I mean aside from there are not actually super speedsters or flying tanks or people with the proportional strength of ants or spiders, there’s one thing that’s totally unrealistic. I’m 64 years old, and aside from the three times I was hit with trucks, I have never been in a situation where a super power would have been useful. I’ve never foiled a robbery, or any other kind of crime. I mean I’ve been a victim of crime, but it never happened directly to me. Crimes always happened while I was somewhere else, never directly in front of me. Closest I’ve been to a crime was when an armed robber came into my store and bought a pack of Pall Malls and left, with police spotting him on store surveillance tapes the next day.
Seriously, an armed robber who was later convicted of murdering a store clerk like me, changed his mind about murdering and left my store after he saw me.
But in comic books and cartoons and big-budget movies, the heroes are constantly catching low-level street crooks between titanic battles against other supers. Batman does it all the time. Superman, not so much but there are constant bank robberies to be thwarted, and even Squirrel Girl talked a few bank robbers into giving themselves up. The number of bank robberies I’ve seen not on TV or in a comic? Zilch. Number of other street-level crimes I’ve seen IRL? Zilch. Number of babies I’ve delivered that weren’t mine? Zilch. I’m not saying it doesn’t happen, it’s just that the odds of it happening repeatedly to one person are so minute as to be Powerball unlikely.
And that’s all I have to say today.
Witch on a Bicycle 