This reminded me at once of a discussion I happened upon in an old AOL chat room one evening a decade or so back. The subject was the decidedly slutty manner in which Sue was being portrayed in the books, parading around in teeny-tiny bikinis, replete with a navel-ring. One of the posters wondered what Sue would look like in a bikini since, after two pregnancies, she'd "probably have stretch marks." Another poster suggested -- apparently seriously -- that she could just make the stretch marks "invisible".

If you're not already seeing where I'm going with this, you may wonder what the heck the rest of my post here is about.

Of course, if Sue turned a zit or her presumed stretch marks "invisible", all she would be doing is making a portion of her skin transparent, and what we'd then see would be whatever lay beneath that skin. In the case of the zit, for instance, she'd probably look like she'd just been shot thru the forehead. In the case of the stretch marks --- well, yuck!

This got me thinking in general about how superpowers are so often messed up with those writing them don't think thru what it is the powers really do. The third X-Men movie shows us Kitty Pryde pulling Juggernaut down into the floor and leaving him there, "trapped". But he's Juggernaut, bitch, so he breaks free. Which he'd be able to do, if Kitty's power was to make solid objects "flow" around her, like the body of a swimmer moving thru water. But that's not what happens. The atoms of Kitty's body pass between the atoms of whatever she is moving thru -- as would the atoms of anything she is bringing with her. So Juggernaut wouldn't be in the floor, he would be the floor. And dead.

The first Superman movie, with Christopher Reeve, gave me momentary pause when he was shown "standing" on the side of a building. But a moment's thought, and I realized that of course his flying powers would let him do that. But a few movies later, a strand of his hair is seen in a museum supporting an enormous weight. A strand that Luthor then cuts with what appears to be an ordinary pair of scissors.

It's not just other media that makes these kinds of mistakes, either. We seem to do it all too often in the comics, too, where it is really inexcusable. I recall a BRAVE&BOLD in which the Flash "ran" to the Sun, and thru it, and back to Earth, with captions explain to us that his enormous speed allowed him to run on wisps of space dust as if they were solid. Didn't explain how he was able to hold his breath for about 20 minutes (speed of light), tho. I think it was also the Flash (tho it may have been Quicksilver) who once managed to run up the side of a skyscraper by traveling "faster than gravity".

This goes beyond scientific "inaccuracies", mind you. Superman couldn't really squeeze a lump of coal into a diamond no matter how strong he was (missing ingredient is time), but we sort of let things like that slide. But when coating something in lead renders it effectively invisible to him, that sort of misses how x-ray vision would work (even portrayed "accurately"). That was something I used to my advantage during my time writing Superman's adventures.

Too many times, tho, I've seen those moments -- often from people who should really know better -- where the use of the power is way out of whack. Cyclops using his beam to start fires (it's force, not heat!), Iceman making his ice so clear he becomes nearly invisible (or naked -- he's coated with ice, not made of ice!).