Eccentric Flower:200907/Why Mutants Dont Help

Every so often someone notices that almost every story of this-world-plus-metahumans tends to ignore their socioeconomic possibilities:

(In addition to that link, see also Reed Richards is Useless.)

I have for some years been mentally constructing a set of stories in my head where an organization on Earth trains and nurtures - and eventually, learns how to create - metahuman abilities. Although they do use this ability for economic gain and world improvement, they tend to be required to do it in a really subtle, secretive way, simply because the bias in the rest of the people against metahumans is so strong. (Marvel has tapped this vein in many of its mutant stories; it's hardly a new idea.) The public will accept the "rising tide" benefits of the organization's works, but only if they can remain nominally unaware that it was metahumans who did them.

This fits what I believe about human nature. I believe that if you can do something most people can't, or you can do something better than most people can, you will not be hailed as a hero. We claim to love our achievers, but it is actually a lie. We hate them and envy them, and we are constantly looking for any cracks in the armor to tear them down - thus we have phenomena such as people trying to ruin Michael Phelps' life just because he hit the bong a few times, or the continued career of Perez Hilton (and his predecessors, such as Louella Parsons).

I'm never going to write these stories, and this is not a market-based decision; it's personal. I'm saving them for myself, as Captain Miller said. But I will tell you that there is a similar treatment - powers used for a slightly different and to me less believable purpose, but nonetheless sharing the same sort of mental territory, in Anne McCaffrey's Talent universe, particularly the five books beginning with The Rowan and ending with The Tower and the Hive.

When I first read The Rowan I thought it was a pretty simplistic treatment of the ideas I wanted to see stressed, but I realized later that McCaffrey was just building toward things. By the time we get to the point where Talents have to coexist with non-Talents in the closed environment of a military spacecraft, the point becomes explicit: The Talents are forever working against a handicap; normal humans dislike, envy, and fear them. And even then, these difficulties are too easily overcome, because McCaffrey is basically of a sunny cheery disposition. There are no riots in McCaffrey's universe. There are no petitions to ban metahumans. There are no people boycotting goods which have been transported by Talents.

And even if there were, it would to me still miss the most important point, a point which no one in the top article linked above has seen, a point which McCaffrey won't go near, but which my stories, were I to write them, could not avoid.

The fundamental weirdness is not that metahumans don't use their skills to improve the world and advance commerce; the fundamental weirdness, the flawed assumption, is that metahumans would want to play in the rule set of the "normal human" universe at all.

Seriously. Give it some thought. Let's say I grow up a metahuman, and let's say I find an environment where my friends are metahuman, my mentors are metahuman - an enclave where we have a chance to realize just how messed up the human world is. Never mind why we don't help with your petty fights and your inefficiencies, such as your perpetual inability to do something as simple as getting surplus food capacity efficiently distributed around the globe - why should we help at all? Why should we care? Why should we solve your mistakes?

If I grow up a metahuman, I grow up realizing that I am the next evolution - that I am the next attempt at a solution to a problem humans failed to solve, that I am the next set of bug fixes to the design. I am probably not perfect but I'm a hell of a lot closer to it than the normal humans are. And if I am among a critical mass of people like me (as is the case in my theoretical stories, the X-Men comics, and McCaffrey's Talent universe), I will come to feel that we metahumans, as a group, have two choices:

1. Take over the world so we can sweep it clean of all the previous mistakes and try to start over better, or

2. Work as fast as we can on getting the hell off the planet so we can start fresh somewhere else, and leave you to stew in your juices.

And the latter, in that universe, will seem like far less work. If we have a Reed Richards or a Charles Xavier on our side, he can figure out how to terraform Mars and build a ship big enough to get us all there on his coffee break.

The only character in any story about metahumans I have ever seen whom I felt was accurately depicted, on this topic, is Jon Osterman in Watchmen. Dr. Manhattan has, effectively, become a god. The fallacy that everyone else has toward him is they expect him to care one way or another on what happens to life on this planet. They never ask why on earth he would. At one point he leaves; only a few remaining loose ends bring him back. When those are squared away, it is clear he will never be back again. He will start over somewhere else.

It is utter hubris to expect the new gods to be concerned with the sewage of mankind.

Of course, as a writer, the problem is that all the best stories deal with the friction between the metahumans and the normals; once the metahumans take their marbles and go play somewhere else, the stories become less interesting. (Although there is a rich vein to be tapped in stories of bringing up metahuman children. Can you imagine the problems of raising a telepathic infant? Or the playground interactions between telepathic and telekinetic children who haven't quite learned the rigid control of their tempers they will need yet?)

Anyway, the point is, asking, "How come stories of metahumans don't have them improving the world in concrete ways?" is asking the wrong question. The real question is, "How come stories of metahumans have them interacting with non-metahumans at all?" It is ridiculous to think of Magneto doing construction projects; for a man with his personality, conquest and subjugation is the only option that is believable, in that fictional framework.