Try to think of a way to make an original, non-clichè or banal superhero / villain origin story

>Try to think of a way to make an original, non-clichè or banal superhero / villain origin story
>Nothing comes to mind

Help ?

What's the type of character you want to create?

>stupid kid Larping as his favorite hero
>everything sort of goes his way because he lives in a small city
>other people see how much fun he's having and decide to join in
>eventually the entire town is either a hero or a villain; it's just a grandscale game of pretend

The reality is that pretty much every concept has already been used in some form.
But a particular type of antagonist that I like that I would like to see more of is someone who has genuine good intentions, and perhaps has actually helped people, but is a dick about it. Essentially, the only thing making them a villain is the methods used to achieve their goals.

Villain with good publicity is another trope that I like. Everyone thinks that the villain is a good guy except for our main characters, who are seen as conspiracy theorists or similar.

Anything, just give me your best idea you have for a hero / villain /anti-hero.

A superhero who crushes the villains by speculating at the stock market.

Why should I give you my ideas for free?

Character with telekinetic/mind-control powers who wants to be a Captain America/Superman-tier role model

A guy gets saved from a villian when he was a kid even if the villain didn't mean to help him. He grows up idolizing him and thinking that doing evil will end up in saving people because he is delusional and thinks everybody will be like him.

it doesn't have to serious, right? could be like one punch man.

So that if someone decides to make it you can claim you got the idea first.

honestly the whole idea of origin stories is stupid and symptomatic of a genre where the characters can never truly change or grow

in real life people dont have one event that explains everything they do in some vague never changing "present" of a status quo, why they do what they do in this individual moment is informed by the totality of their past which in turn informs their future

so instead of saying this guy's a villain because one really bad thing happened to him this one time, say he's a villain because his entire life has been shit and you'll end up with a much better written character

Making a villain that became like that because he got bullied in school or was an orphan still feels kinda clichè.

This. The obsession with origins has ruined several characters over the years (Donna Troy and Hawkman being the obvious examples). Just let these characters be heroes for fucks sake.

Donna is Diana's twin sister and a nice gal with pent up aggression, period. Carter Hall is an archaeologist who hits bad guys with a mace until they stop moving, period. Nobody really fucking cares about their origins anymore.

Pick a less familiar character from old literature. Someone that is cool but most people wouldn't recognize without an explanation. Then speculate on how a descendant of them wuld be. Not Tarzan, Sherlock or Dracula those would be cliche, but AJ Raffles, Carnacky, the Mucker, or Proffesor Challenger.
I know it's the plot of Lupin III but it's unusual enough that you can put a spin on it.

Make an atlantean, whose king is already putzing around on the surface as a hero, deciding to come up and see what's so great about the surface world and end up being a hero too. Bous points if he doesn't have the same powers as his king or the stock atlantean powers, just waterbreathing and above human strenght and toughness, and some other power.

Guy finds out he has faith based powers. Just not his faith. Instead the more people cheering for him, putting their hopes in him and having faith on him the more powerful he gets. Since superpowers are screened out on competitive sports he decides to become a superhero. Because of his powers he also takes appearances in talk shows, makes commercials, does movie cameos, all trying to get more publicity but without making people think he's a glory hound, a fine line to try and walk. He also suffers a hassle from old gods (Zeus, Vishnu, Osiris, etc.) because if he manages to get enough fans he might ascend to be a god himself.

Careful not to cut yourselves.
>Super hero and quintessential "good God-fearing man" dies along with his family as part of a nuclear option villain scheme
>Being as powerful as he is however means his body regenerates few years later
>Super Hero wakes up in a lab and comes to understand he's been out for a while and his family is long buried
>Becomes increasingly agitated that he can't be with his family and that there is no afterlife as he would have gone there with them.
>Dejectedly blames the lab for keeping him alive, enraged he snaps
>Becomes a brutal killer with the end goal of finding and pulping the villain who initially ruined his life and anyone else in the way
>But really he just wants to die, he wants to fight someone who actually has the power to kill him for good
>Can't bring himself to suicide because there's still a shred of him that believes in God
>Proceeds to go even more insane over his frailties and self-perceived cowardliness
>Former friends have to take him down even at great cost, they do, film ends
>Post credits wank, the super hero starts to regenerate again

>Alternate ultra edgy ending: The hero's friends fail. When the "hero" finds his villain he also finds his wife and children alive and well in a bunker, his death was an attempt to rid them of him after years at being in an affair, his kids aren't even his. Turns out his wife cucked him because she miscarried their first kid due to his DNA being fucked compared to normal people. Film ends with him laughing in a commencement of slaughter, the most gruesome montage of death and rape ever filmed, surely to be banned is several countries.

Don't think of an origin story. Think of a cool character you want to create first, and then you write their origin story based around what traits they have that work best.

That's one of the reasons why good Batman villains are so enduringly popular.
Take The Penguin for example. At first, he had no origin, he wasn't even named Oswald Cobblepot until the 60s. He was an odd looking criminal mastermind who used his unassuming appearence and intellect to trick people and enact crimes. He had an obsession with birds, he dressed like a puffy english gentleman and his weapon of choice was an umbrella. That's all there was to him at first

And then subsequent backstories expanded on this.
The odd appearence became a defect that the character had been born with and had endured a lot of misery due to.
The bird theme became an effect of his childhood (his parents owned a bird shop where Oswald could stay and play with his only companions)
The umbrella was revealed to be due to how his father died of pneumonia and his mother eventually forced him to carry an umbrella everyday, which also led to him first learning how to conceal weapons within it to protect himself.
The outdated and classy costume became part of his character and the class issues that govern his line of thinking.
And gradually, further elements of The Penguin's backstory could be created from these, like his complicated relationship with his mother, and so on.
All of this was just from writers extracting potential origins, some better than others

This is just one example. I'm not saying you should approach every character like a Batman villain. But what I'm trying to show here is that a good way to build a character is to create origins based on who they are currently, instead of creating an origin first and then a character.
See . It's better to try and extract a life from a character organically than try to apply the "one bad day" bullshit and build someone from that.

I was originally going to call him "Poolpool".

Look up some real people from history, and insert superpowers into it.
>El Chapo
>Mid/Low level Cartel member.
>Gets powers
>Begins climbing his way up the ranks. Powerful enough to make killing him near impossible, other drug lords forced to make deals with him.
>gets too big, too public. DEA, Cape heroes taking notice.

On the other side
>Young Mexican's with powers recruited to the Federales.

The Mexican drug wars are some seriously fascinating stories that most people don't know about.

What about Divepool.

Damn this is good too.

>Pick a less familiar character from old literature. Someone that is cool but most people wouldn't recognize without an explanation. Then speculate on how a descendant of them wuld be. Not Tarzan, Sherlock or Dracula those would be cliche, but AJ Raffles, Carnacky, the Mucker, or Proffesor Challenger. I know it's the plot of Lupin III but it's unusual enough that you can put a spin on it.
You just described the Wold Newton Universe, a.k.a the world where Tarzan, Doc Savage, Sherlock Holmes, The Shadow, The Spider, Nero Wolfe, Arsene Lupin, Professor Moriarty, Captain Nemo, Solomon Kane, Fu Manchu, James Bond and hundreds of other fictional characters are all part of the same family and all are connected due to radiation enhancement from a meteor strike.

Sounds like Kickass 2

Shale Soldier was created by a reality warper as a joke. In Shale Soldier's stomach lies a globus and every touch he does on this globus happens on earth as well.
His creator left creation behind and now Shale Soldier has to find a way to survive in this sane world.