superman isn't a god and he isn't just a boy scout
i honestly believe that in order for superman to be written well, you should attempt to pair his callousness with his idealism instead of isolating the two from eachother
i'm brand new to reading comics, but i HAVE shed the mantle of larper 🙂↕️
anyways, by "callousness" i mean that clark is usually NICE but is not necessarily KIND. at least not in the way you typically view kindness.
HEARMEOUTHEARMEOUT don't slime me out please 🙏🏾
he CAN kill, and actively chooses not to. there's a certain sense of detachment i believe he has to apply here in order for this to work out efficiently.
when you look at the majority of his rouges' gallery, (intergang, lex luthor, etc.) he doesn't really have the time to expend on talking them through anything or getting to know their flaws better, the way i've seen batman do sometimes with his own gallery. also, being a bastion of absolute good means that clark is oftentimes placed opposite forces of absolute evil, and that requires cool, precise efficacy.
still, it's important to remember that clark isn't defined by his power alone. he always has the dream of a better tomorrow in the back of his mind. his optimism is what drives him to make the hard decisions he often has to make. above everything, he has hope. that's extremely powerful despite sounding so simple, because this dream of his spans the ENTIRE WORLD. He thinks that everyone has some good in there somewhere, and he's focused on paving the way for a future that is conducive for said good to bloom. the paving itself can be bloody and sometimes frightening, but that's only part of the picture.
that being said, you can't just focus on half of the picture. that's how you end up with stuff like snyder's superman, who honestly acts more like a god if anything. i think snyder's take actually led to people not wanting anything to do with that side of superman, and rightfully so because it was overplayed and completely disregarded his other defining trait: optimism.
still, if you ONLY focus on his optimism, I think you'll end up with someone more like MAWS superman. i think he's great and a lovable iteration of the character, but he's missing the edge that makes him well-rounded and raises the stakes. still, i only say that for the sake of comparison. for what it is MAWS is great, and is totally meant to be more lighthearted in tone :)
at the end of it all, superman isn't just an alien god, and he isn't just a boy scout. he's a HUMAN.
he isn't an alien pretending to be a human or just a human who finds out he's an alien--- he is an alien who was raised as a human, found OUT he was an alien after all, and then actively CHOSE earth and humanity over a new krypton. So ig alien human alien human, sue me
(im referring to his mental and physical battle with the eradicator in the krypton man storyline btw which i think is super duper important)
and most importantly, i want to mention that clark's set of powers aren't really what we should be focusing on anyway. have you noticed that with almost every version of an evil superman, the first thing he loses is his patience?
that's his true power: the overwhelming amount of patience that he has.
he may not always be "kind", "nice", whatever, but he is always patient. even when he gets upset.
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