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I AM EMPOWERED, pt.15: The Twitter-based YEAR ONE prose dealie continues!
🕑 Added 2020-06-11 13:00:02 +0000 UTC<Note: You can check out I Am Empowered's previous installments with this tag.
And now, back to Emp's first-person narration in (old) Twitter-based 140-character format, taking place roughly around the beginning of Empowered vol.1. This installment is a bit lengthy, so be warned:>
MY STUPID SUPERSUIT, CONTINUED (part 1)
Remember when I was blithely blithering about my supersuit's pros (unearthly empowerment) and cons (ungodly exposure of my bodily flaws)?
Well, I kinda failed to mention one rather important—in fact, ridonkulously important—"con" drawback to the suit's Elissa-empowering "pro".
Sorry, but I do have limits about how much painful, embarrassing truthiness I can reveal at one time re: how crappy a superhero I am, okay?
As I humble(cape)bragged earlier, the suit's hypermembrane allows me to utilize a modest little array of—to be frank—C-list superpowers.
I'm no all-purpose, sorcery-spewing powerhouse like Sistah Spooky, nor am I a walking arsenal of ultratech superweaponry like Red Griffon.
I certainly can't be deemed among the truly elect in superhero circles, as I lack a common requisite for A-list status: The power of flight.
In the hoity-toitiest cape-culture circles, you're quite often considered to be a second-class supercitizen if you aren't capable of flight.
The snobbishness directed by the flight-capable towards mere "ground-pounder" capes is, in my experience, insufferable and never-ending.
Flyers, like airborne hipsters, love to crow ad nauseum about wondrous aerial experiences that YOU, mere groundling, wouldn't know about.
Seeing the curvature of the earth, storm clouds at sunset, the glittering jewelry of the city at night, the rich tapestry of BLAH BLAH BLAH
Yeah, right, flying buttress(head). You can see the same crap during an airplane flight, can't you? "That's TOTALLY different," they sniff.
"Until you've felt the true majesty of capeflight, you have no idea what you're missing," flyers say, noses—and everything else—in the air.
After suffering decades of "airogance", flightless heroes have developed a richly varied lexicon of derogatory terms for the flight-capable.
Airheads. Pigeons With Capes. Flight-Path Fodder. Air Whores. The Flighty, Flighty Capetones. Butterballs (as in, turkeys). Skyjackoffs.
Thongbirds. (S)kid(mark) Icarus. Saucing Fliers. Jet-Propelled Jerkweeds. Air Pollution. Flight of Fancyboys. Cruising Missiles. Poultry.
Weather Balloons, Masked Blimps: Ugly, catty, weightist terms used by ladycapes to denigrate flight-capable superheroines. Yay, sisterhood!
Old-school: Whizzer. Doesn't sound bad, until you find it references an infamous 70s-era airborne urination incident involving FlyRobinFly.
Even a few flyer-derogatory acronyms have arisen, such as UFO (Unbearable Flaming Orifice) and LUTSIM (Look, Up in The Sky, It's a Moron).
Anti-flyer line: "They're like less-useful Predator drones, except that Predator drones only rarely get drunk and knock up college girls."
You haven't truly lived until a male superhero suavely tries to pick you up—literally—with the flyer's clichéd line: "Let's get high, girl."
I'm rarely thrilled about having to be carried by a male flyer, as they're prone to getting a little "hands-y" at times, if you follow me.
Especially in the, uh, heat of battle, male flyers can get suspiciously cavalier with how they grab and carry their flightless female peers.
After Powerglide flew me to safety during the HyperVigilantes battle, I thought I'd end up with his handprint bruises all over my thighs.
Mysteriously enough, this seems to be a problem mainly for lower-status superheroines like myself, as far as I can tell. Funny 'bout that.
Strange, that A- or B-List superheroines with higher social rankings and badass-ier powersets rarely face boundary-issue inappropriateness.
Despite her famous assets, Jugganaut never, ever gets bad-touched by flyboy peers, due no doubt to her A-List überstrength (and übertemper).
Okay, fine, I'm blatantly dithering and flying off on irrelevant tangents to avoid clarifying my fatal—well, fatal-ish—flaw as a superhero.
In fairness, I should say that my main powerset—superstrength and toughness, the ability to energy-zap—might normally qualify me as B-List.
Alas, what drops my ranking to C-List—or even, cringing here, D-List—is the glaring, Achilles-heel-y flaw inherent to my supersuit's powers.
Yes, I can indeed rock the entire aforementioned medley of not-totally-unshabby powers—but only if my suit's hypermembrane is fully intact.
If my supersuit gets ripped or torn, however, my unearthly powers instantly begin to falter, becoming all-too-earthily flaky and unreliable.
As my suit becomes more and more shredded and frayed, I lose more and more of my powers. My VORPPING grows feeble, my strength melts away.
By the time I wind up half-naked, I'm fully powerless. I'm just plain, power-free Elissa, clutching my suit's now-useless tatters to myself.
So, contemplate the subtle symbolism, here: In effect, I'm a superheroine who becomes less and less powerful as I show more and more skin.
Cruel Irony, The Prequel: In a Suprahuman Studies paper critically analyzing superheroine costume trends, I wrote this familiar sentence:
"A superheroine becomes less and less powerful as she shows more and more skin." College-Era Emp had no idea how true those words would be.
Sometimes, my supersuit becomes damaged in a heroically sacrificial fashion, glitteringly expending itself to save me from certain death.
Like, say, if I get nailed by Ray L. Gun's Railgun Supremo, or when Solar Flayer blasts me with his Snack-Size Coronal Mass Ejection dealie.
