Why do we love the “group of friends with different superpowers” trope?
It's absolutely everywhere (for a good reason).
As a kid, I spent a great deal of time in the school library. For hours I’d curl up on a beanbag chair under plastic signs that said “reading is cool!” turning pages until I had read the whole book. When I finished the Percy Jackson series, I sought out other sci-fi fantasy novels with similar themes and eventually came to realize that my favorite genre was “a group of teenagers with superpowers living and fighting evil together.” I was obsessed with Scott Westerfeld’s Zeroes series as well as Jonathan Stroud’s Lockwood & Co. and Marissa Meyer’s Renegades. My favorite childhood shows also followed this trend (in My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic, each character represents an Element of Harmony, and the siblings in Lab Rats each have a different superpower). Regardless of the medium, I was obsessed with the idea of a group of people each bringing something to the table to fight off a big bad evil guy and learning to care for each other in the process.
When I first started writing, this formula was all that I knew and used. Between the ages of 8-12, every single one of my writing projects involved a group of people (usually middle or high school girls), an overarching theme (assigning each character fire/water/air/earth powers for example), and a common enemy to fight (usually an evil adult) with their individual superpowers that connected to their personalities (i.e. giving a feisty and temperamental character fire powers). I considered this the most entertaining type of story and the only one I was interested in writing. I would refuse to read anything that wasn’t a sci-fi fantasy book and was bored to death by single-POV narration. It’s safe to say it had a chokehold on me and was a defining characteristic of my childhood.
Looking back, it’s clear that I was attracted to this trope because I didn’t have many friends. When I wasn’t reading, I was daydreaming about being a character in one of these books. I came up with code names for myself and acted out entire fanfics in my head where I fought crime with my favorite characters. When I drew pictures of the Percy Jackson or Zeroes characters, I’d always include my self-insert OC. Through this trope I came up with an imaginary life for myself to disappear into whenever I was lonely or bored.
As crucial as this experience was to me, it’s far from unique—I’m only one of millions of people who found escapism through this trope. It simultaneously teaches kids to embrace their uniqueness while encouraging friendship and collaboration, and the combination of the two makes it transformative. You read the Percy Jackson series and realize that being different from your friends doesn’t make you lesser than them. You watch My Little Pony and learn that having unique abilities and passions is what makes you special. These stories take you to a world where you can be seen and embraced for who you truly are.
As an adult, it’s easy to look back at these types of stories and write them off as childish, but fiction is the medium through which we explore reality. This “childish” trope can tell us a lot about human nature and social organization. For example, I think people are inclined to categorize one another and find comfort in exclusive communities. Taxonomies of personality and expertise let us distinguish an unfamiliar person through preconceived notions we have of their “kind.” Meeting someone new and associating them with a community you already know about assuages our animalistic fear of strangers for the better or worse. (People cling to social and cultural identifiers all the time, from MBTI typology and horoscopes to race and gender.) We’re also social creatures, and thinking of our uniqueness not as an alienating quality but as an asset to a greater community of mixed abilities is a comforting thought. In some ways, this mirrors reality (individualized superpowers are reminiscent of college majors and specialization) but without its inequalities (certain skills being considered less “important” than others, or some college majors leading to a lower salary than others) and creates an ideal world where we are all valued. In an ideal world we can find a sense of purpose using our unique strengths and don’t have to give up our passions for stability.
Through all the chaos and violence in the world, I see more people returning to this trope. The arts are wonderful because they help us deal with the horrors (It doesn’t matter if you’re different—together, we can save the day and look cool while doing it!). Maybe one day I’ll write a self-indulgent project with this trope to feed my inner child, but for now, I’m just reminiscing on what I still consider the best years of my life when I was occupied by nothing but books and fantasies of waking up with supernatural abilities.