Catchy title. Maybe I will make it a regular thing. (Probably not. I’m inherently irregular. )

Today I finished watching Justice League : Doom, an animated feature from the DC universe.

To someone of my age and media habits, it comes across as a butched up version of the Superfriends. On the hero side, you have Wonder Woman (original) , Superman (same), Batman (voiced by Kevin Conroy from Batman : The Animated Series, who will always be MY Batman), the Green Lantern (Hal Jordan version), Martian Manhunter (and his awesome deep black guy voice), The Flash (suitably sarcastic and cocky) and Cyborg, aka the ultimate “black guy who is good with computers.

The bad guys are largely unknown to me and AFAIK, only one of them appeared in the original Legion of Doom. On the villainous side, you have Bane (didn’t even exist when the original Superfriends were around), Star Sapphire (some chick GL dumper who took it very, very badly), Metallo (giant robot with a Kryptonite heart, gee wonder who he will fight), Mirror Master (always a better villain for The Flash than that Mister Freeze ripoff), and Cheetah (the one holdover from the original Legion of Doom, known for her feline motif and her psychotic hatred of Wonder Woman). Leading them, instead of Lex Luthor, is Vandal Savag (immortal super-intelligent caveman and way more of a threat than Lex because unlike Lex, he’s patient and doesn’t take anything personally. )

Right away, the movie shows its mission because all our Superfriends are way more into kicking bad guy butt and enjoying it than older and more PG versions of themselves. At times they skirt the fringes of sadism with their enjoyment of beating down the bad guys and even threatening them to get information.

None of this is actually immoral. It’s all justified. But I prefer the nobility of the previous era of DC heroes, who fought crime because it was the right thing to do, not because they got off on it.

Anyhow, the basic plot has two parts : the first half, where all the League heroes are taken out by extremely clever and well thought out plans that very nearly kill them, then the second half, where it is revealing that Vandal Savage has a big plan to set off a huge solar flare that will instantly kill everyone on the sunward side of the Earth and knock out all electrical technology on the other side, plunging the world into darkness and chaos. Then the world will be glad to accept his leadership in returns for the food, shelter, and order he will provide.

Extremely large physics issues aside, this is a very typical supervillain type plan. At least half of all James Bond villains had a plan like this. And like most products of a diseased mind, it makes no fucking sense.

For one thing, it rests on the assumption that absolutely nobody else will have the capacity to restore order, and that is clearly a megalomaniacal delusion. Not only is the world peppers quite liberally with survivalists preparing for exactly this kind of thing, but governments have prepared for it too, not to mention the rich.

And another thing : wiping out existing technology does not wipe out the knowledge of how it’s made. The world is full of highly competent people who know how to make things and who, together, could get modern society running again in six weeks.

Rebuilding the totality of modern global society would take longer, but modern technology will survive.

So humanity would not need Vandal Savage’s leadership at all. The idea that “if you hurt something (in this case, humanity) bad enough, it has to submit to you” is clearly a reptile brain delusion and not at all how things actually work.

But there’s another major flaw. Even if the supervillain is willing to set their sights lower and just assume that some large amount of humanity will accept them as leader, and that they will have to start small and build up, their plan depends on one very easily altered contingency :

That nobody knows who caused the catastrophe.

If they knew, absolutely nobody would follow them. They would, in fact, be the most hated person in all of history and they would live the rest of their lives as hunted fugitives, with no place on Earth where they would he safe from the very very large fraction of the remainder of humanity who wants to kill the fuck out of them a million times over.

So if I was the hero or superhero facing the supervillain who has just revealed their Big Plan, I would tell the villain that lots of people already know what the supervillain is planning, and in these days of Internet ubiquity, the knowledge of who is about to destroy the world would spread extremely fast, and there would be no place for them to hide if they carried out their ridiculously flawed plan.

And I would add “Look. I get it. You’re a megalomaniac and that makes you hate other people for not being you and having their own needs and desires and so on. But don’t pretend to me that this clinically retarded plan of yours was ever anything but a baby crying because it was no longer the center of attention. You hate sharing to such an insane degree that you even hate sharing the world with other people. I know who you are, villain. And if you don’t stop this nonsense, I will tell everybody just what a low, cowardly, immature, whiny, infantile idiot you really are. And everybody will laugh at you…. forever. ”

That might get me killed, of course. It would be entirely consistent with their infantile mindset for them to strike out blindly at the thing that upset them.

But the damage would be done to their fragile egos. That’s the kind of thing that could drive them into true deep insanity (thus rendering them harmless as to the world, they are not a drooling vegetable) or, I suppose, even get them to take a good long look it themselves and grow the fuck up.

Either way, when they are distracted, you could stop their fucking doomsday device.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.