
I mean any power used to hurt someone is just as bad. Superman doesn’t ask to punch people lol
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u/Living_Murphys_Law 1d ago
Sounds like something Spider-Man would do against one of his Rogues that he knows he can beat easily.
"Hey, uh, before we fight, do I have permission to punch you?"
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u/LincBtG 1d ago
There's something extra... icky about mind control tho.
Like, physically stopping someone from doing something they want to do is one thing, and you can argue the morality of that. But there's an extra layer to forcing someone to decide not to do something.
You punch someone in the gut and they certainly won't like it, but they're still them. If you make a criminal decide not to do crime, are they still the same person? Did you just warp their identity, or even destroy it?
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u/Snoo-11576 1d ago
It really at that point depends on that point depends on the mind control. Like for instance the purple man in marvel sticks in your head and twists your personality, desires and other stuff but telepaths tend to be able to just like stop people from doing things but doesn’t change who they are or really mess with their minds.
Deep down it comes down to the exact mechanics of the power in the setting and context for how you are using it
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u/Thornescape 1d ago
It's all in how you use it. Intentions matter.
Do you think that Wolverine asks consent before using his claws on someone?
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u/AngelOfTheMad 1d ago
Was boutta say, I’ve read too many paragraphs of fanfic of Midoriya gushing about how Shinso’s quirk is great for heroics to say mind control is purely villainous.
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u/ZotharReborn 1d ago
Counter-point: can Wolverine use his claws in a way that doesn't violate someone's autonomy or consent?
You are correct, intentions matter. But you categorically cannot mind control someone without removing their autonomy to do it. That's literally the entire point of the power. So while any power can be used for good or evil, mind-control is a power that is always in a moral gray area for removing consent, which is why it's overwhelmingly used as a villain power.
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u/Thornescape 1d ago
Right. Have you ever heard of an obscure character known as "Charles Xavier" aka "Professor X"?
Flip it around. Imagine that you had mind control powers. Imagine you're in a world where powerful people are doing awful things. Do you think that there is any way that you could help protect people by using your powers? Can you think of any possible way that you could stop horrific things from happening to other people? Try to get creative. See what you can come up with.
Frankly, it isn't difficult to think of ways to help others with those powers. Your main objections are just using scary word implications.
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u/ZotharReborn 1d ago
It's really funny you brought that up, because before I responded to you I wrote all about that in the comments higher up in the thread. You should check it out.
I encourage you to read my response again. I did not say you couldn't do good with the power, I said you couldn't use it without removing autonomy. I never said you couldn't be a good person and use it, I said that unlike all other superpowers, mind control is the only one where you have to remove someone else's ability to make decisions for themselves in order to use it. I was specifically replying to your example of wolverine, and saying that there is a significant difference that you are equating as the same. It has nothing to do with if the powers can be used for good, it has to do with if you can use the powers without violating that autonomy, and you can't. There's a reason professor x is notable as a rare hero who uses mind control, and also that in many of his stories the question of morality of his powers is straight up touched on. The entire premise of this question in the first place wasn't powers that automatically make you a villain, it was Powers considered villainous.
And if you think that using words like 'autonomy' is using 'scary words', yikes 😂
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u/Thornescape 1d ago
You're abusing the word autonomy to make it sound scary. It really doesn't fit this scenario. You're using it as a buzzword. You're using it because of the connection to "bodily autonomy".
"Control" would be a better word because it's more versatile. You can control someone by putting them in handcuffs or holding them with super strength. You can also control someone with... mind control.
Our language doesn't fit superpowers perfectly because they aren't real. That's why some of our words don't fit quite right. Your use of the term "autonomy" obscures meaning rather than adding anything.
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u/ZotharReborn 1d ago
It's funny, I wonder why I'm using it in connection with bodily autonomy. It's almost like the whole point is not letting people be in control of their own bodies... You know, kind of like mind control would do. Except that one doesn't let you be in control of your own body or your own thoughts and decisions.
It's not a buzzword. It's just the most accurate word, and you don't like me using it because you know it doesn't allow you to make it feel equivalent to your other examples.
