Welcome to my world Morgan, at the risk of actually being crass. I've had to deal with 8 years of this bullshit, and it's actually not just me.
Thanks, I hate it here.
It just baffles me how people think they can assign politics to someone they don't know personally just off of their fictional work as an excuse to not like them, and then, I guarantee you, in the same breath, "separate the art from the artist" when it comes to
Woody Allen, or more relevantly to Snyder,
Joss frickin Whedon. People feel like they're in such a moral high ground to hate Snyder and his work that they think it's okay to say he killed his own daughter just to get out of having to direct 2017 Justice League, meanwhile these other genuinely terrible directors are still skating by with the good will of stuff they did ~30 years ago. That's the world we live in. Damn, do I hate it.
As an aside, because I can't get over the "Jonathan and Martha are bad parents" bit, it's a really stupid take to dislike Superman just because his parents somehow didn't sufficiently inculcate him into being a good person. The entire point of his story in this iteration is that he's born from an alien race that have their life roles genetically coded into them, gets free will instead, and additionally chooses to do right when he can get away with all the wrongs, not because his parents impressed on him the Savior trope on fear of punishment or their personal disappointment, but because
he feels he has a responsibility to the world with the powers that he has. He operates from a deontological standpoint. Additionally, his parents respect his life choices and despite being flawed people like literally everyone else in the world, give him the best advice they can, that reinforces that what acts he does as a grown man are his choices to make and not impositions, that he'll have to hold himself accountable for even when no one else has that power over him.
"I don't blame you, son. It'd be a huge burden for anyone to carry, but you're not just anyone, Clark, and I have to believe that you were sent here for a reason. All these changes you're going through, one day your going to think of them as a blessing and when that day comes, you're going to have to make a choice. A choice for whether to stand proud before the human race, or not."
"Somewhere out there, you have another father too, who gave you another name. And he sent you here for a reason, Clark, and even if it takes the rest of your life, you owe it to yourself to find out what that reason is."
"You just have to decide what kind of man you wanna grow up to be, Clark. Because, whoever that man is, good character or bad, he’s…he’s gonna change the world."
There's even the additional dialogue in BvS where Jonathan tells Clark that he won't be able to foresee every single consequence of actions he takes in the name of doing the right thing, and that he'll have to wrestle with the feeling of being hailed as a hero but ultimately feeling inadequate and haunted by the ramifications of his actions. It's the exact thing doctors, first responders, firefighters,
anyone working in rescue or human service fields have to deal with. That they could make their best attempt to save a life and still end up losing one. That feeling of guilt at not being able to save
everyone all the time has to be wrestled with and ultimately overcome for the sake of the people that will need help in the future, and it probably affects Clark tenfold because he knows he's not just human, and so quitting wouldn't lessen his feeling of responsibility and subsequent guilt because as far as he knows, no one else has the power he does. (And that's why we have the Justice League, so that no hero suffers the burden of saving everyone alone.)
Instead people are still upset Supes killed Zod. Y'know, the militaristic dictator willing to genocide a whole world and who spits 1:1 Nazi rhetoric about "
[severing] the degenerative bloodlines" for the continued prosperity of his "superior" race. We're supposed to feel bad for that guy getting his neck snapped because people think Superman not killing is an absolute rule of his character. He's also not allowed to say that Krypton, a eugenicist society that brought its own destruction from its practices, "had its chance". And Clark's actions and words somehow stem from Jonathan and Martha being "bad parents".
Next thing you know, "
Narcissistic Parents are Good, Actually" might become a sincerely-held, "uncontroversial statement" in those circles because vicariously living through your children and solely raising them as a proxy to challenge society with values that you yourself don't have to practice and catch flak for but want the credit for "creating" is, well,
good. At best it embraces a trap-like "no-win" scenario for the child where the parent totally wants to raise them into a "successful person" without sacrificing their own status as the infallible ideal that the child will always revere and therefore never surpass. Actually, that's not At Best, because that's the Parent supposing that they're God. The point is if you want your kid to be Better Than You, that will come with some level of acceptance that You Are Not Perfect, but that's not a bad thing, that's just how evolution works. But yeah, because Jonathan and Martha are themselves not moral paragons, somehow this disqualifies Clark from being a hero. Clark still goes to them for guidance, whether in real life or in his own mental "Fortress of Solitude", so, whatever.
It'd be funny if it weren't people pathetically tattling on themselves that they believe a hero can only ever come from "superhuman genes"
and "absolutely perfect, 100% morally good parenting". Pretty sure something that rigid disqualifies Clark's parents in
Smallville, and I'm thinking specifically of the episode where Martha puts "upholding the law" over "doing the right thing" on the matter of whether Clark should save undocumented immigrants from the murderous slaver exploiting them.
But I dunno, maybe these
are the people that unironically love Superman Returns and its reinforcement that Jor-El totally knew he was sending his own child to Earth as a literal "Gift to Humanity" first and foremost, with the interest of his son's welfare and saving him from the exploding planet at second place. Or they
would love Smallville, with its sociopathic A.I. Jor-El that enforced seemingly contradictory demands of Clark and wanted him to "
Rule [humans] with strength", and did things like: painfully branded the S symbol on Clark's chest; brainwashed a woman into being Kara then disintegrated her when she no longer served her purpose; strangled Jonathan to force Clark to comply with his demands; similarly brainwashed, imprisoned, or depowered Clark himself as punishment; cut off all communication with Clark right after telling him to search for magical stones on threat of an apocalypse; then, incredibly hypocritically gets on Clark's case for his willingness to kill a Lex clone to save Lois after being himself responsible for so many deaths including Jonathan's or Lana's given the timeline
and he wanted Clark to kill Lex himself in season, I dunno, five?
I'm just saying, there's a really good reason for why MoS had Jor-El and Lara's individual dreams and suppositions of Clark being an "
outcast" or "
a god to [humans]" go unacknowledged by Clark (since he's a baby then), and Clark only hears exactly what Jor-El wants from him
after he's an adult, and Jonathan similarly doesn't pressure Clark to attain all the answers to his questions immediately when he's a teenage boy wrestling with himself as it is already. Despite Jor-El's wants,
Jonathan would be the one to actually raise Clark, and Earth would be the planet Clark is actually living in. Protecting him as a child first and foremost was priority, and raising him to want to do good for goodness's sake with a healthy understanding of consequences and the foundations to an unshakeable sense of identity was paramount. A teenage Clark being thrust into the public before his time, lambasted by the media like he was in BvS, or experimented on to the point where he'd be twisted by human cruelty would have messed him up.
