A lot of them assuming you don’t get the required secondary powers.
Super speed, if your perceptions aren’t heightened it rapidly becomes impractical, if they are things are going to get painfully boring real quick. Even thinking at double speed means you are going to be waiting for the world to catch up a lot. Never mind what even relatively low G-forces can do to someone.
Super-hearing. Imagine if you really could hear conversations a block away, it can be hard enough discerning one conversation in a crowded room, imagine it being like that everywhere. All the rats and insects you will be hearing, the sound of people’s clothes rubbing together. Even if normally loud things aren’t deafening just focusing on one thing will be taxing.
If you don’t get secondary powers then super strength is going to suck. The human body is already capable of injuring itself with its own strength. How many fastball pitchers get arm or shoulder injuries just from throwing something really fast, or power-lifters who have something break or burst. Modern sporting records are starting to push up against the structural limits of the human body.
Super-hearing. Imagine if you really could hear conversations a block away, it can be hard enough discerning one conversation in a crowded room, imagine it being like that everywhere. All the rats and insects you will be hearing, the sound of people’s clothes rubbing together. Even if normally loud things aren’t deafening just focusing on one thing will be taxing.
Super hearing would essentially be tinnitus with some variety in the inescapable noise.
Duuude what if tinnitus is the superpower trying to happen? 🤯
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Super speed would come with similar issues as super strength. You would get less than a block, and you’d just be a skeleton.
Not to mention, the concept of saving someone from being hit by a car, likely results in 1 or (more likely) both of you being turned into paste from the impact.
Superpowers really only work in comics and movies, in real life there’s just too many variables.
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Honestly the best super power IMO is the ability to open gateways in time and space
Seeing as the earth is constantly moving at 1600 km/h I feel like it would be incredibly difficult to actually open a portal on earth in the past or future
Seeing as position is relative, why not?
Super strength is something I could see being problematic.
The movies always show the super strong hero picking up buses or trains with one hand, but in reality you have to lift such vehicles in specific places, or they will be damaged. Youtube is full of videos depicting cars falling from mechanic’s lifts due to improper lift point placement, or just old fasioned rust. Imagine Mr. Incredible going to pick up a bus in a state where the roads are salted, and just breaking off a handful of the frame.
This is the kind of gritty reality I’d like to see in a movie. Stuff is constantly breaking when the hero tries to pick it up, he has to go through a montage of classes on structure and how to choose the best place to grab onto things.
Also leverage. Unless the super strength comes with stability, lifing a boulder from the edge would just make the hero’s feet slip out from under them. He has to lift one side straight up until he can fit underneath to balance the thing. Then he has to hope that the ground below can withstand all the weight of the boulder pressing on the soles of his feet.
Also super strong guy has to grow morbidly obese in order to gain a slight mechanical advantage over whatever he’s trying to move
Haha, yeah!
I’d just depict it as super strong guy ripping panels off of vehicles or tearing wheels and shit off.
Also, even if you were that strong, the calories you’d have to eat to pick up that shit and put out that much force would be insane. The Hulk would have to eat wheelbarrows of food after throwing cars around
Could be “scientifically” countered by nuclear fusion/fission of the atoms in the food eaten.
I have wondered before how many cheeseburgers Cyclops would have to eat to power his laser eyes.
I never thought about that but you’re correct. You can mess up your car really bad if you put the carjack anywhere else than the strong parts of the frame.
Haha I’ve thought of that. Maybe they can add that to a Deadpool movie or something with a super strong character ripping up a car finding the lift points.
Yup. Same with ‘slowing things down’ too quickly - sure you might save the bus but the strawberry jam inside isn’t going to appreciate it.
Like when Ironman falls out of the sky and slams into the ground. He’s always just fine.
There was a TV show about a guy with super senses -hearing, smell, touch, vision. I grew up with brothers, learned to breathe defensively to not smell things, and remember thinking there is no way I would survive having a supernaturally sensitive sense of smell. There are just more bad smells than good in an average day.
I think also that hearing people’s thoughts would drive anyone crazy.
What I would like to have is super jumping and landing, sort of like flying but just bouncing.
I mean, my dog thinks garbage and shit are the greatest smells possible and he’s the most trustworthy person I know, so I have to assume it all circles back on itself somehow.
The Sentinel. I watched that back in the 90s.
