Things I Don't Get

[forsyth]

Okay, so, The Incredibles. Really good movie. So, Syndrome, the villain. He's obviously a villain, what with the killing supers to perfect each generation of his bot he was gonna send to attack the city. Right, got that.

So, his secondary motivation, though, was to sell off his inventions after he used them, and then "when everyone is special, no one is."

That's quite frankly one of the stupidest lines I've ever heard. Okay, yeah, when everyone can fly, being able to fly isn't unique, but it's still special. And damn useful. That's not really a villain motivation. For all that it'd overthrow the current status-quo, something most heroes don't do. Or maybe I'm just weird and reading too much into it.

Comments

[kail-panille.livejournal.com]

Giving everybody superpowers would definitely be a bad thing. Kliebold and Harris with superpowers? Bad. Granted if everybody's super they're arguably better able to defend themselves, but that only goes so far. Not everybody has the talent or inclination to battle evil, even if they've got the power.

But the point here that I haven't seen mentioned is that Syndrome wasn't giving away superpowers, and certainly wasn't giving them to everybody. He was planning to sell them.

In effect, he's talking about creating a new super-class, the wealthy. Whether that's just a side effect of his own greed or because he thinks that money is a good measure of a person's worth is, I think, open to question. But Syndrome probably does think that someone who worked hard and earned enough money to purchase powers has more right to them than someone who was just born with them by dumb cosmic chance.