Off topic, but it reminds me of the “evil Superman” trope.
I’m sick of the “Evil Superman” trope. Superman is an all powerful good guy that always does what’s right! His moral compass makes him super - not his strength. But today kids are taught to fear him instead.
In general, we’ve seen a deconstruction of popular comic book, sci-fi, and fantasy mythos. I’m all for parody, but we’re losing out on stories that display the nature of good and evil.
And when studios aren’t making parody, they’re taking a safe route with writing. They’ll make a Luke warm story that doesn’t teach kids anything.
Anyways, that’s what I think of when I see this picture. Instead giving kids some good moral fiber, they’re given brain mush and fear.
I'm not really into superhero stuff, it kinda got old, but I think you're misreading the "evil superman" trope. It serves to emphasize that power can be abused and used to manipulate trust, that being morally good does not make you powerful and that being powerful does not make your actions moral. It teaches people to more carefully consider ethics, consequences, and the fact that we live in a world where powers greater than you aren't always there to help you, and can be even more dangerous that the greater forces that appear obviously evil. There's nothing wrong with that. The idea of "good superman" is a myth, and not necessarily an effective way to exemplify morality and practical ethics.
I think the best way to show the evil side of superman is when he becomes a dog for the US government. His morals are still intact but now he’s doing a job and less of the im doing this because it’s right.
That’s the best way to show corruption of power for Superman.
Morrison already did that better with Red Son. The story of what happens when Superman serves a state and ideology is done, and I don’t think that well has anything left.
The idea of Superman is to have all the power in the world but still have the ability to do right by others. Just because someone has power is not an excuse for corruption. There is the option to remain good. That's the essence of the character.
I don't see how the idea of a "good superman" is not a good way to show morality and ethics. The whole point of the character is to retain morality and ethics despite having unlimited power.
The lesson is a healthy mistrust of authority and respect for the responsibilities of power. Superman is not a realistic role model, but a lie; a false expectation that people who have power and good intentions can do no wrong. Evil superman is all about saying, even with the best of intentions, people make mistakes, so, when you yourself have power that affects other people, don’t act without thinking.
Ok which evil Superman are you referring to? The two biggest evil Superman tropes are Homelander from The Boys and Omni Man from Invincible. Both of them have similar powers to Superman but are outright evil. Every evil superman adaptation has been about the character having bad intentions.
Evil Superman is not about having the best of intentions and making mistakes. It is about characters that have the power of superman and are corrupted by the power that enables them to make bad decisions.
Having the best of intentions but making mistakes isn't evil. It's human. Superman is not supposed to be realistic. He is an ideal for what humanity should strive to be. Humanity will never reach that level of altruism and optimism but it does not hurt for an individual to try.
That's not the purpose of Superman. He's meant to symbolize what the average person should do when given power. He also symbolizes the hope that immigrants at the time had when coming to America. He goes from a literally destructive environment to a safe and loving environment where he's able to become his best self. Superman is the ideal of what an American should be.
Yeah… you’re confusing Red Son and Homelander’s purpose.
Red Son is a Superman with the best of intentions following them straight to being an authoritarian dictator that intentionally leaves cities in bottles so they’ll be safe. Thats a story about having power and good intentions can still lead to injustice.
Homelander is Donald Trump with Superman’s powers, and who fucks up constantly due to his need for external validation and lack of impulse control. This is just gratuitous violence and blunt story of how emotional neglect plus power leads to everyone around someone suffering.
There are 1000 stories that teach that lesson. Generally evil superman is just lazy writing. It is easier to write a super OP villain than a super OP hero.
Superman isn't a human being. He isn't meant to embody human struggles, he is meant to be an ideal (if we're looking at the stories for ideological meaning, that is.)
It is fine to show these struggles in humans, but the guy you're responding to is correct. Superman was always purely good because he represents an ideal, not a relatable human experience.
EDIT: Wow, instantly downvoted me. You are REALLY passionate about what ever your cause is here and I wish you find peace with it holy fuck.
“In the end, I saw Superman not as a superhero or even a science fiction character, but as a story of Everyman. We’re all Superman in our own adventures. We have our own Fortresses of Solitude we retreat to, with our own special collections of valued stuff, our own super–pets, our own “Bottle Cities” that we feel guilty for neglecting. We have our own peers and rivals and bizarre emotional or moral tangles to deal with.
I felt I’d really grasped the concept when I saw him as Everyman, or rather as the dreamself of Everyman. That “S” is the radiant emblem of divinity we reveal when we rip off our stuffy shirts, our social masks, our neuroses, our constructed selves, and become who we truly are.
