Satirizing Superman - Detail Diatribe

hello everybody welcome to a brand new detailed diet tribe that i'm definitely not recording one week before this goes up for scheduling reasons yeah uh you see i i i was doing fine until i went to vidcon and that kind of massively threw off not only the schedule for the week where i was at vidcon but the week after i was at vidcon yeah no thoughts were processed this whole week no so you know this is a well-known side effect of recovering from conventions like even if you don't get physically ill which was a well-known con thing even before you know the dark times uh you still need time to psychologically recover from just that much stuff the travel logistics that meeting new people all that good stuff and like i didn't build that in you're kind of new to going to conventions it's totally respectable i should have warned you more um i'm so excited to get back into the con circuit because there's something very cleansing about being that wiped out for like a week straight just from how much fun you have but anyway uh because of that and because i insisted uh we are doing a quick little detailed eye tribe about uh a subject that i think is very interesting to explore and that is superman and the satirization thereof because well superman he's a pretty interesting character you know but it feels like half the people i see who are telling superman stories are people who think superman is dumb and boring and i must ask why are they doing this so without further ado let's get into my sweet little powerpoint about this yeah superman is is i'm sure you'll get into this but he's such a complicated character to work with because he is such a he's not a blank slate but he's such like an open realm of possibilities that it's like what direction do i go in where with some characters were like their backstory is very prescribed their personality is very prescribed it's like okay i know what to do with them but with superman the possibilities are so numerous that it gets tricky to write him well superman is indeed a complicated figure who is deceptively simple but to start off let's discuss who superman is i feel like kent and the powerpoint what nobody tell lois uh i'm the reporter i feel like this is an important thing to discuss even though it is also a wildly unnecessary thing to discuss everyone in the world has heard of superman but we should cover our bases you know cover our ground superman was uh created in the 30s by writer jerry siegel and artist joe schuster they got on great seems like i did a little reading on this earlier in the day this is by far the least important part of superman's character but it is important to note that he came from a place of science fiction action and adventure he is a very sci-fi character right down to his bones uh he was also the first costumed superhero of this kind he debuted in action comics number one action comics ran for like 800 plus issues all the way up to now basically so wow yeah uh yeah that's insane yes page one of action comics number one lays out superman's origin in broad strokes uh the planet isn't named the scientist who his father is is not named a lot of his powers are rather more low than they are now ma and pa kent are never mentioned he's just raised in an orphanage page one martha yeah he uh so uh a scientist saves his baby son from the destruction of the planet sends him to earth moses style it's referenced on the slide i didn't mention uh both jerry siegel and joe schuster uh were jewish siegel i believe both of his parents were immigrants to the u.s from the rapid anti-semitism rising in in europe around 1900 these men lived through two world wars so or at least one each so that is important context that i think it's easy to overlook especially because modern adaptations frequently lean into the christ allegory angle and i think it's better to acknowledge that it's just straight up moses and the bulrushes and everybody knows it so uh and the original pseudoscientific explanation superman's uh well clark kent's great strength and power was from his advanced physical structure because the planet he was from had more evolution in it i mean it was 1938 we can forgive them for the pseudoscience uh he drank so much milk he did so many push-ups and sit-ups uh so he has super strength he uh uh nothing less than a bursting shell can break his skin uh and he's super fast and he can leap tall buildings an eighth of a mile in a single bound and he chooses on page one to turn his titanic strength into channels that would benefit mankind uh and that's his deal that's superman right down to his bones mild mannered guy weird powers from space a stranger in a strange land decides to use his powers to help people and then they have a scientific explanation of clark kent's amazing strength that explains that it's like grasshoppers you see you know how they can jump it's like that so peak stuff uh now superman's core deal can be boiled down to just a few core principles and these remain relatively constant although we'll get to the difficulties of establishing canon for superheroes in a minute um he's an alien from a destroyed world he's basically the last of his kind give or take a few uh he's super strong bulletproof fast grab bag of superpowers he got a lot more during random periods of comics and some of them stuck he's dedicated to using his powers to help humanity this is the one thing he does he maintains a meek secret identity that contrasts with his brash superhero it's pretty much the only thing that happens in action comics one is that clark can't ask slowest lane out and then like she gets menaced and clark kind of backs off and i believe superman swoops into the rescue and she's like oh why can't you be more like that bold superman clark you're such a loser he's a good-hearted heroic and selfless but it is not yet clear at this point whether the true persona is the meek clark kent or the bold and frequently mischievous superman uh yeah contrast with with batman who wears bruce wayne as a mask i think it's interesting that from a very early stage of superhero comics i know there were like costumed people before this but like the phantom was a guy like he wasn't a superhero he was a guy in a costume yeah the idea that even starting with like you know action comics one like the conflict between the identity and the superhero that like already that's a very important part of this character is it's cool to see that like it's such a fundamental aspect like krypton came later yep all the other nonsense came later but there are some parts that were truly fundamental to his character and showed up so early on yes and one thing i thought was interesting about his appearance in the very first action comics number one is that one of the first bits of heroics we see is basically him using the fact that he's super strong fast and bulletproof to essentially break into a governor's house in the middle of the night to say hey someone's on death row i have proof of her innocence you have to save her right now we don't have time for any of this and it's like this is some random lady she's never brought up before she's never brought up again she's nobody superman particularly knows or cares about she's a random innocent person who he saves with his powers in a simple way that nobody else could he's not like saving her from falling off a building he's not stopping a train from hitting her but in the same way that those events do happen he is using his powers to basically say like look we don't have time for this you can save her you have to let's do it and i just thought that was a very interesting and promising thing to be established so early because yeah as we will discuss this universal goodness that there is nobody below superman's notice is very important to his character yeah that is that is huge yes uh other interpretations we'll we'll we'll surely talk about this get into like superman's good because he punches things harder like no he he gives a [ __ ] yeah that's like half of his power set is the fact that he cares yeah um now we must address the elephant in the room whenever we discuss any form of superhero what is the canon as anyone familiar with the website super dickery will tell you superman had some pretty bad showings back in the day and also now we can't make any statements like superman does not kill or superman is always a paragon of justice because there's probably some silver age comic where he was like i think this week i'll [ __ ] with lois lane for no reason it's like boy i think i'll throw this bad guy into the sun all right stop that so you know we there's no concrete cannon we can't make any statements about this is always true where this is never true his powers personality and general vibe have all fluctuated over time how can we pin down the core of a character if they've changed so much over eight decades of existing how how do we handle this and then the answer is you know we we sort of cheat we can sort of establish just the vibes of superman and then work from there because you know any hard-line statement we make can be proven or disproven 100 times over yeah so let's go with the vibes superman's channel venn diagram we narrow in on it yeah it's like if you take a venn diagram but then you fuzz out the edges into a gradient like the center is the stuff that's almost always true and the edges the more fringe stuff that's more yeah i guess it's more like a gaussian distribution though yeah exactly um so uh superman's general vibe was first iconically summed up in a 1942 radio show when they declared that it was truth justice and the american way keep in mind height of world war ii height of world war ii um american superheroes got involved in world war ii before the american army did so you know a lot of stuff going on there superman is an archetypical hero he fights for truth and justice he saves innocent lives he stops bad guys it's real simple what's his motivation the goodness of his heart he wants to use his powers to help people he's not complicated doesn't have a batman style tragic backstory motivating him doesn't have any of that stuff like you said early he's very simple superman is a simple meal well made in addition this is important touch on but it is not exactly core to his characterization superman generally does not kill some writers see this is very vital to his characterization others kind of leave it alone and gloss it over superman is less likely than batman to get really hung up on one of his bad guys just sort of dying anyway batman kind of takes that stuff personally but superman will be like what a tragedy that in his final moments microwave man chose to battle me this is a real thing that happened uh anyway so this is a simple core you can introduce more complexities without disrupting that core there are several questions you can ask what does clark think of himself in relation to humanity is he a a god among men is he crushingly alone in a world that on some level can never truly understand him does he think of himself as basically human these are all things that can be explored what does clark truly want does he want a simple life does he want to save the world and make it a better place does he want to inspire hope lots of things you can do there what even is the american way that's a whole can of worms we're not going to get into tonight how does superman's presence change the world how does it reshape it does he inspire do people rely on him too much are people grateful for what he does or are they presuming too much of him do they take him for granted and what standards does superman hold himself to and why this touches on the sometimes superman doesn't kill thing but you know sometimes he doesn't does he you know how does he hold himself accountable to what levels does he do so and why these are all things that you can unpack in a hundred different ways without in any way subverting the core tenets of superman's personality that he is he's he's here for truth and justice baby that's how he rolls red i don't want to jump ahead too far will you touch on the max fleischer superman cartoons at all oh i will not so uh but i know that you watched a bunch of those so if you want to briefly mention because um with actually austin dm of rolling with difficulty we sat through and watched all of the like 1941 1942 max fleischer superman cartoons and it is really interesting to see like okay you know sure like comics were introduced like you know 1938 and the canon wasn't really set then but there is so much of superman that was was kind of codified after the first round of comics but is already in focus at the point of like 1941 42 when those when those uh animations were were going on he's still very simple yeah a lot of him isn't there yet uh he you know he works with lois he's a reporter at the uh you know daily planet the yeah the day it was like the the golden globes the beautiful no that's the daily bugle yeah uh get me pictures of superman um but you know his power set has not been upgraded yet uh he weirdly goes to fight both the nazis and the japanese in various episodes um so like the war element is is there in a really odd way that i i'm not going to get into right now but yeah um it is cool to see that as kind of an early moment where his character is kind of summed up in in one place because the comics are kind of like they're wibbly wobbly they kind of you know spill out in in in weird directions oh yeah but the show is the first place where like it's it's a solid self-contained thing where like even casual observers would be like oh superman yeah i get it you know the comics were were fairly niche and only in the past like two decades have stopped being that i even it's interesting i mean let's be real the comic side of things is still quite niche most people get it through movies or cartoons um fair yeah but i still absolutely worth a watch if you are interested in the character or in the early history of comics or cartoons yeah it's genuinely fascinating to unpack what works and a lot of what doesn't a lot of it is a little bit yikes like super oh this is in the middle of world war one or world war ii like yeah okay yeah yeah i see it yeah i see it but yeah so i'll say on that i'm gonna need to look some of it up to cut a little footage so it'll be exciting um so i wanted to as we're continuing this discussion of what makes superman tick i wanted to highlight three stories about superman that i thought are really really good and revelatory for different reasons and we'll get into the specifics of these in following slides one at a time uh the first one for the man who has everything alan moore adapted into an episode of the justice league cartoon that is the only adaptation of an alan moore work that alan moore himself has said he likes oh wow superman vs the elite which is an adaptation of action comics number 775 i told you it ran long called what's so funny about truth justice in the american way both the comic and the movie were written by joe kelly so it's pretty true to the original spirit of the adaptation and the second alan moore entry