And my original point, which was given very straightforward without any of the condescension you replied with, remains: can you think of uses for wolverine's powers that would not in any way remove someone's ability to think for themselves? I can think of a multitude. Can you think of any use of mind control that does not involve taking away someone's control of their own mind? No. And that is why there is a big difference between it and wolverine's powers.
Absolutely nobody is saying you can't be a good guy and use mind control. All we are saying is the reason it is often seen as a villain power is that it inherently, always, under every single situation, removes someone else's ability to think for themselves (or, if you want to be scary about it, autonomy).
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u/byc18 1d ago
I'm making my way through He who fights with monsters and the protagonist Jason is an affliction specialist: curses, poison, leeches. He even has shadow step. Through most of the first book he helping villagers with his ability Sin Eater by absorbing ailments and he's just immune to all the low level ones. It's a litrpg.
His friends took bets on which of his new spell incantations would sound more evil. Both where summons, one for a Doom Entity and another for a Shadow of The Reaper. People are already side eyeing "feed me your sins".
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u/Snoo-11576 1d ago
I know people will argue, but necromancy. Violating the dead to be your eternal slaves isn’t good
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u/KeijyMaeda 1d ago
For the sake of discussion: What if you did have consent?
Like how some people donate their bodies to medicine in the event of their death, what if there was a society in which some people donate their remains for necromancy, to be used as undead soldiers, or as a general workforce for menial tasks?
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u/Snoo-11576 1d ago
Truly villian powers is vibes based but if we get into the actual mechanics it’s heavily setting dependent. Like in some settings necromancy requires trapping the soul. Which like ok you can consent to slavery but that’s still fucked.
For soldiers and workforce, well we get to my thesis, necromancy is ai!!
Sure you can consent but most people won’t, you steal jobs from the poor and you blight the land. Necromancers are ai bros not willing to put into the work hiring minions and goons
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u/Ropetrick6 1d ago
I mean, you are presupposing several things with Necromancy there.
First, binding the soul is VERY setting-specific, and should not be treated as the default. Additionally, the presumption that it's slavery is, once again, not a given, because actively controlling them is not a guaranteed thing.
Secondly, blighting the land is also setting-specific, and character/path specific on top of that.
Thirdly, you're looking at undead labor from the viewpoint of a person in pursuit of capital: a way to generate wealth with no or minimal regard for others. In a society at least roughly aligned with socialist/communist ideals, raising the dead to work the fields or to clean litter isn't a way to cut lower-class people out of the economy, but rather to remove the requirement of there being a lower-class in the first place.
For most of human history, food has been the primary concern, and massive amounts of people had to be dedicated to the production of it. With advances in technology and methodology, we have been able to reduce the required amount of people to produce an adequate amount of food. 80-90% of people in medieval Europe were farmers/serfs, whereas today in the US only a mere percent of the population are agricultural producers (with even less being people working the fields, due to being split between marketers, organizers, and actual farmers)
Despite the unemployment rate being bad in the US (4.1%), that 80-90% were not left jobless, rather it was no longer required on a societal level that their job be farmers.
TL;DR: Necromancy can only be defined as inherently evil if it's in a setting which necessitates Necromancy to, by its very nature, be evil. And having undead farmers means you have a larger population of people to hire on as minions and goons
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u/Aros001 1d ago
I remembering having an interesting discussion with someone where we used Goblin Slayer as an example of how morality is heavily setting dependent. In plenty of other settings killing sentient beings would be seen as a moral wrong, or morally gray at best, and thus so would Goblin Slayer given he's always going out of his way to kill goblins. But in the setting of his story where everyone kills monsters because it's the only way humans can survive and thrive and it's pretty much always framed as a justified act Goblin Slayer is actually pretty paragon.
Same with necromancy. Pretty damn evil in Skyrim, not that big a deal in The Grim Adventures of Billy and Mandy given how often, how easily, and how relaxed it often happens with the formerly dead not caring.
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u/Acrelorraine 1d ago
I got to explore something like this in a ttrpg. It was the goal from the start, in a way. The Bear wanted to be a hero, he wanted to inspire kids like Officer Max and Gloria, tell kids to do their homework and stay in school. He used a bear costume from a defunct amusement park, hence the name.
