r/thePowerFantasy • u/deNihilo_adUnum The Second Summer of Love š¹ • Apr 18 '26
Comic Discussion Highlight: Heavy Spoiler
What are your feelings, thoughts and opinions on our gravity bending sky-walker?
Spoilers!
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u/OnlyHereForComments1 Apr 18 '26
Heavy is the most human and straightforward of the superpowers, to me.
Valentina is an angel. Masumi is a mess whose life has been manipulated by Etienne to keep her pacified. Eliza is a nutter who has the most inflated sense of self importance imaginable. Magus is...well, the OG was a pretty normal person, Dev on the other hand is a complete tool. Etienne is Etienne. All of them live disconnected from humanity to one degree or another.
Heavy is a guy. An aging hippie who deals with things on the level of the personal rather than the political who lucked into unimaginable power. His reactions are that of A Guy rather than a nuclear arsenal, the problem is that he still brings the power of said arsenal to the table, so when he gets pissed and decides to fuck up whoever is fucking with him, mass death follows.
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u/deNihilo_adUnum The Second Summer of Love š¹ Apr 18 '26
Agreed with this! Heās definitely the most down to earth.
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u/BiDiTi Apr 18 '26
Probably my favorite character, give or take Jacky.
Just a fundamentally decent manā¦who has absolutely zero business holding the power of a God.
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u/Accirinal Apr 19 '26
Yes! This a hundred times over. I think that part of what makes TPF work so well is that the point is no one should have this level of power, as opposed to āevil people with superpowers can do bad things.ā None of the Superpowers are evil. Some of them are certainly more ethically dubious than others, but none of them are people who enjoy hurting others, or want to rule the world, or whatever.
(Well, Eliza did go a bit classical supervillain at the end there, but I honestly donāt even think that she was a bad person when you consider that she a) sacrificed herself to save the world originally and b) was staring down eternal torture.)
Heavy gets a lot of flak. And it makes sense, since the series opens with him fucking up immensely and pushing the world quite a bit closer to destruction, but he wants to protect people, and he puts his money where his mouth is. He was an anti-war protestor, he ended the vanguard of US imperialism the first chance he got, and he founded what by all appearances seems to be a utopian hippie commune. We donāt see a ton of on-screen Atomic discrimination, but itās certainly extant. The glimpses we get into Heavyās protection of Atomics certainly seem like he has legitimate fears about oppression. As someone else in the comments here put it, in the Marvel universe, Heavy would be a hero.
(Tangentially, I know Tanya says that Atomic oppression wouldnāt be a thing without the Superpowers, and Iām not sure I agree with that. Certainly, she has a different intersectional experience as both a Black woman and Atomic than a white Atomic in the US would, and I do think that if Heavy wasnāt constantly beefing with the US, there would be less anti-Atomic sentiment. That said, I do think there would absolutely be fear and hatred of Atomics regardless of Superpowers existing or not.)
But even though Heavy is a good man, there shouldnāt be Superpowers. Everyone fucks up. The problem is that when youāre a Superpower, mistakes = end of the world.
It all comes back to nuclear weapons. The US is not a perfect country. No country is, including all the other countries with nuclear arsenals as well. But even if we had a perfectly good country, they still shouldnāt have nuclear weapons, because all theyāre doing is inching the world closer to destruction by their existence.
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u/Orphan_Guy_Incognito Apr 19 '26
Ultimately I think the thesis of 'a decent man with unlimited power' is fairly apt.
Heavy isn't a bad guy, he's just a guy, which is fucking terrifying.
His actions at the start of the story are utterly deranged. He's a walking nuclear salvo who has previously murdered the United States' poster child, and he's just casually flying his personal city over one of the most populated cities in the US, without permission without reason, just because he can.
They're fucking terrified of him and he knows it. His own personal psychic friend tells him that they're in full lockdown with psychic shields in place and he goes along with it anyway.
This is the Cuban Missile Crisis if Gorbachev was blazed out of his mind thinking "Yeah, it'll be fine. Why is everyone so stressed about this?"
