Superheroes and Keeping the Status Quo

Renegade Studios is releasing the Cobra supplement to their GI Joe setting, and the Cobra pitch is ... pretty spot on. It points out society is corrupt, the lazy and greedy hoard all the wealth, while the working class effectively slaves under them. And Cobra wants to change things! The thing I enjoy doing when I run games is have the villains be perfectly honest about things - it makes them sound reasonable, and makes the hero's job harder.

But this means GI Joe isn't 'fighting for what's right', they're fighting to keep the status quo - they aren't effecting positive change. At the end of the day, the world is as it was, with little changed.

And this is a problem with most super heroes - they're pushing to keep the status quo against anyone who would change it.

There's this fascinating little story I saw on Tumblr, showing what happens when you have a superhero who tries to enact positive change.

That story doesn't miss the mark, either. Imagine a superhero that fights corruption in the government, or tries to restore the environment when developers are trying to tear down forested areas.

I had a pair of supervillains in one game, their powers would normally be seen as a net 'positive' except how it disturbs society. One had plants grow and propagate at an almost visible rate for kilometres around. You cut down an acre? The next day that acre's grown back - and claimed an extra metre or two of land on top of it.

The other had animals come back from the dead. Think of all the animals that have died in the last, say, two thousand years. Now imagine them pulling themselves from the ground where they'd died, coming back to life.  Just a few at a time - a dozen here, a dozen there every few days. You shoot a deer, it falls over, then picks itself back up. A wolf cull, but the wolves simply won't die - and there's more of them every week. Extinct species come back, great, but society isn't set up to handle populations that existed as if humanity had never cleared them out.

So the PCs tried to deal with this - and the end result was kind of 'you know, these two aren't wrong...' - but the push by those in power is to keep power, and that means keeping the status quo until something better for them comes along.

And I wondered - how would a superhero enact positive change in society? How would they make the world a better place in ways that mattered in the long run? Sure, saving a kid from being hit by a car is a good thing - keep doing that - but how do you clear out political corruption, or urban sprawl, or pollution, or ... ?

Firestorm the Nuclear Man sort-of addressed this once. Firestorm changed, became in essence a fire elemental of sorts. And he went into a region that was suffering from famine and effectively terraformed the region - food for everyone, lush vegetation to prevent erosion, and redirected water to help the villages there.

And the warlords were like 'nuh uh, we're taking all that, and what we can't take we're burning to the ground'. Because it forced a change on society that wasn't a direct benefit for them.

So what's the answer? How do you get the superheroes to do good, while enacting positive change on society, without being painted the villains?

What if, at times, the villains are actually right? And what if the only way change can get done is by being a villain?

Food for thought.