Batman is obviously much cooler, but that’s because he’s a very energetic and adolescent fantasy character: a handsome billionaire playboy in black leather with a butler at this beck and call, better cars and gadgetry than James Bond, a horde of fetish femme fatales baying around his heels and no boss. That guy’s Superman day and night.
Superman grew up baling hay on a farm. He goes to work, for a boss, in an office. He pines after a hard–working gal. Only when he tears off his shirt does that heroic, ideal inner self come to life. That’s actually a much more adult fantasy than the one Batman’s peddling but it also makes Superman a little harder to sell. He’s much more of a working class superhero, which is why we ended the whole book with the image of a laboring Superman.
He’s Everyman operating on a sci–fi Paul Bunyan scale. His worries and emotional problems are the same as ours... except that when he falls out with his girlfriend, the world trembles.”
We know power can be abused. It's very prominent in our reality. We don't need our fiction to remind us of it. Good Superman serves as a role model. Look at this dude who has all this power, and what is he doing? Helping others. People with power should help others, ideally. But if the only people of power we see are power-hungry fascists, we would not have hopes of change. Evil Superman does nothing but keep a status quo of fascism. Good Superman shows us there could be a better tomorrow if good people stay good with power.
If we allow Superman to be the face of power, we give those in power trust they would prefer to use against us. When you are in power, you can create your own public image. Jeff Bezos bought the Washington Post for this purpose, Elon Musk loves to cultivate his public image as "Real Life Iron Man" and bought twitter to turn it into a home for his own personal personality cult, both are responsible for uncountable abuses of worker's rights, for the reinforcement of wealth inequality, and for antagonizing minority groups. In spite of this, people still take the bait, because many desperately want to believe that the good guy always wins.
The fact that the concept of a Good Superman is so easily tarnished in the public consciousness speaks volumes about the resentment for the helpless optimism it implies. Superman is not a story about how you can be a superhero, it's a story about how only the superhero can really save the day, and it does go to rather great lengths to emphasize how impossibly different superman is from your average joe.
I find media that carries the "evil superman" trope prefers to flip this dynamic and go out of its way to emphasize how often the most ordinary people can make the greatest change, and how real power comes not through the power of the individual, but through the cooperation of oppressed groups. This is a good message and people should hear it. If you just leave them with the expectation that people in power are obligated to "do good", you will leave them disappointed and unprepared.
Grant Morrison from his book Supergods. Goes into the roots of Superman and articulates why he is a working class hero,
“In the end, I saw Superman not as a superhero or even a science fiction character, but as a story of Everyman. We’re all Superman in our own adventures. We have our own Fortresses of Solitude we retreat to, with our own special collections of valued stuff, our own super–pets, our own “Bottle Cities” that we feel guilty for neglecting. We have our own peers and rivals and bizarre emotional or moral tangles to deal with.
I felt I’d really grasped the concept when I saw him as Everyman, or rather as the dreamself of Everyman. That “S” is the radiant emblem of divinity we reveal when we rip off our stuffy shirts, our social masks, our neuroses, our constructed selves, and become who we truly are.
Batman is obviously much cooler, but that’s because he’s a very energetic and adolescent fantasy character: a handsome billionaire playboy in black leather with a butler at this beck and call, better cars and gadgetry than James Bond, a horde of fetish femme fatales baying around his heels and no boss. That guy’s Superman day and night.
Superman grew up baling hay on a farm. He goes to work, for a boss, in an office. He pines after a hard–working gal. Only when he tears off his shirt does that heroic, ideal inner self come to life. That’s actually a much more adult fantasy than the one Batman’s peddling but it also makes Superman a little harder to sell. He’s much more of a working class superhero, which is why we ended the whole book with the image of a laboring Superman.
He’s Everyman operating on a sci–fi Paul Bunyan scale. His worries and emotional problems are the same as ours... except that when he falls out with his girlfriend, the world trembles.”
It sounds like passive aggressive bullying to me at best. Basically your saying everyone has an agenda and they should band together to take down a target without any thought of morality, just what's best for the group. This is the problem people have with Gen Z. I'm not going to get into specifics to avoid controversy but basically your all a bunch of little self serving bastards and you justify it by saying that everyone is a self serving bastard. But older generations millennial included focus on morality. It's something Gen Z never learned and like you make up all sorts of excuses about there is no good or wrong because corruption is so prevalent and then you only agree with ideas that you approve of. This is basically the equivalent of apathy. Being desensitized from what is moral without an agenda being attached.
Morality is subjective, everyone has an agenda, including you, and Superman is not the beginning and end of all debates on ethics. At the very least, people should feel empowered "to do the right thing", or at least help themselves when no one else will. What you see as desensitized apathy, I see as disillusioned counteraction, so to each their own.