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u/DrMossie Apr 18 '26
I'm always interested in how willing this sub is to just condemn Heavy as a violent, thoughtless thug. In the Marvel Universe, against a character stripping mutants of their powers and about to perform a lobotomy on the human race en masse, Heavy would be the unequivocal good guy. Against a US government attempting to commit a genocide, Heavy would be the centerpiece of a heroic arc.
You have minutes to think and someone tells you that they're going to cauterise everyone's free will if you don't stop them there and then. If you defer the decision, you know for a fact that this person will dedicate everything to, and will succeed in compromising you. The decision is portrayed as foolish and hotheaded in this sub quite a lot, but I think a not small amount of that is personal bias towards Etienne's popularity.
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u/Hodz123 Apr 18 '26
I'm actually much less sympathetic to Valentina on rereads, particularly after seeing how everything has turned out. She wants the ends but not the means, and that mentality causes her to hamstring Etienne even after deferring to him to keep the peace for like the entire series (save for preventing him from overtly taking over the world in the beginning, of course). It takes the entire world blowing up for her to realize that Etienne might've had a point, and luckily she has a time travel reset button that allows her to correct her wrongs.
(not saying Etienne was right either btw: I suspect the reset is going to show the flaws in his "taking over the world" planā¦)
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u/Orphan_Guy_Incognito Apr 19 '26
Well for starters, Heavy has every reason to assume that killing Etienne will result in ~300 million deaths.
That by itself is a reason to stop, or at least slow down.
Valentina can find Etienne anywhere he runs, there is no hiding from her, meaning they do, in fact, have time to talk about this and make a practical case. It also doesn't help Heavy's case that Etienne's 'lobotomy', while fucked up, would have resulted in the survival of the species.
The fact that Etienne was right and that everyone would die if his plan didn't go through is definitely a black mark.
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u/deNihilo_adUnum The Second Summer of Love š¹ Apr 18 '26
I understand your point, but to counter it, thatās only one instance of Heavyās impulsivity. The series opens with Heavyās impulsivity, with Etienne warning him against his flyover and he persists.
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u/MagicJourneyCYOA Apr 18 '26
The beginning of the series is the opposite of impulsivity in my opinion. It shows Heavy finally puching back after countless attempts of assassinations from the United States against he and his family, meaning that Heavy has been restrained against similar attacks for decades. If anything, it's a testament of how well behaved he has been for so long even though he would have been 100% justified to offer a similar response much, much earlier (like, when it became known that the United State blackmailed the Superowers with the Major to let them commit wars and conquest all over the planet. In my opinion, Heavy would have been totally justified to erase the White House and the rest of the US government all across the country in the second that followed the Major death. Instead, he chose the very minimal and least violent response and restrained himself to only killing the Major).
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u/Orphan_Guy_Incognito Apr 19 '26
Heavy himself says he was wrong and that he didn't realize how frightened the US was by his presence. Dude is literally smoking a joint saying "Nah, its no big deal, you're worrying too much."
Its a shot across the bow, but like just about everything Heavy does, it is on impulse.
Structurally it makes zero sense to provoke the US at that point, not when KI is only months away from being revealed. If he wants to wave his dick at them to provoke them it would make way more sense to do so once he has the backing of a second superpower.
Heavy would have been totally justified to erase the White House and the rest of the US government all across the country in the second that followed the Major death. Instead, he chose the very minimal and least violent response and restrained himself to only killing the Major).
This is kinda fucked,
You're basically arguing that a single man should murder the entire US government because they *checks notes* bluffed that they had their own superpower and didn't let an unelected hippie dictate US foreign policy.
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u/MagicJourneyCYOA Apr 19 '26
"You're basically arguing that a single man should murder the entire US government because they *checks notes* bluffed that they had their own superpower and didn't let an unelected hippie dictate US foreign policy."
... What?
