Power Trip 8 - Persuasion

It's been a long time since I did one of these, but I think I'll finally get on with another post and see if 'Power Trip' still has any juice. For those of you who don't know or have forgotten (most of you I'd imagine!) Power Trip is my brief look at superpowers, which characters have them, where they come from and what they say about us. I start with character who appear in Heroes, look at their abilities and go from there.

It's quite interesting how the bank of superpowers have pretty much all been 'done' - I try on occasion to come up with my own super-team, and it's very difficult to create abilities that don't already belong to a decades-old Marvel character, I wonder what that tells us, do I have the answer - heck no!

Anyhow - this ability was shown in Eden McCain a character in Series 1 who had the ability to get people to do just about anything she wanted just by speaking to them. Her ability was used by the company to cover up their secrets and get people to do work for them. She used it effectively until Sylar went after her power and she killed herself to stop him getting it.

Few other characters have this power, only 'Kelly' - a character from the 'iStories' has a similar ability. I guess this is because it has been superseded by the advancement of Matt's telepathy, though Eden's power was different from this as (in a comic) she killed her mother simply by saying 'die' - which seems beyond a telepath, also she couldn't read minds as far as we can tell.









There has been a long-standing interest in mind-control and powers of persuasion among humankind. Hypnosis, drugs and myriad other techniques are employed or dreamed about as a way of persuading our fellow man to do what we want. The ability manifested in this character is merely a natural extension, someone who can just do it by speaking while the rest of us fiddle about with LSD and fobwatches.

I guess it's just a basic desire for power here - there are various situations when our fellow man just gets in our way and we could do with control over them. Eden herself uses the ability to avoid the police and distract unwanted visitors.










Not many characters have this specific ability, with most going down the 'advanced telepath' route to achieve the same goal. One character who does is Silver Fox a member of the Weapon X team and lover of Wolverine (shown above in her movie appearance) she can make anyone do whatever she wants as long as she touches them, a restriction like this seems to be common, Eden has to speak specifically for control, maybe we still want limits to our powers.

I enjoyed that - I might do some more.