Parahuman

Parahumans are humans who have undergone a traumatic experience (known as a "trigger event") and awakened superpowers. The slang/colloquial term for parahumans is "cape", which is typically (but not always) used to refer to people who wear costumes, but may refer to Rogues.

Biology

Parahumans function like regular human though, unlike regular humans, they have a Corona Pollentia. The Corona Pollentia is the portion of a parahuman's brain that adapts to and allows the parahuman to control their supernatural abilities. The Corona Pollentia seems to awaken during a parahuman's "trigger event". It also seems that parahumans can pass on a similar power to their children without them having to suffer severe mental trauma. It is important to note that while children of parahumans are more likely to gain powers, it is said in the interlude of arc 13 that it is "likely more to do with exposure to parahumans at formative ages than genetics."<ref>Interlude 13</ref>

Psychology

Parahumans who were isolated and not regularly challenged had a mild tendency toward increased mental abnormality.<ref>"Capes have a way of getting weird if they’re too isolated.”
“Ah, you read Weiss Four,” Dr. Rowland comments.
“Yeah.”
“Explain?” Harrigan asks, leaning forward.
“If a parahuman isn’t challenged, they tend to veer a little off course, mentally speaking,” Rowland says. “It’s not a strong pattern, but it’s a pattern. The paranoid get more paranoid, the aggressive get more aggressive.”
“That’s a fact with almost any criminal,” Ingram chimes in.
“True,” Rowland says. “That’s one of the big arguments against the idea.” - PRT Questthread III page 18</ref> Which makes getting multinle members working together to be a large issue.<ref name="SB1">Wildbow:Parahumans are naturally inclined toward conflict, because that's why they have powers in the first place - the entities want to test the powers. A great many parahumans are great balls of neuroses and they've got passengers in their heads that may be nudging them a little one way or another, powers that aren't necessarily controlled or easy to manage, or unfortunate implications. - Conversation on Spacebattles by Wildbow</ref> Further they were know to be more emotionally volatile, their peaks and valleys more exaggerated.<ref name="II2.5">““And while I don’t like the way the idea is often interpreted or the conclusions it’s taken to, there’s the notion of volatility, and the exponentially increasing chance of trouble as the groups of capes grow larger. With parahumans, things are often exaggerated, both in weak points or the hot button issues they have, or their inclination to push certain buttons. The more you put in one place, the higher the chance of the wrong button being pushed. That was another concern of mine.” - Excerpt from Flare 2.5</ref>

History

Parahumans started to emerge around 1982, if one counts Scion as such, with the first heroes appearing in 1987.

Trivia

• It is implied that there are a great many capes in the world, but that they still form only a small percentage of the population. Brockton Bay has roughly seventy parahumans that have been introduced and described in the course of the story, implying that capes comprise less than one percent of the population.

• It is also mentioned that there is about 1 parahuman for every 8000 in urban areas.<ref>Insurmountable. Too much work for one woman to handle. She delegated where she could, but too much of the responsibility was hers and hers alone. The humans outnumbered parahumans by eight-thousand to one, give or take, in urban areas. Outside of the more densely populated areas, it dropped to a more manageable one to twenty-six-thousand ratio. But here in Brockton Bay, many had evacuated. Few places in the world, if any, sported the imbalanced proportion that Brockton Bay now featured. What was it now? One parahuman to every two thousand people? One parahuman to every five hundred people? Each parahuman represented their respective interests. She represented everyone else’s. The people without powers. - Excerpt from Interlude 13</ref>

References

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