AMUSING, INTERESTING, OUTRAGEOUS, or PROFOUND

Superman is way more powerful than any living person in the real world. He has the power to take unilateral action and even armies can’t stop him.

The powerful people in this world do have power, and can do a lot of things, but they have very little unilateral power. Even a dictator like Putin can’t take Ukraine despite being completely obsessed with it. Most other people (politicians, billionaires) have far less unilateral power than Putin. They can only do things when they get others to agree with them.

That’s really the problem with humanity in general and it’s the real reason Superman is a fantasy: it’s a fantasy of unilateral power. The ability to just solve some problems and not have to deal with people opposing you on everything.

Apparently it's really hard to be a writer for Superman too.

His powers are closer to god-like than almost any other character. He can fly, he has super hearing, he's almost indestructible, his eyes can both shoot beams and see through things like they were X-rays, he can run or fly at incredible speed, he can blow on things to either freeze them or generate hurricane force winds. His only real weaknesses are a rock that's incredibly rare and the lack of the yellow sun, and a mere sun shade isn't enough to stop that.

In addition to this massive set of powers, you have his attitude. He's not just "good", but almost completely pure hearted. He's always willing to respond to a cry for help. He always does the right thing. He almost never gets angry or frustrated. He never exploits his massive advantages for any personal gain.

The problem is that the writers now have to come up with why a good god allows bad things to happen. Why are there wars? He could dismantle any army in the world, but he chooses not to. Does he just allow wildfires to happen? Why? Whenever he's in Metropolis he's constantly saving everybody from everything that goes wrong. Not just supervillains but out of control cars, collapsing highway overpasses, crashing planes, etc. So, what happens when he takes some me-time and goes to his fortress of solitude? Does he just allow the various bad things that can happen in Metropolis to happen while he's away on vacation? And why does he protect Metropolis? Are the lives of people in Metropolis worth more than the people in any other big city in the world? Since he doesn't need to sleep, is he out patrolling for 8 hours every night, making sure nothing happens, if not, why not?

Superman is what it would take for the powerful to do things right.

In the new film, at the end, when the cops take Lex into custody, they are not doing it because Lex committed crimes. They're doing it because Superman could fucking destroy them if they don't. If Superman wasn't super strong and invulnerable, they would have told him to get lost.

Superman is a fantasy not because he's good and powerful. He's fantasy because the powerful are not accountable to anyone in real life.

Only in a fantasy world would you ever see billionaires using their money to become heros.

I’ve always read that Superman is what the U.S. would like to be: an immigrant raised on rural values who stands out for his qualities and protects the people by standing up to a powerful oligarch. Meanwhile, Batman is what they really are: a quasi-fascist nepo baby who uses force to drive away people who clearly need psychiatric care, so the powerful can go on with their lives undisturbed.

The earnestness and pain in his voice when Clark said “People were going to die” in the new Superman movie. That was the moment when I knew I was onboard and post helped me put in words.

"Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely, Great men are almost always bad men, even when they exercise influence and not authority; still more when you superadd the tendency of the certainty of corruption by authority.” -Lord Acton

"What if a rich man cared?"