- Location
- Peterborough, NH, USA
So, Wordgirl's gotten a sudden resurgence in popularity recently, and I couldn't find any other threads around here talking about her, so here's my pitch to make her the pre-Big Good, that is, she's in much the same role as Superman when he was Superboy. Going to be the Big Good, but still growing into the role.
There was this one time in her show where she flew from the Moon to the Sun, in about 5 seconds. Assuming mean distance, that puts her at almost exactly 500 times the speed of light. She didn't seem tired or anything, so that might just be her 'cruising speed' when in space where she doesn't have to worry about setting the atmosphere on fire or turning the planet into forms of energy and matter that haven't existed since the Big Bang. Based on the difference between normal human walking and sprinting speeds, her top speed(and she hasn't even hit puberty yet) might be 2100-3100 times the speed of light. Forget a world of cardboard, she probably feels like she lives in a world made of soap foam sometimes, which may contribute to her arrogant streak.
Now, you might be thinking 'How did they manage to have her remotely troubled by anything if she's that ridiculously powerful?' and the answer is threefold. First, she seems to have some power modulation issues. Unusually, it's that she can't be specific with attributes rather than percentages, so if she's using a millionth of her maximum, that applies to speed, strength, durability, and her more exotic abilities like her sonic scream and arctic breath. She can't do 5% speed and 1% strength, so she has issues when fighting people with unbalanced stats if she doesn't want to paste them, which she wants about as much as Superman usually does, which means she has issues with a fair number of people she could beat to a pulp pretty casually because she'd really rather not do that. For similar reasons, her planetside speed is usually hypersonic, but no more.
She seems to have some ability to ignore the collateral damage she should be causing with her powers, possibly connected with her Instant Wardrobe Change being an explicit superpower, but it doesn't seem to extend beyond stuff like keeping the constant sonic booms that should be happening from happening, as opposed to damaging things from banging into them. Presumably, this applies to other things she wouldn't want to break.
The second reason is that, much like Supes, she is vulnerable to magic and Lexonite, the Kryptonite expy to her Superman expy. The former seems to be a reasonably common power for her Rogues gallery, while the latter, while it doesn't seem to start killing her like Supes is with Kryptonite, does shut her powers down, and the effect takes a while to wear all the way off.
Thirdly, she's 9-12, depending on when in the series you're at. Do you have any idea how boring it would be to perceive the world millions of times faster than everyone else all the time? She'd need supercomputers just to hold a conversation she wouldn't experience subjective lifetimes waiting for each word of. Of course she doesn't keep herself revved all the way up whenever her other issues aren't causing problems.
All that being said, it's made fairly clear that she's just playing along with most of her villains, even the magic ones. The only ones she's had genuine problems with are Wordbot, a robotic replica of her, a copy made by Lady Redundant Woman's copier powers, Miss Power who is explicitly a similar superpowered alien, and Rhyme, who is a superspeedy variant on the usual superhumans she has trouble with, and again, she can't spin up her speed without spinning up her strength, which risks turning whoever she's fighting to red paste.
There was this one time in her show where she flew from the Moon to the Sun, in about 5 seconds. Assuming mean distance, that puts her at almost exactly 500 times the speed of light. She didn't seem tired or anything, so that might just be her 'cruising speed' when in space where she doesn't have to worry about setting the atmosphere on fire or turning the planet into forms of energy and matter that haven't existed since the Big Bang. Based on the difference between normal human walking and sprinting speeds, her top speed(and she hasn't even hit puberty yet) might be 2100-3100 times the speed of light. Forget a world of cardboard, she probably feels like she lives in a world made of soap foam sometimes, which may contribute to her arrogant streak.
Now, you might be thinking 'How did they manage to have her remotely troubled by anything if she's that ridiculously powerful?' and the answer is threefold. First, she seems to have some power modulation issues. Unusually, it's that she can't be specific with attributes rather than percentages, so if she's using a millionth of her maximum, that applies to speed, strength, durability, and her more exotic abilities like her sonic scream and arctic breath. She can't do 5% speed and 1% strength, so she has issues when fighting people with unbalanced stats if she doesn't want to paste them, which she wants about as much as Superman usually does, which means she has issues with a fair number of people she could beat to a pulp pretty casually because she'd really rather not do that. For similar reasons, her planetside speed is usually hypersonic, but no more.
She seems to have some ability to ignore the collateral damage she should be causing with her powers, possibly connected with her Instant Wardrobe Change being an explicit superpower, but it doesn't seem to extend beyond stuff like keeping the constant sonic booms that should be happening from happening, as opposed to damaging things from banging into them. Presumably, this applies to other things she wouldn't want to break.
The second reason is that, much like Supes, she is vulnerable to magic and Lexonite, the Kryptonite expy to her Superman expy. The former seems to be a reasonably common power for her Rogues gallery, while the latter, while it doesn't seem to start killing her like Supes is with Kryptonite, does shut her powers down, and the effect takes a while to wear all the way off.
Thirdly, she's 9-12, depending on when in the series you're at. Do you have any idea how boring it would be to perceive the world millions of times faster than everyone else all the time? She'd need supercomputers just to hold a conversation she wouldn't experience subjective lifetimes waiting for each word of. Of course she doesn't keep herself revved all the way up whenever her other issues aren't causing problems.
All that being said, it's made fairly clear that she's just playing along with most of her villains, even the magic ones. The only ones she's had genuine problems with are Wordbot, a robotic replica of her, a copy made by Lady Redundant Woman's copier powers, Miss Power who is explicitly a similar superpowered alien, and Rhyme, who is a superspeedy variant on the usual superhumans she has trouble with, and again, she can't spin up her speed without spinning up her strength, which risks turning whoever she's fighting to red paste.
