The scenario - Superman has been out and about doing his thing for a few years now, he’s pretty much a fixture of everyday life.
One day a fully loaded 747 Jumbo Jet goes down with all lives lost, questions are asked and it doesn’t appear that Superman was off saving the world elsewhere, or dealing with another crisis, he just doesn’t seem to have acted to save this particular plane.
Would there be a public backlash against him, should he be obliged to save people in such a scenario, what would it do to public opinion of him?
I was just mulling this one over today and I wondered what people thought.
My guess is that Superman would have been forced to go into hiding after the first few weeks on the job, to get away from the angry mobs of people who were upset that he hadn’t solved their particular crises.
The time it would take for the public to go from being grateful for Supes helping them, to simply demanding it… yeah, not very long at all.
Even if he had been out solving another problem instead at the time, it probably wouldn’t have helped. If your wife and children die horribly, you don’t want to hear that the heroes are off saving some more important wives and children.
Yeah, “a few years” is way more than enough time to have gotten this figured out… either people accept that he’s got a finite number of things he can get done in any given day, or he gets pilloried every time something falls through the cracks. Even if most people accept reality, there will always be the Righteous Outrage types, so I’d say that the unrealistic friends & family of the people on the plane will be pissed, and others will be more philosophical, even if Superman was just sleeping. He does sleep, right?
How was he supposed to know about it in real time? The only way would be if Jimmy Olson happened to be on board and pressed the button on his special watch to emit the “zeeeeee…zeeeeeeee…zeeeeeeee” sound.
In a world with a Superman there would definitely be a cadre of people who mistrust him and hate him because they fear him. There would be a Fox News type channel that constantly attacked him and would eat this up with a spoon for sure.
This is the motivation of approximately half his villains - Lex Luthor and the current incarnation of Sam Lane (ok, calling him a villain is a slight stretch), off the top of my head.
I think both of these ideas are correct. There would be wild swings in public opinion. When Supes saves a town from tornadoes, he gets a parade. But then a kid gets washed over the side of a ferryboat, and his name is mud. One day he gets the Congressional Medal of Honor…and the next day there are hearings into his dubious patriotism.
Public opinion is fickle. One good sob story can wipe out the good will of a thousand rescues.
Do you know the story about the old man, young boy, and donkey? If the old man rides, he’s cruel for not letting the boy ride. If the boy rides, he’s disrespectful for not letting the old man ride. If neither rides, they’re obviously stupid, and if both ride, they’re being cruel to the donkey.
Superman would have this problem: no matter what he did, someone would object to it.
(“He’s making us dependent on him, so our own rescue organizations are weak and neglected!”)
If you remember Superman III, this air of entitlement (or at least expectation) has been adapted by some people by then. Hardly a film otherwise worth remembering, but that is a surprising element it would’ve been cool to explore more deeply.
I remember reading a Superman story that explored this very theme. He developed a guilt complex and had nightmares because, try as he might, he Just. Couldn’t. Save. Everybody.
I expect the media would be filled with nothing but 20/20 hindsight and criticism about how he should have done this, and not done that, and why didn’t he know about that dam being weak ahead of time, and of course, if he operated out of the US, calls to demand that he do this, not do that, or even serve the US Government outright. “Next on Fox, we discuss whether or not we should draft Superman into the coming war on Iran”
You’d think fooling Supes into thinking he’d accidentally killed someone or actually getting him to do so would make Supes exile himself to the furthest Gold K asteroid…but I just read yesterday a 12 center where Superman and Lex Luthor go hand to hand under a red sun. After just one punch, Lex conks his head on a statue and manages to simulate his own death.
You’d think Superman would be all, “My God, what have I done!” But when Luthors admirers attack Superman (this was on Lexor) all Superman does is sputter, “It was an accident.”
No remorse. No self-recrimination while sitting in his cell. No admitting guilt to manslaughter. Just “Hey, it was an accident.”
There’s a series by Mark Wade called “Irredeemable” which is based on just that premise . A superhero named Plutonian (who is an obvious Superman pastiche) gets fed up because everyone expects too much of him. He loses his temper entirely and starts destroying whole cities, killing other superheroes, etc. Wikipedia covers it at Irredeemable - Wikipedia
