Some people don't think things through...

[kengr]

"Superman is too much of a boy scout"?

Please stop and consider for a moment a world where *wasn't* that much of a boy scout.

The *best* outcome I can see is him ruling the world ... for our own good, of course.

The worst? Remember the battle with Darkseid in one of the animated series. The one with the comment about it feeling like the world was made of cardboard.

Imagine someone with that level of power who can do whatever he feels like. Just act on any impulse...

Comments

[seawasp]

Mark Jones came up with the most frightening scenario:

Mark Jones wrote on January 21, 2003:
> Of course they are. They're all trained agents of the government.
>
> Superman is invulnerable. And immortal. And insane. When Lois Lane
> was killed way back in the 40s, he snapped. He couldn't handle it. So
> he found Lois suffering from amnesia and brainwashing and "rescued" her
> from the people pretending to be her family. There wasn't anything to
> be done about it, so eventually she accepted her role. And the
> government began planning for replacements for _that_ Lois, and Jimmy
> and Perry and Lex and...everyone. There've been quite a few of each,
> but more Loises than anyone else. The sexual revolution was very hard
> on Lois.
>
> The Daily Planet would have gone under decades ago if not for huge (and
> secret) government subsidies. Virtually everyone in Clark Kent's life,
> professional and personal, is part of a huge operation to keep him
> happy. They pretend to be his co-workers, friends and acquaintances,
> and all work hard to keep fans and other troublemakers from getting
> close enough to blurt out his "secret" in Clark's presence.
>
> Think of _The Truman Show_ with a superpowered Rain Man as the hero, who
> gets very unhappy if the lifestyle he adopted decades ago isn't
> carefully maintained....

[xander-opal.livejournal.com]

I'm also reminded of Niven's 'Man of Steel, Woman of Kleenex.'

[stickmaker.livejournal.com]

Niven likes superheroes. He even wrote a Green Lantern graphic novel.

In one of his speculations on Superman, he wondered how long it took the young Clark Kent to learn that objects had surfaces.

The modern interpretation is that while the infant Kal El was more than human he needed time to grow into his full potential, so was (relatively) easy to control early on.

[fayanora.livejournal.com]

That is terrifying.

I had a species of humanoids as a kid who were basically Kryptonians with the serial numbers filed off. When I started writing a scifi story with them years later, I gave them a HUGE downgrade in power. They're still stronger than normal humans, even still could be called superstrong, but nowhere near Superman anymore. Also, they're no longer invulnerable. Though they do have a high healing factor, but it takes time for them to heal. (One character gets her arm pinned by a crashed spacecraft, has to cut her own arm off to get away before it explodes. The arm grows back in like, three months.)

I did this because, well, aside from them being too much like Superman before, I wanted the story to be more realistic. They can still lift cars without breaking a sweat, but like, that one character couldn't lift the shuttlecraft that had crashed on her arm, even if she'd had ideal positioning and leverage. Maybe she could have lifted it a little bit up, like how some humans today can lift the front end of a car, but no more than that.

But yeah, never really thought at the time about how the world must seem to Superman.

[fayanora.livejournal.com]

I like the "grow into his powers" POV, because it makes the most sense to me. It's not like Kryptonians have any powers on their own planet, after all. And a super-powered baby would annihilate the Earth in short order.

[xander-opal.livejournal.com]

A few years back, there was a series called 'Earth 2' or suchlike. An Earth ruled by the Syndicate, evil versions of the then-Justice League members.

'Ultraman' wasn't as on-page evil as he could have been, though there were mentions of slaves mining kryptonite to power the alien implants that kept him alive... and gave him great power.

[scott-sanford.livejournal.com]

You should offer this person a copy of Superman: Red Son. It's an alternate universe tale that starts from a single tiny change in the timeline: Kal-El's rocket from Krypton arrives on Earth a few hours earlier or later. No big deal? The Earth rotates - and instead of landing in Kansas near the Kent farm the spacecraft comes down thousands of miles away on Ukrainian collective farm in the USSR.

Kal-El is naturally included to be idealistic and supportive of the status quo, Lawful Good in RPG terms. He takes his ideals from what's present in his environment, like all of us. And like many people in the real world did, he takes a while to learn that Josef Stalin is not a nice person...

[stickmaker.livejournal.com]

The early version of Superman (when he was still basically had the powers of Hugo Danner, from Phillip Wylie's _Gladiator_) he was an anarchist. He kidnapped crooked politicians and war profiteers and taught them what it was like to have done to them what they were doing to others. He also put wife beaters in the hospital.

He definitely had a strong sense of morality but it was a very different one from today. Also, the folks involved with the comics quickly realized that without some sort of counterbalance - some sort of challenge - that Superman would quickly become boring. Hence the supervillains.

In the history I posted for my Masks stories (at: http://www.dcr.net/~stickmak/Stories/MasksTimeline.html ) I have a quote from Dwight D. Eisenhower in 1953, "Thank God there are so many supers. If there were just one, he could rule the world on a whim."

The novel _The Power_ by Frank M. Robinson (later made into a pretty good movie by George Pal) is about that "single superman" concept.