I went from getting a song stuck inside my head, to creating a list based on a line in that song, to then wondering about a disparity in that list. My list is one which tries to identify all the characters in DC with cold based powers or abilities. I had never thought about it before but most cold based characters are villains. There is no readily apparent answer for this as those characters with cold based powers (Icemaiden or Iceman) do a pretty decent job of being a hero with what they have got. However, digging a little deeper does reveal a few things. I am thinking first of all of Batman and Robin (the movie) in which Mr. Freeze encases various people in ice, explaining that the heroes have 11 (it might have been 13) minutes to save them before they die. This is partially true. A good lifeguard or emergency room doctor will tell you that a patient is not dead until they are warm and dead (as was sort of realistically portrayed in the Abyss) and this is so much true that a lot of heart surgery in modern years involves putting the patient into near hypothermia. This overlooks something about the situation though, people who can be resuscitated in this way have generally gotten cold slowly (at least more slowly than a cold gun allows) in which case most people would start to suffer brain damage after 3 minutes without oxygen. That having been said, a lot of the offensive abilities of ice powers are portrayed as potentially fatal. An ice attack would not have to involve encasing the head though, which is what the heroic characters do. To be honest I think there is something even more primal at play here and something which social workers that deal with the homeless in cold climates have to worry about, that being that the cold is a lot more dangerous than the heat in a certain sense. If you fall asleep in +50 degree whether (that's Celsius) you might wake up dehydrated. On the other hand if you fall asleep in -50 degree weather chances are you never do wake up. An aversion to cold is something which is natural in most people (yes, even for Canadians) so it is not surprising that the ability to control cold is usually portrayed as something which only villains do. Incidentally the ability to control cold also created about 500 bad cold puns in Batman and Robin
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