Question Concept Idea

One of the things to remember is that while there are 'those other things' that show up in comic books as heroes... granted powers by a higher being (Imbued), using the powers that are tied with a special object (Power Gems or Empowered), collective consciousness granted abilities (Batsons), and so on... they are not the focus of the Whateley Academy stories. Sure, we could have all sorts of stories about Ty West, alien graduate student and his manipulation of the Earth's political system in the pursuit of an A on his dissertation. We could be telling stories about super groups that are completely non-mutant class paranormals... some of whom are stronger than the average mutant... some of whom are weaker.

But ultimately, its not 'just' the super power genre that makes Whateley what it is. It's the genre, compressed into a power scale that is still amazing compared to normal humans... but is not 'that' huge a leap beyond humanity's capability with machines, tools, and innovative ideas... so these mutants aren't entirely alien to us. They're still human. And more importantly, they're human teens. Trying to learn about the world. Trying to get grasp on their own identities.

So, when we talk about AI's and androids incapable of being distinguished from humans... it's not that such things "can't possibly happen" ... its that we don't want the story to go down that road, because if such things existed, the chain of events that would happen would quickly make mutants a non-issue in society.

Ib12us wrote: The powers are downplayed for a reason.

I talk about this a lot when people present the more radical character ideas for comment/tips. It's far too easy to make the mistake of a very unique character still being perfectly normal in how they think and perceive the world. The truth is typically going to be, the more different someone's abilities and perceptions from the norm; the more likely they think and grow differently as well. And the harder it will be to bridge the communication gap between us. Take the autism spectrum as a real world example of what I'm talking about.

Imagine that every time you walk into your movie room that someone has reset the color/temperature, brightness, contrast, and focus settings on your display, all twenty channels of frequency control on your sound system's EQ, the speaker placement and direction, volume controls, and so forth. Every time. All of those things are different. How much different will your experience of movies be compared to someone whose settings are set just where they like them and never change? Will you still enjoy them? Entirely possible. Will you enjoy them for the same reasons? How much of your evaluation of a given movie would be based on the particular settings on a given night? And how will that change how you communicate with other people when you talk about movies?

And that's only two senses in a very limited part of your life. Being a mutant, having powers... will change how 'human' you are. And the more powers involved, the more complex that departure will be. And thus, the harder it will be to consistently present that character following a cause-effect rational chain of events. And, of course, the other important part... the less interested an audience is going to be in trying to understand it. We have to care about a character to spend time reading about them. If we cannot empathize with them, or at least sympathize, we will very quickly walk away from their story and find something we do care about.