whatever happened to the man of tomorrow which is a non-canon what-if scenario that i think is still very well worth exploring so uh i like these stories because i think they get right to what matters about superman's character for the man who has everything is a short little adventure the episode of justice league is the one the most people probably most familiar with i'll basically describe that essentially superman gets trapped in a dream by a hallucinogenic plant called the black mercy grants him a full immersion experience of his heart's desire and it is revealed that his heart's desire is a happy peaceful home life on a not destroyed krypton with a wife who suspiciously resembles lois lane and a son in the comic the dream isn't actually perfect it's kind of implied that he's like sort of fighting it the whole time so there's little bits of it that are going wrong somehow like the whole time and the cartoon it's basically the only thing that happens is there are experiencing weird earthquakes that everyone else is like it's fine don't worry about it but he's like no there's something wrong here in his dream notably he has no superpowers no prestige no fame he willingly chooses to work on a farm he even gets a little ribbed at by his dad for not like going into the sciences like jorel did but on some level he knows it isn't right he knows it isn't right the whole time and on the outside meanwhile batman and wonder woman are like fighting like crazy to try and stop mongol from like killing them and just going off to destroy the world because this whole thing is a scheme by mongol to take superman out of commission so he can just destroy the world unopposed he's been watching back the tapes of previous justice league episodes like okay and he did not get my ass kicked by superman let's put him in the box i could either smack him into a wall at the beginning of the fight or so essentially as clark or kal-el uh pieces together in his head that this is wrong it's heartbreaking because he has a son here he has a wife the wife like there's there's parallels to her in the outside world but this kid doesn't exist this kid who he loves with all his heart there's no way he could ever find this kid again he just doesn't exist and there's this moment when he and his son are up on the roof and his son's looking through this telescope and is having a great time where he's just kind of like bent over like clutching the rail and you can tell that he knows that he has to leave and he doesn't want to and he he gives up his beautiful dream his perfect life because he has to be superman being superman is not an act of godly ego stroking it is a terrible sacrifice alan moore wrote this story this episode the theme that being superman is a sacrifice and a burden is something that alan moore loves exploring he does it in the other story of his will discuss here and this is noteworthy because alan moore wrote watchmen which is on record i have observed the favorite comic of everyone who makes a bad superman adaptation and thinks they're being smart about it no that's uh alan moore is such an interesting example because his work is just so catastrophically systematically misunderstood yeah because there are two reads at least to all the the big allen war comics and the first one is the cynical uncharitable view and it's only on the deeper level that you actually get you know the the the honest uh reading the the the straightforward and and genuine read and watchman absolutely suffers from the surface cynical response i mean the thing is alan moore has written mainline dc comics he's written all these characters well he understands them he really does get them he's written some of the most compassionate and heart-wrenching portrayals of superman in the business when he writes a story about superheroes that [ __ ] or like superheroes that kill he's not saying these are better he's saying let's talk about this you know we have all these superheroes that are these god-like super beings that are above humanity well what does it do to them psychologically if they put themselves above humanity you know that's half the exploration of watchmen is just the the explicit textual confirmation that all of these superheroes putting themselves above humanity are making the same mistake thinking they can solve the world's problems without understanding the people who live in it because they think they're better than them and i think it's very noteworthy that watchmen does not have a superman parallel dr manhattan is a corollary to captain adam he was part of a government experiment involving radiation and became this energy being it's like explicitly the intent there is no superman parallel you could read this as alan moore exploring what if you had a superhero setting where superman never existed where all these people being motivated to become superhero vigilantes did not have this paragon high bar to live up to but instead you get people who are like oh yeah superheroes that [ __ ] yeah it's because it isn't like justice league but they're dicks it's justice league minus superman plus time where over time without the correcting influence of this character superman who was just always upright always the moral standard who is constantly sacrificing for the good of everybody else even all these other you know great superheroes eventually will kind of turn they won't necessarily go evil but they will lose touch it's without someone like clark to keep them balanced it's like it's it's bad for them like rorschach he snaps because the horrors he sees are too much for him the other superheroes they they get disconnected they get depressed you know they they have all these really complex issues because one of the things i think about watchmen is interesting is that none of these people feel like they like each other none of them feel like they're friends and i think that that's something that justice league when it's done right really gets across like these guys you know they're superman and batman are the the best odd couple in dc comics they have a great dynamic to rewatch the whole justice league cartoons yes oh it's gonna take forever but it's so good i know it's incredible every time i revisit it i'm like oh yeah um still good uh especially this episode um yeah the the highlight of which i think is interesting it's when superman and his his imaginary son van are are on this building as the dream is collapsing around them superman at this point knows that this person he is talking to is not real and i think that a thing that gets brought up a lot in the what if superman were evil takes is oh you know how could he possibly relate to humans they're like ants to him you know blah blah blah all that stuff and it's like even in a setting that he knows is not real that he knows is not populated by real people he treats everybody in it with heartbreaking compassion like the fact that he knows that this get like it would be less painful for him to separate himself and be like this isn't real nothing's happening here it'll be okay i'm just gonna wake up and get back to business no he he like immerses himself in the fact that essentially his world his perfect life and his son are about to die and he lets himself feel that and stares it in the face rather than turning away from it because superman is so compassionate down to his bones that there was no other option for him yeah this this pairs excellently with also from justice league batman and ace on the swing um yeah this is why they're the best superheroes these two moments yeah exactly this batman is the most compassionate batman he is the best batman and he set the bar and this this superman similarly he doesn't get as many chances to comfort scared kids because in the justice league cartoon superman plays kind of a structural role in the team which means most of the other characters are the ones that get like the dramatic moments but he's incredibly well characterized this really does it it really does it to take a quick break from the alan mooring before we get back into it this is a completely different angle on what i think gets to the heart of superman's character uh this was a an issue of the comic that then was expanded into an animated movie called superman vs the elite and this is essentially a very unsubtle analysis of superman's brand of heroism versus edgy grimdark murder is okay modern 90s anti-hero heroism basically a team of superheroes called the elite turn up they're young they're hip they think killing's okay and uh basically they escalate from being like hey man we're just doing what it takes to get things done to like fully declaring war on superman because he's just refusing to let them get away with like hey man foggy who won't let us kill yeah well he can't exactly stop them from killing is the problem but he really doesn't like it and he's like you have to stop and they get butthurt about it so basically initially and the thing is like this is this is happening in the foreground the important background is that public opinion is behind the elite because they when superman puts atomic skull in jail and then atomic skull breaks out and kills a bunch of people and then the elite kill atomic skull so that he can't kill any more people this is the kind of thing that gets people being like wow with people like these guys around why do we even need superman yada yada obviously they go fully i mean they were never on the rails but they it becomes very clear that their thing is not like we will only kill these kinds of people it's like we kill bad guys guess who gets to decide what bad guys are that's right us so obviously they declare war on superman they fight he gets bashed around for a while and what ends up happening is they think they explode him and it leaves nothing behind but a single tatter of his cape so you know none of these none of these whipper snappers ever watched any dragon ball or they know that the big obscuring dust cloud means he's definitely not dead and what happens is superman apparently changes his mind and starts playing by their rules and immediately kills two of them uh the the other two uh the leader and his his big guy muscle teleport themselves to earth they were on the moon by the way it doesn't really matter uh and uh you know like oh he won't pull anything with the sheep around at which point one of them vanishes in a blur and uh manchester black says where did he go and superman says orbit he went into orbit at mach 7. uh and then he appears for the first time we haven't seen him he's just been a blur until now but he's been narrating and fun fact his voice actor hasn't played many other major characters the other main one is sephiroth villain of final fantasy vii oh my god so when he goes evil it's like wow no wonder he's so good at this um comes down and stabs one of them yeah exactly um so he just starts laying into him and basically the villain manchester black throws everything he has at him and superman's just like modeling you know like i finally bought what you've been selling wow this is great this is gonna be so easy and what ends up happening is um manchester black does like a big psychic beam attack and it actually hurts superman uh and then superman does a little heat visiony thing and he's like oh yeah you're gonna heat vision my face up you can barely stand superman's like well i'm not aiming at your face and then the tldr is he uses his heat vision to perform quick quicky little brain surgery on manchester black to get rid of the part of his brain that lets him do all that psychic-y [ __ ] oh my god does superman lobotomize someone here too yes well he doesn't he doesn't stop him from using his brain he just stops him from using that one part of his brain and he loses his bravado and just breaks down crying and he's you know you're superman you don't do this and superman's like you're right i don't everyone's just unconscious and the comic gets revealed that he didn't actually [ __ ] with his brain he just said he did he just gave him like a minor concussion they'll temporarily stop him from using his powers and then told him oh i totally did brain surgery on you with my mind the guy's like oh no the bad guys aren't dead none of the bystanders that look like they got squished were squished superman's army of superman robots were helping him like sell the illusion but this is important because not because it teaches manchester black a lesson but because it teaches everybody watching the lesson of hey guys you really really don't want superman to start thinking killing is okay all right like i know you think it would be easier if he just killed some of these bad guys but trust me you don't actually want that um and this is an interesting way that that clark chooses to play this because you know you mentioned at the beginning like yeah some of his early comic runs like superman's kind of like mischievous yeah he's kind of a kind of a bit of a card that it is rare that you see superman ever lie um but he kind of he he can be a little sneaky sometimes this is one of the the rare instances where we get that in in in later media because for the most part the the kind of like oh superman's kind of a jokester like it it doesn't it wasn't one of his characterizations that really stuck for for super long i don't think yeah but this is a very interesting iteration of it where he is tactically lying and you know manchester black would believe that superman killed those guys because superman doesn't usually lie so if he's like orbit mach 7 it's like yeah no he checks out yeah okay he probably could do that um that doesn't sound right said it's morbid time it was all downhill from there oh no um yeah one thing that i really like about this is that uh the movie overall actually kind of goes out of its way to show that superman is smart like really quite smart and one thing that is interesting is that the elite they're new at this they are tactically inexperienced they are very good at dealing a lot of damage in horrifying ways but they don't really understand the tactics of doing anything else so when initially in the movie when they're still kind of working together before they go full murder's fine and superman's lame we're gonna kill him whenever they're having to do any sort of like civilian rescue or anything tactical superman is the one calling the shots like okay you know we're gonna do this we're gonna this train tunnel is blocked to both ends and it's under the channel that's okay i'm gonna use my heat vision to cut channels on the rock and i'm going to start lifting and you're going to use your telekinesis to pull them together we're going to lift this entire train tunnel out from under the river it'll be great none of these people would have been able to think of it and without him they wouldn't have been able to pull it off no but the fact is throughout the movie it is clear that while they may have power and weird powers superman is more experienced he thinks things through more and he's more tactical about it and the fact that in the finale he uses that to basically be like everyone says they want me to snap and start