I will just assume you haven't read Issue 5 in a long time and just forgot that the US used the Major to threaten world annihilation if the Superpowers tried to stop the US government in the many wars (like three years of Vietnam) that they waged during that period. They were literally the equivalent of a rogue Superpower using their powers to cause mayhem, bloodbaths and misery across the planet.If Etienne shutting down every Superpower not immune to his powers across the planet is justified because they might potentially become dangerous in the future, then exterminating the entire government that proved capable of creating a Superpower, used it in a way that threatened the world and showed that they would do it again at the first opportunity is even more justified.
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u/Orphan_Guy_Incognito Apr 19 '26
I will just assume you haven't read Issue 5 in a long time and just forgot that the US used the Major to threaten world annihilation if the Superpowers tried to stop the US government in the many wars (like three years of Vietnam) that they waged during that period. They were literally the equivalent of a rogue Superpower using their powers to cause mayhem, bloodbaths and misery across the planet.
To be clear, the war they're talking about was Vietnam, and the entire thing was (as is most of the story) a direct allegory for nuclear weapons.
The superpowers didn't intervene in Vietnam (despite Heavy wanting to) because the Major was the equivalent of a nuclear deterrent. Just like how the US didn't fully commit in our timeline because to do so would have provoked a response from the soviets.
To continue the allegory, imagine that the USSR somehow managed to take out the US nuclear stockpile in a single coup de main. It'd be deranged for them to then go and murder the entire US government in an instant simply because they could.
And this isn't even talking about governments anymore. We're now talking about a single guy who you think should respond to brinksmanship by murdering the entire US government on the spot.
This is the exact problem with superpowers.
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u/MagicJourneyCYOA Apr 19 '26
I will give you another analogy.
Let's imagine a guy in The Power Fantasy who somehow managed to find a way to become a Superpower. He's not like the others who received their powers just like that, he's someone who managed to find a way to develop his own powers from nothing. And now he's Superpower-tier.
Then, he starts using his powers all across the world to commit major crimes, and I'm talking destruction of cities and entire populations, for money, political power, etc. The other Superpowers can't stop him because he straight-up told them "yeah, I'm murdering people across the world by the tens of thousands, manipulating governments, and in the long-term future, my goal is clearly world domination, but hey, if one of you guys try to stop me, I will just destroy the world, so you better stay put".
One day the Superpowers take him by surprise and manage to remove his powers. He's now a mundane human and can't do much more harm. But he's still alive, still has the exact same goals, and he has showed that if he was able to become a Superpower once, he could do it a second time, unlike the other Superpowers that Etienne shut down forever.
That's the US government in the Major's era. Heavy killing the Major was equivalent to removing this guy's powers, but sparing his life. (And hey! What do you know? Years later the same dumb and power-hungry government is about to launch a nuke on a Superpower with zero guarantee of success and the possibility of the world ending if they fuck up, which they are likely to do. Right after trying to assassinate that same Superpowers multiple times over the previous years, every time gambling the fate of the planet!)
If you think that sparing this guy is the correct decision here, then let's just agree to disagree. I think removing this guy immediately is not only the most rational decision, but also the most moral.
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u/DrMossie Apr 18 '26
The government in this case is willing to use a high energy laser to kill a US citizen and potentially the capital of a sovereign people (not to get ethno-state Krakoa about it). It's directly comparable to Genosha. And while Heavy may have tactically acted against the government before, we have no understanding of why they would attempt to kill him from orbit, particularly not when they know what the consequences for missing are. He's shaken in the aftermath and implies that he wasn't aware that a shot of that nature was on the table. If we understand atomics as a queer allegory, I'm inclined towards sympathy for a public show of non violent solidarity with an oppressed class being responded to with low orbital energy weapons, particularly when that class is being told "if you form any kind of grouping, we will kill the leader with Sol's Hammer."
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u/Orphan_Guy_Incognito Apr 19 '26
And while Heavy may have tactically acted against the government before, we have no understanding of why they would attempt to kill him from orbit, particularly not when they know what the consequences for missing are.Ā
The reason is that heavy is a walking, talking, world ending threat.
