Okay – we used to do a lot of alternative speculation on superheroes, the explanations of their powers and origins. Maybe it deserves a thread.
My idea of Superman – or more precisely – of Krypton
Clark Kent growing up discovered he was an alien, but he didn’t know anything about the species of which he was a member. Eventually, he learns more from messages included in the craft that brought him to Earth.
First, imagine the almost Cronenbergian anxiety he must have felt between discovering he was not human until he found out about Krypton and his parents Jor-L and Lara-L. If he wasn’t human, what would he look like when he finally grew up into adulthood? Even as a young man, could he be a larval stage for some adult form that was completely inhuman? If he enters a different environment, how would his body respond? Would he grow new limbs or new organs? Is there some alien monster inside him that will emerge when he reaches a certain age? How does his biochemistry work? If he doesn’t have testosterone, then why does he look like a human man? Is he even a male Kryptonian or do Kryptonians have genders?
Then, what if he was lied to?
Imagine Krypton is the burned out shell of a dead star orbiting a single primordially ancient red giant star inside a vast nebula. In this environment the periodic chart is plentiful with super-heavy elements in the theoretically stable range far higher than Uranium or Plutonium. There is as much complexity in this environment as there was in the ancient past that led to the formation of life on Earth, but it is of a completely different kind in a highly radioactive environment.
When life formed on Earth, it was driven by one specific threat – the abundance of calcium that could tear into and poison early single cell lifeforms. Earth life developed to deal with and then use the calcium (skeletons and exo-skeletons). When life formed on Krypton, it was far more energetic and required the ability to manipulate mass, gravity, electromagnetism, thermodynamics and had to be incredibly tough to contend with far more dangerous and destructive elements at much higher speeds. It had to be extremely sensative.
Eventually, the Kryptonians evolve. They do not look like humans. Instead, they are floating, bloated beings about the size of blue whales with masses of tentacles and sense organs all over their bodies. Something we might call Lovecraftian. In this environment, a nebula illuminated by the light of the red giant star, the Kryptonians are entirely unaware of any cosmos outside their own fairly empty binary system. Their dead star, Krypton, and their Sun Rao.
However, one scientist speculates that there may be something outside. It creates a specialized drone that would explore the theoretical “exoverse” and when it found a planet with other forms of life, it would land there and explore.
Essentially, that is what Kal-L is. He’s the drone exploring planet Earth for Krypton and the messages he thinks he found describing his “parents” and “home planet” are actually misinterpretations that his mostly human consciousness has projected onto the real information that is too inhuman to understand.
Also, his powers are a mistake. Since the drone ship had to use Kryptonian materials to create Clark, his body ended up accidentally developing the same powers natural to Kryptonian life. However, he was intended to only be a normal member of whatever race he discovered. So, this is a problem since his body and neurology essentially believes it is human, but he’s actually very, very superhuman.
So, when he uses his powers, it is very uncomfortable. When he flies, it feels like he’s running at the limit of his speed. When he’s hit by a missile, it feels like he’s been blown to pieces even though he’s actually entirely uninjured. When he lifts a plane or a tank, it feels like he’s being crushed, though he could physically lift a hundred times that weight with no ill effect. Heat vision feels like his eyes are burning to cinders. His life has been developing the willpower to endure the sensation to do what his body and mind thinks is impossible. Also, this is why he doesn’t tear the door of his car off when he gets in. Being a normal human is what his body was designed to be.
Until the end of his exploration, that is. Many people have described Superman as a human spaceship and that is entirely accurate. At some point, the final stage of Kal-L’s programming will activate – the return stage. Kal will gradually start growing in size and lose his human features. Eventually he will become a new version of the craft that brought him to earth. It wasn’t a spaceship, but it was like the cast off shell of a cicada or a butterfly’s chrysalis. And it is the final form he will have when he leaves Earth driven by a homing instinct to return to Krypton, whether it still exists or not after his billion year journey to Earth.
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every topic gets derailed but are you building a whole new track here?
Picked up the full collections of The Pull at £2.39, and Goodnight Paradise and 7 Deadly Sins at £1.59 apiece.
