Superpowers

 

Wouldn't it be nice if you had superpowers one day? You could possibly achieve many other things with your new found abilities but just how exactly good it is to have a superpower? What would you actually do after getting one? If giving in to the temptation of power, one could let's just say, control the world with the superiority of his or her abilties. Or you could actually use the powers for good like fighting off other villians with similar abilities as well, but that's just how many of the story works or the plot goes. In reality there is always the possibility that perhaps only you yourself actually hold some superpower that no one else has. At that time, what would you choose to do?

In this current society, the supernatural is always a hot topic for discussion. Not just popular but at the same time, curiosity and fear that arises from these unknowns. Things such as UFOs or aliens etc that have sparked many controversial views but all those are just supernatural phenomenons. What would the world think if someone actually develops a superpower? In light of recent anime series and of course the past years as well, superpower or supernatural abilties have been a bulk of most plots in general anime. Not including the genre of 'magic' although that is still a supernatural ability but I'm leaning more towards the slightly less fantasy type of ability. In all, japanese anime and manga, other than revolving around romance genres, they are pretty much driven by supernatural plots, as seen by many of the shounen series and of course not forgetting the big 3.

What I would actually think that people will feel if there was ever going to be someone holding a superpower would be fear itself. Let's just take a recent example from Valvrave. Valvrave takes place in a next generation timeline with mechas already being possible and the already expanding social network is still going strong in that time as well. But mechas are at most the advanced development of science itself and has nothing to do with superpowers until the Valvraves appeared. The Magius and those 'man-made' ones like Haruto and the other Valvrave pilots were a perfect example of what we call: people with supernatural abilities. They can body jack others simply by biting on the other like a vampire and transfer their consciousness over, replacing their host's original mind and body. Not just having only the ability to body jack, the Magius are also immortal, to a certain extent that is. Actually we could name it super regenerative speed since if their bodies are gone or they lose a limb, they will still die and a lost limb will never return. But if they are shot, even directly in the head, stabbed through the heart, or even had their throat slit, they survived and that being shared on international media will just put intense stress and confusion from the other people which in the end led to fear which we saw what the Council of 101 did to Saki on international TV in order to achieve that goal. The result? The fear of the supernatural and the desire to eliminate all that is 'different' from the rest. 

Thinking it in another way, with the Magius having such an ability, isn't there other possible ways or means that their abilities could benefit the world? Of course the sustainability would be too extreme since they needed runes to live which are human memories but with the Valvrave systems, just not overloading it would be fine? However the other people or the majority of the world  decided that they are not going to accept them as they felt fear that these 'monsters' could one day turn around and kill them or to achieve dominance when Haruto and the others just wanted to co-exist. Yes of course having an ability could be fun or at least beneficial in some way but when you are the minority and are perceived as a dangerous entity, you are basically screwed. Even Haruto's friends and classmates were dragged into a massacre to clean up the 'monsters' which not only shows how fearful the people are but also at how fast the people actually believe in the media without first confirming the truth. That would be a discussion of media so I'd just leave that aside for now. Who wouldn't be scared if you saw someone getting stabbed on international TV and survives? Well maybe if it was Saki I wouldn't haha.

Another would be the possible evolution of human beings where people slowly develop supernatural abilities, making them a different class of humans compared to the rest. In this case, the process of realising the existence of such people takes a longer time as compared to a sudden appearance which would make curiosity overdriving fear instead since it would be still in the process of validating the truth. For Valvrave, the existence of Magiuses, not just one, creates this sense of uncertainty which in turn leads to fear as people have no idea just how many magius there are on Earth after realising the existence of a few. For this point however, we take a look at Shin Sekai Yori which shows us another viewpoint in terms of people developing special abilities. In Shin Sekai's case, the people with Cantus seek to coexist with the rest, or that was what some of them seemed to want, by first removing the element of fear from them, which was them being perceived as 'dangerous'. What the non-cantus users feel is a sense of insecurity and the fear of being killed by the more superior class which the cantus users took into account and created 'Death Feedback'. This prevents cantus users from killing other humans as it will result in their own deaths too. That was actually a pretty good solution, in a short span of time that is. It was merely a temporary solution that just didn't quite solve the problem in the end. 

