We don’t need another superhero

Before I get to what I have been working on most recently, I want to address these two characters that keep showing up on the periphery.

One is a psychic who keeps getting paired with a disbelieving cop. The question is whether she is someone with real abilities who worked for a fake hotline and got mixed up in some stuff where she requires the cop’s protection, or whether we are in a world where lots of people are developing these abilities, and she is also a cop, and the skeptic is her partner. Either way, you end up with a dynamic of faith versus cynicism in an atmosphere of danger. It comes from a dynamic I had with someone who did not appreciate my intuition.

The other is the idea of someone who always knows when someone is lying because she never lies. They actually had something similar to this with Emma on Once Upon a Time, though she ended up being lied to and not knowing. In that case, her power seems to have been tied to her lack of attachment to anyone, so as she got attached, she lost it.

In my case, one scenario did involve having to tell a lie to save someone else, and then a realization that the power was gone, and the huge sense of imbalance in its absence, because all of the confidence that came with that is suddenly gone. I know some of that comes from an old Vietnam War movie where some nuns were hiding some soldiers and being tortured. (I can’t believe some of the things I saw on non-cable prime time television when I was a kid.)

That one probably would have been a short story, but there were two other times she showed up.

In one, she was a hospital administrator whose work brought her in contact with a wealthy philanthropist/superhero (he was kind of a cross between the Phantom and the Flash), where she did know he had a secret, but not what. Later on she was in an explosion where she was presumed dead, and she came out kidnapped and with amnesia, but she knew she was being lied to, and also her powers were becoming something more. That would have been a graphic novel and it came from a dream I had.

The other time, she was a lab tech who was crossing paths with a vampire who was doing some detective work. Again, she knew he had a secret, just not what. When she eventually found out, she was fine with it. When he turned her into a vampire herself to save her life, that was a more difficult adjustment. This would be more of a television series, possibly a spin-off of a movie trilogy.

Ignoring for the time the question of whether I am going to get back to any of these ideas and develop them, or which ones are more likely (perfectly valid question—I just don’t know the answer), my first thought was why do I keep punishing these truth-knowing girls? Did I think they were boring on their own, so needed some kind of transformation?

Well, I don’t think that’s it. On some level, I have moved away from superpowers. When we get to the next post there are some superpowers, kind of, and that’s cool, but it is also very much tongue in cheek and not to be taken seriously. Maybe we are just too post-modern and jaded, or maybe we can do too many things with technology to need sons of Krypton, but I’m just not finding them too compelling. (Despite that, I have recently seen The Dark Knight Rises and The Amazing Spider-Man and I enjoyed them both.)

Okay, but there are special powers here, with the extra-sensory perception. Yes, there are, but they are kind of ones I believe in. Between intuition and inspiration and empathy and psychology, I guess I can always believe in knowing more and understanding more, and maybe in the knowledge not even being that far out of reach.

In addition to that, I guess I still believe that knowledge is the most likely catalyst to transformation. Of course the ones who know the truth are going to change. Information can be dangerous and powerful and enlightening and many other things. Maybe a lot of what I seek out is merely entertaining, but maybe it isn’t so mere. The paths are often unexpected.

Therefore, Jane pores over library books trying to learn as much as she can, and for a while she can see two days into the future. Maybe she’s the natural culmination of everything I’ve been working towards. But before we get to her, we still need to deal with the Genius.