#nightron

[amebanworld]

Darlings fight.... in Japanese style.

I just noticed Nightbird is a Japanese sterotype, as much Windblade is... and they both have many resemblances with their so-called boyfriends.

I couldn't help, but...

[pumpkinpie59]

Transformers G1:

so here’s a ninja transformer girl! the first girl transformer in the show!

she’s so cool

and the lead villain seems to have feelings for her

how cool is that

TMNT 1987:

i’ll do you one better

here’s a ninja girl.

she easily defeats the main villain of the show! twice! he despises her!

she has TWO episodes and has a mini character arc in one of them.

and the main HERO likes her! she defeats him in battle and he’s so smitten!

and she likes him back!

look at them.

[howtohero]

#059 Souvenirs

Being a superhero is hard, grueling work. You’re constantly being punched or laser eyed or held captive by octopus monsters and that sucks. That’s not necessarily how you want to spend your time. You’d much rather be roller skating or something. So some superheroes try to make the whole situation a bit more fun by turning fighting super-crime into a hobby of sorts. They become collectors. But instead of collecting stamps or ceramic elephants they’re collecting evil eye patches and pumpkin bombs that failed to explode. They collect souvineirs er suvineres no uh, soovineers, gosh how do you spell that? [Souvenirs] Thank you!

Souvenirs from super-battles (supernirs? {nah}) can take many forms. They can range from confiscated weapons to masks or other costume pieces to straight up body parts. You see, bad guys often have a lot of cool stuff. Most of its stolen or created with slave labor or conjured up by evil magic but all of it is undeniably cool. But superheroes can’t get cool stuff the same way villains do. Because they’re not evil. But they still want the cool stuff. Because it’s cool. So they circumvent the whole morally dubious dealio by taking the cool stuff from the bad guys. You’re allowed to take cool stuff from bad guys. Getting your cool stuff stolen is one of the occupational hazards of being an actual super villain. So in a roundabout way superheroes get to take possession of all this really neat stuff. 

After a supervillain is defeated all of their stuff basically becomes up for grabs. It’s like one of those shows where they open up abandoned storage lockers and people get to bid on the cool stuff inside. Except instead of high school yearbooks and vintage pinball machines (more like pin-tage {stop}) it’s high school dark magic spell books and vintage moon lasers. Also, there’s no bidding. Unless you can find one of those superhero auctioneers we’ve mentioned before. It’s basically just a free for all. Whoever gets to the evil lair first gets the best stuff. Some superheroes will just wait around outside known lairs waiting for news to come of that villain’s defeat by some other, more proactive hero. Speedsters in particular often get the best stuff. Them and the guys who can teleport or who have access to teleporters. It’s hard to outrun a teleporter. What’s unfortunate is that the hero who actually defeats the villain often does not get the bulk of that villain’s cool stuff. They only get to keep whatever the bad guy has on them. Weapons, costumes, lucky keychains and the like. Still, stealing a villain’s mask is actually seen as highly respectable in the superhero community. Heroes with many villain masks hanging on the walls of their hideouts are considered to be very good at what they do. It’s like that old proverb says “he who amasses a large quantity of masks from the unconscious bodies of known felons will be gathered unto his people and granted great respect and honor.” (K but real talk, life-size animatronic dinosaurs are way cooler and that’s what the guys who wait by the lair get!) 

Superheroes might collect souvenirs for a number of reasons. Perhaps they do it to keep things interesting. Maybe they do it as memento. Maybe they do it so they can keep a death laser in their sitting room as a conversation starter. Maybe they do it because a giant penny is just what their hideout needed to tie the whole room together. Maybe they just do it because their super-rival started doing it and now it’s a competitive thing. Whatever your reason is, once you start collecting villain memorabilia there are a few things you need to be careful about. Sometimes villains will leave things behind because they want superheroes to take it. Perhaps that evil doodad has a bomb concealed within it or perhaps a tracker so that the bad guys can find out where you live. It’s the oldest trick in the book; the Trojan Horse. Ok, well it’s not the oldest trick in the book. The Iliad wasn’t written until 762 BC, while the earliest versions of the Epic of Gilgamesh date back to 2000 BC. So really the oldest villain scheme in the book is sending a heavenly bull down to Earth to kill the man-who-rejected-you’s best friend. But that one doesn’t come up nearly as often. 

