Once i read all of golden age and silver age and bronze age and pre-crisis in general and post crisis and new52 and rebirth and all the different events and crossovers and learn all of the writers’ histories so i am aware of their biases and influences when creating those stories and familiarise myself with the cultural/social/political climate of when those comics were written to be able to understand and analyse them well from both a watsonian and doylist perspective it’s over for you all
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superboy prime's blorbo is straight up just jason todd
this is going to be a dumb ramble post about the Big Three Things prime has done so far about Jason Todd in the current superman run and how he's 100% a closet diehard jason fanboy. like on the surface he just seems like a quippy comic fan who likes jason maybe but NO he's genuinely so parasocially attached to jason it's scary. anyway this will be under the cut because this is gonna be long
"They'll see I'm like the Jason Todd of the Superman family. But less emo."
in issue 36, prime thinks this to himself while contemplating his own redemption arc. he's clearly at least pleased with this comparison, smiling to himself. now, this isn't really that crazy. like, okay, he kins him, sure, but i've kinned people who aren't my ultra major blorbo before. it's happened.
however, what makes this crazy is the wording. the Jason Todd. the Jason Todd specifically. now, why is this so crazy? we all know who that is, prime is just being helpful by clearly stating his name. well what's crazy about it is that he doesn't actually refer to characters by their civilian names like this very often. here's who he does, an elaborate list:
Alex Luthor Jr. *Referred to him as Alex, but Alex does not have an alter ego, so, there's nothing else to call him.
Bart Allen *I think he literally only does this once, when vandalizing Bart's grave and calls him stupid
Lois Lane *Refers to her as Lois, who could be Superwoman, but Lois is his friend, and he obviously would associate her more with being a civilian than a superhero.
Clark Kent (The Main One) *Refers to him as Superman ONLY until issue 36, where he says "What would Clark do?"
Barry Allen *In issue 39, he mentions Barry but notably is only using his name to differentiate him from Bart or Wally
Jason Todd *See above, as we know Jason can also be referred to as the Red Hood.
Damian Wayne *Messed up and called him that before switching to Robin in 37
now, please note that the ONNNLLYYYYY PERSON he refers to like this that he had NEVER MET at the time of him saying his civilian name is in fact jason todd. alex was stuck in the crystal universe with him, he had Major beef with bart and barry, lois is his new friend, he's interacted w supes since the 80s. it's Just Jason.
even worse, he doesn't even refer to everybody by their names if he knows them!! he usually defaults to their superhero alias!!! examples of superheroes that he's Met that he refers to by title rather than name:
Kon-El *constantly referred as the fake superboy or the other superboy. i think Once he calls him conner kent but i'll get to that in a second
Tim Drake *called him robin very derogatorily before tim sicced krypto on his ass
Cassie Sandsmark *just wonder girl
Diana aka Wonder Woman *redeemed him, by the way
KRYPTO *ONLY GETS CALLED A DUMB DOG when he ALSO REDEEMED HIM. prime even calls him "that dog" post redemption in issue 36. Bro
yes, jason is Different and Special in this way. he is the Only hero that prime hasn't met and yet refers to him in a rather shockingly personal way when he could just call him red hood like everybody else.
to drive this in further, he is referring to jason in a specifically positive way (note how he doesn't knock anything abt jason other than him being emo). the only other ppl who get this is clark and lois. bart and kon get insulted, while barry and damian and alex are used more neutrally. Yeah okay i think i've beaten this horse for long enough you get it you get the idea he acts like they're close when they're not let us move on
Bring Red Hood's Helmet Back!
okay moving along. in issue 37 we get one singular flashback panel where prime is working and getting into a heated discussion with a customer, to which he yells "THEY SHOULD BE MARRIED!" while wearing a shirt that says the above text and wearing a lanyard of a tiny fat plushie of red hood.
well frankly that's just an insane thing, isn't it? i've actually made a post about this before where i elaborated on every which way that he could've gotten the merch and why all of them are insane. because of that, i'll try to keep this short
for starters, his workplace has a uniform: a black shirt with a star graphic. this is the only panel where he is working and he is not wearing this shirt
prime tends to wear merch its true but theyre usually understated graphic tees with just the superhero logo (he's done this for superman, legion, batman, and amazing-man). jason's the only one who has gotten a shirt with words and also a second bit of merch on top of it
its distinctly very cute merch. its a fatson todd. prime why do you have a fat plushie of a gotham terrorist and wearing it to work. btw all of his other merch that we've seen in his room in final crisis is all like action figures and posters and stuff NO PLUSHIES.
listen no real casual fan is going to be wearing a shirt that says that. okay. a casual fan can say that on twitter all fine and dandy but no way are they buying that shirt and wearing it to their public workplace at a job they got maybe that week
see i kept it short. i'm so fucking good at this. lets continue.
