Reddit Asks..
Why are superheroes inhumanely strong and fast while the bad villains are “evil geniuses”? My favourite answers are:
- Partly to appeal to the average person, who can wrap their mind around the concept of faster and/or stronger, but will never really understand genius without being one, and partly because people reading/watching escapist media would prefer to speed or smash things to vent their frustration, rather than think about their problems.
- Because then the hero would have to save the world using his genius brain, and comic book writers aren’t smart enough to come up with the kind of solutions a genius would. So it boils down to intellectual laziness on the part of the comic writers. So much easier to just show your hero smashing something than it is to come up with a compelling plot that requires the use of brainpower to work out.
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Though Professor X is a genius, his mental abilities are pretty much brute force. He forces his mind onto others and controls them, or manipulates their memories, or reads their thoughts. That’s not really an application of intelligence. It doesn’t take a genius to read someone’s mind.
In fact, most mental abilities have nothing at all to do with intelligence.
