Politics are exhausting

Politics are exhausting.

I understand why someone might not want it in their fiction.

So why put politics in a superhero novel?

Superheroes are political.

Not necessarily partisan or ideological. But they are stories about power, authority, justice, responsibility, and the society we build around those things.

Even if your heroes are virtuous, what happens if the laws that define justice are shifted in their meaning?

The villains in my world figure out how systems work and try to capture those systems. They are architects who try to make or bend systems to their benefit, while offloading the horror and the moral injury to those systems. Steinbeck argued that the system is a faceless monster. I would argue that people build systems to benefit the few at the expense of the many, and then the benefactors hide behind it.

When people get evicted because the rent outpaces income, it’s fair market value. When a single parent can’t afford daycare, it’s median household income. When a family making sixty thousand dollars need food assistance, they need to budget better and get rid of their phones. When a family making two hundred and fifty thousand dollars faces a proposed two percent tax increase, it’s financially ruinous not just to the family, but to the entire country.

What happens when the systems that are designed to constrain power stop working, or are captured and start enabling the expansion of power?

The world of Mystech begins in 2025, but it diverged from our time line in 1992. The political scene starts in a state similar to what ours was in 2013-2014. Institutional gridlock, an increasing reliance on executive orders. Competing twenty-four-hour news narratives, influencer culture, the omnipresent algorithm boosting outrage and spectacle. It moves forward from there.

In the end my goal isn’t to present you with the correct view, it’s to query how power functions, and how that function impacts others.