There are superhumans who don’t want to be saddled with the responsibility of using their powers or don’t want to sacrifice their normal lives because of them (Some eras of Spider-Man), superhumans who don’t want the stigma of being ‘different’ (all but one member of DP7*), superhumans who are unhappy with the circumstances of how they gained the powers (Cyborg of the Teen Titans), superhumans who have some reason to fear their powers (the current Flash (although that was the result of his powers changing, not his gaining them)). (Obviously these aren’t the only examples of these cases that exist, they’re just the first that come to mind without repeating myself.)
Examples of those types from Heroes…Isaac, Claire, (No one - yet), Niki.
The ‘“real world” superheroes’ genre - which Heroes and the New Universe (Marvel’s secondary line from the 80s, which included DP7) are examples of - particularly, has a large portion of its characters disliking being superhuman or that Superhumans exist at all, and of those that don’t dislike that, a great portion of them are unsavoury types who wish to use superpowers (either their own, or those of people they employ and/or manipulate and/or blackmail) for unpleasant things, and a large part of the remaining group are often ‘dark’ heroes, who will take the Punisher route before the Superman path. ** I’m pretty sure this is a function of a certain amount of cynicism that almost invariably goes into the decision to create such ‘realistic’ *** superhero stories.
Hiro types (comic book nerds, who think having superpowers would be nifty) inexplicably either don’t exist, or never get powers or hang around with those that do. So, he’s kind of a novelty. Most people who enjoy having their powers, it’s simply ‘wow, I’m special’, or ‘cool, now I can do things I was never able to accomplish before’…or ‘with these I can crush the puny mortals!’. I think Matt fits into the most altruistic form of that second explaination. Peter also does, on the whole, but with a strong dose of a need to be special added into the mix.
** Holy run-on sentence, Batman. ****
*** Realistic…HAH! They’re no more realistic than any other superhero stories. Just more pessimistic.
**** Now I’m just getting silly with the footnotes.
We haven’t seen Niki lift a car or anything, but the implication from how the two goons were dispatched is that she has some degree of super-strength and fighting ability while she’s in her alt-state. I would find it very odd for the creators to spend so much time on her if she weren’t super.
We heard a taped phone conversation between Chandra Suresh and Sylar in which Syler had a male voice. I suppose Sylar could have been using a voice modulator or have shape-shifting abilities but we’ve not seen evidence of either.
Don’t forget we’ve only seen Hiro at the very beginning, before he’s been forced to use his powers seriously against villains. It already looks like future Hiro is a far more serious figure. I think we’ll see him get the joy knocked out of him before the season is over.
And on another note: Am I the only one who thinks that the cutesy nicknames for characters are a thousand times more confusing than just referring to them by their names would be?
The whole set-up with Striperella and Congressman X suggested to me a similar set up from The Godfather, in which the hooker was killed as part of the blackmail scheme, so I fully expected that scenario to play out up to the point where Striperella went ninja on their asses. However, I also don’t see the guy being so stupid.
The cheerleader seems doomed to contract Captain Scarlet Syndrome, in which every week it will turn out that to save the world somebody will have to fling herself into an industrial sausage press, or block the levee’s gears with something about as big as a human body, or disarm a bomb that has been placed in an angry bear’s cave. As it is, we have seen evidence that all hits against her are automatically upgraded to crits, which is a serious vulnerability.
This type is uncommon, but not unheard-of. The Engineer from The Authority is/was (no idea what’s happened to the character) a huge comic-book nerd as well as a scientist. Of course, she was also quite a babe–not the cuddly Hiro-type, but really gorgeous.
Some of them, sure, but as I sit and type this, I honestly can’t remember the real names of Captain Congress or the Flying Nurse (aka The Flying Petrelli Brothers).
And you think calling him QB McRapesalot is better than calling him the Quarterback?
Or that Murse for a character that hasn’t been a nurse since the pilot episode is a good mnemonic? Especially when he’s also been referred to as about half a dozen other things, mostly names that have also proved to be inadequate or misleading even though we’re only three episodes in?
Well, you proposed using their names. Unless his actual legal name is “Mr. Quarterback S. Jones, Jr.”, you are also using a nickname. And most of the suggested nicknames are more easily recognized than names.
Unlike the Amazing Race, where the name of the racers appear on screen, Heroes indicate character names in the dialog, which is often rapid and occurs when viewers are paying attention to the action.
I do agree that vague nicknames and acronyms are bad. QB McRapesalot is a take off of McDreamy (and McSteamy) from Grey’s Anatomy. I agree those can be a bit vague, but most people can recognize the date raping quarterback from that name. I think gary_gnu’s character map helps greatly.
All of the nicknames except “Murse” which I hate and think is kinda dumb relate pretty closely either to a power or a character trait, so, no, I don’t find them confusing in the slightest.
Quick, what’s EvilDad’s name! Huh, huh? Don’t know, do ya? Last time I checked IMDB, he was listed as Horned-Rimmed Glasses. Too tedious to type all the time. I suppose we could shorten it to HRG, but then we’d have newcomers constantly asking what HRG stands for.
Nicknaming is fun, at least at the beginning of a show. I’m not great with names and it takes awhile to get them all down. Even if I don’t like Murse, at least I immediately know who’s being talked about. I don’t have to use Murse myself, and if you don’t like nicknames and you’ve already got everyone’s name sorted out, by all means use them.
I noticed Hiro never got a nickname. Mohinder pretty quickly got called that. Took me until episode two before I remembered Niki. But StripperMom worked great at first. Now I’m calling her Niki I & Niki II. I also like “Niki’s Not Here.”
We’ll probably use fewer nicknames as the show ages, but for now it’s fun.
Isaac claims that he can only see the future when he’s high, and afterwords has no memory and jsut the painting of some future event somwhere. But what about the comic book? It very accuratly described what would happen to Hiro in a few days time. My guess is that Isaac draws the comic book as a source of steady income, since being an artist is not the best way to bring in the bacon. I certianly can’t imagine the whole time he drew the comic book he was high and “future-seeing,” which means he does have the capacity to see into the future when not high, he just doesn’t know that he can do it, since he hasn’t seen anything from his comic come true yet (though the fact that he drew himself getting his brain eaten a few weeks in the future is kind of creepy…)
How about CopyPuppy? He seems to follow people around like a puppy. How about Fluppy, flying puppy? Nuppy, nurse puppy? Cuppy, copy puppy? Luppy, leech puppy? I could keep going…
Super-Hiro, although I suppose that’s not really a nickname.
I proposed “Sucker” a couple of times, both based on his possibly swiping powers and because of the way he gets treated by Captain Congress, but it didn’t really stick. “Leech” occured to me but there’s a Marvel character called Leech so it’s not very original. I think I’ve tended to call him “Peter.”
It’s not like I don’t know most of the characters’ actual names. Niki, Claire, Peter, Hiro, Ando, [del]Sean[/del] [del]Weiss[/del] Matt!, and OK I can’t remember Captain Congress’s real name off the top of my head (Vincent? something with a V?) and Isaac’s name hasn’t really registered but it comes to me if i cogitate a bit. Superhero nicknames are fun. I had fun coming up with some of them and liked most of the ones everyone else came up with. It’s not like it’s that hard to figure out that, say, “doppelbanger” means Niki, because who else on the show could it possibly refer to? Who but Matt is Telepa-Cop or Officer Troi or whatever?