killing bad guys okay let's see what that looks like and it's just it's also so cathartic because the elite are just such little shits they're so annoying and smug and superman is the kind of nice character who basically does not advocate for himself like he'll indulge in a little bit of private angst but he won't be like hey you guys are being real dicks to me you know that so sometimes it's nice to see those characters just snap a little bit even sir yeah yeah i also think it speaks to not only superman's cleverness like he is of course smart but he's not like the world's greatest detective he's not the smartest like his superpower isn't a smartness but his understanding of people is definitely what informs this strategy to play to the palpable fear of seeing a superman actually like you know take off the chains and go for it that if he didn't understand how people worked he he wouldn't have been able to to to make this strategy you know play out the way it did exactly in a very meaningful way he is more compassionate and more understanding of humans than the rest of the elite who i'd imagine are like actual humans not you know like aliens or something but are still so detached and possibly like you know up on their own pedestal and oh yeah look at us from their their limited times been superheroing that they don't necessarily think of of other people as like people they kind of see everybody as the ants that they can squish if they decide they're bad yes absolutely uh there could be arguments made that a lot of them had it pretty rough early on and that gave them sort of a dog-eat-dog world perspective but they try to kill humanity's greatest hero for basically no reason so like you know this is a cool mode of still murder um and one thing i i think is interesting yeah is that um the elite's whole deal is very like might makes right and but by the end of the movie it's kind of clear that they can only really get away with this because people like superman don't because if might makes right superman wins so um one other thing that i think is important to note is that just before superman drops the act a character who had previously basically told him kill atomic skull he totally just killed my dad it's a whole thing uh basically runs up and he's like no superman you can't you have to be better you you have to show us that these ideals matter and superman's like you're so right and uh when manchester says you know if you think i'll just go to jail and rot you're living in a dream world and superman's like good dreams are very important you know it's important to hold these ideals and remember that we can aspire to be better and if that doesn't just sum up the whole point of superman and why he's such an important component in the superhero ecosystem i don't know what does because the thing is you can have superheroes that are darker than superman in fact almost all of them are darker than superman that's kind of the point but if you mess up superman he's the bar that everyone else measures himself against he has to be as good as he can be because if he could be any better he's not setting the bar so yeah there there's a very palpable comparison that's not the right word but uh there's a there's a a strong comparison to specifically ancient greek ideals of heroism which is not to say that superman acts like ancient greek heroes god no but the idea that if you have power it is your you know great power great responsibility but like people who have any variety of status in the ancient world and like the heroic mythic past were thought to have that because they were deserving of it by great actions and and deeds and and their own virtue and strength of character right we've read the alien the odyssey obviously that that was not the case in practice but the idea of like superman is a superhero and is also like morally the best of us like those two things go hand in hand and of course you know you get great power responsibility a million other ways but superman like he he never necessarily needed uncle ben to die for it like that was just already in like his heart the whole time yep yeah he he had to be that good to make it work and uh this is not an episode that i have anywhere in the powerpoint but one thing that i think also highlights that is uh there's a i want to say two-parter in the justice league series where in the first part it looks like superman is killed um the second part turns out he's fine he just flung him like 50 000 years in the future he's okay he has a cool adventure and grows a sick ass beard yeah but why would he write a t-rex or something uh he doesn't find a t-rex but he does fight a wolf pack uh and then like harnesses the rest of the wolves uh to like the ruins he rides a wolf at the end of the episode i remember that he forges himself a sword it's great it's his perfect aesthetic um but uh when he is quote unquote dead there's a funeral everybody except batman because batman doesn't believe he's dead uh does not at all that's right yeah he doesn't go to the funeral like cause he's not dead he just like scrounges up like three tons of stuff from the crime scene to try and figure out what's going on but he he he wavers a little bit in the end there it's it's it's pretty great he has he has a really heartfelt speech but while superman is quote unquote dead and they do the funeral martian manhunter gives a speech and one of the lines i remember because it just stuck with me is he says you know as we remember kell the immigrant from the stars who taught us all how to be heroes and it's like if that ain't the whole deal like he really was the first and best and that's action comics page one yeah yeah uh that's a good line it's so good and the fact that they let marcia manhunter do it was ideal because he's just got such a good voice for it the highlighting moment i wanted to bring up in superman versus the elite is actually a pretty subtle one it's before the big fight it's even before the elite have declared war on him they've just started doing bad stuff and people have started to be like yeah the elite are the best while he's in the fortress of solitude with lois who in this movie knows his identity so that's not a thing he asks lois do you think the world's moved on to a place where i can't follow and i think that phrasing is extremely important because it's not do you think the world doesn't need me anymore do you think the world doesn't want me anymore it's do you think the world is asking for something that i cannot give them and that subtly highlights that in the end of the movie when it's like oh no superman's evil is like no no he would never he literally can't he cannot do that this superman would nev he's not really envious and he would never truly consider changing to win over the crowd he just worries that what the world now wants is something that he can never provide by being what he is yeah yeah it's a subtle phrasing but it's it's it's an important distinction yeah i mean the other highlighting point i was going to do was oh there's a really spooky moment when he's pretending to be evil and he just does this evil laugh and it's great but then i was watching through the movie and i was like oh wait this line is really important actually so yeah yeah and uh back to whatever happened to the man of tomorrow back in the hands of alan moore this is a non-canon what-if storyline that presents a possible scenario for the quote-unquote death of superman it's framed as a reporter interviewing lois lane who is now lois elliott having married a dude whose last name is elliot about what she knows about the disappearance last presumed death of superman i want to say 10 years earlier and the gist is that several of superman's like joke villains like toyman and bizarro suddenly up the ante and start straight up murdering people in the process of all this his identity gets revealed his loved ones start getting targeted super the legion of superheroes comes from the future just to hang out and to pay their respects uh so whatever is happening superman's time is running out and there are a few comic arcs that do like what if superman had like one year to live what would he do i think in one of them he solves world hunger but that's not really the situation here it's more like something is going terribly wrong what do they do so he basically bundles up everybody who has a connection to clark kent who might be targeted puts him in a fortress of solitude it goes under siege by like all the bad guys including lex luthor who's being puppeted by brainiac oh yeah they also did that in justice league they did this one's a little more horrifying because luther is just coherent enough in there to to ask a briefly superpowered lana lang to kill him and she does but it doesn't stop brainiac from dragging his body around for a while ellen moore goes dark [ __ ] places man superman ends up figuring out that basically it becomes clear okay luther isn't behind this brainiac's not even behind this brainiac thought he was destined to win because he's superman's greatest foe and it was it was written in the books that superman's greatest foe destroys him so how can he fail here what the hell superman figures out that the true power behind this madness is uh mr mcsignal picked or whatever the [ __ ] the fifth dimensional reality warper who basically only ever shows up in a wacky quirky i'm causing some mischief and then i'm leaving issue he he can only be banished by being tricked into saying his own name backwards it's some weird silver age [ __ ] it's fine but basically alan moore's take is do you seriously think a fifth dimensional reality warper would look like a silly little man in a bowler hat no man they're timeless and and completely alien and obviously they don't have a moral code like humans do so basically the gist is that oh yeah you know he takes life at two thousand year intervals first 2000 years he didn't do anything next two thousand years he decided to be good middle two thousand years he decided to be mischievous now he's up on next two thousand year chunk and he's decided to be evil so all the stuff that's been happening has been this guy whose name i cannot pronounce which is the only reason i'm not saying it just absolutely messing everything up to kill superman just for funsies what ends up happening is superman grabs the phantom zone projector that will drag him into the phantom zone and gives him enough time to see that he's aiming for him to summon himself back to his home dimension by saying his name backwards which means he gets rent between dimensions and fully actually dies and superman knew this would happen he knowingly took a life and even though lois is like you had to he's like it doesn't matter i don't have the right to take a life nobody does especially not superman so he walks into his room of gold kryptonite removes his powers and lois never sees superman again her exact words those are important this is a lot this comic is a lot it goes places that a lot of main canon comics can't go because it's a non-canon what-if scenario like lana lang and jimmy olsen get murdered like almost all of his villains die it's a lot but i think this is interesting because it zeroes in on a very important facet of superman's personality which is superman holds superman accountable because yeah nobody else can he has no one else can and even in this most like you really had no choice you absolutely had to it's like it doesn't matter i still killed i can't be superman anymore the highlighting point i want to bring up from this one is basically the very end of the comic when it is revealed that surprise surprise the man that lois lane married is in fact the de-powered superman who changed his name grew a mustache and called it a day started wearing a different pair of glasses yes exactly uh so superman takes his own powers away doesn't die like lois implies he changes identity marries lois gets the peaceful normal life he's always dreamed of and their baby son has inherited is super strength as shown by a brief little bit where he's just messing with a bit of coal from the like fireplace and just drops it back in the thing compressed into a diamond which is just hilarious a very brilliant bit of visual storytelling of like what's going on i'll admit the first time i read through it i didn't get it i was like wow i definitely wouldn't get it uh but it kind of is clear if you read between the lines of them talking to each other because among other things when her husband is introduced at the beginning he kind of sas talks superman a lot like a useless old lump whatever but then you know at this point he basically says you know uh superman he was overrated and too wrapped up in himself he thought the world couldn't get along without him which is i think a great little indicator of like superman was torn between i have my duties to help the world and well i just killed so i can't be superman anymore and you know you know he must have been anxious for a while after he got rid of his powers but it's like okay the world's okay it has other heroes it doesn't actually need me and that's good and i just think that's a beautiful little moment uh i also want to give a quick honorary mention or honorable mention to the justice league episode where martian manhunter comes to clark's house for the holidays because uh this episode canonizes something that's very important which is that clark kent is the real person and superman is the persona that he puts on because when they're back at the house clark j he's just he's just being goofy he he describes the room that john's gonna stay in is nice and cozy and john's like nice and cozy i've never heard you speak this way before um and clark says that's why i like coming home for the holidays i can just relax and be myself and that just kind of makes it clear that like superman is not the real person like batman is the real version of bruce wayne superman is clark kent's customer service voice superman is what clark kent puts on to deal with the stuff he needs to deal with and i think that's very important because it really drives home like superman doesn't think of himself as this godly higher being he thinks of himself as clark kent good old boy from kansas just doing his part that that's where the compassion comes from because he thinks of himself as another human even if even if he's nailing even if he has this backstory in this emotional baggage he's he's clark and superman allows him to exercise his very clarkian human compassion with the power that you know any old person doesn't have exactly yeah and i think that this is a very important point to highlight because it kind of undercuts almost all of the easy snark you can throw at superman which is like oh with that much power you know he can't be good and it's like he's he doesn't think of himself that way like he has power but like you know some people are stronger than average some people are really skilled at knitting you know those people aren't like you all ants beneath me you know he's just he's just doing his best so i think that these stories which i consider exemplary of