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Message: <blockquote data-quote="jian" data-source="post: 9662709" data-attributes="member: 78087">I used to like this idea but now I’m not sure about it. It reminds me of a scene in Astro City where Samaritan (Superman expy) is having dinner with Winged Victory (Wonder Woman expy) and she says in exasperation something like, “We’re opposites - you’re a god pretending to be a man, and I’m a woman pretending to be a goddess.” Now, Sam and WV are different characters from Clark and Diana - this scene is really about how WV has tried to use her fame to inspire other women - but there’s a grain of truth there about Clark. Clark isn’t just a nice Kansas farmboy turned reporter who’s a superhero in his spare time - he’s also literally the most powerful man in the world, the closest thing to God most people will meet. He needs to pretend to be human to be human - without the secret identity of Clark Kent, he has no connection to the rest of us and ultimately no need to be bound by any human limits, and that goes bad really fast.(This is something I liked about What Happened to the Man of Tomorrow, the finale to the Silver Age Superman that someone mentioned earlier upthread. Spoilers for a 40 year old comic in case you haven’t read it:[spoiler]Whatever Happened to the Man of Tomorrow is a deconstruction of Silver Age Superman (which is good because honestly half the time that guy was kind of an autocratic idiot, making decisions for his friends all the time without telling them). It’s about removing the narrative protections that Superman has. So first, he loses his secret identity and can’t be Clark any more; then his career becomes more destructive than beneficial, as all his villains attack him and his family and friends, killing several characters; and finally, he’s forced to kill someone to save others.Without his narrative protections, Superman doesn’t have his narrative omnibenevolence either - he can do the wrong thing, his actions can hurt people. He’s reduced to what I mentioned earlier - an unstoppable guy with all the power and none of the accountability. So he does the only narratively moral thing he can, which is permanently remove all his powers, thus removing all his responsibility. [/spoiler]It’s a fitting ending to any era of Superman and probably the only happy ending he can have. Ultimately, the world does just fine without him, as he had hoped.)</blockquote>

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