[SymbiSpidey]

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Originally Posted by Weapon X

But you'll notice that the most successful heroes have only a couple of powers, something to focus on. Superman has far too many. The dude has taken nukes and been fine, it's ridiculous. You cannot root for a man who can't be hurt aside from a green rock.

This doesn't make any sense to me. Ever since 2001, people have been rooting for Wolverine, a guy who can't be hurt outside of neutralizing his powers entirely or a guy with a very specific power that counters the metal in his body. And even in the latter case, he can only, at best, be temporarily incapacitated. Deadpool is even worse: he regularly laughs off gruesome injuries as if they don't affect him at all. Let's not even get into MCU Hulk who, while not quite as powerful as his comic book counterpart, still can't actually die or be hurt in any meaningful way.

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Superman is boring because he is a god with one weakness, and his alter ego and personality are boring as heck.

But Superman doesn't only have one weakness. He can also be hurt by magic, and generally speaking anybody who matches or exceeds him in strength.

Regardless, I find that people who don't like Superman or claim that he's boring are also the same people that don't like Cyclops or didn't like Captain America until later MCU movies introduced darker sides to his character arc. And they all share one thing in common: they play the traditionally heroic "boy scout" role next to their "bad boy" teammates who typically don't play by the rules, come with tons of emotional baggage and angst, sleep with tons of women and usually end up hogging the spotlight because they're often included in stories by writers with a clear bias for them. You look at almost any team dynamic and it's always this character that ends up the most popular. Ultimately, characters like Superman and Cyclops are seen as characters that get in the way of the "bad boys" so fans end up resenting them for it.

But really, I find the idea of an alien that can basically be a god and rule over humanity, yet actively makes the choice to live among them as their equal fascinating. Because when you really think about, Superman doesn't even need a secret identity. But he assumes one because he wants to live among humanity and just experience what it's like to be a normal guy. He thinks that much of us that he's willing to embrace being a flawed human.

That's absolutely fascinating to me, but because he doesn't have the angst or cynical attitude of Batman, people ignore this and call him "boring".

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I'll never forget how irritated I was when they decided at the end of Man of Steel to make him be a reporter at the Daily Planet, because not only is it unrealistic that no one recognizes him, but it's also so much more boring than the wanderer he was for most of the film.

There's actually a psychology behind it. Nobody even really thinks Superman has a secret identity in the first place since he doesn't wear a mask, so nobody is looking for it. And Superman is such a larger than life celebrity in the DC Universe, that nobody would even begin to fathom why Superman would spend his off time pretending to be a meek and mild-mannered journalist. At best, they might go "Hey, that guy looks just like Superman" and then their next thought would be "But why does Superman look so.....weak? And soft-spoken? That's probably not him."

And if you don't like that explanation, I think it's been said somewhere that his glasses help to conceal his identity so there's that...