Pretty much the title. I’ve been watching more realistic super hero shows like The Boys and Invincible. The reoccurring themes is that with great power comes great immorality.
I think it’s easy for us normies to respect other people and their property because there are clear consequences for violating social norms. But what would the average person do if they had super powers?
I have a theory that moral traits, like many other things in nature, follow a normal distribution. If I’m right, we can make some estimates of who would violate social rules given the chance. The bottom 5% of the distribution are going to do some terrible things. About 45% are going to be kind of shit, maybe not terrible. The remainder will be some level of decent to pretty well behaved, actually. Admittedly, that depends on what we think the mean level of morality really is. Having observed many a group of kids playing, I don’t think it’s that bad. Honestly that’s why so many teenage edgelords and doomers get told to go touch grass; reality will almost never be as bleak as we think it will be. There’s a well documented cognitive bias towards negative events, but it IS a bias.
The Boys isn’t realistic so much as it’s a deliberate deconstruction of the genre and a bit of speculative fiction (“What if Superman was a sociopath” seems to be the question it asks). It has elements of satire too, so it’s not really concerned with being fair so much as creating the story conditions that allow it to show us its narrative.
If you want a more “realistic” superhero show I think the 2012 movie Chronicle is more plausible. And yeah it does go badly for some but not for others.