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Description
OK. An exceptionally talky one, done as a commission for LavanyaSix, a cover of his map of the world of the web novel Worm, a very long story set in a GrimDark superhero universe.

In this world, starting with the appearance of the mysterious Scion in 1983, people with superpowers started to appear, in ever increasing numbers, (By 2008 the number was 650,000 and still growing) with powers varying from "just superhuman enough to act like an action hero" to "Godlike" (pagan gods, at least). Unfortunately, people usually gained power as a result of extreme physical and/or mental trauma, with the result that most supers (I don't want to keep writing "parahumans" ), tend to be on the disturbed side. Supervillains considerably outnumber superheroes globally. This has not been good for stability either national or global.

Worse than even the worst supervillains are the Endbringers, three monsters of unknown origin which seem to exist only to torment and smite mankind. The Behemoth is a bipedal mass of fiery rock able generate or redirect enormous amounts of energy (the Soviets using an atomic bomb on it near Moscow turned out to be a very bad mistake). Leviathan is a lizard-thing with massive strength which generates tidal waves simply by existing - tidal waves which grow stronger the longer it sticks around, with seemingly no upper limit (see, Kyushu). And the Simurgh _looks_ like a human woman with multiple wings, but besides massively strong telekinesis she has the ability to profoundly fuck with the human mind, and the longer she stays in a region the more people she can reach. She stayed in Switzerland for a while after she first appeared and before people knew what she was, and a large part of Switzerland went completely dingo and set out to kill everyone they could reach: the unaffected Swiss were mostly either killed by their crazed fellow nationals or by European troops unable to tell regular Swiss from berserkers playing normal.

All three seem to be impossible to kill. At best they can be driven off by the most powerful of supers before they do too much damage, and often it requires the assistance of Scion, first and most powerful of superheroes, who can singly drive them off but seems unable to kill or imprison them.

This has fostered a somewhat apocalyptic mindset.

The US, which has taken in tens of millions of refugees, mostly from Asia, seems dangerously close to splitting at the seams. Neo-Nazis are on the rise, and while they don't have a sympathetic ear in the White House, they have quite a few superpowered members. Superpowered criminal gangs or just leaders are a dime a dozen. It's still a democracy, but an increasingly authoritarian one. It's still a rich society, but that also means that supervillains tend to move there to make it big: the US has more superheroes (and villains) than any other country. (Third world countries may be great for trigger events, but strong supers rarely stay in the third world, unless they're going the mercenary or warlord route). Superheroes are organized into a sort of national crime-fighting union backed by the government, the Protectorate, but there's always a fear that some day the government and the supers might not see eye to eye, and the conventional military might not be enough.

Europe, traumatized by the Swiss War, is threatening to break up into contending blocks and alliances. Attempts to create their own unified superhero force fell through, and instead there are national organizations.(There have been accusations of the use of national superhero teams in covert operations within other fellow EEC members).

Outside of Europe, Australia, and North America, treatment of supers tends to be much more paranoid and hostile. In Latin America, this is not helped by their prominence in the criminal cartels and organizations, while in Africa people with superpowers are about as well esteemed as witches. (African supers either rule normals as warlords or work as mercenaries: there are no African countries with dedicated superhero teams working for the government outside South Africa and Ethiopia).

Russia has its own super teams, but they are largely subordinated to the military: Russia tends to a "ridiculously excessive firepower" approach to supervillain fighting, but is more cautious about dropping nukes on them than they used to be. Some Arab countries tend to integrate supers with their military: Shatterbird, from the UAE, to some extent _was_ their military (someone who can turn every bit of glass in a city into flying shards of death tends to encourage peaceful solutions in other people. She has since gone on to other - and more homicidal - projects).

East Asia tends to be distinctly hostile to supers, if not as bad as sub-Saharan Africa. Vietnam follows a "tough on super-crime" model in which as little as stealing a purse with superpowers can lead to an execution: a lot of Americans loudly proclaim we should follow their example, ignoring the distinctly nasty downsides of such a "take no prisoners" approach. China controls its supers through the Yangban organization, (those they cannot control, they eventually destroy) which specializes in brainwashing, torture, turning people against eachother, and destruction of individuality. The existence of a Chinese Super with the odd ability of spreading out someone's superpower in a weakened form between multiple individuals has been very useful: the Chinese are worried about what may happen if they die.

Indian Supers are weird. More than villain or hero they tend to divide between "hot" and "cold" - hots are public, brightly costumed, celebrity or infamy chasing supers, romantic bandits, valiant heroes, clever rogues, often with a *youtube channel or even their own TV show. "Colds" tend to be unseen, costume-shunning, underground supers - government secret agents and killers, underworld wetworkers, terrorists. Their media presence is virtually nil.

It's not entirely awful. Technology, thanks to "tinkers" - supers with a talent for technology - is rather more advanced. [1] If you avoid a lethal encounter with an Endbringer or supervillain, you may live a lot longer than OTL. After Rwanda and North Korea, genocide or extreme oppression is to some extent off the table due to the risk of many, many trigger events and superpowered resistance forces - too risky. Contact has been made with another (fortunately, rather less superhero-oversupplied) timeline, doubling available human brainpower. Some sixty-odd million Japanese refugees and tens of millions more from Africa and other parts of Asia have been successfully resettled, although not without some nativist reactions (notably in the US and parts of Europe, alas).

[1] Not directly, since most tinker tech, Spark-style, is not mass-producible by normals, but it generates a hell of a lot of new ideas and avenues for research.

