I Can't Stand to Fly

When you take the time to really think about it, superpowers would kind of suck.  Everyone has fantasies of stepping in front of a hail of gunfire and walking away unscathed, or flying like a bird, or, I don't know, firing hot beams of plasma death from their hands, eyes, mouth, or butt- but in the real world, the fantasy falls apart.

Understand that we have to establish a use context here - you can't be able to fly and then never fly, alright?  That's like having a 12-inch member and not doing porn:  you have a great power, and now you have a great responsibility.  We have to assume that since you have this power, you will at some point use it.  For the sake of simplicity, we'll assume you use it for good, though really almost all of the following applies if you use the power for evil.

Kari?

So here's the rules for evaluation:  You get ONE super power.  Just one.  This is much more Marvel and much less DC, but the both of them cheat.  Look at Wolverine:  He's got claws (a superpower that can be mimicked by holding a knife in each hand), AND an unbreakable adamantium skeleton AND a mutant healing factor that lets him regenerate wounds quickly.  Then you've got Spiderman, who can climb on walls AND is super-agile, and that's not even counting later BS stuff like "displays some slight invulnerability" which you'll read in expanded universe wiki's and other fanwank type stuff.  No, for purposes of this evaluation, you're like Cyclops:  dude shoots lasers from his eyes and he can't ever turn them off, which is pretty fucked up. 

Needless to say, if you're Superman, you're cheating.  You have all these amazing powers, and you're pretty much completely invulnerable.  That's awesome, so long as you're superman.  Every contributor to the Superman mythos has sort of had this safety net of being able to pin every potential fallacy or plot hole on Superman's invulnerability.  Dude cannot be hurt (little green rocks from space being the exception), and so dude can use his whole medley of superpowers without consequence or repercussion.

So let's look at three individual super powers on their own, and I'll tell you specifically why they would suck in real life. 

I rename thee "beat-a-dead-horse-man!"

1.  Flight

You're stuck in traffic, honking at the asshole ahead of you, the trunk of your car sticking out into the intersection and in turn getting honked at by every other asshole on the road who themselves think that you're the asshole.  Wouldn't it be great to just abandon the car, take out your briefcase, and fly to work? 

Sounds compelling, but consider this:  when's the last time you stuck your head out the window of a moving car.  How fast was the car going?  Probably about 25 miles per hour, because that's about as fast as you can go and still be comfortable.  After that, wind sheer tends to push the flesh of your face around like silly putty, and you start living in fear of catching a June bug to the eye.

So to manage this power at all, you can only move at horse-and-buggy speeds, but you have to do it at a conspicuous height above ground.  If you're a superhero, that makes you awfully easy to shoot, and actually sets you back from doing any rescue work since it would be way, way faster to just take the bus. 

Up, up, and awlyalwlyalwlyal!

2.  Invulnerability

This one power would make all other superpowers incredibly useful, but is in itself pretty pointless.  First of all, EVERYONE is going to fuck with you.  Think of every time you've been to a rough bar - you thought someone would pick a fight with you, right?  Well now the entire world is your rough bar, and everybody will want to test your invulnerability.  This is a bit like Zeno's paradox of Achilles and the tortoise, except that instead of only being able to run in half measures, and thus never reaching your destination, the turtle reaches over and stabs you just to see if you will bleed.

So every ten seconds someone is stabbing you or punching you or shooting you in the mouth with a machine gun, which doesn't bother you since you're invulnerable.  However: that doesn't magically make everything you own invulnerable, so you're walking around naked because someone shredded your clothes with a chainsaw, and you have no house because someone hit it with a stinger missile while you were sleeping, causing you to wake up to birdsong and charred ash where your walls and roof used to be. 

And of course, without the super strength one usually associates with invulnerability, you become about as useful as an indestructible paperweight.  Imagine that you're going on a date and someone has decided that this is as good a time as any to dynamite your car.  You're fine (but naked) but since you don't have the strength to un-collapse the car, you get to sit there in perfect comfort waiting for EMS to cut you out all while listening to the screams of your date whom you are unable to save. 

Oh my god, this explains everything!

3.  Super speed

Worst chafing ever. Seriously, your nuts would catch on fire.  You could either run so fast that you would literally rub yourself to death, or you could just move kind of faster than most people in which case, who gives a shit?  You're slower than bullets, slower than cars, probably even slower than a well-timed throwing knife, or alternately, you're running down the street like Richard Pryor, in which case the bad guys' only problem has pretty much just solved itself. 

Of course, super speed may also imply super-fast reflexes, like dodging bullets or catching beer bottles when you knock them over.  That sounds pretty cool, but again - you are only fast, and not invulnerable too:  ever wake up from a dream, twitch your head, and give yourself a bad case of taco-neck?  I'm seeing bullet-dodging as a three-step process:  step one, gun is fired; step 2, you dodge bullet; step 3, you hit your life alert pendant because you've fallen and you can't get up.

You literally ran to answer the door

There's a website out there called Superuseless Superpowers, and it does a great job of illustrating some really funny made-up not-so-super powers.  I put it to you, gentle reader, that just about all superpowers have a high degree of built-in uselessness.  To that end, I think one of the best superheroes is also the lamest:  Scott Summers aka Cyclops.  Of all the mutants walking around bitching about how they can't have normal lives, he's the one who gets pinched the worst - he has to wear douchebag blade sunglasses for the rest of his life unless he wants to blast someone in half every time a buddy says "hey, check out the ass on that chick!" 

We imagine superpowers to be cure-alls for whatever problems plague us, but as the voice of our generation once lamented:  Mo' money, mo' problems.  You have to be careful what you wish for, because you just might get it, and in this case you should definitely wish for invulnerability, flight, and super strength in that order, unless the genie did not specifically rule out wishing for more wishes. 

Got a superpower you want criticized?
Think you know one that works on its own?
Post about it in the comments and I'll see what I can do to crush your hopes and dreams. 

***When you buy off Amazon through this site, I make money***