Aug 20, 2021
Ask the Trope Fairy: “Go For the Silver!”
Ask the Trope Fairy is an advice column for characters navigating science fiction and fantasy realms. In this dimension, advice is published on alternate Fridays.
Dear Trope Fairy,
Like a million years ago, my parents were superheroes, but then there was a lot of boring legal stuff, and we had to go into hiding and now we have to pretend to be normal and it is so boring and dull and boring and stupid and boring. I have superspeed, but they won’t let me use it around anyone but the family. I’m the coolest boy in school but I can’t tell anyone. I could win every sports game for our school, but I’m not allowed to tryout. My dad is on my side about that one, but my mom insists that it’s too dangerous and unsportsmanlike to boot. Which of them is right? Why can’t I be a track star or a basketball player? It’s not like I want to play ping-pong against myself, although I could like I totally could. I swear I would just run slightly faster than all the other athletes. I’ll make it a photo finish, seriously. I’d even be willing to lose some. Not like all of them and only like second place but seriously. Put me in the game, parents! Shouldn’t they want me to have a chance to channel my abilities into something more productive than pranks on my teachers? This is win win for everybody but they’re too slow to see it! Everybody is too slow.
I Can Be A Ringer Without Breaking Our Cover, I Swear!
Dear Undercover Ringer,
I sat on this letter a long time before I felt prepared to answer it, and now I’m barely getting it in before your school year starts!
I thought about it the whole time I watched the Olympics with my transcriber in her dimension’s Tokyo. It took awhile to figure out what made me hesitate over each of the potential solutions to your dilemma. Depending on your current age, not all of the elements below will apply to you now, but it’s very possible your parents are (or are not) looking ahead, knowing that it will be hard to drop sports later if you’re an early superstar in little league so they are still worth thinking about.
My first thought was that as a child and adolescent, sports is about much more than pure achievement. There is a camaraderie in sports that can eventually lead to popularity with your social group. There is mentoring from coaches (of varying quality). There is learning new skills. All these things that your parents’ rule is denying you because they worry you couldn’t control yourself from zipping up the football field in a blur that would give you all away.
But it also seems vaguely depressing to imagine you breezing through a game at quarter speed lest you give away your powers or even perform well enough that the coaches tap you for more training and the eventual professional athlete track. Have you thought — really sat down and thought — about how it would feel to see your teammates and friends building muscle and technique to slowly build up their talents while you zoom past them without effort and spend your time finding ever more creative ways to look like you are trying harder than you actually are? And sad for them too!
It likewise feels unfair to think of you zooming past elite athletes, if you did perform well enough to train for something like the Olympics.
That doesn’t mean you should be deprived of something as potentially fun and rewarding as sports entirely. It just means that you need to be honest with yourself about why you want it.
Are you looking to build discipline and train new skills? The purest way of handling this is to choose a sport that, as much as possible, takes your speed out of the equation. Could you be interested in golf or bowling? Would selling archery as a self-defense skill be a plus or minus with your parents? You don’t have to do track to enjoy team bonding and build new skills!
Do you want a new place to make friends/to join all your friends who already play? A more traditional popular sport in your area could make sense, but how do you feel about lying to everyone? I’m sure your daily life in hiding involves some degree of that, but is adding more really appealing? You can pretend to be a mid-range player and throw your energy into learning the non-speed related skills (think perfecting a curveball or change-up rather than wowing everyone with a supersonic fastball). And you even have my tentative permission to pick your moment in a key game to help your team sneak out an underdog victory! OCCASIONALLY. If they start calling you a “clutch player”, that’s probably fine, but if they start thinking of you as a magical lucky charm, then you’ll have to let the team down at the next big moment just to allay suspicions and that will be hard. But if it’s worth it to you to stay around your friends, then you can do it. Just be ready for the times it sucks.
Are you hungry for glory? Do you want to be the big man on campus (someday)? It’s okay to want that! I swear it is. This is a more delicate dance, because you’ll need to find the right level of skill to be your high school’s hero Running Back without being So Good that colleges refuse to be put off when you decide not to take that scholarship. I will make the tentative ruling that that is the hard line you need to draw. It’s possible you could get your college paid for then flame out before going pro, but at that point, I worry about faking your way through sports becoming your life plan. And that would be entirely too sad. Can you commit to that delicate balance?
Does part of you want a gold medal, because you know that Lamont Jacobs is NOT the fastest man in the world? If this is the case, then it’s time for a hard truth: your speed and Lamont Jacobs’s are not the same thing. His is hard won, over decades of grueling training, and yours is a quirk of super genetics. That doesn’t mean that your powers are worth less than his abilities, but they aren’t the same thing. Pretending to only-barely win a race against Olympians who have been optimizing their bodies over painful years does not prove anything worth a gold medal.
Instead, and this was the main thing nagging at me as I tried to answer you before now, your route to achievement lies well outside normal forms of validation. You need to explore your powers, find the limits of what you can do. Not make a mockery of the contests that usually award masterful athletic skill. You playing sports, frankly, would not demonstrate athletic skill. You would just be showing off diminished super powers.
And honestly, that sounds super depressing. I would much rather see you stretch the limits of your true potential, train your powers in the systematic way a good coach would push you to do in sports. And unlock what only you can do.
So be honest with yourself. If it’s about glory and achievement, don’t put yourself up against non-super powered opponents and expect it to feel worthwhile. Compete against yourself and see how much you can soar!
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Transcribed and annotated by Katy Mulvaney with permission from the League of Fairy Surrogates and the Interdimensional Meta — Fantasy Council. The Trope Fairy can be reached by folding your letter into the size and shape of a tarot card and shuffling it into the deck before the psychic’s next reading. There may be a delay based on the talent of the given reader.