superman's characters show some some core highlights of his character alan moore's angle is a popular one that being superman is a burden and a sacrifice it's lonely keeps him from living a peaceful happy life he still chooses to use his powers to help people and make the world a better place power and responsibility style superman's devotion to his ideals is his most important trait if you lose that he ceases to be superman like he can lose some of his powers he can he can even have episodes where he doesn't have a strength or whatever he's still superman the only thing that makes him superman is how strictly he he holds to his ideals and the fact that he holds himself accountable to holding to those ideals he will stop himself from being superman if he goes too far and it's fairly common to bring up like hey if you have a universe where like superman snaps and kills that's a character that our superman goes and beats up until he stops because that's not how he does things baby yeah there is um a good episode in in season one of of supergirl where cara loses her powers and it's a similar thing of like you know even without having super strength or whatever by in this case cara zorel's compassion she's able to solve the the problem at the you know thing that's happening in front of her yeah and and just like that you know superman is strong and can punch the baddies but even without his powers his morals are an inherent innate part of himself yep i think you know you can have episodes where superman's depowered by like red sunlight or kryptonite or whatever and he's still doing his thing and in those episodes he gets a chance to show off that he's also really smart and very tactical but like superman what makes superman superman is not his godlike powers it has never been his godlike powers and i think that is very important to note in his character additionally superman is a tool that clark kent uses to make the world a better place clark finds this tiring but very important duty of his and clark kent does not believe his own hype he does not believe him he's like a god among men he doesn't believe he's better than anybody he doesn't believe any of that stuff he's just a guy doing his best i think it's very important that clark does not actually think of himself as this ideal exemplar of hope showing the world that there is a better way because he he's he's like look somebody has to show the world that there is a better way to do things but he doesn't think like this is my sole duty he just thinks it is a job that he has to show the world that like you don't need to resort to this kind of violence you don't need to make yourself judge during executioner you don't need to try to make yourself the law you can make the world better in other ways using the powers that you have i also wonder maybe i'm about to to catch myself uh in a logical bind here but if clark using superman as the mask allows him to project all of his best qualities onto superman and leave all of his personal baggage or feelings back with with little old clark where because superman is almost it's him playing a character almost he he can be like all the bravado of like oh yes you know truth justice the american way and even if he does believe that he's able to say it more confidently because he knows he's acting i've heard people talk about like getting over stage fright because like oh you're you're just you're just playing a character that's not actually you you are able to bring everything to it that you want but you know it's a little bit it's a little bit flimsy it's a little bit flexible so maybe there's something in that of like because clark is clark and he's not superman he can make superman into even more of a paragon than than clark himself is i don't know maybe i'm maybe i'm getting myself caught here but i wonder there's maybe something to that i think that's fair i think that uh it's not that superman or clark like represses like negative impulses and like puts them in clark it's not like clark does what superman can't it's but you do sometimes get bits where like you see little moments where superman like considers maybe i will punch through this guy's skull and then he's like no i won't do that and you don't have clark being like oh i would have given him one for no no clark is a decent guy yeah but you do sometimes get him like no golem yeah you do kind of get him going back to like the kent farm and just sort of venting to his parents like you know mom doing my best but oh they're saying i should kill people now and i just don't like that and she's like ah you know they're just scared they don't get it it's okay you're doing your best so like clark kent has the kind of emotional support network that superman does not and i think that's very important but you know i i think also the fact that superman is a is an act that clark head puts on definitely means he can be a little more just easy with it you know it's easy for him to say like you know we're doing this for justice and stuff where clark might have like a snarky reporter comment to make or something like that but superman's like no we're gonna we're gonna play this to the hilt we're gonna go all in with this we're gonna be completely sincere so all this to say that superman is already a massive subversion of expectations yeah everything we think about this guy oh half of us are like oh if i had god-like powers you better believe i'd be abusing it like and from then it's easy to kind of project like oh thus anybody who had godlike powers would be a jerk about it thus this character who has godlike powers supposed they were a jerk about it but like that's that's not a clever trope subversion that's the thing played straight that's what you assume would happen yeah that's just that's just a villain origin story that's just every bad guy guys yeah that's just that's just bad guys what if this all-powerful god-like and human being with zero accountability was a jerk groundbreaking really guys it's it's it's not that complicated and it's not that clever i think the fact that because superman is so sincere people think that like smacking a little mud on him like makes it makes it cool and smart like oh i'm doing a clever thing you all think superman is cool because you're you're dorks but i i know the truth he could be lame if we changed everything about it it's like good job guys you figured it out um so let's uh let's see where people get this all wrong yes now historically we have a lot of thoughts on independent beings none of them are particularly optimistic you know we all know power corrupts a lot of us know the epicurean paradox because of the way they butchered it in batman v superman but that's fine oh god yeah we all remember that and a few writers have volunteered their thoughts on it you know the the idea of like an ubermensch superman type who is like just incredibly perfect and unattainably good can be a little frustrating to write a little bit annoying to work with especially if it's the only thing if it's like the thing that that everybody is doing if it's a monoculture i also had to include this quote from zack snyder because i don't really dunk on him that much in this presentation but i really thought that this quote kind of spoke for itself cause like why would anybody tap this guy to write superman for god's sake the thing is superman's boring heroics are a huge subversion of all of this power corrupting angst and and i think i don't know if this is true but i think it's very easy to read into it that superman is intentionally designed as a huge middle finger subversion to the appropriation of nietzsche's ubermensch concept that the nazis got attached to because they used it to invent that whole master race thing they were all about yeah in supposed opposition to inferior humans yeah this is this is also kind of what happened with captain america where it's like yeah we made the ubermensch but like he's ours and he's nice not even it's not just he's ours which is definitely the case for captain america that was his whole point but with superman suppose you guys are right suppose that there is an ubermensch in physical opposition to inferior humans well we've constructed an ubermensch who would save those inferior humans from people like you essentially the ubermensch exists and he hates you um and i think this is important the fact that it's easy to lose sight of the fact that superman is a subversion all the way down to his bones because he's been around for 80 years truth justice and the american weighing it up but like he's important and what he's doing and saying is important because this sort of nihilistic might makes right might means you don't need to care about people who are weaker than you all of that is subverted all the way down by basically saying if a person is a good enough person it doesn't matter how much power they have it won't corrupt them they'll just use it for good it is an incredibly optimistic and idealistic story to tell and you all know my thoughts on grimdark at this point you all know that i'm very suspicious when people are like optimism is stupid you should just lie down and rot come on guys you can have sad stories it's important to also tell these stories and i'll get back to that in a bit now the thing is i understand why this happens because superman is very interesting but he also looks very basic he has a lot of depth but he's a paragon hero in the most paragon way possible he's strong he's brave he's basically indestructible he uses those powers to help people far weaker and more helpless than them if you put superman in a situation you basically know what he's going to do he is going to save as many people as he can as quickly and as efficiently as he can that is always right he's very predictable and because of his very high power level he has very few weaknesses and it is difficult to challenge him in interesting or nuanced ways there's only so many times you can stick a lump of kryptonite in his face and expect it to be interesting challenging superman is difficult narratively speaking and this can be difficult to write a lot of the trouble writers have with him is you know if you have a character who can't be hurt and is very strong and can't be stopped you either take away those things and then throw normal threats at him or you throw ridiculously high level threats at him that make him seem pretty useless in comparison it's the wharf effect but that said superman fills a very important niche in the narrative ecosystem he's the first and greatest superhero he's set the bar both in universe and out every other hero tries to be what superman is because of that superman kind of needs to be a constant point if we move the point of comparison everything changes a lot of people are like why is the dcu so miserable because superman is miserable and he's supposed to be the high point the brightest colored thing in the frame if he is miserable what can any of us do the the point is that he's the ceiling yes he's the ceiling and if the ceiling is low then there's nothing and you're stuck but because of that because he's in this like elevated position even by superhero standards i think it's very easy to lose sight of his personal interest in character traits and the vital role he plays in the superhero ecosystem if you just kind of rake your eyes over it you're like oh it's superman ugh he's dull what if we did something interesting with superman and that means writing something that isn't superman and calling it superman and that just throws off the whole you get you get narrative trophic cascades it's a mess and because of that i ponder the question why do we keep letting people who hate superman tell all the superman stories i mean this isn't exactly a hot take in this day and age i think this is a question that i've been pondering in a more broad space than just superman and we'll get to that i have a later slide for all all my tangent indulgences but the fact is a lot of these like what if superman but evil stories are so clearly written by people who don't like superman and don't understand the appeal of superman as mentioned in that very telling zack snyder quote above i've seen some other interviews from zack snyder he's talked about an interesting angle on superman which is that superman is the dream of clark kent superman is the dream of this kid from kansas which is a good concept that i'd say is corroborated by a lot of stories the problem is he then goes to superman was never real dreams are meaningless and it's like no no no no superman's important because he's real but it's you know it's fine i'm not he's written more movies than i have i'm not going to sass him on that i'm just saying um and i think it's important in this case to unpack a specific binary difference that you can most readily see in the form of satire and that is satire that's in on the joke versus satire that doesn't get the joke yeah yeah and in on the joke satire i'd say the satirist understands the appeal of the original story and i'm saying satire but this also serves for like reimaginings deconstructions even adaptations you know all this whole space of sort of transformative media that takes an original story and then does something to it to repackage it in a new direction in the end on the joke version the person who's doing that repackaging likes the original story or at least understands how it works they get the appeal they want to explore poke fun at it from a new angle they still fully commit to the core principles of the original this reimagining or satire explores things that the original maybe didn't it potentially you know it adds a little depth but it never countervails anything that is structurally vital to the original it doesn't yeah it's a different angle rather than an inversion right and there are stories that do essentially say hey what if we take this story but we we take these core principles and we get rid of them like have an example uh it's mentioned on a later slide a comic run called irredeemable by one of the writers who writes superman regularly and the comic run is essentially it looks like hey what if superman snapped and started killing people one day you'd think i'd hate it but what it actually is is essentially what if you have a character who looks like superman but it's coming from a very very different place there's no human clark kent underneath it it's just somebody who has too many powerful super senses to be able to blot out all the horrible negative things and thoughts anybody around him ever has towards him and correspondingly develops a desperate need of love and approval you know how like if you make a piece of art you can get like 99 positive comments and then one negative one that just sticks in your head for three weeks he's like that basically and all he ever feels is people being ungrateful and and you know expecting the world from him and it's bad so that and several other things make him snap and it's like that character is not superman but evil that character looked like superman for a while but the fundamental question was essentially what if superman was desperate