Driving my son and a carpool full of boys to school, the conversation naturally turned to superheroes—or more precisely, superpowers. Which ones would you pick for yourself? Flying, superstrength, and invisibility got mentions, followed by a long, involved conversation about whether shape-shifting meant that you could fly, be superstrong, and be invisible, or whether that was illogical or (more importantly) unfair.

Whether illogical or unfair, though, I think my carpool was onto something. The battle between good and evil in superhero stories, and even really their plots, often seems beside the point. The fun bit, the part you go to the theater to see, is all those awesome powers powering away. Doing good is OK, but the real fun is in doing good by blasting bad guys (or whoever) with your repulsor rays (which shapeshifters may or may not be able to duplicate). It is, as my carpool cheerfully suggests, a stereotypically boy-centric vision of narrative, in which what happens is less important than who’s stronger and how.

That insight is hardly original. Psychologist William Marston was saying the same in 1944, only a few years after the original Superman started to power up. According to Marston, “It seemed to me, from a psychological angle … that the comics’ worst offense was their blood-curdling masculinity. A male hero, at best, lacks the qualities of maternal love and tenderness which are as essential to a normal child as the breath of life. Suppose your child’s ideal becomes a superman who uses his extraordinary powers to help the weak. The most important ingredient in the human happiness recipe still is missing—love.”

It’s a bit of a stretch to imagine my carpool debating the relative merits of love versus shape-shifting as a superpower. Nonetheless, Marston’s added ingredient turned out to make for extraordinarily popular superhero comics. His character, Wonder Woman, arguably the first female superhero, sold staggeringly well during World War II, when comics could move hundreds of thousands of copies a month. They aren’t necessarily dated either; my son read them and thought they were great.

To some degree, those original Wonder Woman comics don’t seem to stray far from the standard boy model of superheroism: we’ve got lots of powers and we’re going to blast you with them. Wonder Woman is superstrong and superfast (she outruns a car in one of her first appearances), plus she has nifty weapons like a lasso of command that makes you do whatever she says. She does fight bad guys, and bad girls too.

But blasting someone with heat vision is one thing; wrapping them in a rope that compels obedience is something else. The original Wonder Woman comics don’t involve long violent battles in which bodies go flying and property damage escalates, as in the final city-destroying über-punch-fest in Man of Steel. Instead, Wonder Woman ties people up and commands them. And then, quite often, the villain manages to get her rope, and tie her up, and command her. And then she gets it back, and commands them. The comics are more about this playful vertiginous round than they are about violent struggle and permanent defeat. In Wonder Woman No. 2 there’s a two-page sequence in which an “Oriental dancer” named Naha binds Wonder Woman with her own rope and leads her around town. Supposedly this is to throw off the police, but really the comic seems to see the spectacle as a pleasure in itself.

In an interview, Marston explicitly said that Wonder Woman’s lasso was “a symbol of female charm, allure, oomph, attraction.” There are scenes of bondage—of people being tied up with that symbol of female allure—on virtually every page. Wonder Woman comics consciously replace violence with flirtation.

It may seem like the erotic approach to superheroes hasn’t had much long-term traction. Superhero comics and superhero movies tend to be devoted to explosions, not to bondage games. Wonder Woman’s recent comics, written by Brian Azzarello and drawn by Cliff Chiang, are awash in blood and guts. The upcoming Batman V Superman film, in which Wonder Woman is supposed to have a cameo, is directed by Zack Snyder—say no more.

Still, despite the popularity of violent superheroes, one of the most successful multimedia phenomena of the past decade is a superhero story in which love is the greatest superpower: the tween vampire romance series Twilight. And not coincidentally, like Wonder Woman, its protagonist is a woman.

Admittedly, Twilight’s Bella isn’t usually seen as a superhero. But there’s no doubt that in Stephenie Meyer’s final book she gains superpowers, becoming a vampire with superstrength, superspeed, and superinvulnerability. Moreover, the series strongly suggests from the very first book that Bella is a potential vampire in waiting. She can smell blood when she’s still a human, and her telepathic vampire boyfriend Edward can’t read her mind. Most superhero stories are about powers, so the hero gets those powers at the beginning of the narrative. Twilight, though, takes its time—three whole books—before handing over the superness.

Meyer is in no rush to make Bella super because in Twilight the powers are secondary to the romance. The series is all about the sexy ancient/young vampire Edward and about the sexy, virile werewolf Jacob. The ups and downs of those relationships are the focus; superpowers are there to add tension and excitement to the romance, not to the violence. In the very last scene in Twilight, vampire Bella reveals to Edward that she now has the ability to let him read her mind. The ultimate, most awesome superpower is not shape-shifting, as my son would have it, but the ability to join minds with your husband for all eternity.

When I told a college class earlier this year that Bella might be a superhero, they were as skeptical as my carpool would be if I suggested that mind melding with your spouse might make a desirable superpower. Bella, the college students argued, was whiny, ineffectual, mopey, and boring. She didn’t have exciting adventures, and she certainly didn’t stake evil vampires the way that other superhero Buffy did.

The students were right. Bella isn’t heroic the way Buffy is. If superheroism and superpowers are defined in terms of the destructive power of Iron Man’s repulsors, or how much Hulk can smash, then Bella—and the early Wonder Woman—aren’t very impressive as superheroes. But as fun as it is to blow things up and stake evil through the heart, it’s worth considering other kinds of heroism too. As my son shape-shifts on up through adolescence and beyond, I hope he’s strong and brave and able to fight for what he believes. But I hope, for my sake and his, that one of his powers is the ability to love.

Noah Berlatsky, AM’94, is the author of Wonder Woman: Bondage and Feminism in the Marston/Peter Comics, 1941–1948, due out in early 2015 from Rutgers University Press. He edits the comics and culture website the Hooded Utilitarian and is a contributing writer at the Atlantic.