You know...

You know, the whole "Hollywood doesn't get Superman" meme has me thinking: is the crux of the problem that Superman's primary motivation is altruism?

If you think about it, he's sort of unique in that regard, with the possible exception of Captain America. He doesn't have a terrible tragedy in his past. He wasn't sent on a mission by some higher power. He isn't being goaded or tricked or manipulated or anything like that. He does the right thing and he saves the day because he was raised to do the right thing, and using his powers to help people is the right thing to do.

It's so simple, but people keep fucking it up. Is the very simplicity of it the thing that makes them stumble? Is it just that HARD to imagine someone doing good for its own sake?

>He doesn't have a terrible tragedy in his past.

His entire planet blew up.

>not mah superman

>He wasn't sent on a mission by some higher power
That depends on how his dad's being written.

Focus groups react better to angsty heroes, so that's what the studios go with.

My personal favorite portrayal of Superman is as a regular guy who just happens to be Superman. Never liked the shining gold messiah angle.

stop. this didn't affect him as he had nothing to do with it

Superman is unbelievably righteous. That's it. Any normie tasked with making a compelling narrative around him would throw the extreme righteousness out to make him more down to Earth.

For example, Snyder couldn't understand why Superman was so averse to killing people, so he decided to end MoS with Superman being forced to kill the last other member of his species. Snyder thought the trauma might explain Superman's character.

>is the crux of the problem that Superman's primary motivation is altruism?

No its literally just scripts and directors ranging from mediocre to total crap

Except it's been done before? All the iconic Superman stories have him being him.

This, basically Clark Kent as he was in Superman: The Animated Series
>in the end the world didn't need a Superman, just a brave one.

And? I never said it was the right way. I just described how normies approach such a character.

His birth parents, his species, and his entire culture were still lost to him. He was an orphan that was fortunate enough to be adopted as an infant, but that's still pretty damn tragic.

Depends on the story

ok then, how would you feel if i shipped you off to mars and then the earth blew up?

doesnt matter if your a baby or not losing someplace you belong is heartbreaking

>Superman is unbelievably righteous
Not even this.
A good Superman would have serious trouble fighting a foe when Lois or Ma Kent were in trouble. He'd feel serious pain at the idea.
That's believable.

Superman's whole schtick is that he's a god damned farmboy.
There's a story about a farmer in Canada. I can't say about the American farm states, but I can say about the Canadian ones. There was a farmer who knew a storm was coming. He put away his livestock, but his neighbour on the next farm over couldn't put them away in time.
So he trucked through the burgeoning storm to help him.
Why?
Because neighbours help each other.

That's Superman. Everyone is Superman's neighbour.
Yeah, he has some weaknesses. He's just a man after all.
But if there's a choice between sitting at home when a storm blows through, and going out and helping someone who needs it.
He'll always help.
That's Superman.

That's what Snyder missed.

People keep fucking it up BECAUSE it's so simple. Writers and studios don't think audiences will respond to a character who is, at their core, a good person.

But you can see this trend filter into DC. Their characters were, for the longest time, bland and had the same personality. Everyone was "Chum" and "Pal" with each other.

Barry Allen used to be a hero because he had powers and idolized heroism. Now he's a hero because he was traumatized as a child by a mystery he couldn't solve.

Think about it, Geoff Johns' entire career comes down to "Character A" meets "Trauma B" and the entire run will focus around that particular trauma. And he's in charge of DC/WB's media out in the world. That's why the Flash movie has the exact same (rumored) plot; it's the only motivation that makes Barry "interesting".

Superman isn't interesting because in the age of Game of Thrones and Sopranos, studios don't believe that audiences will believe in pure goodness. And, a lot of people, don't believe in pure goodness. Zach Snyder doesn't, David Goyer doesn't and, maybe, to some degree, Christopher Nolan doesn't.

I blame Watchmen and DKR. But there you are.

The truly ironic part is that in an age where we are inundated by characters driven by personal tradgedy of some kind who have this complex and angsty backstory, a story like Superman a man who has a great tragedy in his backstory but it is irrelevant to who he is as a person and why he does what he does makes for a very refreshing and compelling character. Just like deadpool flipped the superhero origin story movie on it's head, Superman had that potential if they pulled their heads out of their own asses long enough to drop the pretense and embrace the core of what Superman. an Ideal, not a messiah, not a savior who angsts with the burden of protecting the world, not a man without a world, Superman is just a dude from Kansas who happened to be adopted from a dead world, has incredible power and wants to do good with it.

