Superman

But it's that kind of thinking that gets people to cry "Mary Sue" and "unrelateable"! The Superman you describe is great... but that one is the one of the Silver Age... little more than 50 years ago.

Eh, there hasn't been a Sherlock Holmes story written by Arthur Conan Doyle for almost ninety years, but people still look back to those stories when talking about how the character should be.

Except the Doyle stories are generally considered to be the definitive Holmes, whereas most writers have tried to avoid Silver Age Superman unless there's a good reason to invoke him. (All-Star Superman, Infinite Crisis)

Let's go pre-Silver Age, then, to Golden Age Superman as done by Siegel and Shuster. Unless there was kryptonite involved, he was still pretty much invincible and unstoppable then, too.

Golden Age Superman didn't initially have nearly a quarter of the strength that Silver Age Superman had. IIRC, he didn't even have any Jor-El Kryptonian technology; he was an arguably socialist superhero who fought for the little guy against the corrupted in the upper class (and later Nazis).

He also never fought anyone as strong as him, giant robots don't count. There weren't many, if any, heavy hitters that could fight him with their bare hands. He was also, comparitively speaking, very prototypical, and was somewhat of a Flat Character (as many Golden Age heroes were at the time, was also roles for readers to fit into which got more blatant with the Silver Age and it's weirdness).

And as I mentioned, Golden Age Superman had no qualms about letting even his human opponents get killed by their own designs. There was never an obligation to Save the Villain. So if we're looking at definitive, then the bad guy getting Hoist by His Own Petard is the rule to follow. Considering that Big Blue is all but a Space Moses by original design, it's only fair to observe the "eye for an eye" philosophy of Mosaic Law.

edited 18th Dec '13 11:39:20 PM by indiana404

The Pharaonic household was hardly the Kenthome. Though "Superman doesn't fall in Minnesota Nice hands" is a magnificent fanfic fodder. Example: Superman is raised by Tom Strong's parents, in some subtropical island. Superman is raised by Uncle Ben and Aunt May in New York. Superman is raised by the Wayne. If he falls a few decades late: Superman is raised by Batman. Etc. etc.

A Superman raised in the Pharaonic household... kinda reminds me of Black Adam, really. Anyway, the point is that, in his original conception, the character didn't pull any punches for it's own sake. Most baddies got locked up in decidedly non-Cardboard Prisons, while some were simply left to die by their own doing. And these were just the plain human threats. Yet fast-forward some sixty years, and there's an outrage over the utterly necessary killing of a superpowered genocidal warlord, and the fact that the corresponding fight scene didn't spare showing the completely logical fallout from such a Megaton Punch-fest.

One of the reasons Man of Steel works much better than What's so funny... is that the latter's moral only works if substantially propped up by such narrative tricks as Conveniently Empty Buildings, Non-Fatal Explosions, and his own powers invariably being As Lethal As They Need To Be. Having The Cape hold a sermon over a moral stance that's only possible due to the whole world literally being written to accommodate him, is very much the "Let them eat cake" of shortsighted morality.

To contrast, having to kill someone in the course of battle, not to mention inadvertently harming innocents the longer the struggle continues, is all but expected in any serious fight. SWAT teams avoid using lethal force whenever possible, but SWAT teams also have snipers for when it's not. Man of Steel didn't shy away from that plain and simple fact, so the stance it took - that such an act is hard to do, hard to live with, but sometimes unavoidable - rings that much closer to reality. Ultimately, a Superman is not the guy who's always given a miraculous third option, but the man who can make the difficult choice when he isn't.

edited 19th Dec '13 4:15:55 AM by indiana404

Superman using his super-robots to protect the bystanders from that fight's fallout makes you wonder why he doesn't have them helping him do that all the time. Such as in the fights against the bad skull guy in that story... what's his name, again?

Atomic Skull. I forgot the exact reason why Superman doesn't have his fleet of super-bots help him protect the world as opposed to them being menial help in the Fortress of Solitude & the Intergalactic Zoo.

Something about a risk of them getting hacked and used for evil? Didn't one of them kill Donna Troy at the time when the Titans & Young Justice formed into the Teen Titans & Outsiders pre-Infinite Crisis? I dunno.

He could hire a better computer expert. Doesn't the DC verse have any Genius who's better than Luthor? I dunno, Oracle?

Because then the world would think he's building his own little robot army to take it over, and Lex Luthor would be all over that sh*t, like ' See? I was right! I was RIGHT!"

edited 19th Dec '13 5:42:09 AM by kkhohoho

Look, Superman is the ultimate example of If I Wanted You Dead.... As for people istening to Luthor at all, that's a world-wide Idiot Ball.

Except people do listen to Luthor. He's a world-renowned selfmade billionare, and has as least some clout.

If my continuity-fu is correct, this is no longer so. He's lost his money, he's lost his goodwill, and now all he has is his genius.