My suit's sacrifice allows me to survive—unharmed—kinetic and/or thermal trauma that would maul even the supertoughest "brick" of a cape.
Howeva: Afterward, I'm left mostly suitless and entirely powerless, armed with nothing mightier than a rosy, profoundly embarrassed blush.
I'm still alive (yay), but now I'm utterly at the bad guys' mercy (non-yay). Time for the rope and duct tape and stripcuffs to come out.
My one-time survivability is so well known that supervillains are wholly cavalier about hitting me with otherwise lethally powerful attacks.
Actually killing a superhero is a major violation of the community's Unwritten Rules, inviting massive and vengeful superheroic retaliation.
Thus, many bad guys tend to hesitate before unleashing überdeadly "capekilling" weaponry that would certainly vaporize most superheroes.
That hesitation? Doesn't apply to me. Knowing my one-shot invulnerability, villains happily unload raw kilotonnage on my supersuited behind.
Not kidding about the "happily" part, either. Bad Guys genuinely enjoy the no-consequences freedom of hitting me with their best supershots.
"I love fighting you!" Tachyanni gushes, duct-taping me. "It's so liberating to use max-power blasts without any worries about capekilling!"
So, Emp-savvy villains can let loose with apocalyptic attacks, secure in the knowledge that I won't die—though my powers will, temporarily.
Afterwards, with my suit ruined and my superheroine status revoked, bad guys get the thrill of tying up a pretty girl! Well, a girl, anyway.
Unfortunately, my temperamental supersuit can also be damaged in a fashion that's far from heroic. As in, VERY far from heroic.
Yeahp, the hypermembrane can stop a bullet, or a large number of bullets, or even a 120mm armor-piercing round from a tank cannon (ouchie).
But it is also—paradoxiness alert!—vulnerable to being torn asunder by a rose bush's thorns. (That actually happened, once. Again, ouchie.)
At times, the suit can be so inexplicably flimsy that anything can shred it—a nail, a cat's claws, a minion grabbing a handful and tearing.
When I hear even the teensiest "SHRIPP" of the suit's film rupturing—the scariest sound EVAR, for me—I instantly feel weak, scared, shaky.
When the membrane gets badly torn, and cold air splashes across my bared, pudgy flesh, I feel all my, um, "superness" rapidly abandoning me.
Honestly, I still have no rational explanation for the suit's bizarrely transient fragility. I do, howeva, have an irrational explanation.
I suspect my supersuit somehow directly connects to my emotional state, that it becomes physically brittle when I'm psychologically brittle.
The membrane is only delicate, fragile, and vulnerable at times because I, too, am (emotionally) delicate, fragile and vulnerable at times.
While I'm trying to be brave and bold-ish and superheroine-y, my latent insecurities and anxieties and self-doubts are always burbling away.
I worry that my innate lack of confidence is undermining my powers, that the suit's flakiness and unreliability are caused by my own flaws.
But I'm not ALWAYS a seething, weepy globule of emotional flux, okay? When I'm superheroing, sometimes I completely forget how much I suck.
Then my self-consciousness drops away, I'm swept up in the hot rush of doing-not-thinking, and the suit and I combine to kick serious ass.
I've occasionally VORPPed villains and superpummeled bad guys despite a badly damaged suit, even though I should theoretically be powerless.
This makes me wonder if I might not be stuck in a disempowering emotional feedback loop, that I only weaken because I THINK I should weaken.
I suspect that, if the supersuit were worn by a truly strong, confident, and self-actualized Elissa, it would have no weaknesses at all.
Sometimes, I despair that I'm the last girl on earth who should wear a mood-sensitive superweapon, given my truly dire emotional volatility.
<TO BE CONTINUED!>
Next time on I AM EMPOWERED: This chapter explores a few aspects of Emp's enigmatic supersuit not directly addressed in the comics, before distressed damselhood in prose form plagues our heroine.
TOMORROW ON THIS HERE PATREON: Possibly another installment of Vintage Con Sketches, though I'm not 100% sure about that.
Comments
Adam Warren
No, thank YOU for the kind words! (Though I should hasten to make sure you meant EMP vol.12, as vol.11 came out last year.) Alas, while there's cuddling and convos aplenty in EMP12, Emp still isn't getting much of a break, as the book will very likely be the most bats**t story I've ever written. (He typed, hopefully.)
K. D. Bryan
Just wanted to take a second to say that you are an amazingly talented writer and I love your unique and messy take on supeheroism. Literally nobody else has even come close to addressing stuff like body issues, self-esteem and IRL problems inherent in such an idea in the way that you have. This plus your galaxy brain sci-fi takes makes you one of my favorite writers out there. Thanks so much for writing what you write! Cannot wait for Empowered Vol 11, even if it is entirely just cuddling and conversations (I'd say poor Emp's earned a break!).
Strypgia
Hmm, so Emp is pretty _aware_ her suit's drop in powers might be psychologically-induced? She should try tests on that, like Kozue did. Even if she doesn't _feel_ it deep enough, just 'knowing' that for sure might give her a boost.
Burninator
Wait, "70s era airborne urination incident"? I thought Empverse supers didn't come onto the scene until a decent bit after the 70s. Checking the archives (Volume 3 P 29 commentary) shows that you did tentatively put the first appearance of supers after 1977 and possibly/likely after 1983, so I guess the first supers appeared in 1978 or 1979? I suppose it could also have something to do with the Empverse's moving timeframe, and that incident got moved forward with everything else.
