Dissecting My Week-Long Heroin Addiction

Apr 19

Or, A Review of “Super Powereds” by Drew Hayes

So, as a writer, I’m not usually super comfortable doing full-on reviews of things, especially negative ones. It just feels . . . rude? Unprofessional? I don’t know, but it typically doesn’t sit right with me. Especially if I come away from something feeling very . . . mixed. I much prefer to just give things I like five stars as a show of support, and stay silent on things I didn’t enjoy or things I wouldn’t necessarily feel confident recommending.

There are exceptions to that rule.

Sometimes, I love something so much, I have to talk about it. Sometimes, a thing hurts me in a way so deep and personal I just have to get it off my chest. Sometimes, I run into things like Super Powereds, which I loved, but cannot recommend without an entire blog post’s worth of asterisks. And so, here we are.

The Review

I was, quite simply, completely addicted to this series. It consumed my every waking thought. I lost hours on hours of sleep reading it late into the night, to the severe detriment of my health and safety (not joking). I neglected family and friends. I didn't eat. It had so thoroughly taken over my life, I had to finish the entire series—all apparently million fucking words of it—in the span of five days just so I could get my life back.

Maybe that’s a glowing recommendation. Maybe that’s grounds for a lawsuit. I don’t know. What I do know is that this series is not for everyone. To essentially plagiarize Yahtzee Croshaw, yes, I know nothing is for everyone, but I feel like this was specifically for me, and I am weird.

So I think it would be most helpful to breakdown exactly what was working so well for me in this series and why, and what flaws I was able to ignore/live with. That way you can stay the fuck away from it check it out if it sounds like your thing.

This review does contain what I consider to be “soft spoilers”, which is to say no concrete details, and they shouldn’t lessen the oomph of any of the moments should you end up taking the plunge yourself.

Premise

Two basic ideas make up the core building blocks of the story: superhero school (college), and the concept of Supers vs Powereds.

The first is pretty straightforward. Take My Hero Academia or Sky High, and bump the story into college so everyone can drink, swear, and have sex (which they do).

The other is…well it confused me the first time I read the explanation so let’s see if I do better:A small percentage of the world is born with special abilities. Of those, Supers are people who can control their abilities, while Powereds are people who cannot. Being Powered can be an inconvenience, or it can be a hazard to the health of the Powered and everyone around them. In-universe it’s kind of treated like disability (Put a pin in that). Everybody got that? Supers = control, Powereds = no control.

The six main characters (Alice, Mary, Vince, Nick, Hershel, and Roy) are the first Powereds to be turned into Supers by a top secret experimental process, who then decide to all enroll in hero college.

So that’s the pitch. Six secretly ex-Powered characters enrolling in Superhero College. And that got me in the door.

Story

There are essentially two major storylines running through the series—the basic quest for graduation, and a looming conspiracy of corruption and murder centering on the program/procedure that turned the main characters from Powereds to Supers and how it came to be.

Interspersed through all of it, particularly in the first three years, is college interpersonal drama and social milestones as people flirt, date, break-up, make friends, go to parties, get jobs, hang out, all that jazz.

There is in fact, quite a bit of this in those first two/three books. And so many of my personal favorite tropes—the troublemaking guy and the proper lady, the too good to be true guy who is that good, the emotionless drone and the shameless flirt, the genuinely wholesome cinnamon rolls, fight-flirting, fake-dating, getting drunk and embarrassing yourself in front of your love interest—a lot of good, my taste-specific stuff. It petered off towards the end, but by that point I was too invested to mind—much. (Put a pin in that.)

I have encountered, to my memory, three superhero school properties—this, My Hero Academia, and Sky High. Maaaaybe four if you count RWBY. And of those, this is far and away the one I think handles the school stuff the best.

For one thing, the plot never gets bored, gives up, and drops all pretense of this being about the school. Instead, school stuff like lessons, exams, rivalries—and introductions to post-grad opportunities in book four—remain a focus of the story all the way through without a loss of stakes (barring one moment in book four where the lack of stakes gets turned on its head in a fun mini-revelation for a major character).

What I really enjoyed was how distinct the school years felt, each one having its own overarching goal/milestone for the students' education. Add on top of that was something from my personal progression-fantasy wishlist: seeing the characters take on roles once held by older mentor figures.

Just as a non-spoiler, low impact example, freshman year, they attend an annual party thrown by the sophomores. Then in year two, the characters become the ones to throw that party. And in year three, they have to select sophomores to host. Things like this, interacting with upper classmen and then becoming the upper classmen the new kids interact with and look up to, was so cool and almost exactly what I wanted to see.

