Maintaining your secret identity

[Micah Sweet]

Well, luckily Superman has a lot of nearly endless but helpful powers. Like the Kiss of Forgetfulness or the even more vague "mental powers". Plus Superman has science/technology like a billion years more advanced then 21st century Earth.

With all that, you could stay secret no problem. The mental ability is confuse people, control minds, erase memories, and such would be very helpful. You could fine tune peoples minds to what you want them to remember.

With Literal Super Tech you could have a MIB Neurlizer type device say like on your skin or clothing. Or a living nano tech virus that would watch and scrub all computers and things online.

And this does not even mention that one of Supermans many many powers is shapechanging, so he can alter his facial features.

Without all of the above, like if you were "just" Spiderman, it might be best just to meet with the government.....


The bad guys, including the government, will come after your family. Guess you'd be luck to be sent to a black box lab for experiments. Maybe just made into a secret enforcer type..

The bulk of my time spent mentally engaging with Superman has been through the series Smallville, so I assume I have the powers of that version of the character at the end of the show (strength, speed, x-ray vision, heat vision, super-hearing, super-breath, flight). I let all the extraneous Silver Age stuff go.

You would need a full suit of some kind, and be very aware of your surroundings at all times, but I think you could do it for a while.

 

[Umbran]

Even in emergency response situations, you'd need to find who's in charge and ask them what you can do to help. Otherwise you might just make things worse. If you get there before anybody else does, I guess you just hope the solution is obvious (grab that child from that burning building). Problem is, you mess up once and somebody gets hurt or worse, you then have to live with that.

Emergency response is, thankfully, a well-documented set of fields. We train people to do it all the time. So, our perspective hero can get that training, too. You got to firefighting school. You train to be an EMT. Now, not only do you know the basics of what to do, you know the language the professionals use, and can collaborate with them on the scene a lot better.

 

[MarkB]

I guess we don't know if Superman sheds skin or hair like we do, sweats, fingerprints, etc. Though those things are easily reduced by a suitable costume.

I believe you suggested to reference this year's Superman movie for his power set, and in that one Lex obtained the DNA to create Ultraman by scouring Superman's battle sites for stray hairs.

I don't think conventional bad guys are going to knock stray hairs or skin off him, but I do think he's vulnerable to his own strength - if he exerts maximum effort to lift something or punch through something, he could scrape himself a bit in the process and leave behind skin or even a bit of blood.

 

[Morrus]

I believe Morris suggested to reference this year's Superman movie for his power set,

Morrus. And that's me.

 

[MarkB]

Morrus. And that's me.

Yeah, too late on the edit. I got mixed up as to whether I was quoting you or Umbran.

 

[Zaukrie]

There's virtually no way you could keep it secret these days. You'd need to have a massive online campaign pointing at hundreds of other people, and create some kind of conspiracy. But that would only fool a small portion of people.

 

[Cergorach]

You jest but I think there is at least one version of Superman's power set where that's actually true. In that case though I still think the sheer power of modern surveillance states means they'd narrow it down pretty quickly, even if you effectively had a full face mask, by tracking your movements. With super-speed it seems like it'd be hard to do so, but you'd really only have to get unlucky once, and given the sheer amount of manpower the intelligence services would likely devote to it, it'd just be a matter of time.

Unless of course you go Roger "Verbal" Kint on your 'normal' persona... Move totally different from you superpower persona to your normal persona.

And you can avoid the cameras with the earlier mentioned IR LEDs, so there is no movement to analyze. I think that hiding your voice might be more difficult and even if you use some advanced speech to text and then to speech again, you might be still recognized by your speech patterns. Unless you also use over the top speech as your super hero persona.

Or you forget to ditch your phone and they track it through there...

 

[Morrus]

Or you forget to ditch your phone and they track it through there...

Exactly. I guess the problem is if you were careful 24/7/365 for your whole life you might manage to do it, but, well, are you? Can you guarantee you won't make a mistake for the rest of your life? That you'll be constantly aware and scrutinizing your surroundings and careful every moment of every day and night forever? Those looking for you only need to get lucky once. You need to be lucky constantly.

 

[jian]

Logical. And most other nation-states will be able to do the math, and they will figure that your local government is working with you and/or covering for you, so they know an attack on one is an attack on the other. If they don't have their own superheroes, this will be a dramatic global power imbalance, so lead-lined spaces and kryptonite will become strategic national security matters.

The problem is regime changes in your own government, then. If you’d signed up as Captain Britain in 2005, you might have serious concerns about what the new PM might do in 2010, 2016, 2019, 2022, 2024, etc; many of those new incumbents might be known for ignoring advisers and civil servants and for doing some pretty stupid and dangerous things. If the new PM is an entitled idiot who’s just been told that they have the world’s only nuke-level superhero on speed dial, things might go south quickly.

 

[Willie the Duck]

And if Kryptonite exists? Then I reckon your days are numbered. Some shadowy government agency is going to track you down and disable you and then bury you in a facility like that. They only have to get lucky once.

This is another great big question mark. How common is our Kryptonite (for the remnants of an exploded planet from -- checks modern canon-- 27.1 light years distant, the stuff sure seems to be everywhere on Earth)? Is it a known super-rare object likely put in a lab whenever discovered? Does anyone know we are susceptible to it? Are the people who might wish us ill genre-savvy enough to try to find rare rocks that might make us lose our powers or suffer harm?