A Request to Mythos Fans
(With any apologies to big, big fans of the comics who are on my f-list):
Please, please, please STOP invoking the fact that Superman has been around for 70 years to explain Why Things Have To Be.
It's silly. It's just silly. Also, it makes you look like an uneducated boob who doesn't know how "Mythos" comes to be. If you want to know what I mean, check out the Wikipedia entry on King Arthur. Or the one on Santa Claus. Or, hell, look up this one on conspiracy theories. When people want to add meaning to their lives, they make some crazy shit up and tell a story about it. And sometimes, if another story is lying around and is pretty powerful and already says a lot of cool things, people will tack their story unto the found story. Religions get started that way. And then when the people who control the religion find out about all the stories people have added to the ones THEY added -- well, that's when fights over Mythos can get bloody (full disclosure: I'm a Presbyterian, so I have a stake in a much older, much uglier and much more violent Mythos battle than that represented by Smallville vs. ICONOCITY).
Point being, you're never going to get people to shut the myth-making down. And comics writers themselves know their stories aren't set in stone, which is why they are constantly re-booting them and adding new characters and retiring old ones and killing people off and then resurrecting them. MYTHS CHANGE. And 70 years is a wink of an eye in terms of legend formation. So don't get your knickers in a twist over the fact that people have been buying Superman comics since the Depression. People have been buying Bibles since Gutenberg commercialized the printing process, and that still hasn't kept 21st-century people from believing Jesus was the founding ancestor of the Merovingian dynasty. Who knows? Maybe he was and it's really the Authorized Version that has it wrong.
Or maybe both those stories are wrong and the New Atheists have it right and the guy never existed at all. Note that this small fact will never stop the myth-machine. Nor will copyright laws ever stop fan-fic writers, or poorly written television episodes stop people who love Chloe Sullivan or Clex or even (God help us all) Clana from saying their ending is better. Because no amount of "cannon" will ever convince them otherwise.
Please, please, please STOP invoking the fact that Superman has been around for 70 years to explain Why Things Have To Be.
It's silly. It's just silly. Also, it makes you look like an uneducated boob who doesn't know how "Mythos" comes to be. If you want to know what I mean, check out the Wikipedia entry on King Arthur. Or the one on Santa Claus. Or, hell, look up this one on conspiracy theories. When people want to add meaning to their lives, they make some crazy shit up and tell a story about it. And sometimes, if another story is lying around and is pretty powerful and already says a lot of cool things, people will tack their story unto the found story. Religions get started that way. And then when the people who control the religion find out about all the stories people have added to the ones THEY added -- well, that's when fights over Mythos can get bloody (full disclosure: I'm a Presbyterian, so I have a stake in a much older, much uglier and much more violent Mythos battle than that represented by Smallville vs. ICONOCITY).
Point being, you're never going to get people to shut the myth-making down. And comics writers themselves know their stories aren't set in stone, which is why they are constantly re-booting them and adding new characters and retiring old ones and killing people off and then resurrecting them. MYTHS CHANGE. And 70 years is a wink of an eye in terms of legend formation. So don't get your knickers in a twist over the fact that people have been buying Superman comics since the Depression. People have been buying Bibles since Gutenberg commercialized the printing process, and that still hasn't kept 21st-century people from believing Jesus was the founding ancestor of the Merovingian dynasty. Who knows? Maybe he was and it's really the Authorized Version that has it wrong.
Or maybe both those stories are wrong and the New Atheists have it right and the guy never existed at all. Note that this small fact will never stop the myth-machine. Nor will copyright laws ever stop fan-fic writers, or poorly written television episodes stop people who love Chloe Sullivan or Clex or even (God help us all) Clana from saying their ending is better. Because no amount of "cannon" will ever convince them otherwise.