Thanks to Darrel Miller for the heavy lifting here. Check out his expansion pack for the CC&VF tabletop RPG.Got a super villain problem? Need to “eliminate” the threat when faced with complicated geo-political circumstances? Not sure how to get it done without escalating the situation?
I’ve got a few ideas you’re welcome to…
- The leader of a threatened nation that is meeting to negotiate with the villain in their sinister lair could have an explosive device surgically implanted that would explode during a scheduled meeting. It would be best if the device replaced an existing, known medical implant, i.e., an artificial hip, so as to avoid tipping off the scoundrel. When calculating yield, go overboard. Nothing angers an arch-enemy more than almost being killed. Of course, ’tis a noble sacrifice on the part of the official who chooses this most ultimate of tasks. We should honor that.
- When the villain is showing off their tank full of sharks with lasers on their frickin’ heads, kick them in. Despicables such as these are frequently so over-confident that they thoughtlessly place themselves in easily exploited positions, believing that their target would never suspect that they are the lunch. If said villain has managed to protect themselves from the sharks, sacrifice yourself. It’s highly unlikely that, in the mad scrum of blood and gore, the sharks could limit their fervor for feeding.
- If Mein Führer appears to have thought of all potential soft vectors their adversaries might employ in an effort to stop their advances without engaging in outright battle, bomb them. The problem might be that they’d have access to an advanced weapon that, even if they were eliminated, could still wreck untold destruction. To bypass that potential, carry a number of bunker busters into the upper atmosphere on giant balloons, deploy them on giant, remotely controllable ram-air parachutes, and drop them when over the target or targets. Location intelligence here is key, so work your double-agents and spy agencies hard.
- Travel forward in time to get an older, mostly broken version of your foe and take him to his young self to use as leverage to convince the junior villain to travel forward in time to kill his older self, thereby preventing the wreck that he would become. If the villain’s future turns out annoyingly positive, you can shift to another dimension where things didn’t work out and engineer your desired outcome, but then… you’d be the villain. If any of this makes sense, you get a cookie. It will be delivered via Einstein-Rosen Bridge portal services LLC. Please make sure someone was/is/will be there to sign for the package.
- For those of you with a bent for the subtle, long game with an unknowable outcome, try using public education as a trojan. With a bespoke curriculum designed to gently guide each subsequent generation towards very specific ideological precepts, you can steer the populace towards the opinion you want the public court to espouse. When the time comes for that inevitable super villain’s appearance, you’ll have already set the groundwork, at which point the populace will have determined how best to eliminate the future threat… Maybe.
- Finally, lots of people have power suits to make them strong, but how many have built a power suit designed to keep a baddie under control? Simply design a highly complex, mobile, armored suit powered by a super-computer-grade A.I. that will stop said villain from being able to do anything but eat & drink, keep clean, and watch hundreds of hours of Night Court, Cheers, and 3rd Rock from the Sun. Racquetball on Tuesdays is mandatory. Don’t be late (not that they have any choice, of course.)
Nobody likes a villain, but that doesn’t really matter because, despite our likes and dislikes, the world doesn’t work like that and we get baddies. Period. Full stop. In fact, they appear to be about as common as your standard, every-day, shit-eating housefly. While our “fortune” regarding the percentage of villains who have achieved “success” has leaned in favor of less mass-murdery types for several decades, there are still plenty petty, self-important tyrants about to spoil most anyone’s day/year/millennia.
And they do, with alarming frequency.
There’s no simple answer to the question of how to deal with a super villain as each is unique and brings their own set of conundrums heroes need to mitigate or manage somehow. If there were easy fixes, we’d not be facing the situation in Ukraine in 2022. But not everyone agrees that other humans have the right to be free or choose their path or just to have the opportunity to take another breath. It’s terrible. We watch the carnage on TV all day long and feel like we have no power to foment change while it appears the villains have all the power to get away with whatever they want…
…then again, I could rant for days. So I won’t.
I’ll leave you with two thoughts:
- If you get enough people to believe in the potential of some concept or thing, you can make it real. Just having the idea isn’t enough and no single person is enough to surmount any and all problems on the road to willing it into existence. It takes a village, quoth he with spite roiling on the tip of his tongue at his need to utter her words, after all. The Randian “John Galt” is an unobtainable mythos. We can’t have it, and the efforts being made in the attempt will destroy the world as we know it, unless we stop it as a collective of peoples who may not share the same ideologies, but do share the desire for our cultures to continue, in peace. I’m not suggesting it will be easy, but we could start with a) not killing each other for a while and b) getting people housed, fed, productive, and inoculated, not necessarily in that order and not as severe as I make it sound. That and trying to save our planet from ourselves should keep us busy for a few decades.
- Money isn’t real. It’s a disease, but it’s like the common cold or the flu; we know how to fight it even though it keeps coming back for more. We just have to manage it better until people get used to money being as meaningless as it ever was and get on with the business of progressing as a species. Oh, I’d say about 1,200 years of solid work should put a good dent in the problem. That’s going to take a lot of hero-types who will step forward and stand up for logical, meaningful, humanist policies instead of forever bending our knees to our corporate overlords. Your first target is stupidity. And because stupidity is so stupid, you will have to be ruthless. It’s only fair, since ruthless is all they’ve been to the rest of us, especially since most of us oppressed have been making their world turn for decades. And by ruthless I don’t mean violent, just that you need to stop letting their stupid run the show. This also means that you must also stop money from being the loudest asshole in the room. If I figure out how, I’ll write it down, but for now people far smarter than me should already have some ideas.
Of course, and I think this goes without saying, if you ever get the opportunity to kick the villain into a volcano, just do it.
Why the hell not? What’s the worst thing that could happen? World War III?
PS: ^^^