10 Times Superheroes Did The Wrong Thing For The Right Reason

Superheroes make mistakes and sometimes do the wrong thing for the most noble of reasons.

Flashpoint DC
DC Comics

Jonathan Lockwood Huie once said that “Heroes act in spite of their fear, while the rest of us act because of our fear.” They make the hard choices, the split-second calls, and face the consequences that most of us hope we never have to face in our entire lives. And many times, they do it silently and without any recognition or accolades.

In the world of superheroes, that is intensified a thousandfold. The very least that they do could have major ramifications and their mistakes could have major consequences. Some have powers that could quite literally crack the world in half and every action they take has to be measured by what is necessary and who needs to be saved.

Many actions happen in a matter of seconds. And every hero has aspirations to do the right thing, all the time, for the best reasons. But sometimes, like all people, they fall short. Their intentions are good but they do the wrong thing. They make a mistake. They zig when they should have zagged and because of that something bad happens. It’s not the outcome that they intended but their hearts were in the right place.

10. Salvation Run

Flashpoint DC
DC Comics

The President authorized a program to capture the world’s super-villains and send them off-world. The order was carried out by the “Suicide Squad”. The villains had been diverted to a hostile planet. Alliances formed almost immediately. Luthor created one with the promise of getting everyone home and the Joker gathered the crazier villains together to start some trouble. It was revealed that Darkseid’s torturer DeSaad had diverted the villains there as targets for his new Parademons. Luthor created his teleporter and got many of the villains home, killing some to power it.

Besides the legal ramifications, this plan was doomed to fail. Putting this many volatile personalities together in one place, even a place where they had to depend on each other for their survival, was just a powder keg in search of a match. And introducing the Joker into that wasn’t just providing a match, it’s providing a flame thrower.

Something needed to be done about the supervillain problem. Even a wedding in one of the heroes' own former headquarters wasn’t safe from supervillain attack and there were so many villains with so much power that the heroes barely had time to run from one fire to the next.

 
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Contributor

John Wilson has been a comic book and pop culture fan his entire life. He has written for a number of websites on the subject over the years and is especially pleased to be at WhatCulture. John has written two comic books for Last Ember Press Studio and has recently self-published a children's book called "Blue." When not spending far too much time on the internet, John spends time with his lovely wife, Kim, their goofy dog, Tesla, and two very spoiled cats.