Similarly, you should always be cautious when taking the possession of any dismembered robot parts, especially the heads. Many times supervillains can remotely access the heads of their robots and they can then use them to spy on you in your hideout. So if you’re going to take any robots or robotic body parts back as souvenirs make sure they’re either completely broken or, if they look really cool and you can’t bring yourself to take a sledgehammer to the robot’s head so it can’t spy on you, just put it in a closet or a box (like a robox {enough}) somewhere so it can’t provide any useful video footage to its evil creators.  

Some superheroes actually do the opposite of everything we’ve listed thus far and instead give out souvenirs. They hand out pins or shirts or pants (why don’t you see more people and organizations giving out souvenir pants?) with things like “I was saved by Boost: The Man from Beyond and all I got was this stupid pin/shirt/pants.” Usually they’ll even autograph it if they’re not too busy. These signed superhero memorabilia might seem kitschy (because they are) but they actually (surprisingly) command substantial prices on the secondary market. For that reason alone I’m going to have to strongly discourage doing this. If people know that if they get rescued by a superhero they might be able to make a good deal of money then they might purposely place themselves in danger. We can’t have that. That makes everybody’s jobs a lot harder. So just no free gifts when you save people’s lives. If you’re only reading this after having hundreds of novelty “I just got my life saved by Nightron he’s so dreamy” pens then maybe try handing them out to citizens who are being especially safe.

Whether you’re collecting them or handing them out, souvenirs can make superhero life more fun and interesting. It’s like turning your job into a hobby. If your job requires you to routinely fight alien gladiators haunted trains. And hey, if you managed to amass an impressive enough collection it might get placed in a museum. That’s a great way to secure your legacy! That’d be pretty neat!

[howtohero]

#021 Support Squad

Being a big-time fancy shmancy internationally renowned superhero is a lot of work. Way more work than being just your average casually-stroll-around-the-same-six-blocks-in-your-neighborhood-hoping-someone-commits-an-easily-stoppable-crime-in-your-line-of-sight superhero. But you know what they say: if you’ve got great powers you’re basically morally responsible to do lots of good stuff with them. (If someone has a catchier way of saying this please, send a telegram.) Now all this added responsibility can be overwhelming for just one measly super person. It is conceivable that you’ll need help in accomplishing your goals of ridding the entire world of crimes. (A real hero would work tirelessly to dismantle and rebuild the social and political systems that create an environment where people even need to commit crimes, but whatevers, we’ll start small.) Which mean you’re going to need to start putting together your own superhero support squad.

The members of your support squad are the people you can count on to help you foil crimes and keep people safe. They’re the trainers who help you master your powers. They’re the omni-disciplinary scientists and engineers who build you cool super-gear. They’re the guys at base who quickly google the supervillains you come up against and help you devise the best way to stop them on the fly. (They’re the literate folk who quickly read through this handy dandy guide in order to help you get through situations such as infiltrating ancient temples, filling out insurance claims for your jetpack choir, and asking other heroes out on team-up adventures.) They’re the mechanics who help upkeep your fleet of hat-themed vehicles. They’re the tailors who design dynamic and striking (and comfortable and chic) costumes. They’re the doctors and police officers and firefighters [and lawyers] who often provide key assistance. They’re the random teenagers who one time stumbled upon your hideout by accident and since you can’t just make them disappear or lock them in a cell or something you have to give them something to do so they don’t go off and tell everyone about your secret (they’re basically like the unpaid college interns of the superhero world). A hero is only as good as the people who assist him or her in the heat of a battle. So making sure you have a good superhero support squad is key.

Now, since the most effective support squad is made up of people who actually know who you are it’s important to gather people who you know you can trust. Go through your close friends and acquaintances and see which of them might be useful. A good way to determine a friend’s viability as a member of your support squad is to give them some sort of quiz or questionnaire (quizstionnaire) that covers the following areas.