Shit, making that the central conflict, people refusing to believe Superman's altruism while Lex Luthor propagandizes would've been a great plot. Superman doesn't need to have personal angst in his life. He can be a simple, kind person who does the right thing because it's the right thing and it's probably do really well. and today it would work because nobody else was doing it. the opposite of what DKR and Watchmen were all about

But Mos's Clark was absolutely a good person at his core.
Virtually everything he did (minus trashing the trucker's truck) was out of concern for other people.
Even letting his dad die was out of concern for the global ramifications of his reveal.
Just because he wasn't bright, joyful & smiling 99% of the time doesn't make him less of a good person.

Dan Turpin movie when?

I've noticed it's very rare for current media to take a good-natured person and play it unironically/without cynicism. It's "cooler" to parody the idea or deconstruct it or something.

>an Ideal, not a messiah, not a savior
Why are these incompatible to you?
>who angsts with the burden of protecting the world,
He angst not over helping but with the bad that comes with it.

>He isn't being goaded or tricked or manipulated or anything like that. He does the right thing and he saves the day because he was raised to do the right thing, and using his powers to help people is the right thing to do.
>someone doing good for its own sake
But, the Superman in the movies does exactly that, and people still harp on him for being edgy.
I mean, I'm just going to get a "Snyder, pls", but I honestly think BvS Superman is just like that, a good man trying to do a good thing, and it sort of baffles me when people don't see it.

>Is the very simplicity of it the thing that makes them stumble? Is it just that HARD to imagine someone doing good for its own sake?

Have you seen every director talk about this? It's not just a meme in the sense of some inane idea exaggerated. It's literally how they all think. They're incapable of wrapping their head around a hero that isn't defined by tragedy or trauma, or motivated by vengeance.

And no disrespect to Captain America, but he is a soldier. His origins are tied to military action, e.g. World War 2. Superman is a vigilante, since he derives no authority du jure.

What Superman needs is one journeyman director, a comic writer in DC's stable, and one competent screenwriter to turn the comic guy's story into something you can actually film.

Mark Waid already wrote the perfect Superman movie. It's called Birthright.

Who does Turpin team up with? Bullock or Montoya?

>I honestly think BvS Superman is just like that, a good man trying to do a good thing, and it sort of baffles me when people don't see it.
That's why I got too. I'd be pretty frustrated too if I was doing all I could to help people, but all it did was cause more controversy about me.

>Bringing up Game of Thrones

It's ironic you metion that since the Starks are still far and away the most popular house, and Jon Snow is the most popular character

Fat chance dude. Supes already has 3 fucking reboots and there's no way WB is gonna stop the DCCU, no mather how much it fucking sucks. We are just gonna have to dealt with this cancer.

>"We have always created icons in our own image. What we've done is we project ourselves onto him. The Fact is, maybe he's not some sort of devil or Jesus character. Maybe he's just a guy trying to do the right thing."
Say what you will about the movie, but I really like this line.

And yet the writers don't get that.

sure, cap is a soldier, but even his motivations for joining the army were pure- he simply wanted to do anything he could for his country

Whenever a creative hears "messiah" they just can't stop doing The Garden at Gethsemane over and over again.

Snyder totally views Superman as a Christ-figure, but to him that means he must be tormented, betrayed, and killed because humanity is just that shit.

The ideal of Superman is a man who only does good, not just because it's the right thing to do, but because he wants to inspire us to do good as well.

There is nothing in recent DC movies you could call "inspirational"

Well if I grew up in a mildly comfortable environment with nice Martian parents who make me feel that I belong I probably wouldn't give half of a shit.

I don't think that's an issue if you try hard enough. It's not unsalvageable, and worst case scenario, I don't think anybody would care about casually discarding all the shit that wasn't working.

I think it's partially because people forget that "is a fundamentally good person" doesn't mean "has no flaws" or "never fails"

I like to think Stabler played a military version of him in MoS.

He's a near-invincible fictional character with a convenient sense of righteousness that almost always gets his way, makes billions in profit, and is an icon of an entire subgenre.

Plus, he has many different iterations and stories to choose from over the past 70 years.

Why do you people whine about the same things over and over again?

Superfrank?

>Martian parents
What would it be like to be raised by jobbers?

>canadian farmers

what the fuck do people farm in canada? pinecones?

My point is I don't want them to be. Superman doesn't need to be a fucking Jesus allegory. Superman can just be a really good person who wants to use his powers to help everyone. Not some dour, atlas messiah who must bear the sins of the world upon his shoulder type. Superman can just be a man who does good because it's the right thing to do without all these implications about gods and men and saviors and the highminded religious spiritualist allegorical bullshit that's constantly attached to him.