Another thing really well handled: the stakes surrounding graduation. For one thing, the characters becoming the first ever (ex)-Powered heroes would be huge for society. But for another, out of a freshman class of like forty, only ten are allowed to graduate senior year. And not all of the main six make it to graduation. But despite that, they all maintain an active role in the story through to the end, and their post-college lives feel like satisfying and natural completions of their characters even without graduating as heroes.

As for the overarching conspiracy/outside of school plot line, it has some serious set up and payoff and plenty of big reveals. It also turns the whole series into a bit of a legacy story, kind of similar to My Hero or Sky High, actually…hm. (In goes the pin and on we move.)

More than anything else, it was the plot and characters of this beast that kept me hooked in. I loved watching them grow, learn, love, battle, and seeing them find their place as adults.

Characters

Speaking of.

This cast is stacked.

Alice’s transformation from spoiled rich girl ice queen to decent human being to shrewd and terrifyingly competent Super Spy over the course of the series may have been telegraphed from paragraph one of her introduction, but damn if it wasn’t still satisfying.

Hershel is a pretty textbook shy nerd kid, so his arc you can similarly mostly see coming a mile away, but his dynamic with his brother Roy is what really makes him interesting. And damn it if he didn’t make me proud all his own multiple times through the series.

If this were Grey’s Anatomy, Roy would basically be the Alex of the story—the big lughead jock that starts out a skirt chasing jerk (Pin here too) but turns out actually has a heart of gold. Much like Alex, he was insufferable at first and became one of my favorite characters by the end.

Vince is basically Captain America with a temper. Total optimism fountain, chaotic good boyscout who never stops believing in people—but becomes absolutely terrifying when people endanger his loved ones.

Mary is that “looks like a cinnamon roll, will kill you” kind of character who also manages to be a really interesting look into the social hardships someone with her abilities might have. And if anything happened to her I would kill everyone in this room and then myself.

Nick. I don’t even know where to start with Nick, man. Often unapologetic bastard with a heart of gold. On the side of the angels, but by no means one of them. He has a comparatively weak, low key power, and gets by almost entirely with cunning and resources. This man made me cheer. Made me cry. He broke my heart. Turned my stomach. Rolled my eyes. Made my day.

Which is to say the main six, all great. Loved my time with them. But my word is there a big supporting cast, so many of them with full fledged arcs, unique motivations, abilities, relationships, backstories, and hype moments.

I mean, they’re not all contenders for someone’s favorite. Clarissa’s entire personality is just “in love with Phil.” Some are pretty one note. But there’s a ton of them, I can handle a few being a little less rounded. And plenty of them are spheres.

This kind of helps tie into that soft spoiler about graduation. Because there’s only ten slots at the finish line, and so many interesting student side characters, and the story demonstrates that not even the main six are safe from getting the boot, there’s a very real sense of “anyone can fail,” which is the school setting equivalent of “anyone can die.” And then in the big, real-stakes battle of year three, it did feel like anyone could die.

I cried when there was a funeral for a student. And then again when a character’s surrogate parent died of cancer. And then again basically every time people talked about how much they missed a dead character. On Halloween, one person dresses up as the Dread Pirate Roberts because Princess Bride was a dead character’s favorite movie, and that was it, I was sobbing. Now, anyone who’s watched Grey’s with me (hi honey) will tell you I’m an easy lay when it comes to getting me to cry, so take that with a slight grain of salt, but that’s long-form TV. I’ve never had a book make me cry like these did.

Pacing and Structure

So these things were originally a web serial, and without meaning to sound like an insult, you can tell.

It is not paced or structured like a novel, it’s paced like a long form, serial story. Each book feels closer to a season of TV, where we’ve got a series of episodic events that build up to a mid season finale that happens right around the 50% mark on Kindle like clockwork, and then a season finale at the end, with character development and exploration throughout. There’s also the annual Halloween and Christmas episodes, where things go really wrong and everything’s really chill, respectively.

I was skeptical of this at first, but it quickly grew on me. For one thing, as previously established, this shit was my heroin for a week, so I wasn’t going to say no to more of it. But it also was just fun to have what was, experientially, a new TV show.

Longer form, serialized storytelling has a certain lived in, slice of life feel to it you just don’t get from more one and done stories like novels and movies. You get more room to breathe and explore and just exist in the day to day goings on of the world. And I enjoyed that immensely—probably because it was better for the immersion and thus addiction.

Pins and Problems

Okay, that was the good stuff, onto the stuff I saved for later and things that I was able to overlook and forgive but might really turn it off for other people:

First pin: Powereds as disabled.

