amorphousbl0b

His bare hands are a massively underrated part of his design that contribute immensely to him looking approachable and friendly. He is able to touch you, to hold your hand, to dry your tears, and lift you up. It's important. Putting gloves on him and covering up those universal signs of humanity is the most subtle, easiest way to make him look more authoritarian.

And if you realize this, you can see it clearly all over the place. Almost any Superman variant or pastiche that the artists want to convey is somehow flawed, they give gloves. From the Justice Lords,

to Red Son,

to Homelander,

to Omni-Man,

to Metro Man,

they all have covered hands.

It immediately demonstrates disconnection from the people they protect.

Even his weird little back-of-the-hand covering thing in the New 52 comics made him look aggressive and unusual.

When Hesiod first wrote about the Golden Age, he literally was living amid the ruins of an older, greater time, when people built palaces so grand that some had trouble even accepting that humans made them. Mycenaean civilization gave the Archaic Greeks an idealized past that truly was greater than their present, The early Archaic period was an era still slowly recovering from the political scattering and loss of literacy that came with the Bronze Age Collapse and subsequent Greek Dark Age, and looking back on the half-remembered greatness of Mycenae must have felt like trying to glimpse a paradise by comparison. And Hesiod's backwards-looking wasn't revanchistic, it was nihilistic; he believed that those better days would never come back and eventually his Iron Age would end in destruction, leaving humanity in its final, most pitiful form. (in contrast to the much later Virgil, who in his Eclogues did actually prophesy a return to the Golden Age, which given his position -- living in Rome, the biggest baddest Mediterranean civilization ever -- only highlights how situationally specific this whole thing can be)