Fairy Tale Themes
Having a distinct superhero identity is very important if youâre going to be a superhero. You canât just be stopping crimes as a civilian, stopping crimes is often a crime, for some reason. So you need to wear a whole getup and come up with a whole unique shtick. But that can be pretty hard. You canât just throw a bunch of darts at a word board, thatâs how you get heroes like Cat Vomit Confetti Man, or Pencil Rhombus Mount Rushmore Woman. (No offense to those guys, I know you guys were instrumental in repelling that Planet Doom invasion a couple of years back!) So sometimes, instead of coming up with an entirely new thing, heroes just steal an old one.
If youâre going to pattern yourself after a figure from a popular tale or piece of folklore you need to make sure you pick a good one. For example, you donât want to run around fighting crime calling yourself The Ugly Duckling. (No disrespect sir, I know you singlehandedly held the planet together during The Great Fissuring.) But at the same time guys calling themselves Hercules are a dime a dozen. (None of you come to my house and punch me! I know how important the Hercules human pyramid was in saving Earth during the Galactic Olympics.) You need to hit that sweet spot of not completely ridiculous and not too overplayed.
Youâd also be smart to grab a fairy tale character whose got a similar set of abilities as you do so your powers are thematically appropriate. If youâre an ice guy you can be The Abominable Snowman or Jack Frost (not to be confused with Jacked Frost the ice man who is almost too buff) but you wouldnât want to be calling yourself Elsa from Frozen Man or Frosty the Snow-Man (yes Mr. the Snow-Man I know about the time you cooled the fires of Hell and freed several hundred wrongly damned souls during Greg the Skeleton Kingâs war on the living. If youâve got the power to turn things into gold you might call yourself Midas but you wouldnât want to go fight crime under the name Rumplestiltskin (for one thing, his whole bit is that people canât guess his name, and if people canât guess your name youâll never be able to sign any lucrative sponsorship deals!) If youâve got a winning smile you can call yourself Cheshire Cat but you should, under no circumstances, model yourself after dental hygiene folk hero Finnigan Floss. (Heâs a sixty foot giant who has teeth the size of cars and spends all his days flossing, the story was meant to teach children not to focus only on one thing and let life pass them by but the dental industry coopted it and turned Finnigan Floss into a propaganda tool!)
But becoming a fairy tale character isnât just a simple trick to get out of putting any effort into your superhero identity. You need to be ready to grapple with the consequences of such an action. For one thing, if thereâs any villain out there who is already aping the image of a character from the same fairy tale, theyâre going to automatically become one of your villains. So if thereâs an entire crew of Wizard of Oz themed villains, maybe donât call yourself Glinda the Good With of the North Man. (Tinman-Woman, I swear this is not a callout on you, I have nothing but the utmost respect for you after you singlehandedly, and I mean that literally she had one hand tied behind her back, thwarted a robot uprising.) At the same time though, if theyâre famous for being hilariously ineffectual villains, then it might not be a bad idea to guarantee that they move to your town and attempt to commit crimes there for you to easily stop.
Your decision to become a fairy tale character might also inspire fairy tale enthusiasts to take up arms against you. These nerds will point out all the inaccuracies in your take on the character. Every. Single. One. âAhem, Marry Poppins never drove a Poppins Mobile, she had a magical umbrella this is highly inaccurate.â âErm, I hate to be that guy (you know that they love to be that guy) but Little Red Riding Hood was not a thirty five year old man with perpetual stubble.â âGoldilocks historically (???) had 150,000 golden locks. Iâve noticed when I observed you while you were sleeping (????) that you have only 135,000 locks of hair, and donât even get me started on your roots.â So youâre going to need to preemptively block every fairy tale and folklore nerd in the word on all your public social media accounts, and probably some of your private ones too. Donât underestimate the power of an angry nerd. Some of them might even be so angry, that theyâll try to become a fairy tale themed villain, just to show you the error of your ways. So... if you want to have a little fun with that be our guest. Make some nerd rob a bank while showing you what the real Little Bo Peep would look like! Convince some fairy tale buff that the best use of their time is mugging people while espousing the importance of pronouncing âbippity boppity booâ correctly.
Side note: Donât become a Goldilocks themed superhero. Goldilocks is the clear villain of that story. Anybody who breaks into someoneâs house and eats their food and sleeps in their bed is a criminal. Thatâs not just right. Thatâs just wrong. You should avoid taking on the appearance of any classic villains. Thatâs going to confuse trigger happy police officers who are responding to the scene of the crime. I guarantee you theyâre going to shoot the guy dressed like Dracula (or plunge a wooden stake into your chest, which is just like, splinter-city) or an evil step-mother before they ask even a cursory âWhich of you costumed ninnies is the superhero here?â
Superhero identities are as unique and varied as the people who choose to don them. And some people are just not all that unique, and for them we have some not so unique superhero identities. The stories weâve been told as kids are rife with potential do-gooder (and do-badder) identities. So head to your local library, pick up a giant book of fairy tales from the kids section, and then sit there and read it and make all the parents there with their kids wary.
