Some superheroes are just gosh danged loved. Everybody likes them. People stop them on the street just to say how much they like them. It’s kind of gross? Like, gosh just because someone can make tornadoes with their fists or produce breakfast meats out of thin air doesn’t mean they’re the best thing since sliced bread. (Fun fact: I wanted to make a joke here about some better food that was invented after sliced bread and there is literally none. Even grilled cheese which you would think would have to be invented after sliced bread showed up a few years earlier in France. Frikkin’ French people man. Grilling that cheese. Sliced bread or not.) So anyway, these losers are so beloved by the people they’ve sworn to protect that they become a major source of pride for the townsfolk. They’re thrown parades, given metaphorical keys, their names are placed on the city’s welcome sign and official tourism website. Brochures are printed in the image of their silhouette. Sometimes there will be talk of renaming the city in their honor, a local talk show host will jokingly suggest they run for mayor. It’s all very nice.

And who wouldn’t want to be beloved by a whole city! It’s much better than being hated by a whole city! If you’re universally hated you always have to be on the lookout for angry mobs. You can never look at a pitch fork the same way again. It diminishes your ability to help farmers. It’s just no good. But being universally beloved might not be ideal either. It comes with its own problems that you need to be prepared to deal with.

When you’re communally celebrated you get invited to a lot of events. Museum dedications, college graduations, town hall meetings, movie premiers, barbershop openings. You become a celebrity, everyone wants you at their thing. And good for you, go enjoy the thing. But when you agree to go to a thing that’s going to be advertised. The ad men will come up with something clever about it being a super event (somebody hire me). What’s the point of having you at a thing if nobody is going to even know about it! So it’ll be in all the papers, on all the radios, probably someone’ll skywrite it into the clouds. And that means the bad guys are gonna hear about it. They read newspapers, they listen to radios, they occasionally look up at the sky (often while collapsing to their knees and shouting the word “nooooooo”). You never want a supervillain to know where you are. Because, remember, they hate you. When they know where they are they’re going to show up in a giant Spider-Mecha and attack you. So when you agree to appear at an event, and that event is then heavily publicized, you’re putting everybody else who is attending that event in danger. So you better have the roughest, toughest security team on high alert. Get some of those power-detectors the banks have invested in, hire some super-mercenaries (not one of the ones who are super shady and kill lots of people. Get the ones who only kill some people. You’re a superhero) invite some of your super-pals to come to the event too. Do what you need to do to keep things safe.

Additionally, if you’re adored by all then you might actually have a more difficult time getting your job done. If you’re constantly being stopped for autographs or selfies or babies that need kissing (ugh so unsanitary), then you might be prevented from responding to a super-crime as quickly as you could have. That’s why many superheroes prefer to operate just below the public’s radar. They fight crime in the shadows. They stop a supervillain from destabilizing the sun with a nuclear toothbrush and then run away before the cops get there. They’re urban legends. Nobody ever invites an urban legend to a movie premiere. (Which reminds me, Bigfoot told me to tell you all that he’s insulted by the lack of movie premiere invites, he likes movies too!)

There’s also an inverse proportional relationship to how much a superhero is loved by the public and how much they are hated by their enemies. Remember a lot of supervillains are so dang thirsty for attention and notoriety and they hate when that public attention is instead diverted into love for a superhero. If the public loves you, you can pretty much guarantee that your arch-nemesis is going to start pulling off grander evil schemes to try to swing some of the attention back to them, they’re ginormous babies like that. Just colossal infants. If before they were unleashing piranhas into one public swimming pools and it was fine because nobody even used that pool anyway because it was gross and then all the piranhas died from the grossness of the swimming pool, now they’re going unleash microscopic piranhas into the city’s water supply so that everybody’s drinking microscopic piranhas (which also doesn’t really sound healthy for the piranhas) and broadcasting the whole thing on multiple flying jumbotrons placed throughout the city. Don’t be the reason the bad guys are pulling off more outlandish crimes.