davidmann95 answered:

It’s largely a matter of his role in that world matching up with his role in ours, which is part of why I’m insistent that he’s supposed to be the first superhero: there’s a notion that ordinary people in that world and even a lot of the other heroes look at him with an almost childlike faith, and separated from the idea of him as the first and the best it’s hard to justify that even if he’d still clearly deserve it. There’s a comfort fantasy aspect at the core of Superman’s appeal, the notion that he’s going to make everything okay, and while that can and has been taken apart in interesting ways it’s still part of the baseline. Both in the idea of someone swooping out of the sky to save you, and also that amidst all the horrors of the world, somehow - to paraphrase and invert a description applied to a character meant to differentiate them from this guy - “a person who deserved the power, got the power”. Without that sense of elevation he’s just another guy in long-johns (albeit a very interesting one), and while you can tell stories that don’t at all bank on him having that sort of station, sometimes he has to be *Superman*.

Anonymous said: Haven’t seen this one so how about you talk about Superman and the relationship to “hope”? I feel like that started with Mark Waid’s Birthright. I gotta side with Doc Shaner on this one, I think “hope” has become of the most overused and meaningless buzzwords that writers have latched on to, ESPECIALLY in regards to Superman. We hear so much about how Superman = Hope and yet I haven’t seen how Superman embodies that in any way different from how every hero does. What’s so great about hope?

Hope as a term for Superman has definitely been devalued a lot, by both the stories themselves and by the fanbase who want him to stand for a sort of nebulous nonconfrontational goodness that that seems like a decent shorthand for. But the thing is, hope IS central to Superman and what he’s about. It was an act of hope to send a baby away from an exploding planet on faith that they would land somewhere good, just as it was an act of hope for a passing couple to think adopting that alien baby could work out. It was an act of hope for Clark to put on his ridiculous suit and yell to the world “Hey, I’m an alien and I’m going to be upfront about that, but I believe that I can have a place among you”. It’s an act of hope to think he can make a difference, to finally open up to people after a childhood in hiding, to not throw his enemies into the sun because there’s a chance they can become better people and he doesn’t deserve to decide otherwise for them, to not just leave Earth for any number of better places or start running things himself but keep up the fight because he believes in our own capacity to change. Superman is all about hope, but not in a passive, naive “well, everybody’s good deep down, so let’s let things be and it’ll all surely work out” sense. Hope matters to Superman as an impetus for