That is it! I remember thinking what an awful boyfriend he would be. Like, it would just be so uncomfortable to think he was always thinking you stink because everything was dialed up to 2000%. Never wanting him to go down on you because any taste/smell would be so magnified. Perfumes would hurt him too. And he’d probably want you so quiet as well.
I never thought of that but yikes.
If I remember the show correctly, after the first few episodes he could mostly control when the enhanced senses were in use.
I mean, dogs somehow manage
Imagine
How
Slowly
It
Seems
Like
Everyone
Is
Talking
To
The
Flash.
Can you imagine what it’s like when they ask him to search the entire city for a bomb? To him he’s spending months or even years just walking around looking in every room, every trash can, under every car, etc.
Laser eyes/heat vision where you can’t see where to shoot.
Unless you get magic oakleys, a là Scott Summers.
Super speed. Either you would need to also think and react at super speeds, which mean the world would be agonizingly slow, or you would have normal speed reaction in which case you would crash and die.
There is also the option of super reaction time on demand, but in any case non of this matters as super speed would make the air as “thick” as a concrete wall so you would also need to me super strong and super durable.
This might not be a problem, since you could regulate how fast you run, in which case you could run as fast as a car which wouldn’t necessarily require other super stats
Also friction
Unless your power is to control fire, the power to create fire or engulf yourself in fire would be mostly useless. Finding or making fireproof (not fire resistant) clothing would be a pain and uncomfortable to wear all the time. Plus, a lot of things are flammable, so unless you plan to be a super villain you’re more of a menace shooting flames everywhere than you are a hero.
Shape-shifting would almost certainly be agonizingly painful.
Not sure why it has to be. Being a superpower, it already defies logic. Why is it necessarily painful? I don’t see why the brain can’t temporarily shut off pain receptors if it’s already doing something fantastical.
I’m reminded of the Animorphs books, where they describe the process as grotesque and the odd sensations they feel.
The Animorphs series explores this quite well. It’s not actually painful for them, but should be and is plenty disturbing.
Only the first time. Then just leave out the nervous system going forward?
x ray vision, pretty sure you need to expose things to x rays to see skeletons. You gonna walk around irradiating people with an x ray source?
Eh I don’t think this is meant to say it’s actually x-rays. Wouldn’t that require a receiving end on the other side of the person?
Sort of. You don’t really see things on x-rays, you see shadows created by denser material.
Projecting X-rays at your target wouldn’t be very useful, as they are usually absorbed rather than reflected back (I think). You’d be able to see if somehow the subject got between you and a significant source of x-rays
It would be good if you’re a super villain
Black hole manufacturing.
Super speed. That doesn’t necessarily mean you have super reaction time.
And doesn’t grant you invulnerability. Any small bump at a high speed will hurt like hell.
Or your like the Red Rush and experience EVERYTHING in super speed. Normal conversations will take weeks from your perspective
I think in that case I’d just ask them to write it down and I’ll come read it and write a response when they’re done, then could go do something else in that time- I guess it’s like my life now… text me or what you said doesn’t exist… 😆😩
when I visit relatives in the south it seems like this sometimes.
Superman’s powers would be totally impractical in real life. I mean, destroying any building you’re in with a fart you didn’t catch in time doesn’t sound very practical to me…
And if you clamp those steel cheeks you create the paradox between an immovable object vs an unstoppable force. Turns out super humans also get the super shits.
Larry Niven covered this in 1974’s, “Man of Steel, Woman of Kleenex” which discusses the impracticality of Superman/Clark Kent having sex.
The problem is this. Electroencephalograms taken of men and women during sexual intercourse show that orgasm resembles “a kind of pleasurable epileptic attack.” One loses control over one’s muscles.
Superman has been known to leave his fingerprints in steel and in hardened concrete, accidentally. What would he do to the woman in his arms during what amounts to an epileptic fit?
Consider the driving urge between a man and a woman, the monomaniacal urge to achieve greater and greater penetration. Remember also that we are dealing with kryptonian muscles.
Superman would literally crush LL’s body in his arms, while simultaneously ripping her open from crotch to sternum, gutting her like a trout.
The more you think about the “super” genre the dumber it gets. And that’s quite apart from it’s gross political subtexts…
Super speed. You’d have to slow down or die of heatstroke from air friction.
Invisibility, imagine trying to get a license
Who needs a license when you’re invisible?
So are you just walking everywhere?
They can’t see me, they can’t stop me.
