Title says it all
1. Power
When I say that having Superman’s powers would suck, I don’t mean the 1000 different drawbacks of super-strength and super-speed, what I mean is the actual scale of his powers. The dude can easily bench press the entire earth and fly from Texas to Beijing in a second, and even hear random problems happening on continents on the other side of the world. How is this bad? Well, it’s because of moral responsibility. Lots of things happen everyday; crimes occur practically every hour, several people die in a minute, and at least a thousand problems pop up. But, now you can also hear and detect exactly where they’re happening, and you can resolve it in seconds if not less. Basically, you’re obligated to do things because you have that power to, and if you decide not to in spite of that, then you’re avoiding what you could solve, and probably even indirectly responsible for a lot of the bad stuff that you could prevent, which brings me to my next point:
- Responsibility
Superman gets his powers from the sun, meaning he’s constantly at full power. yeah sure you could also depower him through kryptonite, but he can’t just decide to depower himself either to escape that responsibility of being Superman, since he’s then actively avoiding what he could do, and even if he was permanently depowered; if he himself made the choice to do that, then it’s just the previous paragraph all over again. Sure, there’s lots of powerful characters in fiction, but the fine distinction between them and someone like Superman is that they often can’t do everything he can. Spider-Man is extremely powerful, but he can’t be everywhere all at once, and he has human limits. Same with Hulk, Theos, Captain America, Trigno, and so on. Obviously anyone with power likely has a moral obligation to use it for good, but…I think you get the point.
- Conclusion
(yeah i get an argument is usually 3 paragraphs and then a conclusion but stay with me here)
Anyway, none of this is to say that Superman (or most non-evil Kryptonians, for that matter) doesn’t do anything at all.
It’s important to note that Superman isn’t omnipotent, and that when it comes to people he can’t always save everyone, and this applies to pretty much any powerful character. This isn’t to comment about the various drawbacks of having superpowers (unlike how the title might imply), but it’s just the moral responsibility that comes with having that power.
TL;DR: uncle ben was right
