As much as the world doesn’t need another think piece about James Gunn (reprobate) or Zack Snyder (talent-deprived reprobate) and their respective takes on the Man of Steel, I can assure you of this:

I choose Superman.

Not their Superman. Not Snyder’s emotionally stunted demigod sleepwalking through apocalypse after apocalypse. Not Gunn’s trauma-wrapped, irony-soaked avatar of postmodern alienation. I choose the idealized story told by two boys in Cleveland. I choose the original myth. The boy from a doomed world, sent not to rule but to survive.

A father saw the end coming. Maybe it was climate collapse. Geological instability. Terrorism. A galactic cataclysm. The details vary. What doesn’t is the refusal of a ruling council—scientists, politicians, scholars—who, for reasons of pride or politics, ignored him. So he did what a parent does when time runs out and the world refuses to listen: he saved his child.

He and his brilliant wife placed that child in a vessel of hope, not conquest. Not as a seed for empire, or a second chance at a Kryptonian dynasty. One child. One chance. A rescue mission, not a legacy play. And when that child landed, he didn’t fall into royalty. Or genius. Or wealth. He could have fallen into the ocean. Or crashed into a mountain. He could have fallen into autocracy.

Instead, he fell into the arms of two kind, hardworking people, close to the earth, burdened with nothing but their decency. They could have turned him in. Could have hidden him away. But instead, they raised him. Loved him. Taught him how to plant and reap, to hold back and to step forward. He learned restraint, not indulgence. Compassion, not dominance.

He was different. He knew that. The world would know that, too. But first he learned to be human. That was the point. No prophecies. No messiah complex. Just a boy who could do anything, choosing to do what was right.

It’s a simple myth. An immigrant who adopts a planet—and it was written by two Jewish sons of immigrants, outsiders, who, in a time of global conflict and rising authoritarianism, imagined not a conqueror, but a protector. Not a god, but a man so good, so principled, that even with the power of a god, he chose to serve. That is Superman’s origin story. That is the covenant we inherited.

What we have now is something else entirely.

Superman, as told today, is no longer that immigrant myth. He’s been rebranded, retooled, and redirected to serve the aesthetic tastes and psychological insecurities of his handlers. And the two men most responsible for this transformation—Snyder and Gunn, most recently—have made clear they are less interested in Superman’s moral clarity than they are in using him as a mirror for their own fixations.

Snyder’s Superman is a symbol of power misunderstood. He is bleak, burdened, detached. He does not inspire, he endures. His story is not about service, but sacrifice. Snyder confused spectacle for scale, iconography for insight, and in doing so, hollowed out the soul of the character. Yet for many of the hollow young men of our modern era, he becomes a new but terrible icon.

Gunn’s Superman, though not yet fully realized (because time often reveals more once people are over their enthusiastic gushing), already walks in the shadow of irreverence. His work trends toward trauma-as-origin story, comedy as defense mechanism, and genre detachment as brand. His Superman risks becoming a posture, a clever reconstruction for an audience that fears sincerity.
Neither of these men demonstrates a lived understanding of Superman’s core value: restraint in the face of absolute power. Considering their histories (not the point of this article), neither reflects the humility or clarity required to steward a myth designed not for monetization, but for moral imagination.

And that’s why I called them reprobates; not out of casual spite, but because they are unfit to carry a story larger than themselves. They have turned Superman into propaganda, again. (This is not the first time Superman has been propagandized, mind you.)
Not for state or ideology, but for themselves, for their side in the great culture war. Each “take” on the character becomes a flavor, a product, a loyalty test. You hear it all the time—“Gunn’s Superman,” “Snyder’s Superman”—as if Superman were a brand extension, like soda or sneakers, something to be customized, stylized, and sold.

But Superman was never meant to carry your fears. He was meant to counter them.

That’s what people don’t understand. This isn’t about nostalgia. This is about preservation. Superman is not a blank slate. He is not whatever we want him to be. He is what we need him to be. A symbol of ethical power. Of moral courage. Of the immigrant made good, who chooses to protect people who can do nothing for him in return.

Travel the world. You will find two symbols nearly everyone recognizes: Coca-Cola and Superman.

One sells sweetness. The other sells something we’re running out of.

Hope.

And that hope is fragile. Superman survives not because he’s invincible, but because people believe in what he stands for. Strip that away, and he’s just another cape.

As a cultural critic writing about the Metropolis Marvel for over thirty years, I’ve watched people try to graft their ideologies, insecurities, and aesthetics onto him, expecting him to carry their water, prove their points, fight their wars—and never once stopping to ask: is this the right thing to do?

You don’t get to reinvent Superman every time you feel insecure. You don’t get to colonize him with your issues, then pretend it’s faithfulness to the myth. And you certainly don’t get to profit from hollowing him out, branding him with your initials, and calling it storytelling.

Superman is not yours.

He’s not mine.

He’s not a “take.”

He bears a standard.

And we are falling further and further below it.

So no, I don’t care what James Gunn intends. I don’t care what Zack Snyder meant. I care about what they’ve done. I care about the millions who still look up and recognize that symbol on his chest and believe it stands for something more than funneling a worldview into a narrowband cultural context, stripped of the meaning the character was born from.

Superman is the story of an immigrant, by immigrants. Superman is a story about restraint in a world without restraint—a world willing to do anything for likes, for wealth, for the lolz.

We owe it to those original creators not just to tell the story well.

We owe it to them to tell it right.

I choose Superman—the myth, the legend, the ideal worth emulating.