I'm sick of seeing Superman being angsty over anything because he's fucking Superman. Spider-man can be angsty, Batman can be Angsty, Let them, But not Superman. Dilemnas? Sure, But let him be just a man who is Superman.

Should've just removed all the El vs Zod bs and made it a Guardian movie with Faora as the sultry antagonist.

>supesfags still think that just because he's written to be liked by people he must be liked by people in the real world

He's a damn fictional franchise character who is at the whim of whoever is on DC's payroll.

It's country guy trying to do the right thing with great power. Cut the Jesus shit. Cut the brooding. Don't have him murder. Let him be fun, whimsical, and corny. Why is that so hard to write?

Superman is a dad for everybody. Like a dad, sometimes he hits hard times. But like a dad, he does not take the easy way out.

Yeah but that's not really his motivation. It's part of his background but not really why he's motivated to do superheroics.

That entire montage with Charlie Rose and Black Science Man was my personal favorite in the movie. It asks a lot of questions that really need some thinking before giving an answer

They already invisted way too much into this. And they got enough back to not declare it a failure.

Canada actually was like the breadbasket of Britania.

Everyone's got daddy issues these days. That's why.

Let's keep this Superman dead and get another one from a parallel universe that isn't such a downer.

Montoya. And she keeps asking annoying questions

Same exact grains and livestock that Americans farm.

>Shit, making that the central conflict, people refusing to believe Superman's altruism while Lex Luthor propagandizes would've been a great plot
So batman vs superman?

True, it's not his main motivation, but it's still a tragedy.

>Snyder totally views Superman as a Christ-figure
Disagree.
I think he used the Christ imagery to imply his potential but contrasted it with the reality that he is a fallible conflicted youth who is prone to rage & spite while still yearning to do great things and so strives past his own flaws.
>There is nothing in recent DC movies you could call "inspirational"
--Clark holding onto DD despite seeing the nuke coming.
--Clark accepting this world as his home and sacrificing himself to stop DD.
--Clark going out to the world engine despite knowing he would be weaker around it.
--Clark rising up and taking out the engine at the same time Perry & the sports guy stay and accept death before abandoning Jenny.
--Clark turning himself over to the miltary to be turned over to Zod.
--Hardy's "good death"

The trouble is that Superman is barely a character in his own movie.

I was INFURIATED when the fucking bomb went off in the Senate chamber before he even opened his mouth. Let him talk, Zack!

It's because people hate heroism nowadays, user.

Celebrities, heroes, etc all have to be torn down and destroyed because we can't stand the idea of someone being good.

People consider Lex Luthor more of a role model than Superman

>That's what Snyder missed.
More like didn't care to see/went out of his way to avoid, any minimum amount of reseach about Superman would tell you "Superman's a great guy who helps people because he loves to do what's right". I don't think the problem is that Snyder doesn't "get" Superman, it's that he hates Superman.

>There was a farmer who knew a storm was coming. He put away his livestock, but his neighbour on the next farm over couldn't put them away in time.
So he trucked through the burgeoning storm to help him.

And he died in the storm while saving the neighbor's dog.

None of that was inspirational.

It was weird but when I saw BvS it didn't come across that Superman WANTED to be doing all that shit. From his dour expression, constant melancholic music, and general personality, he didn't seem like he was doing it because it was the right thing but because he had to, because he had the superpowers. It felt much more like the early, reluctant Spider-Man the whole great power and great responsibility deal.

He came across, and again this was just my watching of the film, as almost forced into his role as a hero by the way his heroics were portrayed. Shit the whole montage of him saving people should have been this great fanfare of him rushing in to save the day but we get dim and washed out imagery with him coming from on high with just a blank expression on his face. Most of the movie it just seemed like he wanted to chill with Lois, which the crazy part is that isn't out of character for Superman! Him wanting to just have a normal life with Lois is a big one, at least more recent Superman, and that would be fine. And yes he does feel go out help people, but not out of a sense of guilt or external obligation but from his own morality. He wants to help people with his gifts, he feels he needs to, but across the whole movie he doesn't come across as WANTING to.

The awful thing is, all the stuff in the movie on paper makes sense, the lines they say, the actions they do, but they are presented in such a lacking way that it comes across all wrong.

Indeed, a tragedy he learns of much later in his life, that informs what he does with his life but wasn't not a character building moment for him.

