HOLD UP OKAY okay okay head over my hands taking deep breaths thinking about this.

A young Goddess taking on Bonesaw’s role is just so shockingly perfect as a fit. Jack probably wasn’t involved in her trigger this time, but found her somewhere along the way and swept her into the Nine. She almost immediately took on a role as some kind of apprentice to him (he only managed to not be mastered by his power messing with her thoughts on the matter.) She leans into her new role and learns fast, where Bonesaw can’t seem to get it right. Jack hates how easy her master power makes it to acquire new members, but loves the fucked up things she can make people do with it. Combined with her danger sense and TK, she can do some absolutely brutal and terrifying things.

But, Goddess has bigger ambitions than playing second fiddle and she doesn’t really like Jack the some way Riley does, though she plays at it. He rubs her the wrong way, makes her think of the people that made her trigger, though she does latch onto Siberian. Jack knows there’s a sword hanging over his head in every single interaction between the two, but he loves it, the tightrope of playing with her and seeing how far he can push her before she tries everything.

At some point things will blow up and she and Shatterbird will head off to make that #Girlsquad, but that’s years down the line.

An older Riley as Goddess is SO interesting. I see for her a pattern of harassment, getting her powers and doing something unconscionable, then being pushed into a corner and having to do it again and again. If we keep the cluster for her, I think it’s all but guaranteed Bill pushes her to do something so fucked up she convinces herself anything she does in response is righteous. At some point Cauldron sees the path she’s heading down and intervenes to put her somewhere more containable.

They also make sure to drop her somewhere she’s pressed to fight and that the ball will just keep rolling. Shin is already a world falling apart and a young Riley, with this need to do good, falls into a Taylor framework. She convinces herself it’s for a better cause and keeps doing worse and worse things: converting capes, making monsters, biological weapons.

Despite this she still manages to get people behind her, and when she starts taking over places she brings it all down. Riley craves that human connection, it’s central to her character, and in a world where she can’t seem to do anything right, she’ll instead build a world where she can. It’s a fucked up Kingdom, maybe likeable to something Nilbog might do if he cared about humans more, but it’s hers and she’s happy to be its queen.

Essentially though, she just makes the world of Twig. This fucked up society of body horror and bio punk, just with a bit more actual tech mixed in there.

Though she’s helping out with those parahuman research facilities from the get go; can’t let the scientists steal all the fun.

I’m not sure who, if anyone, I’d take to the woodshed in the way they did Bruce and Hank. But in a more positive direction, I think Ultimate Superman writes itself.

One thing that the Original Ultimate Universe caught basically infinite shit for was that Spider-Man was the only likeable hero out of the entire roster- everyone else was a jingoistic government stooge, a sellout, an ineffective moron, a vindictive moron, or involved in whatever label you want to stick on the clusterfuck that was the Ultimate X-Men. Certain commentators treated this as something that happened by accident- like somehow Spider-Man was the only character to slip through a net- but this was actually a very deliberate thematic and political choice. The early Ultimate Universe in particular was undergirded by a running theme of the ways in which the heroes were compromised and made dirty by having to exist in a world that was remotely politically realistic. Captain America was unexamined in his patriotism in the way that a guy unpaused direct from the end of world war 2 would realistically be; likewise the celebrity and proximity to power of the classic Avengers lineup was characterized as insidious and complicit in the crimes of the Bush Administration even as they embark on flashier superheroic exploits. The Fantastic Four’s dimension-trotting adventures were explicitly underwritten by their work building new ways for the Military to kill people in the Middle East (paraphrasing a direct quote.) The X-Men were a hotbed of moral compromise, seediness and occasional bouts of ethically-dubious psychic-assisted ass-covering, with the repeated drumbeat from multiple writers that they were letting their own narrative about being feared and hated overwrite their awareness of how their entire enterprise was a complete circus- itself a metatextual commentary on the out-of-universe observation on the fact that, for all they bloviate about being oppressed, a significant chunk of their lineup consists of cishet white people with supermodel good looks:

As shown here, a consequence of all this is that Spider-Man, despite not changing much in his characterization from Baseline Peter, came out looking like a paragon. His early-career anger and sense of put-upon-ness is significantly more justified in this continuity because the entire world actually is out to get him; he got his powers through gross negligence by a military industrial complex contractor, he spends his time constantly beating the crap out of more of their runoff, and American Intelligence is circling him like a hawk waiting for an opportunity to headhunt him and sicc him on their enemies. Bendis narratively tied this to his youth; he’s able to be a hero in the classic mold because the world hasn’t dragged him down yet. The forces arrayed against him, of which there are many, haven’t found a way to pin him down and make him sell out. Everybody is expecting him to sell out. Kingpin has a whole speech about it; Jameson’s hatred of him is expressly tied to the fact that he lives in a world where skepticism of good intentions is generally pretty justified. But Peter remains, fundamentally, an outsider- in a way that feels contrived in mainline Marvel but incredibly well-earned in this context- right up until the forces aligned against him actually do get him killed. Accounting for comic book time, poor bastard only lasted a couple years before the bottom fell out and his lifestyle caught up with him. Only the good die young.

So. Superman. The parallels here are obvious, right? Superman, like Spider-Man, wants to do classic Superhero Shit. He’s not overtly political and he isn’t ambitious. He wants to go out and save people, he wants to stop people who’re trying to hurt people from hurting people. He’s the nicest guy in the world and he can eat guns and it’s almost impossible to make him do something he thinks is the wrong thing to do. But if you live in a world remotely like ours, having that level of power and using it to go out and help people and save people means that you fall somewhere on the scale between weirdo and enemy of the state, and the bad guys you have to stop from hurting people work for the duly elected government, or they run the economy, and the guns you have to eat belong to the cops and the military as often as they do bank robbers in white striped shirts. Putting a nice guy who wants to do the right thing into a setting with a remotely appropriately cynical outlook on politics is basically an instant deconstruction without you having to do anything extra to the hero himself, it’s like throwing a sodium bomb into a bathtub.

This sequence from Batman vs Superman is one of my favorite pieces of superhero media that exists, and any Ultimate-style spin on the character would be extrapolated directly from this. The Snyder take gets some flak for taking itself too seriously, being too dark, yadda yadda yadda, but Superman himself is very pointedly not the site of any of that darkness. Superman is just Superman. He spends this whole sequence doing Classic Superman Shit- no violence whatsoever, just rescues- and the talking heads won’t stop picking him apart, looking for the angle, looking for the catch, looking for a lever to get him under control. Tyson trying to make him into some kind of existential harbinger of Man’s insignificance in the universe, juxtaposed against a mother in a flood zone crying tears of joy because God didn’t send boats or a helicopter but spraypainting Superman’s logo on the roof actually paid off. Lex wants him dead in this version mainly because a guy this powerful being this nice makes him insecure.

What really sells this for me is that Clark is visibly aware of, and deeply uncomfortable with, the immense impact he’s having on everyone- he’s asking all the same questions about the implications of his own existence as the talking heads. He doesn’t know either! But there are still people in burning buildings and flood zones. Someone’s gotta do something, and he’s someone, and he can do anything. And he is, of course, dead by the end of the movie.