elmi

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.