It is hard to put into words how much I despise Reed Richards, but it’s the point of this blog post so I’ll try my level best.
Where to start?
Well, apart from the fact I can’t even read the Wikipedia entry on the character without wishing he was real so I could punch him in his smug, elasticated face, I suppose it’s the complete lack of common sense. One of my major bugbears about him is the way in which he takes his best friend, girlfriend and girlfriend’s younger brother on an experimental star-ship into space just because the American government threatened to cut funding for the project. That’s the kind of total disregard for the safety of others you will hardly ever see in another character as it escalates within a single sentence. I mean, Batman may take teenage boys out onto the streets of Gotham to fight crime, but not because someone merely threatened to shoot his parents in front of him when he was eight. The man has standards.
What makes the entire situation even worse is that he knew damned well that the ship had not undertaken full safety testing and still took a sixteen year old boy out into space despite the (later completely vindicated) concerns Ben Grimm had about radiation.
Pinpointing the exact problem with Reed Richards is problematic only if you don’t know what the term ‘Gary-Stu’ means. May I remind you that before the aforementioned spaceflight (in his mid-twenties) he earned PhDs in both physics and electrical engineering by the time he was twenty-two and had taken college level courses by the tender age of fourteen. Now, I know this is comic books, and that does give him a certain level of leeway.
Or it would if he wasn’t the best at everything. There’s a reason the trope ‘Reed Richards is useless’ exists, and it’s because he is perfectly capable of solving every problem that can be solved by science by himself. Or more likely, with the help of four graduate students, one of whom would be a hot blonde he’d bone behind his wife’s back and she’d forgive him for. Of the other three, one would be a fan boy, one would be kind of dim but be improved solely by being in Richards’ presence and the other would question Mr Fantastic and inevitably turn evil because Richards would always be completely right about absolutely everything except the one thing that would scar the student for life.
Hey, he’s got form for that.
The problem here is that real scientists aren’t like that, they aren’t experts in everything. It’d take something like twenty real scientists from a variety of disciplines to be equal to one Reed Richards. In fact, it’s worse than that, real scientists also have to win funding from universities and businesses and are accountable to ethics councils. They also have to go through peer review. Can you imagine what it’d be like if Richards had to be up to these standards?
He’d get back from battling Doctor Doom to find out his paper has been rejected by Nature because it was a onetime observation of a creature from another dimension that he personally sealed off to save mankind, but also stopped anyone else looking at the damn thing and knowing that it even existed. Oh, and GlaxoSmithKline has pulled funding for his ‘stretch patients to get at difficult to reach areas’ program due to safety concerns, and the American Psychiatric Association wants to have words with him for shutting down his son’s brain.
To try and be fair, though, this is probably the effect of him being created when he was. In 1961 people had even less of an idea about what scientists actually did than they do now and by the time popular consciousness became more educated on the matter, albeit not by much, the damage had been done. If he was retconned into a real scientist, well, he wouldn’t be Reed Richards anymore. Personally I think that’s a good thing, but your mileage may vary.
Speaking of retconning him into a likeable character, the Fantastic Four movie did exactly that. He’s not Reed anymore, even though Ben is Ben and Johnny is Johnny, and Sue is not Sue. Yes, for Mr Fantastic to be a character I can stand, Susan Storm had to be turned into a stereotypical ‘I love an absent minded guy and yet don’t seemed to have noticed he’s absent minded’ bitch. Not to put too fine a point on it.
Frankly I’m not sure whether this is a bad thing or not. It’s definitely an improvement on her having been in love with him since she was twelve, but then again, stereotypical bitch.
But this isn’t about her, she’ll get her own blog post, this is about Reed, because everything’s about Reed.
So, essentially, he’s a product of his time (like the movie version is a product of ours) and this is what makes him the smug bastard that he is. However, it’s bound to get worse, recently writers have started to make him more distant from his team mates because of his scientific mindset. No! Real scientists aren’t like that! The vast majority are like normal people but with more research under their belts! No one is completely scientific in every aspect of their life, and even if they were, that wouldn’t necessitate them being a dick.
In fact, I can’t fit how much of a dick he is into a thousand words. Not even a simple list of his crimes. So here’s a picture of him slapping his wife:
And one of him slapping his son:
'Nuff said.
Nicely put
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