Superman’s Continued “Injustice”

I’ve said before, and I stand by it, from a pure gaming perspective Injustice: Gods Among Us looks to be a good fighting game. The mechanics look solid if the controls react properly and while some things have been done before (multi-level arenas) there are some good tweaks that could make for a good game. From a pure gaming perspective.

This is, however, not a gaming site. I don’t review games (unless I can finally get some Video Game Clutter episodes made for The Clutter Reports), I review stories. So from a storytelling perspective…actually it’s not all that bad either if not for one minor detail…they’re screwing over Superman again! Thus once again we see what happens when people who know nothing about Superman writes official Superman stories. This is not a franchise for cynics and yet that seems to be all we’re getting, as evidenced by the comics, the upcoming movie, and now NetherRealm Studios. I’m pretty much at my wits end here.

Here’s the basic plot of the game, as played out by the prequel comics: The Joker tricks Superman into killing Lois, thus setting off a bomb that levels Metropolis. Why? Because that’s what the Joker does nowadays, a rant for another time  but long rant short today’s Joker is just a psychopath with a permanent smile. He’s actually rather pathetic in comparison really. Anyway, from what I can tell this leads to Superman taking over the Earth and ruling with an iron fist. Some of his friends in the Justice League went along with it but at some point the heroes see Superman for the tyrant that he’s become and rise to stop him. Why does this sound familiar?

Irredeemable (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Oh, yeah.

There a famous line by Lord Acton: “Power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely.” Superman has always stood in defiance of that quote due to his upbringing but there’s this group of people who can’t bring themselves to believe that. Often they’re the same people who would use X-Ray vision to see women naked. We call them idiots. Others, however, are just too cynical and sadly too many of them are the ones writing Superman stories. Yes, I know this is essentially an “Elseworlds” tale and not part of the New 52 but is he fairing any better there? Beating up rich people, getting all moody because “things were better on my Earth at the old Daily Planet”, being all detached and alien and crap–is that Superman to anybody? Sadly, yes to too many.

And then there’s poor Lois. As the Stars & Garters blog brought up recently, Lois is being tossed aside in favor of Wonder Woman because of that whole “Man of Steel/Woman Of Kleenex” thing, which I learned recently was never meant to be taken seriously by the person who first brought up the theory. And yet genetics is now determining who Kal-El can be romantic with–something that scares me beyond some funny book with people in spandex or whatever they’re wearing now. And yet in the prequel for Gods Among Us we see that Lois was pregnant. There’s even part in the issues currently online that Clark can hear Lois and the baby’s heartbeats: “two heartbeats, one body”, a line that gets used later when Lois and the baby die that under different circumstances would be a nice callback. If this were an exception and not becoming the rule with Superman and his multiversal analogs I’d call it a great line but here it’s connected to further deconstruction of Superman and Lois and at this point there’s been so much deconstruction of the superhero genre in general and Superman specifically that the building is rubble. Kind of like Metropolis in this game because goodness know that city hasn’t been leveled enough in the multiverse.

Look, this might be a great game and the story wouldn’t be so bad if not for the fact that it’s part of a trend that is really cheesing off Superfans and doing serious damage and mistreatment to characters we’ve all grown up as. Unless immortals walk the Earth I don’t think there’s anybody alive who hasn’t grown up with Superman. At the rate DC and Warner Brothers are going, however, I wouldn’t be surprised if there will come a generation who doesn’t know the Last Son of Krypton and his friends. That shall be a dark day indeed.

Related articles

• The Injustice Comic Prequel Explains Why Superman and Batman Are Fighting (Again) (kotaku.com)
• Injustice: Gods Among Us plots Superman’s ascendance (joystiq.com)

EDIT: Speaking of Stars-And-Garters, Notintheface has taken his own look at the prequel through the eye of a new father whose favorite superhero is Superman. He’s not very happy about this.