In this thing I am working on, only Americans have superpowers*. Not many American, mind you, there are less than a thousand or so known powers.

This is down to what empowered them to begin with, although that is not widely known, being kept for the public. But the spin off effects of this end being pretty substantial.

America is the only…..er, superpower superpowers, which makes us a target and causes some tensions even with our allies. It’s also lead to attempts to recreate the powers, although this hasn’t met with any known success. 

But what ends up being really plot relevant is it’s one of two big reasons the US is keeping the three extremely powerful (and nuts) first generation supers alive. They are, essentially, the nuclear option.

Which is actually how they’re treated in the book. They’re powerful enough to murder cities individually, and they’re several orders of magnitude more powerful than the known second generation supers (these facts are connected).

The other reason is the second generation supers themselves, as the original three are kept as a possibly controllable weapon if one of them starts to manifest power on the level of the gen ones. 

The tricky bit is presenting this to be the reader. Basically, what’s going on in the book as that the second gens (which as far as the public knows, are the ONLY gen) are being presented, very deliberately, as comic book and movie style super heroes. 

This is to keep the public from panicking, but it’s also a distraction for exactly how unstable the appearance of super powers have made the world. 

It’s not that the powers themselves are that destabilizing – the gen twos are as yet nowhere near that strong – but government reaction to them is. 

Which is fairly complex. But it’s part of theme of the book, which is KINDA (there are a few themes) the idea of American Exceptionalism versus the ugly reality.

(Which is also reflected in the gen one’s versus gen two’s – basically the former are black ops soldiers given Justice League level powers, whereas the gens two’s are basically Instagram influencers and reality stars with powers, which is basically a stand in for military power versus cultural propaganda)

Be cool if I can pull it off though.

*Well, actually, the empowering event happened in America, but some people in the country and with the right physical circumstances were affected, but this is not widely known.