Is There a Specific What to Superhero Status?

“What are the ways to create a superhero?” According to This American Life, a human mind is the only thing that can create one. They don’t explicitly state this in the two acts I watched; in fact, in the radio show the question is rhetorical and it is used only to introduce Zora: a woman who molded herself into a hero using a to-do list.  Despite this, in both Act 2 and Act 4 of this episode on superheroes, the creation of superpowers is a thing of the mind. Zora does it by writing a to-do list of everything that a superhero needed to be in her head, and then setting out to do every single one of the things she wrote down (these include learning to drive a helicopter, martial arts, weaponry, and CPR amongst others). The twins portrayed in Act 4 are completely different, it is the minds of people around them that created their hero status. They were seen as the two child super heroes of God’s Army in Burma mainly because God’s Army needed a way to gain more followers and instigate fear in those who challenged them. Everyone who knew the Htoo twins claimed that they had seen them using a super power of some sort. If they just knew about the Htoo twins they could easily narrate various stories about what the twelve-year-old kids could do in battle. There is only one way to create areal life superhero and that is making people (this maybe other people or yourself) believe that you are. It’s all a mind game. The real question is: What makes a superhero?

In her heroic dreams Zora saw herself as a woman who is powerful above any law of nature. She has impossibly long silver hair and a voice that sounds almost musical to anyone who hears it. In her dreams it is the magic tattoo that gives her powers. In real life she doesn’t have silver hair and she is not powerful past the laws of nature. Her powers aren’t granted to her by a tattoo (even though she does have one), they are granted to her by years of hard work and practice that she went through to achieve everything on her list. The Htoo twins in Burma know that they are special and they talk as if they were heroes, but it is mainly a craving for all the love and attention they never get in reclusion with the army. Unlike Zora, in the twins’ case it is other people and stories that give them power rather than any true accomplishment of theirs. In Zora’s case what makes her a hero is everything she did with the idea of helping people in mind, it is everything she still does to help people despite being rejected from her dream job at the CIA. In the twins’ case what makes them heroes is the fear they have instilled in other for the sake of God’s Army and the war stories they are stars in.

So what makes someone a hero? Some would argue it’s the urge to do good for the community. Some would argue it is the possession of a power that other human beings do not. Some would say it is doing things that others wouldn’t do, not necessarily good… just different. Today the word hero has even been used to highlight someone being funny or to encompass situations that wouldn’t be considered heroic in the traditional sense (ex: “Everything the teacher did he did the opposite, and then outsmarted all of her arguments. What a hero.”) 

In today’s society there is really no all-encompassing hero character because of these varying definitions of what it is to be “super”. In other words, a person may be a hero only to a certain population while being a neutral persona or even a representation of evil for others. This is why we find so much controversy around characters like Chavez and Petro in politics and such varied opinions about musicians like Bono and Shakira. This is also why soldiers are considered both villains and heroes, depending on which side of the conflict they are fighting for and which side you ask.  In the end, a defined thing creates a superhero, but there is no defined characteristic that all superheroes share precisely due to the previous fact. The mind creates a superhero; the mind gives it the characteristics it wants. No two minds will dream up the same superhero.