Cont. Thoughts on Superpowers and Insecurities

So writing that last post got me thinking about the desire for superpowers, and the personal insecurities that lead to the desires for different types of powers.

I went into my personal insecurities in relation to the powers I listed, at least on a surface level.

But the question I'm pondering at the moment is how do we seperate the desire for powers "because they are cool" from the desire "because they would allow us to be free of something we hate about ourselves". And perhaps how to find the desire for powers that would actually allow us to grow as individuals, rather than being a crutch we can use to avoid or escape our own fears and shortcomings.

Perhaps seperate is not the right word. Because these aspects can't be completely separated. We desire powers because they are cool. We desire them because they would allow us to be more than we are. We desire powers that should free us from the things we hate about ourselves. These are intertwined and they should be. But to understand ourselves we need to look at each piece separately. And to understand a character we need to do the same. For a character to be real they have to have those same internal struggles they do. They need to be a representation of someone real. What superpowers would the character want? Why? What about themselves and their life do they internally struggle with so much that they desire the ability to magically make it go away. And if that character does have powers, is that power the one that they had needed/desired? Does it really make the issue go away or just change it? Does it make a new issue they they struggle with now? Or is the power completely irrelevant to their own internal issues?

I'm preparing to Co-GM a superhero RPG with a friend, and I have been creating a lot of NPCs, partially as a way for making sure I understand the system well enough to run it, and partially to make sure I have sufficiently populated the world the players are going to be in. Some of these NPCs are obviously going to be various levels of based off of existing characters throughout the genre. When I have trouble coming up with a character concept I turn to comics and tv-shows. But the interesting characters are ones who I've taken the time to get into their minds. Even if these are supposed to be easy one-shot baddies, intimately knowing the character and what makes them tick really helps me, especially when it's time to play the character.

But now I'm starting to go back and think about these characters not just from the questions of "what do they do in the world", "how do they interact with society now that they have powers", "what motivates them to act", etc. Now I'm asking "what do they hate about themselves?", "how do they use their powers in relation to those insecurities?", "do they use their powers as a crutch or as a tool for making their lives better?".

And perhaps the more interesting question is, "how can I use these characters to explore my own insecurities in a safe environment?".