Description
OK. An exceptionally talky one, done as a commission for LavanyaSix, a cover of his map of the world of the web novel Worm, a very long story set in a GrimDark superhero universe.

In this world, starting with the appearance of the mysterious Scion in 1983, people with superpowers started to appear, in ever increasing numbers, (By 2008 the number was 650,000 and still growing) with powers varying from "just superhuman enough to act like an action hero" to "Godlike" (pagan gods, at least). Unfortunately, people usually gained power as a result of extreme physical and/or mental trauma, with the result that most supers (I don't want to keep writing "parahumans" ), tend to be on the disturbed side. Supervillains considerably outnumber superheroes globally. This has not been good for stability either national or global.

Worse than even the worst supervillains are the Endbringers, three monsters of unknown origin which seem to exist only to torment and smite mankind. The Behemoth is a bipedal mass of fiery rock able generate or redirect enormous amounts of energy (the Soviets using an atomic bomb on it near Moscow turned out to be a very bad mistake). Leviathan is a lizard-thing with massive strength which generates tidal waves simply by existing - tidal waves which grow stronger the longer it sticks around, with seemingly no upper limit (see, Kyushu). And the Simurgh _looks_ like a human woman with multiple wings, but besides massively strong telekinesis she has the ability to profoundly fuck with the human mind, and the longer she stays in a region the more people she can reach. She stayed in Switzerland for a while after she first appeared and before people knew what she was, and a large part of Switzerland went completely dingo and set out to kill everyone they could reach: the unaffected Swiss were mostly either killed by their crazed fellow nationals or by European troops unable to tell regular Swiss from berserkers playing normal.

All three seem to be impossible to kill. At best they can be driven off by the most powerful of supers before they do too much damage, and often it requires the assistance of Scion, first and most powerful of superheroes, who can singly drive them off but seems unable to kill or imprison them.

This has fostered a somewhat apocalyptic mindset.

The US, which has taken in tens of millions of refugees, mostly from Asia, seems dangerously close to splitting at the seams. Neo-Nazis are on the rise, and while they don't have a sympathetic ear in the White House, they have quite a few superpowered members. Superpowered criminal gangs or just leaders are a dime a dozen. It's still a democracy, but an increasingly authoritarian one. It's still a rich society, but that also means that supervillains tend to move there to make it big: the US has more superheroes (and villains) than any other country. (Third world countries may be great for trigger events, but strong supers rarely stay in the third world, unless they're going the mercenary or warlord route). Superheroes are organized into a sort of national crime-fighting union backed by the government, the Protectorate, but there's always a fear that some day the government and the supers might not see eye to eye, and the conventional military might not be enough.

Europe, traumatized by the Swiss War, is threatening to break up into contending blocks and alliances. Attempts to create their own unified superhero force fell through, and instead there are national organizations.(There have been accusations of the use of national superhero teams in covert operations within other fellow EEC members).

Outside of Europe, Australia, and North America, treatment of supers tends to be much more paranoid and hostile. In Latin America, this is not helped by their prominence in the criminal cartels and organizations, while in Africa people with superpowers are about as well esteemed as witches. (African supers either rule normals as warlords or work as mercenaries: there are no African countries with dedicated superhero teams working for the government outside South Africa and Ethiopia).

Russia has its own super teams, but they are largely subordinated to the military: Russia tends to a "ridiculously excessive firepower" approach to supervillain fighting, but is more cautious about dropping nukes on them than they used to be. Some Arab countries tend to integrate supers with their military: Shatterbird, from the UAE, to some extent _was_ their military (someone who can turn every bit of glass in a city into flying shards of death tends to encourage peaceful solutions in other people. She has since gone on to other - and more homicidal - projects).

East Asia tends to be distinctly hostile to supers, if not as bad as sub-Saharan Africa. Vietnam follows a "tough on super-crime" model in which as little as stealing a purse with superpowers can lead to an execution: a lot of Americans loudly proclaim we should follow their example, ignoring the distinctly nasty downsides of such a "take no prisoners" approach. China controls its supers through the Yangban organization, (those they cannot control, they eventually destroy) which specializes in brainwashing, torture, turning people against eachother, and destruction of individuality. The existence of a Chinese Super with the odd ability of spreading out someone's superpower in a weakened form between multiple individuals has been very useful: the Chinese are worried about what may happen if they die.

Indian Supers are weird. More than villain or hero they tend to divide between "hot" and "cold" - hots are public, brightly costumed, celebrity or infamy chasing supers, romantic bandits, valiant heroes, clever rogues, often with a *youtube channel or even their own TV show. "Colds" tend to be unseen, costume-shunning, underground supers - government secret agents and killers, underworld wetworkers, terrorists. Their media presence is virtually nil.

It's not entirely awful. Technology, thanks to "tinkers" - supers with a talent for technology - is rather more advanced. [1] If you avoid a lethal encounter with an Endbringer or supervillain, you may live a lot longer than OTL. After Rwanda and North Korea, genocide or extreme oppression is to some extent off the table due to the risk of many, many trigger events and superpowered resistance forces - too risky. Contact has been made with another (fortunately, rather less superhero-oversupplied) timeline, doubling available human brainpower. Some sixty-odd million Japanese refugees and tens of millions more from Africa and other parts of Asia have been successfully resettled, although not without some nativist reactions (notably in the US and parts of Europe, alas).

[1] Not directly, since most tinker tech, Spark-style, is not mass-producible by normals, but it generates a hell of a lot of new ideas and avenues for research.