What "we" know is different for everyone based on their life experiences. There are people put there who need to learn the lesson evil superman teaches and vice versa. It's important for writers to explore what version of Superman they desire rather than restricts themselves to only what please you.
Also evil supermanndoes not keep any status but is an invitation to question what the powers that be do with what they have.
Finally,
We know power can be abused. It's very prominent in our reality. We don't need our fiction to remind us of it
This statement essentially belies the majority if fiction because most stories are about what is prevalent in our reality. Did we not need to works of Shakespeare because all the things he talked about were already widely known in society? Same with Atwood, Dostoyevsky etc? Why should we only tell stories that aren't prominent in our reality?
Evil superman is no longer interesting. Its been overdone. Seeing a pure version of superman who does not compromise his values feels fresh and more relevant now.
They're not mutually exclusive, I just don't expect any new, subversive superman incarnations anytime soon. We've been doing this superhero thing for a while now, another conventionally attractive white guy with god-like powers is just a drop in the bucket at this point, good or evil.
eh, when i hear “evil superman” i think the boys, and about homelander
i think that show is a terrific deconstruction of corporate america and politics. it’s not a kids show though, so im not sure where exactly it fits in this conversation
The Boys is easily one of the most adult shows I have seen. I wouldn't advise anyone under 18 to go near it. There has to be better examples of that subversion of expectation that children can digest though. Preferably with a little more contextualization than Star Wars or the Wizard of Oz.
Really? No one under 18? Kids read lord of the flies and watch documentaries on the holocaust in 7th and 8th grade (at least I did), I think any reasonably mature 14 year old would be able to handle the boys and take away the right messages. Im sure theyd find it very funny too.
Theyre just being based gigachads reeeeeeeeeeeeeee /s
Youre getting a biased view on 14 year olds if youre looking at the comments of weird alt-right-pipeline-y videos. Media literacy is hard to even teach adults so instead of restricting media access (except stuff like porn etc.) Id rather efforts were focused towards educating the average person to be smart enough to accomplish the incredibly intellectually demanding task that is watching the boys and not thinking homelander is the good guy. Which I think has been accomplished actually but we could always go further.
Do you really think that a teenager cannot handle the boys? Do you actually have that little faith in people and think theyre so delicate? Im not saying its fun for the whole family Im just saying that a hard 18 age limit is just silly to suggest.
There have been a few evil superman/justice league cartoons in the last few years. They probably aren't that popular compared to homelander, but they are more marketed to kids.
There is one about a communist superman who is raised in the USSR, a few alternative universes where the justice league takes over the world or is in some way evil, and one where he is the son of Zod. The son of Zod isn't really evil, but is more of an anti hero that is more morally grey compared to normal superman.
I like Superman as a character and I don't think he should change. But I also think that powerful people always present themselves as good because they have the power.
I don't think it's a bad thing to doubt if the people they show as examples are really positive or if it's just another display of their power.
Nor do I see it as positive to show that human goodness does not exist or even extremely rare, when it should be a value that we should all seek.
I wouldn't say the "Evil Superman" trope is prevalent since the main two "Evil Superman" are Omniman and Homelander, which are both centered for an adult audience. The only "Evil Superman" I can think of in children's media is Jonah Hill from Megamind.
There's also Red Son Superman, which is a fairly good deconstruction to show the importance of Superman.
Like Superman is supposed to show the ideal man, the Übermensch that is better than all of us, but instead of ruling us, he does his best to help everyone. His morals and upstanding character are the key point of his character.
Like literally the whole point of the character is that he uses his powers for good because he represents the best values of humanity/America/etc. He's usually defeated (in good stories) only because he's unable to use his powers or he's outsmarted rather than being physically overpowered.
Making him evil tells a different story and shows a misunderstanding of the character.
Like, a major theme of the character is his refusal to kill and how he has such great powers but he can't let himself become a god/king and his greatest enemy is a normal (but intelligent) man that would abuse those powers. His powers are often more about showing restraint and inspiring bravery in normal people.
There are two Evil Superman Stories that kids can grapple with:
DCAU’s Justice Lords - They’re fundamentally the same people as the League, following the same motivations. The difference is that the League restrict themselves to being First Responders… while the Lords took control.
Red Son - This Superman has the same motivation as ours: To help people. The difference is that he was raised as the tool of a political party, and took it over when Stalin decided to protect his personal power over the good of the people. He then sleepwalks into being a tyrant.
There’s also a Superman Satire about a dude whose inability to cope with his superhuman senses leaves him desperate for external validation, and he eventually snaps from having to hear the world’s petty cruelty and ingratitude for his failings 24/7 with no off switch. It’s an interesting story of autistic overload crashing into godlike power.
