* Soups are more of a target. Some regimes want to hunt them down and kill them; others want to make use of them. Both of these things lower the survival rate.
* Soups also seem more inclined to put themselves in dangerous situations. Not all of them, but possibly enough to make a blip in the statistics.
* Extreme stress can cause traumatic manifestation. War is full of stress. Therefore, the bigger the war, the higher it pushes the manifestation rate.
* Radiation is mutagenic as well as being a survival threat. The advent of nuclear weaponry, and its testing, created a distinct rise in the manifestation rate. Most of that didn't hit until the baby boom, but the leading edge began with the first explosions.
* Many superpowers enhance survival under adverse conditions. Armor, Body of (Something), Energy Beam or Bolt, Invisibility, Invulnerability, Luck, Phase, Regeneration, Teleportation, Toughness, etc. can all allow people to escape situations that would have killed an ordinary person. In extreme cases, it goes all the way to bottlenecking: only the soups survive. This raises the proportion of superpowered survivors to ordinary survivors. You can see an example of this in "Bulletproof."
As another example, I just spotted someone whose grandparents all survived the Khmer Rouge. One couple were 2 of the 15 survivors out of 17,000 people put through a famously lethal facility. Their grandson has Luck powers. Exactly no one in the family was surprised by this.
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
dancing_serpent
Re: Thoughts
Date: 2018-04-25 05:47 pm (UTC)* Soups are more of a target. Some regimes want to hunt them down and kill them; others want to make use of them. Both of these things lower the survival rate.
* Soups also seem more inclined to put themselves in dangerous situations. Not all of them, but possibly enough to make a blip in the statistics.
* Extreme stress can cause traumatic manifestation. War is full of stress. Therefore, the bigger the war, the higher it pushes the manifestation rate.
* Radiation is mutagenic as well as being a survival threat. The advent of nuclear weaponry, and its testing, created a distinct rise in the manifestation rate. Most of that didn't hit until the baby boom, but the leading edge began with the first explosions.
* Many superpowers enhance survival under adverse conditions. Armor, Body of (Something), Energy Beam or Bolt, Invisibility, Invulnerability, Luck, Phase, Regeneration, Teleportation, Toughness, etc. can all allow people to escape situations that would have killed an ordinary person. In extreme cases, it goes all the way to bottlenecking: only the soups survive. This raises the proportion of superpowered survivors to ordinary survivors. You can see an example of this in "Bulletproof."
As another example, I just spotted someone whose grandparents all survived the Khmer Rouge. One couple were 2 of the 15 survivors out of 17,000 people put through a famously lethal facility. Their grandson has Luck powers. Exactly no one in the family was surprised by this.