for validation that's not a core principle of the original superman but it also doesn't exactly violate any core principles of the original superman because well you can unpack it and say superman does not need external validation superman holds himself accountable but it's like this is a new thing to add onto the base template and then say hey what does this do the answer is very bad things but that's the whole point to explore that question i'd still classify this as in on the joke satire because this writer has written superman before and done a good job like this they cl he clearly knows what he's doing so on the flip side you get the other side doesn't get its satire this is a satirist who does not understand the appeal of the original and in this case this means basically all of their satire takes the form of what if this thing was actually as stupid as i think it is because in order to satirize something on a deep level you need a deep understanding of what makes it tick and if something doesn't work for you there's only so deep into it you can ever get this person cannot determine what core principles make the story appealing to those who enjoy it so their satire or reimagining or adaptation or whatever it either contradicts or ignores foundational elements that make the original story work because from the surface they can't tell the difference between something that's just an aesthetic choice and something that's absolutely vital for how the story works this produces a parody that's surface level and shallow yeah you get it thinned down to not even the most like basic quality of a thing but it gets like filed down and compressed down into the surface level trait that the writer doesn't like yep yeah it's the parts that make it not work for them and that makes sense again people don't have to like things but i feel like asking those people to do an in-depth flip on its head for something that they don't like or understand is just unhelpful to everyone involved i have two little examples of like an in on the joke style thing versus a doesn't get it style thing they're very small text i'm not sure if they're gonna be legible the the enom joke example i use is the way that tolkien plays with various things from macbeth just subtly in lord of the rings he's just having a good time with it but you know you can tell that when he read through macbeth the prophecy of no man of woman born shall harm macbeth and uh you know et cetera et cetera until great burnham wood to hide dunsinane hill shall come against him which are both supposed to be two impossibilities no man of women born how can a wood march on a hill and in the play it's like oh mcduff was from his mother's womb untimely ripped and also hey we took all these branches and we used them for camouflage and that's kind of like the wood coming to hide duns and in hill and you can just tell tolgen was making his little marginalia like that's [ __ ] like with the first one he's like any woman can harm macbeth and then he's like ah i'm a man from his mother's room on time lyric because that's just needlessly over-complicated and then he's like what if great burnham wood actually came against him on high duns in a hill and then you get the ants storming saruman's keep the trees can walk and they [ __ ] hate you yeah exactly you bulldoze their friends they [ __ ] you up very slowly it makes sense and that's the kind of like it's a loving little bit of affectionate ribbing at a play that he clearly liked and had a good time with in contrast for the doesn't get a department i will classify every story where batman technically doesn't kill but does kill you know oh he can kill people as long as he hits them with a car he can kill them as long as he technically just chooses not to save them from a preventable threat frequently that he caused it's okay if he mounts a gun on his car and then shoots them with the gun on his car if it wouldn't hold up in a court of law i don't know why they use it as an excuse yeah yeah uh and this is probably the the spiciest part of this presentation uh i wanted to give an example of two different superman alikes one of which i think gets the joke the other one i think does not and those examples are invincible and the boys now i will say right out the gate i have not watched the boys i've seen a lot of stuff about the boys nothing made me think it would be worth watching i don't understand what the point of it is and i i did look up on the wiki i looked up stuff about this character homelander who is their superman alike in the what if superman was evil style and there was some interesting stuff on the wiki in the comic that they appear to have completely negated and aren't using in the show so now he's just what if superman was evil which feels like some wasted potential but that's fine so this is as spicy as i'm gonna get all this criticism is coming from a place of stuff i've heard about the show stuff i've looked up about the show not stuff i have seen or immersed myself in because it seems incredibly unpleasant and i have heard nothing that makes it seem worth engaging with for a very brief season three spoiler homelander tells someone to jump off a building that's kind of all we need to know yeah i mean the thing is like i don't think it's controversial to say hey homelander is like what if superman was the worst possible person alive like we know that but like if there's a greater point to it you know like i mentioned with irredeemable like that's exploring a superman who's kind of the worst possible person alive but really what it's doing is unpacking a everybody else in the world trying to solve the mystery of why this character would snap and b what the hell is going on with his brain and why he's like this homelander seems to be about as deep as he appears to be on the surface which is what a superman but he was a dick so but uh i wanted to bring up invincible as an example that really surprised me with how good it is because when you start watching invincible it looks like the premise is that omniman who played by jk simmons is the superman alike he plays that role he's a founding member of the essentially justice league he looks like him uh his costume's got that design and the focus character is his son mark who learns at the beginning of the series like oh i've got superpowers now whoa this is great i want to be a superhero just like him and it looks like it's setting up to be what if superman was evil and it's not until the final mini arc essentially the final fight where omniman reveals to mark that he is indeed evil he killed the justice league parallel he was sent here as part of like an advanced conquest force they're supposed to take over the planet and rule it together and he wants mark to join him he wants him to together we can rule the galaxy his father and son blah blah and it becomes very clear that the premise is not what if superman is evil it's what if superman had an evil dad but was still superman because during the course of that fight it becomes very clear that mark has the same ironclad principles that superman does and this frustrates the hell out of omniman because he's just like you can't beat me they're like ants it's pointless you know he's doing all the standard evil superman you need to make a fraction of our power exactly yeah thanks mark because omniman fundamentally has no compassion until the the very end when he like flies off into space yeah but mark demonstrates throughout the show that he has the superman compassion and love for his fellow you know people because he was raised as a person which is an important aspect of superman's character is that even though he is like this extraterrestrial being he was raised as a human he grew up with them he lived with them all this time and understands it because he has the same human perspective and experiences that all of them do yeah and the fact that it looks like the show is going so gritty and grimdark it does the thing where like if you catch someone falling off a building but you don't do it right they might still get hurt you know there's collateral damage humans are very squishy in this show it like it's played for grimdark and horror a lot of the time and i didn't have very high hopes but i was very pleasantly surprised by how they did it in the finale because the answer to the question is like what if superman had an evil dad who did all of the evil superman points you know humans are ants we're gods we should rule them blah blah what if that was faced with it and the answer is well it would be very very gut-wrenchingly unpleasant for him but he would stick to his principles and fight to save humanity no matter how outclassed he was or how much it hurt him or how many people were killed in the process he'd keep going like he couldn't be broken and it was like very inspiring in a very painful way this is not a show i recommend people watch because it's real heavy but it it really does some very impressive things that i hadn't seen in any other grimdark superhero adaptations i think just to use the maybe i'm hitting the nail too hard on the head here but the the title of invincible of course like these guys are pretty much like physically indestructible but his moral code is also invincible i'm sure they address that at some point in the show again i haven't seen it yeah i don't usually take myself as being squeamish but like i watched some clips of invincible nope couldn't do that yeah uh so i feel like that is also part of the the implication of like his morals are unshakable they don't move they can't be broken yeah well that's that's part of what is so interesting because of course he calls himself invincible but pretty much at every turn in the show it has proven he's really not like he's pretty tough especially by human standards but like most of the people they're fighting can put a dent in his dad and he's not that tough yet so like it's funny oh you call him invincible but he spends almost every episode like in the hospital but at the end it's like okay yeah invincible is not about his body at all it's not even really about his like mental well-being it's about his indomitable spirit uh to a degree that surprises even his dad the supposed superman analog and that that i think is a very interesting deconstruction slash reconstruction of the superman archetype and i remember you mentioning this when like invincible first came out is it is a deconstruction and reconstruction you break it down with omniman and you build it back with mark and that's the thing is like you said it's not until the end of the season that you realize oh mark is the superman character and maybe you know it maybe it takes a little while for that to become apparent it's like oh he doesn't have a cape he can't be seen but you know it it deconstructs and then it builds it back and only by deconstructing can you highlight the you know incredible character and valor and upright moral integrity of a character like mark when being juxtaposed directly to all the worst things that he could be if he was basically completely like detached from human reality yeah yeah the comparison is what makes it work exactly yeah and a major factor in mark's arc is that up until that point he really wants to live up to the potential that his dad is the the ideal that his dad as far as he knows is establishing but mark is kind of [ __ ] up a lot he's he's clumsy when he flies he has difficulty he tries to save people's lives and they get hit by the collateral and then die in the hospital and he feels terrible like i said i don't recommend this show to people most of the time like it's really good but you you really don't have to watch it unless you really feel like it but i think that the fact that they deconstruct evil superman with omniman and then reconstruct superman with mark it it really feels like a very valuable exploration of the superman story through a familiar enough lens that we're not telling a completely different story like omniman looks like the superman we recognize mark has the actual spirit of the superman we recognize pitt them against each other and some crazy [ __ ] goes down it's a very interesting show that's doing a lot of interesting stuff in contrast again with the caveat all my talking is coming from a place of haven't watched the show never will don't want to whatever the boys may be doing that is interesting none of it is in the character of homelander he seems like the most basic [ __ ] on the planet it dares to ask the question what if superman was a narcissistic sadistic megalomaniacal sociopath with a milk fetish who thought of humans as lester beings and used his godlike powers to commit whatever murders and atrocities he wanted under the thinnest veneer of good publicity would that be [ __ ] up or what the answer is obviously yes there's nothing deeper there again this is like you take the base character and then you remove all the things that make it tick and you're like hey wouldn't it be [ __ ] up if that happened it's like yes it would congrats yeah it's it's the purest cynical reading kind of in the vein of like i was mentioning earlier like the surface level alan moore reading is like oh wow all these people are awful yep it it appears to me and again i i also haven't watched the boys i i've gotten a lot of like secondhand you know like plot spoilers and stuff from from just general like online existing but yeah it is a purely cynical corporatized superheroes are just the worst all the time and i understand that there is a market for that clearly but it's just generally disappointing yeah that even if these characters have traumas and even if they are awful people for you know broken homes or like whatever the reasons may be it is fundamentally unsatisfying to watch a story that is not it's not a tragedy and everyone's terrible like sure bad things happen to some of these characters like you know stuff goes wrong yeah they have to deal with with with things but it's just like misery porn that's the point as far as i can tell the point of the boys and just so you all know where my head was at when i was doing this i literally googled what is the point of the boys i got no answer but as far as i can tell it is about celebrity culture and it is about corporatization and how hero worship and stuff like that is bad i think that perhaps their point is not helped by the fact that this character who you know i'm sure there are more interesting other characters that are explored this is the guy whose face i see everywhere clearly by design he's supposed to look like superman he's clearly supposed to be the poster boy for all the [ __ ] that's going wrong in this show he's just so blandly terrible i don't know again i i don't feel super comfortable going super hard criticizing a show that i haven't watched and will not watch because i know if i go too hard sassing it all anyone's gonna comment is oh you gotta give it a chance it just seems so relentlessly unpleasant i've heard nothing about this that makes me think it's worth me specifically watching i'm not particularly impressed with misery porn i already know celebrity