I'd started to post this in Birdygirl's v4 thread, but figured it would be more polite to start a new one.


I'm genuinely curious: Why do people want to see Mac stuck in an office and Heather flying around in the suit? It seems to play contrary to their strengths.

Heather's chief strength has always been a remarkably strong, decisive, and bold core. She doesn't come across as an overly aggressive or self-centred person, but doesn't back down when challenged. Her background makes her the perfect choice to be the person that deals with things from a position of authority in an office atmosphere. She'd be an unstoppable dynamo.

Mac, on the other hand, would be a bloody disaster. Mac's an inspirational figure -- or at least he is if you look what was done with him before the Mantlo days. Judd, Bochs, and many other spoke of Mac in almost deific terms. He took the plans of a crippled engineer and helped him build a super-suit from it, trusting in that man's vision. He took a vertically-challenged criminal and gave him a chance to be a hero. He took a backwoods psycho with tinfoil pigstickers and... well, fine, he lost that one -- but he tried.

Mac's the idealistic nutjob that gives everybody a second chance. He inspires those around him. He doesn't kill. He built the suit, and is responsible for the innovations behind it. If something goes wrong with it in combat, realistically he's the one most qualified to handle it. Put him in an office environment, however, and he's screwed. He may have been a reluctant leader, but his temperment is more geared toward adventure than bureaucracy: he trusts people and believes in second chances. That idealism is commendable, but will get you run over like a groundhog on the 401 in that environment: it would be too easy to take advantage of him.

Heather's an able combatant in the suit, but she's incapable of dealing with it's intricacies (save through writers fudging a scenario). We're not talking about something as simple as learning an OS here; this sucker's complex in a way that defies modern science. It's emphatic proof of the Unified Field theory (which has always had me believing that Mac should be a physicist and an engineer) -- an accomplishment at least on par with Tony Stark, and possibly even closer to Reed Richards in sheer brilliance. Heather's bright and capable, but not a genius.

She's capable in the suit, but Mac makes a better super-hero from perspectives of both idealogy and capability. Mac, on the other hand, would make a terrible CEO or Department Head. Heather, in contrast, would rock the world.