What Is A Superhero?

[kigmatzomat]

Back to the topic at hand, I really expected people to fight over Star Wars, but I guess the Leeloo arguement still worked to make the point.

To recap

IMO the "superhero genre" involves individuals who have unique, usually personal, special abilities beyond the norm for the setting and they use those powers to protect "normals" from evil people with special abilities beyond the norm.

I.e. Fifth Element is an action movie not a superhero movie, being Diehard in the future.

Star Wars is a sci fi movie, not super hero, because Jedi are an order where numerous people can acquire that power, but the Order has been suppressed so only a few Jedi remain. It's the Three Musketeers in space with laser swords.

So people thought Leeloo was a "unique" human and therefore a Super Hero movie, while I consider her "just" a Mondochiwan, which means the move is "just" an Action Movie in the scifi genre.

But no one argued for Jedi as super heroes, which means that it's some combination of quantity and uniformity of high power people that switches between Super Hero Movie and Action Movie.

So how does this apply to RPG settings?

Well, it would say LotR is a Super Hero Movie of the fantasy genre, where Gandalf/Sarumon are Superman/Zod, Sauron as Darkseid, elves=amazonians, Aragorn is Batman and the hobbits are a bunch of Robins.

Meanwhile the D&D movie is a fantasy genre Action Movie, because bards, wizards, sorcerers, druids and the like are at least as common as jedi. Thay is ruled by Red Wizards (sith), barbarians are wookies, unreliable spellcasters work as hucksters, adopted daughters fight for their homeland (funny, she didn't look Druish) despite having an evil bloodline, etc, etc.