1. How big is your thirst for justice?     a. I have no thirst.     b. I have some thirst.     c. I have a moderate to severe thirst.     d. UNQUENCHABLE!!!! 2. How often do you reveal the deep dark secrets of your friends to the press?     a. About once a month.     b. Basically every month which has 31 days.     c. Leap years.     d. I never have and never will not even for a million billion bazillion dollars. 3. Do you know how to build a freeze ray on a budget?     a. No.     b. Uh… what kind of quiz is this?     c. I can build a freeze ray but it will be obscenely, prohibitively,     aggressively expensive.     d. Yes. 4. If given the opportunity would you gladly spend all your time helping a superhero fight crime?     a. Yes, gladly.     b. No, can I go now?     c. All of the above.     d. Wait that last one doesn’t make any sense.

If none of your friends perform well on that quiz, or you’re just friends with incompetent people with no useful skills, you should start befriending people who will actually be useful. Once you’ve assembled the people you want on your team you need to actually take the time to mold them into a functioning unit. That means it’s camping time. Take the new squad on a team-building outdoors retreat where you all can do trust falls and tell each other your deepest darkest secrets and do practice supervillain attack drills. Have one of your new squadders play the role of a random supervillain and have the rest of your squad come together to come up with an effective strategy to defeat them. Keep repeating this with different squadders portraying different supervillains until you’ve developed a workable, timely, supervillain response system that you can confidently implement in the field.

Now, once you’ve gotten yourself a support-squad you need to take extra precautions against bad guys who seek to hurt you. Keeping the identities of the people on your squad safe and secret is just as important as keeping your own identity safe and secret. Assign everyone codenames that you can use over comms when you’re fighting. Stuff like “Googler” or “McTypey Pants” or, hell, just call them by the wrong normal people names. Call your official superhero electrician Donald something like “Matt” or “Diana.” Really as long as you’re just not calling them by their real names you’re golden. Advise your team not to put “superhero support team member” on their social media profile or on their resumes as cool as that might be. Because that will get them kidnapped, tortured and possibly killed by supervillains. Tell them not to put down “Captain Thunder” or “Nightron” as references when applying for jobs. If they still do it anyway be sure to give them a terrible reference so they don’t get the job and they learn not to pull that kind of thing again. At the same time also make sure everyone on your team has some sort of device that can alert you immediately if they are in danger. If one of your squadmates gets captured, you need to make rescuing them your top priority. Drop everything else to save your bud. If you can’t have favorites when saving people what’s even the point. Also if -worse comes to worst- one of your squaddies does crack under pressure and gives up your secret identity or the location of your hideout or your favorite guilty pleasure film, don’t hold it against them. You should’ve been there to protect them. You can’t bring a person into your secret crusade against crime and then not save them when they’re kidnapped and endangered because of it. Also like you should move. Your base is definitely compromised. Also check to see if your dude hasn’t been Trojan-Horsed into some kind of mind-controlled lackey or living bomb. Supervillains loooove their mind-controlled lackeys and living bombs. 

Once you’ve put together a quality superhero support squad you’ll no doubt find that you’re able to operate as a better and more effective superhero. People perform better when they know someone has their back and having other people to assist with the parts of city-protecting or world-saving or galaxy-defending that you might not be best equipped to handle can only help things. Sure they might get annoying sometimes. You might need to get a bigger hideout. You might not all agree on the same type of music. Karen is allergic to peanuts and insists that nobody puts anything with peanuts in the team fridge. And also someone keeps stealing Karen’s lunch from the team fridge. Probably as revenge for the peanut thing. Maybe you should just invest in two fridges for your hideout. One with peanuts and one for Karen because she’s making things difficult but at the same time you’ve never seen a better mutant toucan trainer than her and it’s not like you’re going to give up your mutant toucan sidekick. Lots of little annoying things that you may need to deal with. But overall having a support squad means you can save more people and be better at doing it, and really isn’t that the whole point.