If you could be anything

There's a question a lot of people have told me to ask myself in trying to decide a clear career path. "If you could do any job, without regard to what it paid, what would you do?"

Now I know what you're thinking. Max is going to say this question is bullshit because you have to look into what it pays, and if you don't you're leaving out a key part of the job because the money is the main reason you do the job. Well I'm not. Not now anyway, I do think that, but I have a much bigger problem right now.

You may think, based on previous blog posts, that the list of top jobs would be artist, scientist, psychotherapist etc. Well it's not. Those are all around 7-10 on my top 10. So what's on top?

Supervillain.

Yeah, I know. "It’s not a real profession." Which summarizes my problem. One thing though, and the subject of today’s rant, is the nature of Supervillains and superheroes.

The thing people don't understand is that superheroes need Supervillains. Without an equally super threat a superhero is just some whacked out vigilante in spandex. They aren't even really heroes; they're just a weird variant on cops. But once a supervillain emerges and begins wreaking their brand of highly dramatic chaos it sets the stage for a singular being of immense power to be a hero. They remove the threat, and by doing so become the hero, but the villain always gets away. I don't think that's accidental either, I think heroes know that they need an antagonist against which to be the protagonist. From my understanding the cycle works like this.

1. Villain commits one successful crime or other act of villainy.
2. Hero readies self as a reactionary force against villain’s next act of villainy
3. Villain hatches some needlessly complex scheme.
4. Hero and villain clash.
5. Hero wipes out villain’s henchmen.
6. Villain narrowly escapes.

The Key thing about this is that the villain always gets enough successful crimes to stay in business, while the hero gets enough "I defeated the villain" points to remain a figure of public adore. Besides they must make a fortune on merchandising.

It's also important that the hero have a figure that only they can beat. Think of the collateral damage caused by the average super hero. When superman throws a car at someone, the guy who owns that car doesn’t sue him because he knows that if superman wasn't there he would be at the mercy of Lex Luthor, who would do much worse things then just break his car. Once heroes stop being necessary they lose all of their perks.