6 Superheroes Whose Lives Would Be Terrible IRL

No question, this would be the best power to have in real life. You get a text from Mom saying that she's coming over, and you can clean up your whole apartment in less time than it takes to message her back "OK." You'd never miss another delivery, no matter how little time the FedEx driver spent between leaving a note on your door and sprinting back to the van.

But spare a thought for Quicksilver, whose entire life would be a hell of waiting for ordinary humans to go about their slow-ass business ... to the point where it's hard to imagine he'd maintain his sanity.

They kind of make a joke of it in Days Of Future Past. When the X-Men first meet him, Quicksilver has a difficult time defeating boredom, between playing a game of ping-pong against himself, playing video games, watching television, and pick-pocketing Wolverine, all within less than a minute. But they are drastically understating the problem. The comics go into it a bit more -- there, Quicksilver has a therapist, to whom he describes the nightmare of his day-to-day life, like waiting behind someone to use a banking machine or standing in line at Burger King.

"Whopper farts seem like they take days to leave a room for me."
"Nah, that's how it is for us, too."

But even that is barely scratching the surface. Remember, he can move so fast that bullets appear to hang in mid-air, and he thinks at that speed as well. He's able to make decisions, to be present in that moment, at a thousand or ten thousand times normal speed. In other words, he doesn't think of himself as fast; he thinks of the rest of us as statues. For Quicksilver, standing in line at a grocery store would last the equivalent of years.

Bleached hair and goatees are back in style -- that's how far ahead he is.

Also, forget about normal relationships. Conversations would involve waiting hours for the next word to come out. This isn't just an annoyance, either. The brain needs stimulation -- stick a prisoner in solitary confinement for a while and they quickly lose the ability to form rational thoughts. It doesn't matter that, unlike the prisoners, he's free to interact with other people, because we're not people to him. We're snails. He'd never find anyone he could socialize with at his own pace. DC would never give up the rights.

Think about how many times this would come up in an average day. What if his elevator is busted? We hope he has an audio book, because it'll be a slow climb up those stairs (with frequent breaks) if he's going to avoid exerting himself and shapeshifting into a being of pure destruction, putting hundreds of innocent lives at risk. He also presumably can't have any caffeine, and as far as entertainment is concerned, he should probably stay away from horror movies, because he wouldn't want to get too scared ... or excited ... or laugh too hard ... hell, better stay away from movies altogether.

Except for Ang Lee's Hulk. That would knock him out, easy.

And this is all the stuff he can control. He still has to worry about nightmares, which are a real possibility, considering he lives in a world where monsters and alien invasions are a thing. Hell, even getting sick is a risk, because even a fever will increase your heart rate. Shit, at this point it's probably easier to stay in Hulk form all the time. That sounds like the less stressful option.

A perfect 10 on the Deadpool scale.

And why not? It's all based on fictional technology anyway. He has an infinite power supply and the tech to make tiny jets that fit in his palm. Hell, we'll probably have those things in the next 30 years or so! What Tony did not upgrade, however, is his squishy human body. Therein lies the problem.

Ever been in a car crash? Or even braked suddenly to avoid hitting a squirrel that clearly wanted to die? Your car stops, but your body keeps going -- that's basic conservation-of-momentum stuff. That's why your car is equipped with a whole bunch of technologies designed specifically to prevent you from becoming a human missile launched or having to wear your steering wheel as a necklace for the duration of your trip to the emergency room. If you're not wearing your seat belt, a sudden stop at a mere 30 miles an hour is enough to put your head through the goddamned windshield.

Or in his case, his whole body through the car.

Now imagine a sudden stop -- like the one Tony does above -- at 10 or 20 times that speed. Or imagine all the times we've seen Stark outright crash into hard surfaces at full speed, often due to having been flung into it by the Hulk. It doesn't matter if the machine around you is made of a perfectly indestructible substance, because your body is going to run into the machine. And that kinetic energy gets transferred right into your bones and organs. This is the problem the NFL has with concussions, by the way; no matter how advanced the helmet, the problem is that the brain is still bouncing around inside the skull every time it comes to a sudden stop against a 250-pound linebacker. And that's without having several tiny jet engines strapped to their bodies.

So to imagine what happens during Stark's mach-speed landings/crashes, take a carton of eggs and throw it against the wall as hard as you can. Now picture that inside of an Iron Man costume.

Like this, but all the time.

And then there's the pure stress all of this eating puts on his system. The fact that he relies on calorie-dense food explains why Allen is shown stuffing his face so often with pizza and ice cream, but eating nothing but grease is a great way to land yourself in the emergency ward before you hit 30, superpowers be damned. His body still has to figure out what to do with all of the salt, cholesterol, and fiber he takes in. On top of the stress on his liver, kidneys, etc, he's going to be shitting constantly.

Every public restroom in Central City looks like Trainspotting now.

If you haven't heard of this, you might think we're overstating the problem for the sake of comedy. A plane is metal, a bird is meat and feathers. Wouldn't the latter simply bounce off, leaving a faint red smear behind? That's the magic of velocity, though. Given the speed at which your average plane is traveling, even hitting something as small and fleshy as a parrot is enough to make it look like it was hit by a goddamn anti-aircraft gun, as these photos from a bird-struck passenger jet in Namibia attest:

Alas, the bird can't attest to much these days.

And keep in mind, that's a plane the birds could see and try to avoid. Wonder Woman's Invisible Jet doesn't give any nearby wildlife any such warning. Also, even if the plane is somehow super-strong and immune to bird damage, it's still going to be covered in a thick coat of bird gore long before it reaches its destination. Which, you know, kind of defeats the purpose of having an invisible plane in the first place.

Because that's normal-sounding at annual stockholder meetings.

Oddly enough, that explanation is even weirder than if they'd just said he built the stuff himself. It's one thing for Bruce Wayne to spend his personal fortune on a Batmobile. This is America, after all, and he can buy what he wants. Instead he's cooking the books of a corporation, to embezzle not cash but military-grade weaponry. Even if Al Qaeda doesn't exist in the Batman universe, domestic terrorism sure as hell does (and is a weekly occurrence). You don't think the federal government has anyone in charge of keeping track of these stray weapons systems? This is top-of-the-line technology, too. Even if they weren't afraid of terrorism, they'd want to keep it out of the hands of the Russians or Chinese.

This is the property damage a good guy is capable of inflicting with one of these.

There would be a bitter fight over which huge agency would have the pleasure of nailing Wayne Enterprises to the wall. The Department of Defense? FBI? ATF? IRS? FTC? Homeland Security? Fooling them all would take an army of accountants and lawyers, all of them willing to be accomplices to several felonies.

Sure, there's a sequence in The Dark Knight in which a consultant stumbles across the discrepancy in their books, but Lucius and Wayne are able to shut him up and the problem goes away. But even without that guy around, you'd expect Wayne Enterprises' monthly shareholder meetings to include more than a few awkward silences when some bureaucrat admits that yet another billion dollars has mysteriously disappeared, while on an apparently unrelated note, a masked vigilante has been spotted piloting a nuclear speedboat that uncannily resembles the one their company designed, albeit with giant bat wings added to the back.

"Eh, great minds or whatever ..."

Tara Marie writes.

For more reasons being a superhero probably isn't all that great, check out 6 Awesome Superpowers (That Would Suck In Real Life) and 7 Awesome Superpowers (Ruined by Science).

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