Board Thread:Speculation House/@comment-203.14.52.144-20150518014116/@comment-24.104.77.242-20151028224957

Star Wars: The Force is scientifically defined by the Jedi to be measured in microscopic midichlorians. A couple decades later, no one knows how the Force works... it's just a mysterious phenomena espoused by batty religious freaks.

X-Men: The original series made no mention of an X-gene. It was originally theorized all mutants were born from radiation mutating their anatomy. The idea of a dormant, yet long existing, X-gene didn't come along until later.

Superman: When the world first met Superman, they had no inclination that he was an alien. They actually thought he could be a god. In modern depictions, the automatic acceptance he must be an alien is due to our world's outlook that their must and should be alien life in the universe.

Inhumans: Insofar as Agents of SHIELD goes, the unknowing Inhumans born of Earth have no idea how they're getting their powers even if we the audience and SHIELD do.

Modern depictions of DC villains such as in Smallville and The Flash (and even before that on Static Shock) use a singularity of some kind to explain all of the villains' powers (and in the case of Static and Flash, heroes). But originally, all of them had separate triggers or even never had their powers explained. Personally, it's long been my head canon that even the Marvel/DC heroes who weren't "born" with their powers were congenitally metahuman all along, but unlike the vast majority, many required some form of traumatic trigger such as radiation or chemical exposure or some other life-altering or deadly circumstance. This is how I explain that the Hulk and Captain America for so long could not be duplicated despite that everyone knew how they got their powers. Hell, we learned firsthand that Marvel's the Juggernaut got his powers from a magical gem but all along he was actually a mutant whose x-gene simply hadn't activated anyway.

Um... anyway, yeah, sometimes the public doesn't know even if it feels like everyone should. Everyone knew about bending on Avatar. Everyone knew about