Bruce Wayne saw his parents die when he was very young and was scarred by that experience very personally. Clark Kent learned when he was 19 or 20 that he's an alien and his planet was destroyed. That certainly gives him a very unique perspective on life and will lead him to do things to learn more about it but the person that is Clark Kent was already established by that point.

Man you should come to Canada sometime, we have a beautiful country.

I still haven't gotten around to watching BvS, but did they ever fix how alien Clark acted in MoS? A bunch of his scenes made it feel like it was his first day on Earth, putting everything alien about him at the forefront of his character, instead of having him act like a normal, well-adjusted human who's been on Earth for most of his lifetime.

Oh wow, he lost a planet he never knew, how tragic, so sad!

He isn't even the last of is species so cry me a fucking river.

>putting everything alien about him at the forefront of his character
That wasn't something to fix, that was the entire point, that this dour realistic cynical world has forced him to alienate himself from the world for both his own and their own good.

Ew, I don't like that aesop

Shit bro, "this dour realistic cynical world" has people that act like Clark Kent is typically portrayed all over. Clark Kent's earnest, good-natured farmboy personality exists, there are people just like him living right now, but for some reason that's just too outlandish so we have to make Clark Kent a standoffish sadsack? That's some shit.

Altruism is impossible and when you try or pretend to be altruist, shit like Red Son and Mastermen happens.

Snyder's objectivist Superman in BvS is the best Superman. I really want to see Superman as a super saiyan John Galt in the Justice League movies now.

Objectivists are literal cancer. They should all be sent to Somalia.

trump wants to build the wall on the wrong border

Take altruism too far and you get places like Sup Forumsmblr and leftists in general who are such bleeding hearts they are blind to all reason and facts and think purely based on emotion ie let all migrants into this country because helping people in need is the right thing to do. A superhero like that is terrifying because they can do so much damage through good intent.

Gonna have to disagree with you there. Tumblr uses ethos as it's guiding light, and want to enact change based on that.

Super-altruist (in this case) just wants to help people any way that they can, not force them to change.

I do agree that the road to hell is paved with good intentions. I just see Superman as the friendliest guy, who'd give you the shirt off of his back, not a 'for the greater good' kind of guy.
S:TAS, not Injustice.

Great, then I'll enjoy the best internet services in Africa while making money with bitcoins.

Also, fuck off, fucking commie.

Shut up, Bruce.

Sup Forums's favorite writer Max Landis nailed it. Clark is just a guy who was blessed with incredible godlike powers and feels like he should use these powers for good. He didn't need a tragedy. His mother didn't need to be murdered by a time traveling monster. His parents didn' need to be shot by a two-bit scumbag. Wonder-Woman is similar in this regard, unless you take being a rape baby as tragedy

>Sup Forums's favorite writer Max Landis nailed it.
As much as I dislike the guy in general he fucking gets Superman.
>mfw Max Landis is literally the only hollywood type I've ever heard that actually understands Superman
>mfw he's probably the only writer in hollywood who could write a good Superman movie
May God have mercy on our souls.

>My parents I never knew died and the place I have no memories of no longer exist
>I also got a great childhood with a happy couple that took care for me
Yep, the greatest tragedy of all.
My family escaped to America from a shithole country and my father died little after I was born. I would love to had my father when I grew up but I can't say I miss him or feel anything about him since I never met him, my mother get sad every time she hears bad news about that shithole country but I personally could not give a fuck about that place or anyone living there as I have no emotional investment for it.

The planet exploding could only be a tragedy to a kryptonian who got to live it.

>in a better world, Landis adapts American Alien to the big screen while Snyder continues making music videos in obscurity

Clearly this is God's punishment.

No, superman is a grimdark edgelord frat boy dudebro. I know this because I saw 3 panels.

In American Alien*

>a regular guy who just happens to be Superman

no regular guy with such powers would do what superman does for a long time. There has always been contradictions on how sup-fags describe superman. No full-time hero who has been a hero for years is just a normal person, any normal person would just break at some point. No normal person could just deal with this amount of power and his role as being an alien, outsider in this world. Full-time heroes have always been beyond normal persons because their powers and lives as heroes have an influence on their personality and superman has been like this since he was born, also there is no way people would ever stop fearing superman or think of him as something higher as themselfs, even if they say he is a real human bean who belong to this world, everyone knows this isn't and can't be true, it would be a balance act between fear and worshipping that easily could tilt in one or the other direction. Keeping this balance would increasingly limit superman in his actions, he'd have to be cautious all the time for example not to get as much as mad as normal humans are allowed to be, he'd be under constant pressure if he was anything like a normal human being.