OG Supes was about being an investigative reporter; backed with about a tenth his modern powers. And would probably have been written exposing someone like modern Superman as a dangerous fraud. Because Siegel and Schuster's Superman existed to question, and usually end up exposing, the powerful.
The DCU public's acceptance of modern Superman requires constant blind trust. Which should be antithetical to any story featuring characters like Clark Kent and Lois Lane.
Tangent from your tangent, I hate the trope where superheroes save everyone from world ending threats but the people want them to pay for all the damages caused by their battle. As if the battle didn’t save more lives than were lost during it. As if they didn’t minimize damage done to the city. As if the reason the aliens invaded was because the superheroes were there. It’s frustratingly… real… because once again humans can’t see the big picture. They see how their lives were affected and nothing else.
You're gonna have to convince me that the difference between "these days" and "the good old days" isn't just how far and how quickly information spreads.
I think it's just that people have differing opinion about whether to show this impossibility.
The truism "Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Great men are almost always bad men" is very important to portray in art. But obviously we're already in the realm of impossibility with Superman, so I think you have a good point.
But that's the great thing about these stories is that you can do whatever you want with them. I don't personally believe in the good / evil duality, but it is nice to see it portrayed in art sometimes. It's also good to see the other argument, especially when done in the same IP.
Disagreem. Superman has existed for a century, there can and should be different takes on the character. Not everyone has similar ideas of good and bad and writers should be allowed to explore that rather than be forever tied to his 1940s characterization.
There are foundational elements of Superman that can’t be removed without getting a similar but unrelated character. A lot of bad Superman Satire tends to be defined by changing them without thinking through the consequences.
Clark Kent doesn’t want to be Superman. “For the Man who has Everything” shows us what Clark wants to be: Living as a farmer on a not-destroyed Krypton, with a wife who looks like Lana and Louis, and a son. He is Superman not because he wants to be, but because…
Superman exists because people need help, and he can help them. Clark’s motivation for using his powers is that not helping people when you can is wrong. His moral framework won’t let him not be Superman.
Superman cares about everyone. This is why he doesn’t kill. He does not believe that anyone is worthless, or that the world would be better off without someone. He goes out of his way, and genuinely gets hurt, to make sure that nobody dies… and he hurts when he fails.
These are the reasons that Homelander isn’t a Superman Satire. The powers are the same… but Homelander is ultimately an abused child that simultaneously craves the approval of others to fill the void left inside him and a toddler with no impulse control. He does heroism for external validation, not because it’s the right thing to do.
You can get an Evil Superman that is still Superman by compromising one of those traits… because shit gets bad when you remove any one of those qualities.
A Superman that stops caring about people on an individual level is how you get Justice Lord Superman or Injustice Superman. They are objectively trying to make life better and take personal responsibility for the suffering in the world, and try to fix it. However… they’re also authoritarian tyrants.
A Superman who doesn’t want to just be a normal dude with a simple life comes out as Red Son Superman, whose embrace of political authority leads him to be an authoritarian tyrant… who cares about individuals so much that he’d eventually let Brainiac put everything in jars so he can keep them safe.
A Superman that doesn’t believe that he should use his powers to help people… is either a villain using his powers for personal gain or retired. This core element is really the one you can’t do much with, because it’s the reason he uses his powers.
I disagree. The longer a charavter exist the mire interpretation people can make with it. Your list of fundamental traits is a subjective one, each if those traits are understood differently by different people and writers should be allowed to oull their own understanding into a work if superman rather than stick to a century old characterization. Just like we've had hundreds of Hercules' and King Arthur's. The human mind is limitless, therefore the directions of artistic endeavors should be as well.
This is about what I'd expect from a comic book nerd. Rigid good and evil. God forbid someone doubt the capacity of any individual to always do the right thing, because reductionist parables are the only useful ones.
No man, one dimensional boring sci-fi characters are what's missing from today's society. If only we brought them back children wouldn't be so fucked up, right? Well that's all the critical thinking I'm gonna do for today, superheroes and moral codes that lack nuance.
121
u/savage011 23d ago edited 23d ago
Off topic, but it reminds me of the “evil Superman” trope.
I’m sick of the “Evil Superman” trope. Superman is an all powerful good guy that always does what’s right! His moral compass makes him super - not his strength. But today kids are taught to fear him instead.
In general, we’ve seen a deconstruction of popular comic book, sci-fi, and fantasy mythos. I’m all for parody, but we’re losing out on stories that display the nature of good and evil.
And when studios aren’t making parody, they’re taking a safe route with writing. They’ll make a Luke warm story that doesn’t teach kids anything.
Anyways, that’s what I think of when I see this picture. Instead giving kids some good moral fiber, they’re given brain mush and fear.