Brians Superman Post

[Professor Smarmiarty]

Originally Posted by Odjn

Well technically there's all kinds of evil doods who never killed anyone and then gotten beaten up so yeah. Oh and it's worse to be in comics land because then you're saying Well, it's ok for me to send this guy to the same jail he just broke out of after killing forty people and now that I've done that I better help clean up this fifty people. That's incompetence.

This is complete nonsense. You reducing morality to a simple math equation of how many people live and how many die- not even utilitarians do this (and if they did the utility loss of letting a few individuals adminster justice and death should easily outwiegh the benefits), not even comic books do this.
As discussed above, superman doesn't say "Oh I'll let this person die to save a 100 people" he tries to save everybody and generally does because that's what he does. Superman is pretty good at saving everyone.

Also also. Villains can't be 'cured.' People can choose to change but they're not cured because that would imply they're forced to be good. Superman lobotomizing them in the Justice Lord dimension is a cure.

I'm saying this in relation to a comic book world where there is "evil" and "good" as definite concepts and one of them is inherentely bad and liek a disease. Comic book people don't work like real people, villains generally can't choose to change because they are cast as archetypal villains. You are trying to hodge-podge comic book morality with real people- it doesn't work.

[Odjn]

Originally Posted by Fifthfiend

I mean we already did this on the fartzorarium but that never happened so I'll resay it here.



You're making an argument against contrivance which relies entirely on contrivance, because the biggest, dumbest, most relentless contrivance of superhero comics is that you put people in a high security prison, and then of the people in that prison, any of them can just walk out of it any time he wants, because ~lolz~.

There's nothing wrong with Superman's morality because in 'non-contrived' comics he just puts people in jail and they stay there, and in 'contrived' comics people escape death as easily as jail, because characters coming back has nothing to do with Superman's (or Batman's) morality and everything to do with the fact that writers want to write comics about Lex Luthor and the Joker.

If everything in comics is contrived - which it is - then the only differences is whether your contrivances serve the characters or break them, and contrivances which contrive to have Superman adhere to his perfectly reasonable morality do the former, and contrivances which throw that out in order to accomplish, ultimately, nothing different than if he did adhere to his morality, don't.

EDIT It's worth noting that every version of "Superman except he also murders" has not-incidentally been terrible, except for Apollo and that was only because of the heartwarming lulzy assfucking.

That's what Black Adam is and we love him for it.

[Odjn]

Originally Posted by Smarty McBarrelpants

This is complete nonsense. You reducing morality to a simple math equation of how many people live and how many die- not even utilitarians do this (and if they did the utility loss of letting a few individuals adminster justice and death should easily outwiegh the benefits), not even comic books do this.
As discussed above, superman doesn't say "Oh I'll let this person die to save a 100 people" he tries to save everybody and generally does because that's what he does. Superman is pretty good at saving everyone

Joker kills people because he likes doing so and will never stop killing people, with the possible exception of Batman dying sometimes (but not the actual Bat death.)

So yes, I will, because he is a grade A evil guy and it's either he dies or every one he continues to kill dies and it's up to you which happens. The answer is, kill his dumb ass dead because if the legal system doesn't do it, someone should. There's no reason NOT to kill the joker- he always gets out and always kills more people and no shrink can cure him. He's less of a man and more of a beast/force of nature. And yeah, he's 'come back from the dead' a lot, but I don't seem to recall someone shooting him in the head and burning the corpse so someone should give that a try.

Originally Posted by Smarty McBarrelpants

I'm saying this in relation to a comic book world where there is "evil" and "good" as definite concepts and one of them is inherentely bad and liek a disease. Comic book people don't work like real people, villains generally can't choose to change because they are cast as archetypal villains. You are trying to hodge-podge comic book morality with real people- it doesn't work.

No, some comic books treat it like that and some don't.

Good comics do treat good/evil as vague, good fictional characters aren't how real people act but are reasonable replicas, and good fiction can present the illusion of choice which makes quite a lot of villains more compelling.

[BitVyper]

Superman is not anyone's paid police force or military, last I checked. He's a free agent and has no particular moral or legal responsibility to kill The Joker for you.

[Odjn]

Originally Posted by BitVyper

Superman is not anyone's paid police force or military, last I checked. He's a free agent and has no particular moral or legal responsibility to kill The Joker for you.

Last time I checked he was explicitly working for/obeying the law. And that's ok if he isn't, we'll shoot the Joker on our own and he can bugger off to space.

[Loyal]

At that point you're railing less against Superman and the other Capes and more against the law enforcement system in the comics for failing to adequately dispose of him. Which is a whole other can of worms.

[w0rf]

The problem with Superman... is that he's "F'ing Superman" (tm).

What you have in Superman is both the literal and the figurative ubermensch. He is stronger than all the strong heroes, faster than all the fast heroes, smarter than all the smart heroes, "good-er" than all the good heroes. He's nearly indestructible, unflinchingly moral, and revered without exception by all of his superpowered peers. (except Batman and you could argue Guy Gardner).

So what do you do with a guy like that? The idea of an invincible good guy stopping bank robbers is noble, but that's not even a light workout for someone like that. So you cook up some superpowered bad guys. And of course he's always more powerful than all of them also, or when they have a physical edge he thwarts them tactically. He's literally unstoppable.

So again, what do you do with a guy like that? You contrive limitations for him. Kryptonite and magic are all right but how many time is one guy going to fall for the same gag? (according to the trailer, I guess one too many) Same with human shields. So you come up with other reasons: worn down from constant fighting, memory loss, suddenly less strong than you thought, self-imposed exile... You're stuck trying to imagine reasons he is NOT invincible because you have to find a way to make the story interesting when technically he should defeat every nemesis in like five seconds. But then the instant you make him something less than he is, you're being unfaithful to his character.

The Superman in the trailer was interesting, but to make him so, you had to make him not care about the lives of billions of innocents and all of his comrades (except Wonder Woman... makes you curious). You had to make him absent from the battle until the right dramatic moment to step in and be all Supermanny. You had to make him mortally violent against Black Adam and Luthor ("you don't deserve to live"? Seriously?). Essentially, you had to make him not-Superman. And that is the problem with being Superman.

On a different note, is it just me, or did everyone including Superman, Batman, Luthor, Adam... basically, every male character except Joker, sound like Kratos? Did they all take their gravelly baritone pills with their breakfast? I kept expecting to hear "And so, Kal-El cast himself from the highest mountain in all of Krypton..."

[Kurosen]

Originally Posted by w0rf

So what do you do with a guy like that?

You do All-Star Superman, or Superman For All Seasons, or Superman: Red Son.

[POS Industries]

Originally Posted by w0rf

On a different note, is it just me, or did everyone including Superman, Batman, Luthor, Adam... basically, every male character except Joker, sound like Kratos? Did they all take their gravelly baritone pills with their breakfast? I kept expecting to hear "And so, Kal-El cast himself from the highest mountain in all of Krypton..."

Probably for the same reason they made every male character including Joker look like Kratos.

[RobinStarwing]

As I said, too dark...too gritty...to gloomy...to God Of Warsee...

I will stick to Dante from DMC. He at least doesn't have these issues for me.