Is It The Superhero's World, Or Are They Just Living In It?

This post originally started as one thing, but I realized there was a more interesting direction for it to go.

During Dwayne McDuffie's stint on Fantastic Four, he was handed a bit of a rough situation. It came immediately after Civil War, when the team had fragmented. Reed had been Pro-Reg, Sue and Johnny switched to the Anti-Reg side about the time Reed and Stark unveiled Murderous Clone Thor, and Ben left the country for a time, unwilling to fight his government or his friends. So McDuffie had to try and patch things up between them, and try and explain why Reed would produce things like Clor and the Negative Zone prison.

The solution he went with was that Reed made psychohistory work. He'd read Asimov's books as a boy, and he tried to make it a reality. At some point, he succeeded, and his actions were an attempt to keep things on what seemed the path least likely to result in disaster. This seems sort of reasonable on the surface, and I do find it kind of cute to think of teenage Reed trying to work out the math behind psychohistory during 3rd period Spanish, or something.

There's a possible hitch, though. In the Foundation series, the flaw in psychohistory is it can't account for random individuals. Large groups of people are predictable, a single person is not. This is how the arrival of the Mule throws everything off, because he's a solitary individual with incredible psionic power, and Hari Seldon's calculations could not account for him*.

Now consider the Marvel Universe. There are dozens of people on Earth alone equal to the Mule's power in one way or the other. The Hulk, Dr. Strange, Apocalypse, Dr. Doom, the High Evolutionary. There are abstract concepts such as Death which are aware and occasionally take an active hand in the universe's proceedings. You have things the Celestials, whose true goals are unclear. You have people falling into toxic waste and developing powers every whipstitch. Time travelers, people from alternate timelines or other universes entirely. Reed Richards himself has shaped the course of the universe more than once. He convinced people to help save Galactus once. Imagine how differently things might go if he hadn't.

Given all these individuals, how can psychohistory work? Can't their powers give them a disproportionate level of control, to the point large groups of people are essentially meaningless? I mean, humans as a group have been trying to exterminate mutants for years. Legally, illegally, camps, giant robots, smear campaigns, using other mutants against them, whatever, none of it worked. The Scarlet Witch, by herself, came closer than all those groups ever had.

Then it occurred to me. Readers of serial comics talk about illusion of change. We also talk about how the genius characters never seem to use their big brains to fix the problems their world (and our own) has. And it's because the writers want to keep the world fairly recognizable to the audience, I presume so things they want to have stand out will. So things may go in a different direction for a time, but eventually, inevitably, they cycle back around. Mutant population was devastated, mutant population is reborn. The government trusts heroes, then it doesn't, then it does.

So what if that's point McDuffie was making? Superheroes and villains, for all their power, don't really make any sort of impact on the world? Or if they do, they cancel each other out? The nature of their stories prevents them from making any lasting change, so any permanent changes we (the audience) see in the Marvel Universe will be a reflection of the changes that come about in our own world, as writers attempt to continue representing the world outside our doors.

In-story, it would come down to Reed having determined that the superpowered individuals will have sufficiently different and opposing goals that they'll all stop each other from accomplishing anything. Which leaves the way open to the masses to determine the path, or be lead down it, if someone knows how to game the system. Say, someone who can predict what those masses will do. Like Reed Richards**.

* Given Seldon's Second Foundation was staffed by psionics, I'm left wondering what it was about the Mule that was so successful. Was it the strength of the Mule's talents, that they couldn't find him and draw him into their organization, or the fact that he set his eyes on galactic conquest? You would think, if Seldon had a group of psionics dedicated to keeping the Plan on course, there would be some way to predict their occurrence and account for it.

** I feel like McDuffie sort of of touched on this in a time travel sense. This is going off a vague memory, so it could be wrong. Reed says one person going back in time can't cause a sufficient difference as to change things, but if a large group of people go back, they just create an alternate timeline. Apparently the optimal number of people needed to change the outcomes without causing divergent timelines was 4.