Some time ago I brought up the campaign by YouTube video creator Ross Scott. Mostly known (around here anyway) for the comedy series Freeman’s Mind, playing through the Half-Life series while hearing the crazy thoughts of Gordon Freeman, Scott also hosts Ross’s Game Dungeon and Dead Games on the Accursed Farms YouTube channel. It’s from that latter show that the “Stop Killing Games” campaign began. Scott had gone over numerous games no longer playable, often due to online DRM, where you had to be on a server to play a game even when it wasn’t an online game. When the servers were no longer supported and shut down there was now no way to play the game without a hack that allowed you to use a fanserver. The last straw was an online only game called The Crew, a racing game with a single-player story, though I guess the emphasis was on the online racing. Because the game got older and totally not to get players to finally move to the sequel, the servers for the 2014 game was shut down in 2023 without much warning, making even the offline story of infiltrating street racers to stop a corrupt FBI agent impossible to play.
Since my initial article, Scott has been succeeding in getting signatures on petitions to force game companies to change this practice. His reasoning is if you buy the game you own that copy and should be able to continue playing it, either on fan servers or at least the offline versions of the game, that don’t require other players. Currently the European Union (EU) is where he’s focusing his efforts, and the European game companies are seeing him as a threat since reaching his legally required goal of 1 million signature. The lobbying group Video Game Europe (link and info courtesy of That Park Place) recently put out a statement defending their clients’ rights to shut down any game anytime they want and not refund gamers. You can read along with the full statement or scroll down to the end of the article and see what Ross Scott himself has to say about their earlier statement. I won’t cover everything because that’s too long an article.
BW Media Spotlight 
No, James Gunn, Superman Is NOT An Immigrant! (but I’ll tell you who is)
There are so many things about Superman I get tired of hearing because it’s wrong. He’s not boring. He’s not a “boy scout”. He’s not too powerful (in the right hands). He’s not “Supergod”, he’s SuperMAN. He can be defeated without getting beat up or killed. He is doing more than wearing glasses as Clark Kent. He and Lois have a fine…love life. The list goes on forever of stupid takes on Superman. Not personal tastes, mind you. That too powerful thing…if superpowered superheroes aren’t your thing, that’s fine. He is not the most powerful being in the universe, and he doesn’t have to be, though his powers can lead to good stories if you understand the characters and the world he lives in.
The one we’re talking about just got spit out by James Gunn, of James Gunn’s Superman By James Gunn fame. I hear he’s directing a movie with “Superman” in the title.
Because Kal-El comes from a little piece of space debris that used to be a planet called Krypton, there’s this annoying opinion, usually among activists easier to claim the most famous superhero as “one of us” but not limited to that, treating Superman as some immigrant allegory. They even try to say it goes back to the very beginning, except that Jerry Siegel was born in the US and Joe Shuster was born in Canada, which is still North America and rarely is anyone from Canada treated as an “immigrant” the same way other countries are. Possibly because our cultures are similar enough, but this is a storytelling site. Treating Clark Kent like he’s South American or something is a storytelling issue, though, because these people try to cast Superman’s story as that of an immigrant. Except that was never the case. “Krypton” was just an excuse to explain his superhuman abilities before the Silver Age leaned heavily on sci-fi and started showing us more of the place pre-explosion.
That didn’t stop James Gunn from going to UK news site The Times and trying to convince everyone that Superman has “always been political” and that it’s the story of an immigrant. Gunn didn’t want to do a Superman movie initially because he said he didn’t know what to do with the character. Days away from James Gunn’s Superman By James Gunn hitting theaters, and we have more evidence he still doesn’t.
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Posted by ShadowWing Tronix on July 8, 2025 in DC Spotlight, Movie Spotlight and tagged Clark Kent, commentary, DC Studios, James Gunn, James Gunn's Superman, Superman.
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