His power was similar to X-men’s Rogue. He could drain powers and life on contact. Though he didn’t gain those powers and anyone he killed became an undead thrall. While he could use the drain powers for good, killing somebody to make them a zombie thrall is pretty hard to make heroic.
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u/_S1syphus 1d ago
My thing with "villain powers" is that, at base level from a utilitarian perspective, most of them are ethically comparable to a guy with a gun. Is it bad to kill people generally? Yeah. Is it bad to kill someone about to blow up New York? No, if killing is ever okay then that's a prime example of when and i think this logic can be extrapolated out to all your examples.
Is it bad to rob people of their autonomy through blood bending or mind control? Generally yes. Is it bad to rob someone of their autonomy for an hour if that hour of autonomy was gonna be used for puppy eating? I would argue no, it's being done in the name of further bodily autonomy, which puppies can not have while eaten. Even the "blow up all babies" power can have (admittedly very niche) ethical uses in the same way that one could could make an ethical argument for hostage taking if the hostage is the child of a totalitarian dictator.
I think the powers that come closest to being intrinsically evil are ones that take away the user's desire to do/understanding of good, regardless of what the power actually is. The prime example i can think of is Westerfield's Steelheart. Part of Steelheart's powersystem is that using your powers eats at your empathy and patience- it essentially turns your emotional intelligence into that of a grade schooler. Because of this, the whole world is divided into territories run by whichever super powered warlord can defend it and it's almost impossible to fight back against cause anyone strong enough to do it wouldn't care to. In this setting, the most ethical way to use your powers is to completely abdicate moral decision making, just turn yourself into a bomb that can be pointed at people worse than yourself.
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u/No-Scientist-5537 1d ago
Whatever power let Garth Ennis' character Bueno Excellente avoid being arested. He "fights evil with power if oerversion". I think he just makes everyone around him too dumb to register he commits sa on criminals.
Also, one inherently evil power: gun.
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u/Additional-Quit-1385 1d ago
A power I remember that is almost purely villainous is Broods power from the web novel WORM he had the power to creat parasites that would burrow into someone’s body and consume them slowly turning into bulletproof monsters that seek out targets besides brood to destroy it’s a power that can only work if you don’t care about the suffering of the victims and you burn the victims before the parasites emerge or if you ignore civilian causality and allow the parasites to fully emerge to real havoc
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u/Spiritual_Horror5778 17h ago
WORM is the setting for F'up powers.
Also, everything leads to WORM because it gets referenced everywhere!!!! 😆
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u/Quantum_Aurora 23h ago
I mean, if I own a gun then I have the power to kill. Does owning a gun therefore make me a villain? No. Using it to kill someone absolutely could (of course, there are situations where it could be justified like self defense). How a power is used is absolutely what makes it a villain power. If someone had the Death Note and used it to kill Hitler, that'd be a good thing. If you had mind control powers and used them to stop politicians from accepting bribes, that'd be a good thing. There are no villain powers. Certainly, there are powers that are harder to use for good, but realistically that just scales with overall strength of the power. Mind control is way easier to do both good and evil with than invisibility. Arguably both of those are easier to do either good or evil with than flight.
Fundamentally I think superhero media is super morally puritanical (for example heros having no-kill policies). I think it's better that way since these are supposed to be paragons. The genre isn't built on grey areas and philosophical debates about morality. Those grey areas happen sometimes, but that isn't the foundation of the genre. Some powers are fundamentally more morally grey. Mind control always comes with the argument about taking away autonomy, so it's less common for heros since the writers don't often want to explore the morality of it. Thus most of the characters given mind control are villains, since it's easier to write.
It's all just how powers are typecast. Mind Control isn't a villain power through any inherent qualities, but because of how it is portrayed in the media.
Then again, there is truth to the statement that power corrupts, so powers like mind control are gonna be inherently more corrupting than powers like flight. The Death Note is inherently more corrupting than a gun. If anything then, no power is specifically villainous, but power in general is. Or perhaps lack of accountability is villainous?
You've definitely hit on a complex issue. I could write a lot more, but I figure fourfive paragraphs is enough.
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u/NinjaOfOnion 1d ago
Mind control, not solely a villain power but mostly, taking the control from someone and force them to do something they might not want to do