- The reason Syndrome found all the other supers first (including Frozone) was because Bob kept getting fired from his jobs, forcing the government to wipe his existence from multiple companies and forcing his family to move each time that happened. He unintentionally saved his family by forcing them to relocate so often.
- Two of the biggest differences between the two versions of “go home, Buddy” is the focus, and length. In Mr Incredible’s version, “Go Home, Buddy” is a midpoint, a random event that just happened to stick because it was weirdly specific, and it was right before the important parts. The attempted suicide, train crash, and wedding are much more important because those were more important to Mr Incredible (since the first two ended the superhero movement, and the last was his wedding). Buddy, on the other hand, only flashes back to “Go home, Buddy”. Which is weird because Buddy almost died later that night from a bomb on his cape, and he almost killed dozens of people on a train by dropping a bomb on them, and because of that, he was indirectly responsible for the death of supers. All three of those things should be much more important to Buddy, but it’s a sign of his psychosis that the one thing he remembers is not Mr Incredible saving his life, or his life being in danger, but instead Mr Incredible rejecting him. Buddy was unstable, and an extremely unreliable narrator who edited out massive chunks of his own story to better justify his hero syndrome.
- Also, on a more sobering note, some have brought up how Incredibles 2 seems a step down from Incredibles 1, and while that’s arguable, there’s some related bits in there I’d like to mention. You know how there were a slew of superhero’s in the movie for when they made superhero-ing legal again?
Notice anything funny about that lineup? Anything at all? Okay, here’s a hint then. How many of these heroes were working before heroes got banned? How many of these new heroes are from Mr Incredible’s era?
Frozone, Elastigirl, and Mr Incredible are the only ones who were active before the ban, or more specifically, were left from those active before the ban.
Think about it, Elastigirl was on the news basically continuously, there was a UN declaration on supers, any super left who had even been five degrees of separation away from Elastigirl back in their heyday would’ve come up to talk to her and her movement. But when Elastigirl was brought in to meet other supers, she didn’t know any of them.
And it’s not like she and Bob were loners who never interacted with anyone, look at their wedding day, it’s packed to the gills with capes (and possibly some secret identities too):
Syndrome happened. This isn’t just some serial killer picking people at random, Syndrome systematically wiped out an entire community of people, arguably, an entire generation of supers, since Violet, Dash, and Jack-Jack seem to be the only kid-supers in existence.
That’s why Elastigirl is so emotional when she’s introduced to these new supers, she thought her people, barring her family and Frozone, were wiped out by Syndrome. And in a way…they were.
Nobody’s left from her era of superheroics. None of her old friends survived. It’s just her, Bob, and Frozone left out of what was once a thriving, vibrant community. All those bright lights snuffed out because some kid couldn’t handle being rejected but his hero.
- Honestly, this allegory kind of brings to mind the AIDS crisis and the gay community. A “syndrome” almost specifically targeting a subset of the population with a flair for dramatic outfits and superheroics, picking off members one by one until the population is decimated. The members of the community have to intervene themselves to slow/stop this “syndrome” because the government, which was supposed to protect them, is unaware of, or is blatantly ignoring the crisis until it starts hurting the “normal” community. Because of this “syndrome” there’s just this gap in this community, where an entire generation is just…missing…with the few survivors having to counsel the new, untouched generation, and helping them achieve widespread support and acceptance they could only dream of.
- Side note: I just realized something. Take a look at Syndrome’s kill list:
And take a look at that wedding shot again.
If it’s to hard to tell, at least four of the people Syndrome killed were at Bob’s wedding.
Mr Incredible wasn’t watching supers getting killed, he was watching his friends getting killed. People he trusted enough to share his secret identity with people he trusted enough to share his wife’s secret identity with. Hell, our poor boy Gazerbeam got a front row seat with Edna and their NSA agent that’s usually reserved for family only.
And that’s bad enough, but something else occurred to me, Bob and Helen clearly haven’t been keeping in close contact with their superheroic friends, Bob asks Frozone if he’s been keeping in contact with Gazerbeam, implying they haven’t talked in a while.
Additionally, Bob’s life, and the superhero community’s life, went tits up basically immediately after his wedding night. So if there was any point for them to stop talking with other supers, it’d be then.
It means, in all likelihood that when Mr Incredible looked at that list of dead friends and superheroes, he realized with growing horror that, his wedding?
The happiest point of his life?
That was the last time Mr Incredible saw his friends alive.
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