I just rewatched The Incredibles in preparation for seeing the sequel at the cinema when it finally comes here in about a week (no spoilers for that, please).
While watching the early parts of the movie, I kept silently comparing the movie’s setting/premise to Worm, more specifically Emily Piggot.
For those unfamiliar with Incredibles backstory: In the 40’s, superheroes were fairly common, but after a 1947 incident involving a suicidal man suing the hero who rescued him (“I saved your life!” “You ruined my death!”), many collateral damage lawsuits cropped up. Public opinion of the supers dropped so hard that the government chose to force them into hiding, abandoning superheroics (though some heroes still did their thing in secret) and living normal lives like normal people. The movie’s main plot is set in 1962 and follows a family of two retired supers and their kids.
This can’t happen in the Wormverse, because supervillains are much more common there and there’s the Endbringers (and a bigger future threat) to contend with. As things stand, no one with any sense would suggest that getting rid of superheroes (just the heroes) would be a service to the greater good of the mundanes.
If not for those things, it does seem like a future Jirector Piggot would appreciate. Letting the parahumans keep their abilities to themselves and out of the mundanes’ lives, aided and restrained by the government, sounds like a dream for her.
But because that’s not an option, she does the next best thing, which ironically is to make sure the government-controlled superheroes’ PR stays positive, and do her best to help them get rid of the supervillains by all means necessary. She can’t help the mundanes be free of all parahuman influence, but she can help the more lawful parahumans free them of the most detrimental of it.
If she could finally put an end to supervillains and Endbringers somehow, then her focus might change.
I’m not sure how clear I’ve been about this so far, but I think the perspective shown in Interlude 13 turned Director Emily Piggot into a very interesting spanner to throw into this story’s conflicts.
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