"...YOU RUINED ME AGAIN!"
okay heres the Big One. the Most Recent one. in issue 39, prime is fighting against manchester black, who is trying to psychologically torture prime and he does it by making him experience a bunch of different hallucinations where he's trying to make him break down. the last one he does has prime be revealed to have killed a fair number of people and also beat up batman and wonder woman (who had redeemed him before) and lois is also there (his closest friend at this moment), and Also Jason Todd Is There Too, being held up by batman. prime crashes out and then punches reality, revealing that none of it was real and he just accidentally brought MB back to life.
sorry that was a really long recap. anyway this might not seem That gay but its pretty gay. manchester black (an unrelated third party) decided that it's more important that prime sees an injured jason todd than, say, Damian Wayne, who he befriended in issue 37 and is also robin and is also batman's son.
why? is it because MB looked into prime's brain and saw jason everywhere? is it because he saw the red hood merch? is it because he ships them? MB is a fudanshi confirmed?
anyway MB thought jason was so unbelievably important to prime he's on the same level as batman wonder woman and lois lane. that's how important he is to him apparently. you know a guy he hasn't spoken to ONCE. A GUY HE HASN'T EVEN MET. A GUY WHO DOES NOT KNOW HE EXISTS
In Conclusion
three strikes and youre fucking out. prime is obsessed with him no other explanation. that is in fact his blorbus blingus. his scrunkly. he loves him thats his fav no other real thing i gotta say. prime's personal close friend jason todd.
what makes it crazy is that he did all this in one arc and he's never really done this for any other superhero in specifics. like he's never worn multiple pieces of merch at once for green lantern, he's never told superman that they're similar (in fact, he tends to point out their differences), and hes never freaked out to the point of punching reality about harming someone he's never met before. jason is the one common denominator. he has to be his fav
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sorry im rly trying to form an opinion and you seem very educated about prime, thoughts about this? https://www.tumblr.com/cer-rata/818277362884067328/and-you-know-what-speaking-of-superboy-prime-at
I feel like it's a misguided point that isn't really relevant to Prime himself. Like, I understand where they're coming from, but I feel like they need to understand the overall context of his writing and his character. He wasn't redeemed now out of nowhere—he was redeemed six years ago in Dark Nights: Death Metal.
And OP brought up Damian, but I feel like they don't understand that Williamson really likes Damian. I think if they're commentating on the writing and the intent, then they're misguided. And if they're talking about the fans, a lot of different people don't like the direction Prime's "redemption arc" is going in, including Prime fans like myself. And a lot of Prime fans also like characters who struggle with a redemption arc, like Damian himself.
And the idea that people are projecting onto Prime... Prime is clearly guilty over what he did even if he acts flippant on the surface. He doesn't want to be evil anymore. I understand being offput by him being so easily forgiven, but that's a fairly common thing in comics and in media in general. OP is forgetting that he is still supposed to be SUPERMAN, and he was groomed at age 15 by one adult and dismissed by the other one that took him in.
I feel like OP is trying to grasp at a moral reason to dislike him, when it's perfectly fine to not like him on a general level.
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can we talk about the genuine meta horror of prime's whole, "they made me evil / they made me do this / they made me a villain" sentiment? as much as it's thrown around casually as proof of his immaturity and childish refusal to take the blame for his actions, he’s.. kind of right?
(very long analysis under the cut ! you’ve been warned)
even in the most recent superman issues, post-redemption, he's still insisting that all his evil actions were "an accident" or "not [his] fault." while ive seen a lot of ppl understandably critique this (because if we’re meant to believe he’s a good guy now, he needs to own up to this mistakes and stop being so dismissive of the atrocities he's committed), i think there's a lack of people talking about the fact that, in a sickeningly existential way, it’s true.
he’s a character. he knows he’s a character. everything he does—it’s not actually him, right? it’s a writer behind the scenes deciding how he needs to act to best serve the plot. obviously you can say that about every character, but the difference between every character and prime is that prime is aware of it.
