As a Fridge subpage, all spoilers are unmarked as per policy. You Have Been Warned.
Fridge Brilliance:
- Mongul never tried to take revenge on Supergirl even though she and Superman brought him down and destroyed Warworld together. Back then, Superman could not have defeated him without his cousin's help: though here, it's a different story. Yet Mongul doesn't bother with Kara. Why? Look how he talks to Wonder Woman. He is a misogynistic asshole who thinks women are weak and insignificant. Disregarding and dismissing Supergirl is in-character for him. Then again, it may have been "Superman first, Supergirl next."
- In the original version, Superman's Krypton turns out to be dark and depressing. This is probably Superman's mind trying to tell him something is wrong, instead of giving him a pure fantasy.
- Considering how Kara was assaulted by a protester of the penal use of the Phantom Zone as part of Superman's subconscious resistance to the Black Mercy's imposed delusion, it strongly suggests that he is privately troubled about the justness of its use as punishment. However, since it is the only way of keeping Mon-El from dying from lead poisoning and containing the various Kryptonian inmates who otherwise would be incredibly destructive and nigh-uncontrollable in a yellow sun environment, it's an opinion Superman has to keep to himself.
Fridge Horror:
- The fact that Superman's dream world takes place back on Krypton is really a Tear Jerker if you think about it. The Black Mercy is said to show a person their greatest desire...doesn't that mean that, subconsciously, he really wishes he'd never come to Earth and met the people he knows here?
- Not quite that bad; he's married to a combination of Lois and Lana, he has a child, he interacts with the world. The real fridge horror is that Lois and Lana are the only people he really connects with on such an intimate level - especially since Pa and Ma Kent are dead in the Silver Age comics. The central facet of his fantasy world is him being just another Kryptonian on a planet full of them. He has friends he values on Earth, but in his deepest reaches of his heart, he feels completely and utterly alone.
- No really. He was also visibly and emotionally attached to Kara in his dream (and Lyla Lerrol is a previously existing character
. He wishes that his Kryptonian family was alive. He always wondered deep-down what growing up in Krypton and being raised by his birth parents would be like. However, the Black Mercy showed him maybe they would not have led happy lives, so Superman had to acknowledge that he and Supergirl being stranded in Earth maybe was for the best. - It's stated that the Black Mercy creates a "logical extrapolation" of the victim's deepest fantasy. Superman's deepest fantasy, ultimately, is to have had an ordinary life and family; to not have to be Superman, essentially. The Black Mercy just takes this fantasy and constructs it in a way that makes most logical sense. Logically, if Superman had just grown up to be an ordinary person, he'd have never gone to Earth in the first place, since he wasn't born there and any circumstance where he ends up going there fundamentally make him no longer an ordinary person; ergo, he stays on Krypton, because that's where he was born and should have been raised in an "ordinary" life. However, the rest of his fantasy also stems logically from this premise — ergo, he never meets his friends and family on Earth. So it's not really that Superman deep down wishes he'd never come to Earth necessarily, just that the way the Black Mercy interprets and constructs his fantasy means that the possibility of him coming to Earth is logically excluded. If anything, the fact that the fantasy is ultimately rotten at the core is a pretty big sign that Superman deep down doesn't feel like he would truly belong or be happy on Krypton... and therefore, that he feels most at home on Earth, and so is glad he found himself there.
- What would the Black Mercy show someone like the Joker?
- Probably something similar to the Emperor Joker storyline
