Dealing With Heroes Without Villains

In far too many stories, the conflict too often comes down to the hero versus the villain. It's hit the point that stories where the opponent is anything but another entity have virtually disappeared; "conflict" is defined solely by who the hero defeats and all other sources of conflict seem to have disappeared, such as conflicts versus nature, or society, or even self. Even when the true opponent is decidedly non-physical and abstract, such as a hero facing a personal crisis, there is some sort of physical avatar of the problem.

Writers need to stop looking at the physical fight and look at other possible conflicts. Let's look at when the hero has to fight something other than just another villain, be it a single villain, a group of them, or even an evil army.

Of Cats and Trees

Being a hero is more than just fighting the bad guys. While most powersets are pretty much limited to combat, some have plenty of interesting non-combat effects; ignoring job-specific powers (using speedsters would make delivery companies so much faster while super-strong characters would be awesome in construction), imagine how effective Cyclop's optic blast would make mining or how useful Storm's weather control would be in shifting a storm from where it's doing damage to somewhere that needs it. For that matter, it would be interesting to have super-intelligent characters working to solve mankind's bigger issues like pollution, disease, or even space travel.

Interestingly, you don't see a lot of powers used in rescue/evacuation efforts. Every so often a speedster will rescue everyone in a falling building or an exploding mansion, but it happens so rarely it comes across as a flex. Telepathy could be used to determine who is still alive and their locations while telekinesis could dig them out. Swimming and flying characters could save people in out-of-the-way places, like airplanes, mountaintops, islands, or even underwater bases. Throw in some time pressure and that rescue gains a little edge.

Sure, you could use your powers to get a cat out of a tree, but why would you want that positive PR? Your heroes have capabilities beyond mere mortals; there have to be things they can do with them besides fight super-powered villains.

When Mother Nature Becomes the Problem

Natural disasters should be an obvious issue that needs dealing with. Volcanoes are the obvious ones since they need to be stopped, the lava dealt with, and civilians rescued, but they aren't the only ones. Brush fires need people rescued and the fire itself needs to be dealt with. Flooding has all of that water to be dealt with as well as the dams being shored up, but don't forget you need to get all those fish back in their streams before the rest of the water is dealt with. Hurricanes are just an evacuation with a countdown clock. Mother Nature has enough going on to keep most heroes busy.

Fighting Crime More Effectively

We need to give Batman a bit more credit: It's often ignored that not only does the Wayne Foundation contribute to a wide variety of different causes but Wayne's appearances at social events help encourage charitable giving. He's also one of the few heroes who does this; imagine the effect on crime if more heroes contributed to charitable causes. Or shelter pets. Or cancer and other diseases. For that matter, you could stop a warlord from gaining power if all the villages in his area had a working well, easy access to electricity, and good farmland.

Besides stopping crime and other evils before they even get going, superheroes could help manage some crimes. In some areas, organized crime is inevitable due to government issues; in Japan, the yakuza got its virtual invulnerability because it helped deal with crime since the local police wouldn't always step in. In such areas, a gentleman's agreement could exist that as long as the organized crime didn't go past certain limits, the heroes wouldn't come down on them, too badly. Between such "crime management" and charities, superheroes could eliminate a lot of problems before they even became a problem.

In a Fight, Who is the Real Opponent?

It's easy to determine the victors and losers in a super-hero/super-villain fight, especially if one side is taken away in handcuffs. However, the victims are often ignored. While Marvel Comics touches on this a bit with its Damage Control dealing with the collateral damage of said fights, and JLU episode "The Greatest Story Never Told" deals with Booster Gold failing crowd control duties, you rarely see it addressed otherwise. Nonetheless, in a fight between super-powered entities, you need to allow for ways to avoid collateral damage; it makes little sense to destroy a city to save it.

It just makes sense that while one person or group deals with the main threat, other teams are keeping civilians out of the area, evacuating people from the area, dealing with the emergency situations created by the crisis, and doing their level best to limit collateral damage from the fight. Sure, the main group is no doubt going to be dealing with these issues as well, possibly even making it a point to take the fight elsewhere, but their main concern is the fight; you need someone saving the city from the fight and keeping the lives lost, the buildings damaged, and the infrastructure destroyed to a minimum.

This is not to say that we need to vacate the whole premise of villains. There is no better way to personalize the fight than to have the hero physically fight a villain that symbolizes the real conflict, and it makes for a really nice visual. However, this is something that needs to at least be tried every so often; it's part of the toolbox that should be visited more often just to see what happens, and you may be pleasantly surprised at what happens.