I used to have little knowledge of the terms "punk" and "post-punk" until Adrian explained them to me. As I understand their meaning now, "punk" describes a setting where a new development has radically changed society, such as steam technology or cybernetics, and people are still getting accustomed to the change. "Post-punk" is a setting where people have come to accept the new development, and now it is commonplace and widely-understood.
With superheroes being as prevalent in entertainment media as they are at the moment, I've started to suspect that superhumans have their own punk and post-punk settings.
"Superpunk" - as I shall call it for want of a better term - frequently seems to have the following features:
- People with supernatural powers are only just showing up.
- Most of the general public do not know about these powers, and if they do, people with powers are regarded with suspicion or fear.
- A character in the setting probably had no say in what powers he or she has.
- Many super-powered individuals have limited control over their abilities, and stress can trigger the use of their powers.
- If the story has an ensemble of main characters, they will probably have only one power per person.
These themes seem all too familiar from television shows such as Alphas, the 4400, Heroes and Misfits. They even apply to the recent Avengers films, since the general public in Marvel's setting are still getting used to the idea of thunder gods, alien beings and heroes in powered armour.
Interestingly, if I want to find something post-superpunk, I would probably have to look at entertainment that is aimed at a much younger audience. DC's cartoons portray a world that has become accustomed to the existence of powerful superheroes. Some excellent "post-superpunk" films exist, such as the Incredibles and Sky High, but I cannot deny that they are aimed mostly at children or young adults.
Perhaps this is because of an assumption on the part of film and television producers that older audiences cannot accept fantasy as easily as children can. A child can accept a character having superpowers after just a few seconds of explanation, whereas adults seem to need to be taken on a whole journey and see how those powers work out in a semi-realistic world before accepting them. As Steve Dismukes said to me in a recent conversation, DC's Dark Knight films seemed almost apologetic about the fact that they were about a vigilante running around dressed as a giant bat. Steve may be right that one of the most refreshing things about Guardians of the Galaxy is that it made no apologies; instead it simply presented a fantastic setting full of aliens and space ships - without trying to seem grounded in reality or slathering on exposition.
On the other hand, perhaps superpunk just offers more familiar options that writers can mine for drama. A world in which having powers could be unacceptable immediately offers more ways to create tension than a world where people have become used to superhumans.
When I look at role-playing instead of television and films, however, the situation seems to be reversed, and the preference seems to be overwhelmingly post-punk. A lot of games about superheroes (e.g. Champions, Mutants & Masterminds) contain a setting where superheroes and supervillains are well-established. This may be because these games try to provide a way for role-players to insert their characters into the comic book worlds that they have been reading. Marvel and DC comics both have their own licensed RPGs, and other games such as Mutants & Masterminds contain a lot of material that references existing comic books - their characters include "Superman by another name" and the like. I can imagine that another benefit of having a post-superpunk setting is that it allows writers to create heroes, villains, aliens, etc to include in later supplements and thus expand the range of products.
This is not to say that a group of players could not try to tell a "superpunk" story using these games, but they are not really designed to capture that particular narrative flavour, either in their "fluff" or their "crunch". They provide the chance to trade blows with the Joker or Loki, but their books say a lot less about characters that have to hide powers that they can barely control, and have to fear the social consequences or their controversial abilities.
The closest role-playing game to being "superpunk" that comes to my mind is White Wolf's Hunter: the Reckoning. It does a lot to capture the themes of a story where characters come into power that they cannot fully control, and they also have to reconcile this development with a world full of people that do not believe in or understand what they are doing. Hunter: the Reckoning is not quite a perfect example, because the setting's mystical powers only affect other supernatural creatures, but if this caveat and the game's interdependence with the rest of the World of Darkness were removed or ignored, it would be pretty close to what I could call superpunk.
