Manifesto!

You want to know why I stopped doing it? Hell, everyone else does. I was big, I was famous, yadda yadda yadda. It wasn't the battles, you know. Fight one super-powered nutjob and you've fought them all. It seldom changes, you know. The thrill remains, but the outcome is always the same. Bad guy loses, good guy wins.

You want to know the funny part? It's always brains against brawn, at some level. Superheroes tend to hit first, and tend to be quite good at hitting. Sure, they have brains, but the villains with brains are never the strong and tough types, just the brainy ones with tech and henchmen and giant robots: in the end, it just comes down to raw power. And going that extra mile, you know?

The average villain says he wants to take over the world, but the smart ones -- well, they know what a hassle it would be to run. Probably be easier to juggle tachyons, so they just really want money, and more than that: recognition. They want to be famous, to be reviled, to be feared and loathed and turned into urban legends. You want to make a supervillain impotent? Just ignore them.

Without the media, the supervillain wouldn't exist. Because it's not the villains who do the really nasty stuff, but the copycats. Genius doesn't work well with others, especially the mad kind. But below them you get those who study them, the businessmen villains who can run a real organization, who can turn the mad ideas into working ones. That's when things get nasty.

For one thing, they have legal teams.

But none of this is why I quit. I quit because they always win. No matter what I did, what I planned, the heroes always won. I take over the world, they alter the past. I alter the past, they alter the future or jump dimensions or just find me and beat me silly until I change it all back. That happened a time or two, before most of the villains began installing cameras and recording events. Now the just have to be polite about it and hide their fascism a little better.

That's all. Nothing changed. All the lawyers and tricks do is delay them. No matter how brilliant we are, we're not as driven as they are. Sure, some of us are driven in the small ways, against certain heroes, certain other villains; but the hero is driven by larger causes, deeper desires than just beating one single villain. And so we lose.

Even knowing why doesn't make a difference. Even knowing all their errors and all mine doesn't matter. All the self-help and improvement programs and psychiatric sessions don't change the fact that I never won. That I don't really matter. The heroes win because of might, but what allows it in the end is right. They will die for what they believe, fight to the last man; crazy fanatic bastards, all of them, but they still win.

The final score hard leaves me with 0. And I'm tired of it. That's why I'm quitting. Someone else can be the Quiet Destroyer, someone else can take up war against Captain Flux. Just don't expect me to care. And if they come crying to me when they lose, I'll just kick them out the door, same as I was kicked out doors years ago.

I'm too old for this shit. There. That's my final damn manifesto, if you wanted one. Now bugger off.