culture is bad i think i'm good so i i think it's unfortunate that the the very valid points about celebrity culture are played secondarily to ah superheroes being being dicks yep i feel like the the points would be better served by not having superheroes in the main role yeah maybe i don't know i mean maybe that's my take and also i think we can i think we can move yeah i did want to say just really quick that like i i didn't i did try to look up like which of the writers that write like evil superman stories are ones that have worked on superman before which are the ones that had like interesting insights in the character and all i found with this was the creators were told like do you think superman or homelander would win in a fight and they were like oh totally homelander man he hits below the belt and it's like oh yeah yeah that's superman's problem he doesn't fight brutal enough we've been there folks anyway i do want to make it very clear that superman's story is not for everybody that's completely fine no story is for everybody his particular brand of goodness and righteousness can indeed seem boring or unrealistic or unrelatable generally not one's cup of tea you don't need to find the funny space man flying around in spandex compelling it's fine actually does not mean that superman should not exist and it does not mean that superman's idealistic narrative must be changed or grim darked up to appeal to an audience there's a difference between this story's not for me and this story is not worth telling and shouldn't exist yeah i think the timing of of superman's creation is relevant because 1938 things were going bad people saw the writing on the wall that things were going to get worse and the idea of a character who can do anything and chooses to be good just because it makes them feel warm and fuzzy on the inside yeah is such a potent concept for a character that i think is probably needed now more than it has been in a while it's like there's enough awful things happening every day all the time everywhere that maybe it's okay to just have a character who's good and the whole point is that they can do anything and choose to be good every time no matter what they always make the choice and sometimes maybe they can't do everything but they always choose to do the right thing that is an aspirational model for us to remind us that humans can actually get it right sometimes yes yeah maybe it's 1938 and you're like oh man i wonder if they're going to innovate poland next year but people can still be good yeah in spite of that there is still goodness in the world and it can come from you know middle of nowhere kansas that you know greatness from small beginnings you know uncharted sick paris magna whatever but like even in a very awful world that we're living in right now where a lot of things feel like they're going wrong any one person can still just just choose to do the right thing like even if you know even if you're a mild-mannered little clark kent like you can you can put on a mask and you can step outside of yourself and and do something that maybe your normal you wouldn't you can choose to kind of like puff out your chest a little bit and and do something that's you know brave and maybe a little bit scary but is the right thing to do yeah even if you're not aspirational for all of us yeah i mean it's wildly different but i think this is a lot of why everything everywhere all at once resonated with so many people because its core moral was even if nothing matters we can still always choose to be kind and that's always true it costs you nothing you can just always choose to be kind and good and i think that stories like that are extremely important i won't even say now more than ever i think to say that we have it worse now than they had it in 1938 is a little bit dubious um the fact is things have always had the potential to be bad things have always had the potential to be good things have at every point in history had at least five major storms going on at once bad things have happened and that's just a fact of life and and our experience in it and if we accept that that is the only way reality can be we hold nobody accountable for making things worse but if we accept that things can be better and made better and that people can be good and do the right thing then when people don't do that we remember to call them out on their [ __ ] and you know hold them accountable and and make them experience consequences for their actions it it is very important not to buy the lie that reality is unilaterally terrible and everyone is evil secretly and everybody given an ounce of power would use it for evil because if we believe that we let the worst people in the world get away with doing terrible things because we treat that as what we expect we have to expect better or we can't get mad when people do worse yeah yeah because if if being awful is par for the course it's like yeah okay you know business is business but no you gotta remember you gotta you gotta have standards man you gotta you gotta hold the world accountable for what it does well i do wanna say that like as a corollary just as i say superman's stories should exist i am not going to say that grimdark what if random's evil stories have no right to exist i just because i personally think they're much too impressed with themselves doesn't mean they don't deserve to exist or to have the audience that they have some people get a lot out of them i've seen your posts i get it it's fine and there are what if superintendent's evil stories that are written by authors who do like superman as mentioned mark wade's comic irredeemable does that exact thing these are writers who understand how they can write superman and choose to write a character who looks like superman and has some superficial similarities to superman but some key differences and then explore how those key differences make them not superman which is different from taking stories that say hey what if we took superman and then we [ __ ] him up yeah just grind him up a little yeah make him worse let him kill people on day one let him smash up that entire city that's great okay i said i wasn't gonna experience of reading some what i'll call good faith superman satires where it's like you know they're in on the joke yeah it can have the same experience as like you know kind of an ice bath type thing where like it it's it's different it's it's a shock all at once and it jolts you and it can make you think about it and think like oh you know oh i i can see by contrast like this is very much not superman and i can appreciate the actual superman more again it's the invincible omni man comparison exactly yeah in a similar way i feel like just reading like an honest to goodness regular superman story or like watching the justice league cartoon or whatever is is similarly like it can have that kind of ice bath quality where it wakes you up to like oh my god like this is what true goodness can look like this is an example of just pure unselfish virtue for the betterment of everybody else and that's what that looks like yeah because it is so rare that we see that in the world and we see a lot of small ways that that virtue can can have positive impacts and we see you know the little acts of kindness that people do but as just a demonstration of pure goodness with someone who has the power to do everything good that they want and goes and does it that is refreshing and cathartic and i find quite relaxing not necessarily relaxing but it's it's comforting to read stories like that so that's why i personally enjoy a lot of the the superman narratives that um that we are are lucky enough to have and i think there is a similar benefit to reading a good superman satire but less so than just reading good superman i think good superman satire needs to serve a purpose uh sorry when i say that i don't mean it shouldn't exist if it doesn't have a purpose again i'm not making any statements on what art should and shouldn't exist every piece of art has an audience that would benefit from seeing it i'm not here to police that i'm just here to complain uh but i i think that when you have like hey what if we made superman evil like it really helps if there's a point you're going at there like what if we took a character who looked like superman but he got this way from a completely different direction or you know there are also all those story you know like red sun where it's like what if superman's origin was different like would he would he still wind up as superman were mon paw kent the catalyst or was it something else you know what what makes him the way he is and i think all these explorations exist because superman is such an open book he really is what he appears to be on the surface he is not complicated if he has hidden depths they don't go down very far he's not dumb and he's not shallow but he is simple i've said this before one of my favorite ways to describe paragons is from the discworld a character who is very similar is described as simple in the way a sword is simple very very good at doing what it does not very complicated but extremely effective my main thing is i just don't understand why people who don't like superman keep getting forced to make movies and stuff about it he's like you don't have to guys it's okay you can leave this to somebody with other characters that this would work for yeah that's the thing like making hey this character is just like superman but evil like i can get i can get in a twist about that but there's only so mad i can get but when they take my boy and then they mess him up i'm like guys there are so many interesting things you could do with this character and the fact that you can't see that does not inspire confidence and i did want to go on a brief little like just let us go off on some tangents because that thing about like satire that gets the joke versus satire that doesn't or beyond satire you know adaptation reimagining this extends well beyond superman this extends into all kinds of different stories and i just thought it could be fun to maybe real quick talk about some of those uh the first one is about batman because i had to um let's go yeah i mean you know as mentioned is before like any version where it's like it's okay the batman kills because he did it with a car is like okay so you don't understand why batman doesn't kill you think it's okay as long as he doesn't fire a gun with his own hand um that kind of betrays just a fundamental lack of understanding of what makes batman such an interesting paragon of moral integrity and my favorite go-to punching bag for that is the nolan batman movies which i watched for the first time recently enough to not at all be impressed with them by nostalgia they are desperately embarrassed to be about batman it's so obviou they want to be about a cool suave bazillionaire who has a suit of cool bulletproof armor and punches the disenfranchised with it i actually think the second movie with the line of like what makes you better than said us not wearing hockey right now it's played as a joke but i think it is telling that the movie thinks the difference between some guys who dress up in hockey pads and batman is that batman can pay for better kit yeah it's just it's the old what's your superpower i'm rich no it's not it's his iron will damn it everybody knows that whatever um yeah the the nolan batman movies treat this whole batman thing as like a dress-up game played by bruce wayne so that the cops can't come after him for his crimes which is also what they did in amazing spider-man by the way um there's a there's like cosmonaut variety hour about that uh where he just talks about like he makes the spider-man suit so that the cops don't arrest him for his crimes and i was like god i forgot that part everything else about that movie was so bad too um anyway the normal batman movies they they don't want to be about batman and by the time that nolan actually read any comics which is when he made the third one he tried including a few more batmany things like the dumb bomb threat and bane and stuff like that the breaking the bad arc all that stuff yeah that's the only bane voice i'm gonna get i'm a white boy i had to i'm sorry um boy but this is one i would classify as an adaptation or a reimagining that does not understand the point of the original it gets the surface level this is a billionaire who dresses up like a bat and punches the disenfranchised woo so it does that right it's like oh also he doesn't kill and it's like okay he doesn't kill but i don't have to save you either it's like no he does actually he he really does i'm sorry to be charitable to the nolan movies they started off as crime movies with batman in them rather than batman movies about the criminal underworld i can only give that as the most charitable charitable interpretation that i have yeah on them i think like the performances are good for all the reasons that people like you know really like to like like the second one like yeah no good good yeah but but batman is not ever the focus of that movie it's it's all about the villains yeah in those ones batman is a side character in his own movie and now that we've seen the batman and can see what a like a good batman movie looks like it's like wow you could have done this well but she did uh another example that's not a superhero uh but indigo kind of insisted i bring this up uh the tom hooper movie musicals for a more in-depth explanation of this uh sideways has a couple videos about this about the music and les mis and the music and cats specifically why the music in these musicals sucks so bad uh because tom hooper as a director is very impressed with the possibility of making the music bad in creative ways like making everyone do it in one take 12 times over day of shoot while dehydrated um yeah in many ways because it's like what is the point of a musical the music like if you're seeing it on stage it's also the stagecraft and the theater and stuff like that but like ultimately it's the music you listen to the soundtrack on youtube you watch the slime tutorial that's secretly the pirated version everybody knows it okay so why would you take a movie musical and make the music not good for the sake of realism like nobody's listening to the original soundtrack of the les mis movie because they'd have to listen to russell crowe it would feel more authentic uh if these sad french people like clearly hadn't drank water in like four days yeah you know what would really make this like 12 part harmony and one day more better recording everybody in separate takes with no click track anyway so i i never used to have strong opinions about click tracks this is sideways fault i highly recommend the channel um big ups to sideways for uh for hot click track takes well that's not even a hot take that's just the truth yeah how is that hey we're going to do a musical but we're not going to give them the rhythm they need to sing to because it's more authentic in the real world sound off on your click track opinions in the comments hey you know what also isn't realistic people singing