Heros Ex Machina

"Si Dieu n'existait pas, il faudrait l'inventer."

Voltaire


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Major spoiler alert for Pillars of Eternity 1's ending.
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One of your first adventures in Pillars of Eternity (#1) has you infiltrating Raedric's Hold to speak with and/or murderize Lord (coincidentally enough) Raedric. You can either fight your way through or sneak to him with minimal combat by helping one of his two advisors kill the other. And you thought workplace competition was cut-throat in capitalist societies. One of your choices of ally, Nedmar, is a priest and loyal old follower of the Raedrics. He speaks softly, inhabits a cozy study on the castle's top floor and though it breaks his heart, asks you to do what's best for the suffering people of his land even if it means siding with the plucky rebel resistance and killing the now tyrannical Raedric. The other choice, Osrya, is a disfigured, monomaniacal loner mad scientist haunting the castle's dungeon alongside her army of zombies and other fleshly abominations. She wants you to preserve Raedric no matter what atrocities he's committed (and will continue to commit) since he's paying her bills.

Kind of seems like an open and shut case of classic good/evil roleplaying choices, except for the unexpected twist of the woman being on the selfish "evil" side. Their interpretations of their nation's calamity remain in character. Nedmar the priest says you have to appease the gods while Osrya the scientist says it's the fault of mortal villains acting via technological means. It turns out Osrya was absolutely 110% correct and Nedmar was talking out of his ass. In fact even Nedmar's entire pantheon were secretly manufactured by an ancient civilization in order to bring the whole world together under one faith.

Religion is psychologically safe. It's a cozy upstairs study. Lets you feel taken care of. Saves you the trouble of thinking for yourself. "God did it" makes a convenient explanation - for whatever. Unfortunately it's also a very, very lazy non-explanation leaving you with the inevitable question of who or what, in turn, did that God thing in the first place, or at least "why did God do it?" It fails to answer anything satisfactorily, not only from a scientific perspective but from a storytelling one.

We've had fantasy storytelling forever. Folklore is replete with epic poems, fairytales and fables in which things happen "just because" some inscrutable supernatural will wills it so. About the second half of the 19th century, western society became increasingly aware of the value of rationalism, of knowing just how things work, and its literature branched out to reflect this growing consciousness through science and detective fiction. By the time superhero comics became a thing of their own in the 1940s such fiction had undergone decades' worth of pulping. The public was all too willing to revert back to its golden oldie superstitions. Nevertheless, Batman grew out of detective thrillers like The Shadow and Superman was among other things a logical reversal of pulp SF's planetary romances. Through the Silver Age, most of the most memorable superheroes like Spider-Man, Flash, The X-Men, Iron Man stood out against previous centuries' background of mystical superheroes like Siegfried and Herakles for embracing 20th century science, albeit superficially. Superheroes are demi-dei ex machina, emphasis on the machina.

This may seem like splitting hairs. Siegfried bathes in dragon blood, Spidey gets injected with spider spit, po-tay-toe / po-tah-toe, who cares, it's really all about punching stuff. The justifications for superheroes' powers withstand little more scrutiny than mystical babbling anyway... but that little counts for a lot. When you dream up kryptonite you're creating a substance with physical properties, and its role in the story is constrained by those properties. Fans begin to ask questions. Good questions. Like, what's its density? Valence shell? How exactly did so much of the stuff make it to Earth given the inverse-square law? Or where in the original planet's crust did it come from? What's its LD50 if Supes eats some on toast? In a hamburger with ketchup? In a homeopathic distillation? The same kind of inquisitiveness is not prompted by the unanswered questions of why, for example, Nessus' blood was poisonous in the first place and how many species could it affect (could it penetrate the skin of Achilles / Siegfried?) how long is its half-life sitting in Deianeira's amphora or krater or whatever, what exactly are its pharmacokinetics and renal clearance, etc.
Meh. Who cares. Centaurs are just weird like that, dude. Whatever, brah. God(s) did it.

Science is messy. It gets its hands dirty. "Scientific" explanations in fiction quite often reek of the sewer and cause no end of efforts at cleaning up some writer's spewing buzz-words like "gamma rays" or "ruby quartz" or whatever the hell Flash is snorting. Comes with the territory. Unfortunately, superhero comics were littered from the start with truly supernatural supes like witches, gods, amazons and Atlanteans, but they used to take a back seat. Used to. I take it as a sign of our times that the biggest names in superhero movies since last decade have become Thor vs. Loki and Wonder Woman vs. Ares, and that Spider Man was apparently retconned to have been bitten by a magic spider-pixie or some bullshit instead of a radioactive spider. As each generation since WWII degenerates farther and farther into anti-intellectualism, it becomes more and more susceptible to facile, shallow mysticism instead of facile, shallow technobabble. And yes, there are degrees to facile and shallow, even among punch-drunk comic book characters. "Abracadabra" is still lazier than even half-assed technobabble.

Games and gamers have the potential to turn this nocive flood around. To actively play a game instead of passively absorbing a story is to deal with game mechanics. Even with god-moding enemies, you're more likely to ask yourself how expansive exactly is Almalexia's mana pool, or how many total 9th-level spells per day Talona can hand out to all her most toxic players. You start thinking of the dice rolls behind the squinting and grunting of magical conflicts. Your fictional setting might need gods, sure; it might need the influence of vastly superhuman wilful forces. But it is important to root these forces in mechanistic vulnerabilities, even if the mechanics are not fully explained. If you must have gods then manufacture them, in universe, by means accessible to others within the same universe. Start assembling superpowers from nuts and bolts instead of starting with a "flying brick"effect and then trying to justify it. As unpleasant as Osrya seems, remember she is ultimately right, and her methodology infinitely more likely to yield coherent answers than kindly old Nedmar's kow-towing before his own tulpas.

You want to write better superheroes? Game the system.