this post was submitted on 09 May 2025
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You're missing the line right before Helen says "everyone's special, Dash" - "But Dad always told us our powers are nothing to be ashamed of; our powers make us special!"
That exchange is part of an ongoing argument between Bob and Helen about how to raise their children. Bob wants to teach the children a sense of superiority, Helen wants them to fit in. Bob's desire to see himself as better than others is something he slowly overcomes over the course of the movie. He can't defeat Syndrome until he gets over that mindset, stops trying to do everything alone, and accepts help from the people he loves. Helen directly says in the cake/rubble scene that Bob is projecting his ego onto Dash.
In that scene, Dash is showing us that Bob's misunderstanding of heroism is tearing his family apart and affecting his children. He's already hurt one child with his idea that heroism is about superiority, and now he's hurting another. We see Syndrome say the same thing as Dash so that we understand Bob needs to overcome this thinking to prevent Dash from growing up like Syndrome.
It's really good writing.
To bring it here, since you pointed me at it, I don't see how Helen's line changes anything.
The movie never contradicts Bob, Dash OR Syndrome. Right after Syndrome brings back Dash's line there is no more debate. He just goes to enact his plan and the family goes to physically stop him, which ends with him getting exposed as a fraud and then killed. By his own incompetence, I might add. Because he's not meant to be special.
Likewise, in Dash's scene that's the end of the conversation.
If the movie was meant to reinforce that, actually, everybody IS special, they forgot to put it in the text.
And hey, I think Bird has conservative views on this front ("there's no school like the old school!"), but I don't think he's a bad writer. If he wanted Bob to learn his lesson he would have had him learn his lesson. He does explicitly learn he should not have lied to his family and that they work better as a unit (itself a heck of a conservative read on the thing), but not because "everybody is special". He wins THAT particular argument pretty spectacularly, both with Helen, who is fully back on his camp by the end, and with the government, who are also back on board with special people being special all by themselves, which apparently yields benefits for society at large, I'm being told.
Syndrome is special. He built himself rocket boots as a ten year old. I'm a grown adult and I can't do that! He doesn't get his ass beat by the Omnidroid due to a specialness deficiency. He gets his ass beat because he invented an AI specifically designed to learn how to fight supers, and then had it fight him. He did a bad thing and the bad thing hurt him. He got leopard face'd. "I didn't think leopards would eat MY face, says supervillain who trained leopards to eat faces." There's nobody in the movie who can solo the Omnidroid. Not Bob, not Frozone, not Syndrome. The Incredibles beat it with teamwork, love, and trust. Syndrome tells his teammate that love makes you weak and he can't be trusted.
The counter to Syndrome's argument is that power didn't make him a superhero. Syndrome says "Oh, I'm real. Real enough to defeat you! And I did it without your oh-so-special powers." Syndrome thinks being a "real hero" is about being strong. Selling his technology to rich people isn't going to turn everyone into a hero. Syndrome, and all other billionaires, are unheroic because of their awful personalities. Powers aren't what makes the difference.
You know who doesn't have powers and is awesome? Edna. Edna Mode is most certifiably, 100% special. And it's all in her personality.
Edna describes her work with supers as "designing for Gods". Again, this feeds into the underlying subtext through the film that some people are innately better than others, and should not be constrained in the same way normal people are.
She then goes on to describe how many of her "gods" were killed by their capes. The same thing that happened to Syndrome.