randomly it's like look everybody knows that every disney movie in the last 10 years has made that joke because they're also desperately insecure but the point is like we already get that the music doesn't make sense you can at least make it also sound nice also i wanted to take a little opportunity to just yell at sherlock a little bit more because again in terms of like this is an adaptation that gets the surface and then nothing deeper a series that is allegedly about a genius detective solving mysteries that turns into just being about a genius because he doesn't solve very many mysteries and he doesn't do any detectiving it's mostly about him being a dick to the people who still put up with him and that's just not fun to watch you guys seen that meme where it's like the 10 worst episodes of sherlock and it's like he only got 13 episodes bud [Laughter] i uh i think it definitely got worse in later seasons as they tried to lean in more to like sherlock is like tormented yeah whatever yeah um and i i don't want to harp because like benedict cumberbatch did a great job with what he was given and i mean this was like my first instruction you put i i thought like seasons one and two were super cool yeah it was only season three when i was like wait a minute yeah hold on hold on but sirens going off there's there's a validity to like let's take a different approach let's let's play with it a little bit see what we get see where this goes and then that's valid that's like the whole point of remixing stories and thinking well let's let's play with it what aspects of these characters are immutable what what can we change what happens like that's the experimentation that keeps the character going since the 1800s yeah you gotta play with it or else he's gonna get stale yeah granted yeah granted but the commitment to making a character the hero by virtue of them being a dick and like wow look at how much everyone still puts up with them despite the fact that they're a dick that's i feel like that's the whole point of rick and morty as well um i i think is is interestingly undercut with elementary which was the less popular of the two sherlock shows from the 2010s um i watched parts of it uh as as cyan was doing her full series watch through earlier this year where he's a guy who has difficulties he has problems but beneath everything he still abundantly cares about the people around him and you do not have to dig far to get that even if he puts up a facade that's only the facade that's not the real guy the real sherlock in sherlock is a dick the real sherlock in elementary cares deeply about the people around him and the people who he's helping yeah in his cases that's an easy thing to overlook if you only know sherlock holmes from like the modern adaptations is that sherlock holmes is a very kind person a lot of the people he helps in the original stories are like young women or like widowers other people that society has not helped and the police will not listen to like by far the most vulnerable yeah the most vulnerable people like they go to him because they need his help because they are desperate and nobody else is there for them like sometimes it's kings sometimes it's a girl from an abusive household who's worried that her father is trying to kill her and holmes listens to the girl a lot more compassionately than the king i'll tell you that yeah and it's just like this is a read that a doesn't understand the appeal of the character of sherlock holmes it's like yes he is a genius but he's fun to watch because he's also just this eccentric goober who's like watson's disaster roommate who like deletes important astrological information from his brain to make room for more cases and micro doses on cocaine on the weekends to keep his clearly visible adhd in check and also misses that the point of the stories is that it's interesting watching these mysteries unravel and like seeing how they actually get pieced together through at the time like cutting-edge forensic techniques and stuff that turned out to be pseudoscience but was still very cool to watch like that's the fun part the mystery solving and uh there's some videos about this about why when sherlock stopped being about solving mysteries in episode two uh it kind of stopped being so fun to watch anyway all this to say there are many many examples of situations where a story is reimagined or adapted or satirized by somebody who doesn't seem to like understand or have ever really critically analyzed the original in any way and they end up being very obvious yeah i i think with all these examples with with superman with batman with with movie musicals with sherlock i i think i i will just highlight that we're not dunking on the the concept of like satirizing a character we're specifically going out of our way to be like here is an example that understood it that played with the source material that said something new and made a point with how they changed the character even if they kind of gruff him up a little bit like you know sherlock in elementary is is a kind of he's he's he's a down at his luck guy he's got rough edges to his character but compare that to homelander compare that to nolan batman compare that well not even nolan but compare that to like the tom hooper stuff compare that to sherlock from sherlock where they're it's just oh what if they sucked yeah that's really it maybe there's something else buried under it but the point of the story is oh wouldn't it be cool if they sucked yeah it's so just disheartening to deal with the character who has very little ethos beyond just being obnoxious and being tolerated by the rest of the cast anyway yeah it's like is it really that unbelievable that like a character can be nice and care about other humans and the the general tone of all of these adaptations is look how silly it is to care that's just that's the biggest indictment i can give to the adaptations that don't treat these these characters as compassionate people is like it belies a very very jaded and cynical perspective on humanity like oh yeah you know like what an idiot being vulnerable and having feelings caring about other people better to fortress up and be a dick to everyone so they can't hurt you you know and granted a lot of these these characters in the you know mean adaptations have complexity they still do have complexity yeah but the surface presentation is is like but they suck and that's that's just disappointing i think it's actually really interesting that you made that connection because the angle i was mostly taking is essentially just the the very technical like if you don't understand what you're deconstructing you can't write a deconstruction of it by its very nature you need to understand what makes it tick in order to take it apart but the thing that you pointed out about like these stories almost uniformly have this oddly like mean-spirited jaded what an idiot caring attitude i think that that exists in a sort in both a doylist and a watsonian context in story what an idiot caring these characters don't care and anyone who thinks they care is stupid and on a metal level who would care about this story i don't understand the appeal of it it's very silly and weird and thus by extension any story i tell about it will punish you for caring and that really does feel like a lot of what kind of bugs me about this because some of these stories come from a place of like potentially misplaced caring like i don't think anyone can accuse tom hooper of not caring about the musicals he's trying to adapt i just don't understand what he's getting out of them if it's not the music and the the the question of essentially if you don't care about the story why would you take it apart and try and put it back together or or satirize it or adapt it or tell a story with it like if you don't care why are you doing it and in contrast you can really tell when a story is being told by somebody who cares the caring just kind of leaks out of it because they care so much they commit to the bits they let the characters and the creators care about what they're doing and when they don't do that you get something that's just kind of shallow and really just makes it seem like the creator doesn't really understand what they're talking about and the thing is even if the creator does understand even if they have at times like written other versions of this character or more intriguing explorations it can still make it seem like they are punishing you for caring i mean i think that watchmen is a very interesting story but i think that there is a reason that so many people who love it get this completely erroneous message out of it that alan moore did not intend there's something in the way it's written that makes it seem like it's punishing you for caring watchman's intended is a tragedy right yes very much so yeah okay yeah and maybe i'm just repeating myself at this point but there is something in in reading a story about a character who just in their bones cares about everybody else that is reassuring on a deep level where it's like yeah you know maybe there's some nonsense going on but i i can see this person caring and imagine them you know if they were a real person caring about you know someone i know or caring about someone like me or you know caring about someone that you know society isn't able to care for and take care of that it's just reassuring because people humans root for each other intrinsically all the time it's it's in like our blood it's in our thoughts it's in everything we do is we want to root for each other that seeing a piece of media or a story that negates that and rejects that feels inhuman which is why i hate it so yeah i i couldn't tell but yeah i mean also you know humans also learn by example when we see somebody caring that deeply it gives us permission to do the same and uh speaking from experience as somebody who has spent most of my life caring very very deeply and strongly about a lot of things i can't change and can't control to a degree that i frequently got made fun of for you often get hurt for caring and that makes it tempting to stop or to redirect it into self-pitying or harmful directions and being shown examples of people who did care that fiercely that strongly that openly and kept going even if it hurt can sort of give you a degree of just the the resilience to hold on to this fundamentally very important and good part of you rather than letting it shrivel up or or hide in progressively smaller corners of you to avoid getting hurt by it yeah compassion creates an internal fortitude that is very difficult to shake even though the surface reading is that oh you know if you like something it's just fodder for someone else to make fun of you yeah i mean we all had the the thing we liked as a kid that we got made fun of it's like oh you know caring just just gets you hurt no these these heroes show that caring is a source of strength it is usually the source of their strength yeah that's the whole point i will also say that like when i started doing trope talks it took me like a serious mental hoist to be willing to admit out loud some of those shows that i liked and watched but afterwards i was like i'm glad i did that and i have seen some people be like oh i can openly admit this thing i like that i get made fun of or you know stuff like that it's just it is very important that people have examples of people just being open and honest about how much they care about stuff and and people and because that's very very important and good for you and shoveling that away is bad and hurting people for caring is one of the worst things you can do to them supporting people who are caring and open about that stuff is one of the best things you can do because it gives them the resilience they need to keep caring even though it does hurt and it will it does open you up to that kind of thing but it's much better than the alternative uh this is just paraphrasing a speech guitar i gave at some point i can't believe an episode about superman got kind of soapboxy um anyway all that to say the tldr everyone who says watchmen's a real good comic watchman is good but please read another comic before you write any some more superhero movies anyway superman can and still care about those two things aren't mutually exclusive superman hangs out with some superheroes that kill okay it's not that special wonder woman kills on the regs and nobody thinks that's weird yeah why the whole point of captain america is that he wanted to kill father i hunger for blood oh a good man anyway uh yeah i uh i i think there is is clearly much more that we we could even continue saying long into the night yeah but i think instead i'll go and re-watch all of justice league i i think that would be our our recommended reading not a homework assignment but uh go go watch justice league yeah to see how superman as a moral paragon as a leader who does not have the capacity to do harm to another person even like you know like he can't even kill the enemies like he can't he it's not in him it's not in him to do that yeah to see how that person makes everybody around him better what i actually do right now i do recommend watching justice league i actually recommend taking a slightly more critical attitude not bad attitude but like there are some episodes where he is really on point and there are some episodes where his role in the team almost sort of supersedes his internal incorruptible paragon it's not because he does anything bad but because the role that they sort of give him in the team is superman flies off the handle sometimes especially when his own bad guys are in play when it's lex luthor or darkseid or brainiac superman tends to go a little bit rogue and leave batman and the others chasing after him to clean everything up and this is an interesting part of his character that i don't necessarily approve of but if you're looking at it episode by episode and seeing okay which of these episodes does he feel most like superman what does he do that makes him feel really super manly and where does it feel not quite right i think this is just a very fun way to sort of unpack the parts of his characters that get overlooked and the parts of him that work for you for instance there's an episode of justice league that i categorically refuse to rewatch it's called clash in it superman is manipulated by lex luthor into fighting captain marvel because basically lex luthor builds a housing development and puts a thing under it that looks a lot like a bomb on x-ray vision and essentially just does it to mess up superman's public image and i find it immensely frustrating because superman probably shouldn't be that stupid but again like this is this is the kind of thing that we we analyze you know we look at stories that get these characters in a way that we think is correct and we look at stories that don't quite get them and we try and piece together what we see that makes them tick what's important about them and what can fluctuate from story to story but also just re-watch the show it's really good that's good so uh bye [Applause] [Music] foreign