So, I am an able-bodied, neurodivergent individual whose parents refused to acknowledge me as that second thing my entire childhood, so take this all with an entire shaker's worth of salt.

Powereds kind of read as disabled in a lot of ways in this story, which ends up falling into a lot of the same pitfalls the "superpowered people as marginalized" trope often falls into. And then there's the fact that the main characters are ex-Powered, and thus much of the plot centering around a cure for being Powered...there's some potentially dicey territory there for some people. I was fine with it. I was always okay with the metaphor inherent in X-Men's storytelling, I was fine with this. You might not be.

Pin the second: the ship well runs dry.

So I'm a man who really likes me some shipping in stories. I'd consume a lot more romance stories if they had more magic fistfights. And in book one of this series, I was feasting. But as the series went on, the focus on the romantic subplots fell off, and it lost the spark.

By book three, it seemed like interest in it was winding down. Our endgame ships became locked in in really vague, unsatisfying ways. One of the major endgame ships never even gets a big, onscreen first kiss. They just go from being friends to what I can only describe as "technically in a relationship, I guess." That upset me. I was pulling hard for these two, let them bang.

Ahem. Like I said, I was pretty invested in the rest of the plot and characters by this point, so I managed to sustain myself on scattered PDA, references to going on dates, and some side characters hooking-up. But I wanted more.

Pin three: legacy

So, much like Sky High and My Hero, Super Powereds is actually a legacy story, in that its a cast of characters dealing with the fallout of the problems of a previous generation of characters, which, in and of itself, is fine, I guess? I kinda feel like it detracts from characters as their own people when their role in the plot boils down to "clean up crew for the last cast's unresolved plot."

And it wasn't helped by the reveals in book three that Everyone Is Related™. Like, not literally every character is revealed to be secretly related/descended from each other, by my goodness it was a lot more than expected. And between that and the out-of-school plot being the previous generation's problems, it just made the world feel a little smaller.

Pin four: Misogyny!

Okay, that might be too strong of a word. Diet misogyny? God, how do I phrase this . . . you can tell this was written by a dude. Especially in the earlier books.

The womanizing habits of multiple characters feel presented less like character flaws and more like wish fulfillment, descriptions of female characters, while not "breasts boobed boobily" level, routinely focus on attractiveness and figures, and there are some really...awkward attempts by the story to lay down its (admittedly, I think well intentioned) views on gender equality. As well as a fascination with the female characters trying on/wearing sexy outfits and swimsuits . . . which, you know, that one may or may not have only bothered me on an intellectual level.

...I'm a sucker for "Shy girl picks out a stunning outfit to try and get the guy she likes to notice her/make a move," okay? Sue me, I'm human.

This is something that absolutely gets better as the books go on, and is essentially gone by the end, but I'm not gonna pretend its not there at the start. Oh boy, is it there.

I soldiered past it. Some people won't be able to.

The final of five pins: the Primary Loop (dialogue)

Alright, so this actually wasn't a pin, but all my other major hang ups fit into pins, so we're going to pretend this one did too.

The dialogue's not amazing. It has it's moments of truly great lines and wit, but in a lot of places, it can get unnaturally wordy, stiff, and formal in places. There are some characters who that would be appropriate for, but, just, everyone seems to get a turn speaking like that at various points. There's some archaic word choices like "courting" and "warrior" which I do not hear most people in real life using on regular basis. And especially in the early stages of book one there is a lot of blatantly expositional dialogue which just knocked me right out of the story and into my editor's chair.

It gets better and you get used to it, but it never completely goes away. If consistently good dialogue is a make or break for you, this might break you. Maybe give the first one an Amazon sample, because that's probably the worst it gets, and if you can handle that, you'll be fine.

Conclusion

So yeah, that's Super Powereds, Years One through Four. I read the e-books, but there are audiobook versions available. Cannot attest to their quality, but my word they're probably long as shit, because the e-books certainly are.

And, uh, yeah. That's all I can think to say about that. Let me know if I convinced you to check it out or stay away, or if there's any questions about it I can answer for those of you on the fence one way or the other. I'll just be here.

Going through withdrawls.

This post was originally written on a Reddit thread, posted in October of 2021. The language has been cleaned up, and I’ve removed small pieces which referred to other Reddit posts I had made, but the meat of it is intact.

I won’t say go follow me on Reddit, but just in case anything maybe seemed off or slightly out of date, that’s why. I will say, the original post had spoiler tags, which I have not figured out how to implement here on Squarespace. But it’s also too old to upvote, so any further engagement on it is a waste.

Elijah Menchaca