Hubris, the New AV

My main character could do that easily. Of course, when everyone is super....

More seriously, it would be a pretty bad idea. Magnifying the pettiness and short-sightedness of the average person would not end well.

Exactly. The thing is, I don't actually consider that a bad thing. More importantly, it's only correct if you feel that it's important that some people be relatively more whatever than others. I look at a boost for everyone as a boost for everyone. Just because no one is now exceptional, does not mean that no one has benefitted. The phrase your'e quoting sees power as money: when everyone has more money, the value of money decreases. I'm looking at power as a tangible good: when everyone has more goods, everyone is more wealthy in a real objective sense. If I had twice the money I have now, and so did everyone else, I wouldn't be richer than I am now - but if I were twice as strong, twice as healthy, lived twice as long, and so did everyone else, I would still have a better life than I do now (though I might not be aware of it at all times - it's easy to take things like not dying of smallpox for granted).

Magnifying the pettiness and shortsightedness of only those people who are lucky or ambitious enough to receive that magnification is not any better. In the world I see around me, power falls into some hands by chance and into others by ambition, and I find myself desiring a more equitable world, in no small part because there exist people who in every practical sense can kill me and get away with it. Why should the presence of superpowers change that reasoning? Already, there exist people on this world, the world we live in, who can order the destruction of humanity. They have the means, and in theory they have the authority, and indeed the mandate to do so under certain circumstances. If your premise is that no human being can be trusted with that much power, then we are already doomed.

Then again, perhaps the practical short-term solution for the City of Heroes world is to reverse-engineer, mass-manufacture, and universally distribute Nullifier Rifles. Those things work *great*.

(I'll have to run a test in AE sometime to see how many Sappers it takes to bring Statesman to heel.)

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I've dabbled in pro-Arachnos propaganda before, and it's not all that hard for me to do, and I'll tell you why; it's also why I actually find Emperor Marcus "Tyrant" Cole to be a sympathetic figure and why I'm so bitterly disappointed that the Loyalist Path of Responsibility bluntly terminates at level 20. Arachnos, and the Praetorians, are both struggling something that would have to be done, HAVE to be done, in a world that's had supers in it for two whole generations, going on a third: integrating supers into the political system.

The City of Heroes canon suffers from what TV Tropes calls "Reed Richards is Useless." (And this time I mean the word "suffers" literally, as in it's a major and painful constraint on the canon.) In order to make the game world recognizable, in order to minimize the amount of explanation needed before new subscribers can jump into the game and understand what's going on around them, the back story for CoH has to assume that even though there have always been supers, and even though supers have been ubiquitous since the 1930s, the world isn't significantly different from the one that the players live in: WWII and Korea and Vietnam and the Gulf War still happened, the economy went through the same boom and bust cycles, the tech that non-supers use still looks mostly the same.

The way they did that in the CoH canon makes story-telling sense if you accept that constraint, but if you think about it too much, it's monstrous. Trading on his prestige as the man who saved America from Nemesis on Brass Monday, Marcus "Statesman" Cole struck a bargain that, frankly, would have ruined America permanently: in exchange for staying out of politics and messing with ordinary peoples' lives as little as possible, in exchange for spending all of their super-powers only on fighting super villains, super heroes are above an awful lot of the law. Thank Prime for the Morality Missions system, it's finally acknowledging some of the ways in which that would go horrifically wrong.

What Arachnos did looks awful, and in places, it is awful, but it's a lot more long-term viable than what Statesman did to the rest of America. Lord Recluse, in the name of Social Darwinism, has told the supers of the break-away nation of the Etoile Islands that they can seize as much power as they are capable of seizing, defending, and governing -- but that if they do, they're responsible, before him and before the time-traveling all powerful Arbiter Corps and the future-seeing mind-reading Fortunata Corps, for actually keeping it governed. (I've been waiting for a while for this to affect the game world; by now, Kirk Cage should be in HUGE trouble with the Arbiters for his failure to end the Scrapyarder strike and deal with the Ghost of Scrapyard.) At its best, it produces startling prosperity and progress, like in Aeon City and New Haven, because it creates conditions for stable (and born to be 'shipped) triangles like Aeon/Brass/Vines: radical Aeon providing the super powers that keep pushing things forward, conservative Brass being there to keep Aeon from destroying the planet, Vines to serve as the non-super nagging conscience for them both. It's a more stable, more likely to be successful governing structure than the entirely vestigial, entirely pointless, effectively invisible civilian government of "Primal America." (So pointless, so vestigial, that after seven years they still haven't even bothered giving us canonical names for the fictional mayor of Paragon City, governor of Rhode Island, and president of the US.)

And Emperor Cole? Cole is the perfect metaphor for something that's horribly dysfunctional about modern politics in the real world: the awfulness that happens when you hold someone responsible for things that they cannot possibly achieve. After the Hamidon War, a terrified and grateful public begged Marcus "Tyrant" Cole to rebuild society for them in such a way that there will never be another world-threatening super-villain like Praetorian Hamidon ever again. And even if Primal Earth didn't exist, he cannot possibly deliver that. Now that Primal Earth is attacking his homeworld, he's got to be shaking in his shoes; because Primal Earth never had a Hamidon War, even given the lesser devastation of the First Rikti War, its super population (and its conventional military, for that matter) is probably every bit of 100 times what the surviving super population of Praetorian Earth is, maybe more. And one guy has been told, "do whatever you have to, just keep us safe!" Any guy put in that position is going to do just that: whatever he thinks he has to do. And if that guy was an art thief, tomb robber, and amateur classics scholar, who has only even thought about how to govern the world for a few years, who never even thought about politics and government and political science before that? Most of the things he thinks to try will be bad ideas.

Marcus "Tyrant" Cole is something far scarier than an all-powerful vengeful god-emperor. He's an all-powerful vengeful god who's an amateur emperor. Given that? I think he's actually doing remarkably well.