Channel: Overly Sarcastic Productions

Views: 1,222,937

Keywords: Funny, Summary, OSP, Overly Sarcastic Productions, Analysis, Literary Analysis, Myths, Legends, Classics, Literature, Stories, Storytelling, History, Mythology

Id: _50968MO0PU

Length: 99min 8sec (5948 seconds)

Published: Fri Jul 08 2022

Reddit Comments

[u/nihilist-ego]

I'm pretty disappointed by The Boys section. Why have your primary 'bad Superman satire' example be a show you haven't even watched? Red and Blue end up just looking embarrassing. They're falling to the same thing they're criticizing Superman satire writers for: only doing a surface level analysis. They call the character of Homelander, and The Boys altogether, 'shallow' when they aren't bothering to do a deep analysis. It's fine not to want to watch a show, but then don't put it in as a 'bad example' of something.

[u/McWonderballs]

So a bit of context on The Boys and why the comic is better than the show and although I wouldn't recommend it to Red, why I give Garth Ennis (the author of the comic) the benefit of the doubt when it comes to his writing. Garth is an edge lord to a T. He really likes violent characters his first big hit was a comic for DC called Hitman and if you like big edge gun guy (like punisher or nick fury which he also wrote comics for and were really good if you like edge) then it is right up your alley. However, Issue number 34 of Hitman has the titular hitman strike up a conversation with Superman and what follows is some super interesting concepts about the character, and it is really really good. Garth Ennis doesn't like superheroes, except for superman. Superman is his one exception. In The Boys, the point of Homelander is basically what would happen to superman if instead of love and care as a child he was a victim of abuse and emotional neglect. It's admittedly a bit shallow but as someone who adores superman but also loves edgy bullshit, I felt the need to explain I guess?

[u/kilomaan]

Guys. She’s not gonna watch boys.

[u/KingGranticus]

Obviously not something they would get having not watched the show, but like The Boys is just like Invincible in that Starlight is the "real" Superman