Imagination, anyone?

[scarfman]

Okay, I guess I need to say this, once, in my own journal, so that from now on instead of typing it over and over again I can just link back here.

Just because a character can do anything, just because he has no physical limits, doesn't mean he's an uninteresting character. It just means you have to do stories about what he won't let himself do ... or, about the circumstances when he will let himself do that.

You just have to be a good writer.

Comments

Re: From Metaquotes

[antikythera.livejournal.com]

Eh, I figured it was cancelled. Shame. I'll look for DVDs. How many seasons were there? :)

...I don't think he would be Superman if it wasn't something he truly wanted to do.

Actually, you've just put your finger on something I couldn't put into words.

I think he feels it's his duty to be Superman, and if he stopped, he'd feel a lot of guilt about not using his powers to help people. He does it because he can't not. But in that episode where the brain-sucking plant thing makes him dream about a world that he would never want to leave, he dreams up a farmhouse and a family on a Krypton that was never destroyed. Some part of him just wants to be an average Joe.

I have no idea if any Superman other than the toonverse one has ever been explored this deeply. I suspect not, because that would explain why so many people think it's boring to tell a story about an invincible and undefeatable hero.

Re: From Metaquotes

[scarfman]

I haven't seen the tv episode about the mindsucking plant but I read the story it was based on. Elsewhere in this journal I repeated the observation a friend made at the time that Superman is the only person to fall under the plant's power whose vision goes bad. I don't know whether that happens in the tv version, but the impetus for that journal entry was that I added the observation that he's also the only one to realize it's an illusion while he's still under. Through superior physiology, or superior something, he's incapable of living a pretty lie. I can see how this would translate in some writers' minds as a burden of obligation or duty. But that's not how I see him. In the new movie while Lois's still mad at him for leaving, she says Earth doesn't need a savior. I think she's misreading the relationship. I think Superman does what he does freely because Earth was his savior. He's paying forward what the Kents did for him.