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Message: <blockquote data-quote="James Gasik" data-source="post: 9647224" data-attributes="member: 6877472">Hackers being Wizards is a long-established (and terrible) trope that the entertainment industry seems really loath to let go.  Sometimes you need a deus ex machina, and since apparently the average consumer has no idea how computers really work, it's one many people will accept, especially with a little technobabble.  Just watching something like Hackers or Leverage (which I love, but fully admit it's run by rule of cool, not realism) would likely make any real Comp Sci major's head explode.In superhero fiction, the industry has trained us to mostly not think about the ramifications of what we're being shown.  When The Hulk transforms, where does the extra mass come from/go? Why are characters who can grow in size rarely left nude, instead somehow bits of their shredded clothing managing to stay on their bodies (not even going to touch violations of the square cube law)?  Characters with super healing also can somehow generate new biomass without any apparent source.  Characters with super strength but not invulnerability rarely destroy their muscles or bones when exerting too much force (I remember a scene from the Invincible comic where Mark's invulnerability is on the fritz, and he punches someone so hard he obliterates his own arm!).  Or when a super strong character lifts something with much greater mass than they have, as if it's somehow been rendered weightless, and super massive objects don't instantly collapse under their own weight (Superman deciding to casually lift a cruise ship, for example).  And that's just the tip of the iceberg-X-ray vision, heat vision, probability manipulation, psychic powers (both telepathic and telekinetic), FLIGHT (dear God, no wings, no source of propulsion, just some BS handwavium like "subconscious gravity manipulation")- the list goes on.  Or how characters with "cold" powers seem able to generate infinite amounts of ice without dehydrating anything and everything in their vicinity (don't even get into "cold beams", which make no sense in anything ever- yeah I'm looking at you, D&D!).Superheroes don't make sense, their powers are basically "black boxes" that cannot be explained and are described by what they do, not how they work.  It's true that some writers try very hard to figure out the science, but eventually, they just give up, because it often leads to nonsensical concepts like the "punch dimension" (if you know, you know).Even characters who don't actually have stated powers to perform tasks still do them routinely- Captain America's ability to bounce his shield off of multiple targets, it always moving in the direction he wants, without any appreciable loss of force (yes, I know, handwavium shield, but he's done it with objects made of regular metal too).  Oh sure, you might say, "Super Soldier", he has better senses, can process information faster, has greater strength, accuracy, blah blah blah- and then Sam Wilson learns how to do the exact same thing!You can, in light of this, still be flummoxed by Daredevil's "heightened senses" not working the way they should, but it seems like a strange hangup to have if you can accept the rest of supeherodom.  Sure, the writers of the show have tried harder in some areas (like having Matt use sonar instead of the "radar sense" of the comics), but at the end of the day, he co-exists in a world with other individuals who also routinely do impossible things.Heck, on the topic of super-senses, I always wondered why characters like Wolverine (who has them, even if most of the time he's depicted merely as an angry stabby man who heals fast) cannot replicate Matt's feats on a regular basis!In summation (because damn I'm long-winded), I'll say this.  If you can still watch Frank Castle in action and are not bothered by him, you know, living and breathing, after all the, ah, "punishment" his body has taken, you've already accepted the fantasy- and probably don't even think twice because this sort of thing has been established action hero plot armor since at least the 80's (and probably longer).Look how long it took Hollywood to figure out that mere Kevlar* doesn't make you immune to bullets! And even now, people wearing body armor still tend to be moving around afterwards, acting like they've just been kicked by a mule, instead of, you know, laying there on the ground being lucky to be alive, lol.*Sure, nowadays, we've got things way better than Kevlar, like Dragonscale or graphene, but the prop department isn't always kitting out actors in top of the line armor, lol.</blockquote>

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