I'm not talking about the specific current continuity as it now; I don't really keep up with DC's current comics, and with how many times they've changed their continuity, I don't think it really matters. No, I'm talking in general; a Lex that still has his money, his power, and his worldwide clout. That's the Lex that could convince the people that Superman's building a killer robot army.

Same thing with Man Of Steel. There were at least a dozen different things Superman could have done to handle that better. There are tons of critics and parodies that bring them up, and the whole climax was no less railroaded by narrative tricks to force the conclusion that you "can't avoid casualties". Like I said, you really can't praise Man of Steel for that, because it's JUST as contrived.

But again, human beings have limited options. Snipers exist because we only have, let's say two or three ways to resolve a conflict without casualties. Superman does not. There is literally nothing Superman can do against almost any opponent that would kill them that he also wouldn't have a non-lethal option for. A sniper can't move faster than his own bullet to knock the bad guy out, so he relies on the bullet to do what he cannot do. Superman can do this, so there is almost never a reason why killing is a necessity.

Except again, he had TONS of options that the story conveniently forgot.

Fridge Logic options? List them, then.

Alright, but first, keep in mind that these options are not intended to say "this definitely would have worked", because I'm 90% sure that anything that's listed is going to be countered with "Yeah, but, that wouldn't have worked because X", which basically becomes a My-Headcanon-Is-Better-Than-Your-Headcanon debate that I want no part of.

Instead, this is simply meant to cover the options Superman didn't take and the movie glosses over, regardless of whether or not they were foolproof.

1. Clark could have gone to Jor-El for advice instead of a random priest, thus letting him know about the Phantom Drive and having that option ready before the mothership even came to Earth.
2. Clark could have asked Jor-El how to stop Zod when they briefly met on the ship. Instead of giving Clark some vague pep talk, Jor-El could have just said, "I explained to Lois how to stop them".
3. Clark should have been the one to fly his pod into the mothership. He can fly faster, he can protect the pod better, and he knows how it works. The soldiers were in no way more suited to this task.
4. There is no Kryptonite or red sunlight in this universe, but the Kryptonian ships serve the same purpose. Destroying all of them, instead of just taking out their pilots (like Zod) removed any backup plan from the equation. ^note Because, let's face it, it was only through sheer luck that plan captured every Kryptonian except Zod in the PZ. If two or more had managed to avoid it, Clark would have been screwed without a backup plan.
5. There are several moments in the final battle where Clark had Zod either off-balance or disoriented. (Such as the really cool shot where he punches Zod miles away twice.) But both of those times were chances for him to take he fight somewhere out of the city.
6. During the final headlock, Superman could have flown up, flown down, put his hand in front of Zod's beams, etc, etc.

Like I said, the issue isn't whether or not these options were "sure to work", so yeah, I'm aware there are plenty of reasons they may have failed, may not have worked, etc. But the problem is that Superman never tried them. The entire climax of the story was just an Idiot Plot that leads to badass fights, destruction, ad placement, and a ham-fisted final solution. As the Nostalgia Critic noted, the problem isn't that Superman killed Zod (because no one really cared when he did it in the Donner film or the comics). It's that the plot pretty much piled up the contrivances until that was the only real option.

edited 19th Dec '13 9:46:56 AM by KingZeal

What, you mean everyone would have been okay with it if he'd killed Zod deliberately and with other options available, like he did in the Donner film?

Disney Villain Death plays a part in it. You could only assume Superman killed Zod in the Donner film, but otherwise, it was a very nonchalant thing. In this film, the idea that Superman was so desperate and despondent that murder seemed like the only solution kind of rubs people the wrong way. The fact that the climax of the film was genuinely unpleasant might have contributed to their dislike, as well.

So, again, the complaint is that the villain wasn't offed in a nonchalant way, and that the climax resulting from his murder wasn't happy?

No. That's not a complaint—it's an observation. Superman killing has been done before, but the heavyhandedness of the movie to make it seem like a "relatable" or "realistic" solution backfired.

Maybe that's how you feel. As far as I'm concerned, this reluctant killing makes Superman look responsible and principled, rather than a gleeful sociopath.

Of course, my optimal way is to get Zod to have a Heel Realization and redeem himself, accepting to coexist with the humans etc etc. But nooo, he has to be craaaazy and an utter jingoistic racists xenophooobe. Upon failure, he'd rather commit Suicide by Cop than, you know, reconsider his life goals and start anew. Obviously they don't have Where's My Cheese on Krypton.

I personally didn't care. I'm a comic book reader. I've seen Superman kill before. The general audience, however, didn't seem to care for the plot railroading. Also, Nostalgia Critic had another good point when he said that the movie doesn't really do anything to give Clark his own unique perspective—the whole movie revolves around trying to fit Clark into a human perspective.

Which, come to think of it, I realized myself as well. When I texted my friends minutes after the movie ended, I said: "It was a good movie. But, it wasn't really a 'Superman' movie as much as a movie where a guy in a Superman suit reacted to stuff.'"

edited 19th Dec '13 11:26:55 AM by KingZeal