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I’d ask why won’t Zach Snyder shut up, but this time Joe Rogan got him to talk about it.

Snyder recently appeared on Joe Rogan Experience talking about his various works. Apparently Rogan is a fan of Snyder’s work and the Snyderverse. That means when Snyder said something stupid, Rogan got in on saying equally stupid things. As you can guess from my article title, they BOTH think superheroes should kill, that it makes no sense for them not to kill. Thankfully, these two will never be superheroes. In most comic worlds, superheroes are vigilantes the police work with because supervillains exist and the laws make them harder to fight. Plus the superpowers and one of a kind gadgets don’t help. You won’t want supercops, but that’s sort of the role superheroes fill in classic superhero stories. That’s not how it started but it’s how those universes evolved.

There are reasons these heroes don’t kill, and there are those of us who gravitate towards those heroes. Sometimes we want to watch Arnold shoot up a bunch of baddies, sometimes we don’t. There’s a reason Chuck Norris has been both a lethal and non-lethal hero depending on the project. Some of us don’t want Batman to be the Punisher even if we enjoy both. (I’ve never really gotten into the Punisher outside of his original miniseries myself.) In fact, in JLA/Avengers, Batman tells everyone not to interfere with this universe because they don’t know how the Marvel Universe rules operate…and then jumps right in to stop the Punisher minutes after saying that. Plastic Man rightly called him out on the hypocrisy but that’s who Batman is, someone who doesn’t kill, even the villains. However, Snyder has two comics he really loves: The Dark Knight Returns and Watchmen. I don’t have a problem with that, but what gets on my nerves is the believe that every superhero story should follow those books.

So if Snyder’s not going to stop defending his universe, I’m not going to stop telling him why I think he’s wrong. These are characters I grew up with. They meant something to me at a time I really needed them, and the version that Snyder made and Rogan defends in the following video are not those characters. Do I hate Zack Snyder? No. All I know about him is that he made terrible stories with characters who got me through a bad point in my life. I do hate what he did, and I have problems with his point of view on characters when he clearly doesn’t understand our issue beyond “they’re fans and passionate about their take”, but he’s still wrong. In the video he refers to “character canon” as “god”, and that’s something I can go after him for as a critic.

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