Sup-fags always want their idealized version of superman yet they claim he is somehow a normal guy from Kansas and then they wonder why people find their version boring. Just admit you want your idealized superman in an idealized world, maybe then you'll understand why people don't care about that version.

Also of course superman works in the comics after so many years because enough characters who are stronger than him have been introduced but in the movie-verse, in his first appearances everyone can see the obvious differences between superman and a normal human bean.

He could be a pretty good introduction to the Fourth World, as a set up movie for JL. Sort of him and other normals being affected by a hidden war between gods raging on Earth. Jimmy's dead, so he can't be the audience insert anymore.

It's a polarizing thing, maybe. To me, that's the reason I like him. As Ma Kent said, "You don't owe this world a thing", but he decides to give anyway. That's Superman.

Because producers are to Jewish and have never done anything altruistic in their lives without large sums of money attached.

It's been that way forever, though. Hell, read the Natural. It's brutal.

But you know what Hollywood did? They turned it into a god damned inspiration instead of soul sucking agony.

The MCU, especially Captain America, is living proof that people do like "gee, golly" heroes.

It's like the people in charge can't understand that someone would help people just because they're a good person.

Like the "Language." line in AoU. Cap has to be a joke for being a boy scout.

But then Civil War, The Winter Soldier and First Avenger all played him straight.

In fact they even mocked Stark's cynicism when he thought Cap would kill him, only for Cap to prove him wrong and simply ending the fight.


Whedon is a hack.

What country?

For some strange reason Altruism is at complete odds with capitalism. It makes no sense for superman to exist as iconic good in today's market.

Only one that can play that card is Kara.
poor kara

Bullshit, private property doesn't preclude morals. Stop with this meme.

>It's so simple, but people keep fucking it up

What people? Zack Snyder? Because before him we had Donner's movies, the admittedly weak Returns, and on TV stuff like Smallville or TAS, and they all got the character right even if you can't call any of them masterpieces of their own medium

private property=/=capitalism

You're taking the term "regular guy" way too literally. The point of "regular guy who happens to be superman" is that he's a farmboy from Kansas, with as normal an upbringing as an alien with the powers of a god can possibly have. He doesn't have a tragedy to convince him he needs to be a force of good. He just believes that he should use his powers for good, any way he can.

Now, I'm not like most people, in that I feel like Superman would kill threats big enough to destroy Earth. He'd kill Zod, and he did. He'd Kill Doomsday, and he did. If he could, he'd kill Darkseid. But he wouldn't kill Metallo, or Lex, or Kryptonite Man, or Parasite, and so on.

As for an "ideal" superman, he just has to be more upbeat. He doesn't have to be the Donner Superman, or All-Star Superman. He just has to be more positive and upbeat than his current self in the Snyderverse. There were flashes of it in the movies, and at the end of MoS it looked like it was going in that direction. But we didn't really get that in BvS, and I think that's because we got BvS. We should have not gotten BvS, at all. It was a plot that shouldn't have existed at the time it did. The world was barely established, and they threw the "Heroes fight each other" at us. They should've waited until the fucking world was built. Waited until Flash, Aquaman, Green Lantern, Wonder Woman, Batman, and a JL movie at the least before giving us a Batman vs Superman movie.

Capitalism is using private property and private investment to achieve a gain, a profit.
There is nothing immoral about that, the ends aren't bad, the only argument you could use is that people sometimes use immoral means to achieve these ends, but then again the same happens for collectivist systems. Thus the fault is not in the concept but in what people make of it, not so different from socialism.

This is also why balanced systems with power descentralized usually result in fairer outcomes.

.Superman can just be a man who does good because it's the right thing to do without all these implications about gods and men and saviors and the highminded religious spiritualist allegorical bullshit that's constantly attached to him.

But the very point of the jesus allegories are that he HATES THEM. How the fuck can so many people miss this? That's exactly why he's a dour little bitch. He wants to be normal and meanwhile people like Luthor and Wayne consider him Lucifer incarnate while anyone he saves seems to want to worship him.

He just wants a "thanks" at most instead of all of the conversation about him. He hates that he can't just save people and not be debated.


You're quite literally asking for the Superman you received only you're saying you want the world to see him as a global friend. Which is by far the most fictional piece of any superman story. Half the world would fucking hate the guy.

>nothing immoral about that, only with means
A system that can result in "you won't get the medicine we have right in this building to survive because your business went bankrupt, tough luck" is immoral.

Do you know when Superman gets to be normal?

When he's CLARK KENT