He has spent his entire life as an outsider
t:
He does appreciate how fragile life is, why bother saving all those lives even as a child if he didn't see the value in life and how something so fragile needs his intervention/protection whenever possible...
You or I would save children drowning in a bus if we could. That doesn't require a rare outsiders veiw of human mortality, it just requires a bit of compassion.
But Superman has more than just the compassion you or I would have. He HAS a rare outsiders view of mortality and the taking of life.
And like I said, he views life in a way we don't even understand because of that.
Also in MoS, I'm pretty sure he puts the utmost value on the lives of that family there at the end there, to prove the point even further. The first time in that entire fight he had some control and he started saving people best he could.
Not best he could at all. Could have easily saved that specific family without killing Zod.
Whether he could have stopped Zod in the end without killing him is another thing. But in that one moment, there most definitely was another way of stopping him from killing that family.
To be fair, Birthright isn't the only way to tell a solid superman origin(he doesn't have to be a vegan that see's souls for it to be superman).
When did I say it was?
And when he tells Darkseid this, it's a weary superman who has been fighting these sorts of fights for years now, MOS is literally his first fight ever...
That being said, who's to say he wasn't being as careful as possible in this movie. I mean he just learned to fly yesterday.
I was just commenting on the fact he has spent his entire life training himself to have self restraint. To never let go completely, because he knows how dangerously powerful he is.
Not using lethal force is something that he is conditioned to do.
This is my point. How does the movie go against this?
Moreover, this is how it went down in the books, I can't remember the issue but I recall batman having brought this up to clark at one point. That incident has set up what we know as the character in the comics today.
Because it doesn't once mention it?
He kills, he's sad for a moment, then he's fine in the next scene. Absolutely fine. No hint of giving two hoots about Zod. No mention of it to his mother in the scene after that either.
That was a story with this specific theme at it's core. Not all superman stories are about any violence themes. Even then the early parts of that story have alot of damage that superman could have stopped had he be better prepared. Just as this movie has damage that could have been stopped had superman been "better prepared"
Well that's the point though. Any story in which Superman kills (or is thought to have killed) SHOULD have that moment be at it's core.
It should be a huge character defining moment. It should be something that they discussed in scenes before (like the church scene), and in scenes in after.
At the very LEAST you should dedicate a few lines of freaking dialogue to it.
What they did, was dismiss all of the reasons i've listed cause they didn't WANT to deal with them. They just wanted to do away with it in this film, so that they could do something 'cool'.
All of those things that are incredibly important to me, and have been important to so many Superman stories.
Just couldn't be bothered to touch them.
Which from the sounds of it is how Goyer felt about the glasses issue too. Just glad he 'got to avoid it this time'.
As for the ending, that's a far older superman than MoS, to the point that it's a talking point of the villains and civilians. Moreover, that same superman, killed Zod doomsday and learned from it and became the man in that Story. Don't forget about the robots...
This is seemingly an unfair comparison, but it keeps rearing it's head.
How does spiderman feel about girl friends after he looses a few? Probably pretty strongly, but why would I expect his origin movie to convey that particular trait? It's a popular trait of his but it's also learned.
I'm not trying to make it a comparison though. I only mentioned it as one example of where I am picking up that particular reasoning for the no kill rule from.
I'm not actually trying to compare the two stories, cause they do have different contexts.
This was just a discussion about why Supes would have a no kill rule if he'd never killed before.
And I think there is plenty in his life and upbringing and understanding of the world that explains it, without needing to have killed in order to feel that way.
