In a Powered-Up World
In no particular order, here are some observations I have about what it must be like to live in a world where any random person could have the ability to, say, shoot laser beams out of their eyeballs.
Car insurance must be a very different experience than a normal world. Seriously, every superhero show I’ve seen, someone’s car gets run over, smashed into, or used to swat someone else with. Spider-Man: No Way Home has a major battle right on a highway, for example. All of those people whose cars Doctor Octavius smashed up? After they recovered and got home and whatnot, they’re going to have to call State Farm, Geico, Farmers, whoever, right? That’s going to be fun.
Do corporate law classes and business education programs have to allow for the possibility of evil corporate supervillains? You see those all the time too, right? LexCorp., Roxxon, Daggett Industries, etc.? You’d think the Feds would’ve stepped in on those.
Why does anyone stay in the cities? Cities are where the major battles happen: Metropolis, Gotham, New York in the MCU, etc. So how come there isn’t a major exodus to the suburbs and/or rural areas, commensurate with an increase in remote work? I mean, we’re not just talking rise in crime, normal things like that. Depending on what ‘verse you’re dealing with, we’re talking multiple apocalyptic-level events. In The Dark Knight Rises, a nuclear bomb is set off outside of Gotham City; in a Superman: The Animated Series episode, a similar bomb goes off outside Metropolis. That’s just nuclear; in the MCU New York is attacked with the Chitauri army, Johannesburg is trashed by the Hulk, there’s the thing with Project Insight in DC, plus numerous other events. You don’t hear about any of this happening in suburbs, Smallville being the primary exception.
Air traffic control must be a problem with all the flying people. Do they issue transponders? Do they just depend on the good will of people like Superman and the Green Lantern and whatnot to stay out of the way of airplanes? When say a random superhero flies into a city and shows up on a radar screen, how do the controllers know if it’s Flying Brick Man or Flight 217 from Seattle? A problem, no?
Timelines. If I were an ordinary person, I think I’d be terrified that some random space wizard or guy with an alien monolith would decide to change the timeline to avert some alternate future that would doom humanity, and I’d blink out of existence before I knew it. How do you cope with that? Therapy, I imagine. Lots of therapy.