i’ll admit the first few times he does the whole, “they made me do it!” thing in infinite crisis, he's clearly just talking about conner and the heroes around him for trying to stop him and therefore 'making' him hurt them. this is naive, yes. this is a misguided 15 year old freaking out over the destructive potential of his powers and out of either shock or puerility (or both) refusing to take accountability. but by the time we see him in adventure comics, after he's become aware of the fourth wall at the end of countdown, the "they" he keeps blaming for his violence shifts explicitly from characters to the dc writers themselves.
his whole vibe at this point still reads as petulant and bratty, as a purposefully easy-to-hate loser. him crashing through the dc headquarters and threatening the dc staff is supposed to be a funny fourth wall-breaking sequence, a tongue-in-cheek critique of obsessive fanboys who take comics too seriously and can't separate reality from fiction. all we're supposed to get out of it is that he’s an annoying child still blaming everyone but himself for the ways his life has gone to hell.
it works until it doesn't. because if we're looking at this solely from the level of a fictional story, sure, yeah, this is a character and his words and actions show us the kind of character he is supposed to be. but when prime is constantly acknowledging that he knows it's fictional too, the “wall” that keeps us at the story level starts to crack. prime isn't “just” a character. his whole conceit is that he is real, he is someone from the real world, who has somehow ended up in the world of a comic book. of course prime can’t tell fiction from reality; it’s not that he’s an overly invested fanboy, it’s that his whole existence blurs that line on principle. so when he cries that he's been "forced to hurt people," and that the writers have "made [him] into a villain," we end up looking at it from the level of our world. and they did make him into a villain in our world. someone from dc sat in a meeting and pitched, “hey, what if we brought those guys who sacrificed themselves to save the dc universe in the 80s back, but made them into antagonists?”
prime’s whole framing as a character that knows this turns his whiny "i wasn't supposed to be like this" lines from immature to heartbreaking. prime didn't want to be a villain. he tells us this explicitly, whispers it into an empty room in the wake of his fight with the black lanterns. but what can he do about it? characters don't choose for themselves how they’ll be written. he can slam through a comic's depiction of the dc headquarters all he wants; it's still just a depiction. the real world is untouchable. his entire existence has become an outlet for annoyed writers to point and laugh at, to make a fool out of as reparations for the hate they deal with from fans online. he's a convenient plot device. he's a lampshade personified.
it might seem kind of obvious, but i really get the sense that it’s not fully intentional by the writers? like, they showed us more and more of his backstory over time, gave us examples of him being bullied and emotional and prone to outbursts as a child, because we’re supposed to see prime as a boy who turned evil because he already had a predisposition for erraticism and then lost control of his life, not a boy who turned evil because a writer decided they wanted him to be evil. but the reality is, his agency has been stripped from him. as long as that fourth wall is being broken by prime’s awareness of his existence as a character, it feels like we can never properly blame him for the things he's being written to do. and isn’t that terrifying? that we’re watching someone the writers want us to believe was once a real boy get yanked around, forced to commit atrocities with unwilling hands?
so. do i have a point im trying to reach here? sorry, not really. i just love meta characters and wish i saw more people playing into the horror that can come from realizing the lack of control someone has in their own narrative, kris deltarune style.
also, i think it's worth mentioning i don’t think anything i’ve said here is going to end up a canon explanation for why prime is still acting so callous about his villainous past in the current superman run. stuff like this gets too close to the root of why fourth wall-breaking characters are so hard to develop. if you make them too aware of their existence, what's left? it's just depressing. it's a motivation killer. like, literally kills all possible character motivations, because they'll know those motivations were just shoved into them like doll stuffing. and how do you write a fun superhero story with a character like that?
if we were to apply this to our current prime anyway, just for the angst fun of it, i think it can still work. he’s no longer screaming, "this isn't right! ... i was supposed to be the real superboy!" instead, he's casually explaining, "[it was] not my fault. at least, that's what i'm trying to retcon." it's like he's given up on fighting it directly, recognizing he'll have to work outside the context of the story. he'll "retcon" it, rather than prove with actions within the story that he isn’t to blame, because he doesn’t really have control of those actions. he’s come to a begrudging acceptance of his own lacking autonomy.
but hey! he's finally being written as a good guy, just like he’s always wanted. maybe if he keeps reminding the writers that it's his redemption arc, that he's finally been changed, they won’t forget to write him a happy ending.
even if there’s nothing he could do to stop them, if they choose not to.
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