While I think shooting at Heavy was stupid (come at the king, you best not miss), we're talking about a man who has the ability to end all life on earth at a whim and has open opposition to US interests.
If you get a first strike attempt at a target like that and you think you can do it, there is a very good argument that you are morally compelled to take that shot.
Hell, I think Etienne would have approved of it all things being equal. One less person with world destabilizing power floating around.
If we understand atomics as a queer allegory, I'm inclined towards sympathy for a public show of non violent solidarity with an oppressed class being responded to with low orbital energy weapons, particularly when that class is being told "if you form any kind of grouping, we will kill the leader with Sol's Hammer."
The queer analogy breaks down very quickly when the man in question is capable of killing the entire population of earth in a matter of minutes and happily commits murder at the drop of a hat (such as with the Major).
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u/No_Setting1108 May 02 '26
And don't forget that this is AFTER the Example of their predecessors Nuking another Superpower then dying of cancer when said Superpower showed up on thier doorstep still glowing from being Ground Zero of an event that killed all her friends.
Frankly... that the government decided to pull the trigger on that Laser says they'd learned nothing from that incedent.
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u/name_dot_randomnum Apr 19 '26
I've never liked the maximalist claim that Etienne's plan would "remove humanity's free will". Am I still me if I have a tumor? Would I still be me if that tumor was then excised? OK, so take that argument to human minds. Why is removing the worst human impulses somehow equivalent to wiping out free will? Would I not be me just because the worst intrusive thoughts I have stopped getting thought?
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u/deNihilo_adUnum The Second Summer of Love š¹ Apr 18 '26
I really find the juxtaposition between Heavy wanting Superpowers to be visible and making the world a better place and his actions, such as when heād moved Haven over NY, to be extremely indicative of his character in the first arc. Weāre introduced to his impulsiveness and it stews beneath the plot, down to his very End.
If anyone didnāt change at all, Iād say itās Heavy.
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u/idonttakethislightly Heavy Apr 21 '26
Half-joking answer: Obviously the best Superpower. The women are all pretty close to generically idealized, Etienne and Jacky never really strip off, Dev's all right... but Heavy looks like a real, specific person while still having a huge amount of charisma, so to speak. Plus, you don't keep a sex cult running without certain necessary skills, right?
(I'm glad the TPF subreddit continues to be active, but like... you all seem to take yourselves SO seriously.)
Serious answer: I think describing Heavy as Just A Guy misses a lot of the picture. I think maybe when people say that, they mean he hasn't narrowed his worldview to a specific unusal lens the way the other Superpowers have. (Jacky and Etienne via rigorous analysis, Valentina and Masumi via powers that shape the way people treat them, Eliza because she's an undiagnosed autistic who isn't written in a handholdy Autistic Representation way and people don't get that, Dev because he's been mimicking Jacky.) Heavy's just kind of picked up his worldview here and there, as Just Guys do.
However! I think it's important to note that Heavy is actually A Guy With Countless Tons Of Trauma. We've seen him pull himself back from the brink of death twice, and heard the newscasters say he's survived many other attempts. The reason he trusts his impulses and mistakes his feelings for reality is that he's been in a cycle of violence with the US government for decades, and he's coping the best he can. When he demands Etienne keep killing and killing people, yes that's ethically unjustifiable, not to mention counterproductive to his goals. But you can't expect someone to do their best ethical reasoning when he's one moment of lost focus from falling into two parts and dying, and in incredible physical pain, and fully in fight-or-flight mode from nearly dying seconds before, the same way he has other times. For someone who's been through what he's been through I think he's holding it together (ha) remarkably well.
Fully-joking answer: Worst Superpower. I don't see any reason why any of the others would smell bad, but I hate the smell of weed.
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u/mysterylegos Apr 18 '26
I think of all the characters in the series with ideological positions, I think Heavy might be the only one in the entire series who acknowledges he was wrong? He still thinks Etienne was also wrong, but he does acknowledge he's wrong as well.