What I believed was the origin of their fear of cantus users wasn't totally removed. True enough the cantus users had prevented themselves from killing humans but just how long would that last? Since it was them who created it, wouldn't there be a possibility that it can be removed as well? Even if it was in theory, impossible, people would still believe that it would as people who can use cantus still exist among them and the uneasiness will still continue. What actually is creating the fear is not the fear of being attacked but the fear of their existence as a whole. And of course their solution of adding a Death Feedback only solves part of the problem. Cantus humans are now unable to kill other humans but the other way round, humans can kill cantus users, if they are able to. As a result, I presume many of the cantus users were killed resulting in an ultimatum being passed down of turning the humans into queerats to bypass the Death Feedback. That is totally inhumane of the cantus users to do that but putting yourself in their shoes, what more else can they do? If you yourself had willingly taken a disadvantage in an attempt to coexist but the opposite party decides to do otherwise, this is definitely not the best solution but it was in a way, inevitable. Even if one tries to coexist but as long as one side decides not to, everything will fall apart. Trust is one thing but being afraid of the unknown is another.

Add another factor into the equation of coexisting and it will work out in the end. A common enemy. Now we take a look over at Darker than Black. In their world, there the contractors which will be the focus of this point as well as regular human beings who do not possess any sort of special abilities like the contractors do. In the world of Darker than Black however, the humans don't exactly fear the contractors or rather the 2 kinds coexist quite well together. Just that when they are in search of certain criminal contractors, they have their own contractors in the investigation department to be able to bring them into custody. So in this way, the humans actually don't fear the contractors as much perhaps due to already having them working close to them. This thus brings up the point of being able to understand each other and to realise that either side don't mean harm. However, this is possibly possible only due to the existence of enemy contractors. With an enemy that the normal humans are unable to take out, it creates a kind of reliance on the ability of contractors as well to deal with them. As a result, you could say that there's not much of a choice for them to coexist but in the end it still worked out. So in other words, if you one day had special powers, you better hope there is another one similar to you and possibly, the evil side so that you'll be trusted in dealing with them. Take the recent movie Man of Steel for example. True enough Clark was being feared for his powers and no one wanted to believe him that he was a good guy until he saved the others from his evil counterparts and it was then, that they realised that "hey, this guy is on our side". 

For the above discussion we had used enemies as individuals with superpowers as well, but it does work the same way for normal humans who are able to deal with superpower users without they themselves having such powers. We take a look at To Aru Kagaku no Railgun where the Academy City is housing students who have supernatural abilities and study them as their powers grow individually. Near the end of the series, we see a scientist without any powers being able to subdue power users with certain equipments to cancel their ability to use them. The series has a human squad known as AntiSkill as well who are the kind of normal police that we see, and Judgement who are the police but holders of abilities as well. We do see the coexistence of such, other than just mutual understanding that many espers exist, but with their common enemy who is surprisingly human but yet able to fight on par with espers. In this scenario, of course it would require the teamwork from both sides and hence the coexistence being made possible. I guess for Railgun, there's a separate factor that the existence of espers are already too well-known to perform a purge or something unlike Valvrave's situation where it was the manipulation of media that misled the humans that led to a massacre of innocent students. 

Now think about it, would it be actually good if you one day had held these special abilities? It might be initially fun but that's just personal.

What would others actually think?

What would you use your powers for?

Will you ever be consumed by your own powers?

Will you be able to coexist with the others?

Will the humans trust you?

And of course, there are much much more uncertainties that follows. There isn't a zero possibility that someday we will see such an individual but when the time comes, even as humans, what would we do? 

With great power comes great responsibility. Sometimes, it's better to remain status quo.