#076 Prioritizing
Not all crimes and crises are created equal. A pick pocketing on the corner of Jewel and Main doesn’t warrant the same response or attention as a meteor shower at Buckingham Palace. The day the aliens invade Earth is gonna be the same day all the banks get robbed and that’s ok. As a superhero you need to master the skills of prioritizing and planning proportional responses.
Depending on your power-set and your levels of experience, certain jobs might simply be beneath you. And not even in an arrogant way! I’m not saying that you should stick up your nose at people asking you for help because they’re not cool enough for you or that if an old-lady is being purse-snatched right before your very eyes you shouldn’t do anything. But if you’re able to prevent volcanoes from erupting or you specialize in fighting rogue AIs and you get a call to do something like that then maybe don’t make twenty-seven pit-stops to help cats out of trees or to fight the Rambunctious-Red-Light-Runner (who, by the way, never commits any other crimes and is literally never worth anybody outside of traffic cops’ time) on your way to where the AIs are forcing a volcanic event.
If you’re part of a large superhero team the team should be divided into different units that can deal with different level events. When an Omega Class Threat (say, a robot dinosaur or a walking, talking, cartoonishly anthropomorphized nuclear bomb) strolls out into a densely populated area you shouldn’t send the same guys that you would send to fight Smuggles or the Glorious Gobstopping Gumball Gladiator or other starter-villains™. Different heroes are just built for different things. And that’s ok! All levels of super-crimes are occurring all the time! There’s definitely always something for everyone to do. You just need to make sure the super-communities resources are being deployed efficiently.
If possible the smartest superhero (or superhoes if you have a bunch of them just lying around) in your universe should bench themselves from the field and devote all their time to determining which superheroes would do best in every specific situation. Possibly they should even try downloading their consciousness into a computer for maximum efficiency? Do we think that’s a thing they’d be willing to do? Or if not maybe they should download a computer into their brain. If that kind of thing is possible. I’m not really sure that it is, it’s not like people have USB ports in their heads (maybe that’s what nostrils are for {nostrils are for smelling parenthetical voice, not for sticking flash-drives, we’ve been over this} excuse me who even invited you to this blog????) If you don’t have anybody who’s willing to dedicate their lives to this incredibly important and noble pursuit, then everybody else in the super-community is going to have to pick up the slack. Thanks a lot smart-people, your unwillingness to give up all your energy, free time, and some of your brain’s real estate, has forced everybody else to take stock of their own abilities!
Each superhero needs to honestly evaluate their own strengths and weaknesses to determine which combat situations they’d be best suited for. Hydrokinetic superheroes (that’s people who can control water) or people who can turn their bodies into the form of water (like the form of an ice-unicycle or a bucket of water) should be sent to deal with fires or beached whales. On the flippity floppity, pyrotechnician superheroes (that’s people who operate fireworks) should be called into deal with any Fourth of July related crimes (like if someone steals the Declaration of Independence or if someone drops a giant soapbox into the middle of Philadelphia and then gets up on it and starts ranting about “Fourth of July” being an example of the date-month-year method of saying dates that several countries including our former oppressors, the tyrannical Great Britain use and calling Independence Day anything but “July Fourth” is unpatriotic and then fires an AK-47 into the air as is their constitutional right).
Proper prioritizing can lead to not only a more efficient way of fighting crimes and dealing with catastrophes but also a safer way of doing it. Brad the Radioactive Man (don’t try calling him the Bradioactive Man, he does not appreciate it) is great for fighting giant nuclear monsters but he’d be no good for fighting off Knife-Man, the man who is made entirely out of containment-suit-piercing-knives. A fight like that would potentially cause a nuclear detonation. That’s not what we’re going for. Generally, when superheroes show up somewhere they are not trying to cause a nuclear detonation. That is almost always the rule. Someone whose skin is too tough to be pierced by knives such as Rockblock, the seven-armed rock-man, would be way more effective at dealing with Knife-Man. (Plus, under the rock-paper-scissor clause of reality, he’s guaranteed to win!)
Other events would be better dealt with by just regular law-enforcement, to the point where the appearance of a superhero would actually serve to escalate the situation. Cops can actually be pretty good at fighting crimes or deescalating hostage situations. And they do it all without wearing flamboyant costumes. How interesting.