{"id":400,"date":"2024-07-28T19:25:33","date_gmt":"2024-07-29T00:25:33","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.sssuperman.com\/blog\/?p=400"},"modified":"2025-01-14T21:56:37","modified_gmt":"2025-01-15T03:56:37","slug":"the-problem-with-young-justice-superman-a-brief-follow-up","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.sssuperman.com\/blog\/the-problem-with-young-justice-superman-a-brief-follow-up\/","title":{"rendered":"The Problem with Young Justice Superman: A Brief Follow-Up"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p>A few years ago, I wrote a blog post called <a href=\"https:\/\/www.sssuperman.com\/blog\/the-problem-with-young-justice-superman\/\">The Problem with Young Justice Superman<\/a> talking about my dissatisfaction with Clark Kent&#8217;s portrayal in the named cartoon (particularly in Season 1, because there&#8217;s just not a much to say about him in the other seasons due to his minimal appearances &#8211; which I suppose is a problem in and of itself). The other day, <a href=\"https:\/\/community.cbr.com\/showthread.php?169827-Conner-Kent-Kon-El-Superboy-Appreciation-2024&amp;p=6887869#post6887869\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">I talked about Young Justice Superman and Superboy on the CBR Comics Forum<\/a>, and I figured I&#8217;d share a slightly modified version of that on this blog. (The CBR thread contains a lot of interesting discussion of Superboy, so I recommend it for anyone interested.) In it, I was basically responding to the idea that Superboy having issues with wanting Superman to be a father figure to him, and Superman failing to live up to that, is a good thing that should be included in future media.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<hr class=\"wp-block-separator has-alpha-channel-opacity\"\/>\n\n\n\n<p>Young Justice is a good show, and certainly much more watched than the comics are read, but its depiction of Superman and Conner&#8217;s relationship is bad and not something I want to see emulated. If you&#8217;re going to be pedantic and say that he technically is a son and not a clone because he has 50% of Superman&#8217;s DNA, I could be pedantic and say we don&#8217;t know that he was formed by a sperm and egg meeting. I don&#8217;t think we should define their relationship by biological technicalities. His conception is clearly not the normal way children come about on either a biological or social level. And it&#8217;s obviously nothing close to a typical deadbeat dad situation, considering Clark had no involvement in his creation.<br><br>While Season 1 of YJ was great, the handling of Superman was a blemish on it. It made Clark seem unappealing and frankly kind of lame (as I discussed in the past blog post). But the one thing I actually like about it is how it implied (by Clark eventually calling Conner &#8220;little brother&#8221;) that trying to force Clark into a traditional parental role despite the unusual situation was harmful or at least not conducive to their relationship getting better.<br><br>I feel like Conner&#8217;s DNA and precedent in non-comics media isn&#8217;t really enough of a reason to emphasize the idea of Clark being his father. Obviously, it&#8217;s fine to like the idea, but I personally don&#8217;t. It feels a bit inauthentic to me. Relationships are not defined by DNA or a person&#8217;s origin and I think that&#8217;s a good theme to be present in the Super-family, considering Clark himself was adopted. It also risks making Clark look bad unnecessarily.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>A few years ago, I wrote a blog post called The Problem with Young Justice Superman talking about my dissatisfaction with Clark Kent&#8217;s portrayal in the named cartoon (particularly in Season 1, because there&#8217;s just not a much to say about him in the other seasons due to his minimal appearances &#8211; which I suppose [&#8230;]<\/p>\n<p><a class=\"btn btn-secondary understrap-read-more-link\" href=\"https:\/\/www.sssuperman.com\/blog\/the-problem-with-young-justice-superman-a-brief-follow-up\/\">Read More<span class=\"screen-reader-text\"> from The Problem with Young Justice Superman: A Brief Follow-Up<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":402,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[43],"tags":[14,3,4,9,18],"class_list":["post-400","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-mini-posts","tag-analysis","tag-dc","tag-superman","tag-tv","tag-young-justice"],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v23.5 - https:\/\/yoast.com\/wordpress\/plugins\/seo\/ -->\n<title>The Problem with Young Justice Superman: A Brief Follow-Up - Small Screen Superman Blog<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.sssuperman.com\/blog\/the-problem-with-young-justice-superman-a-brief-follow-up\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"The Problem with Young Justice Superman: A Brief Follow-Up - Small Screen Superman Blog\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"A few years ago, I wrote a blog post called The Problem with Young Justice Superman talking about my dissatisfaction with Clark Kent&#8217;s portrayal in the named cartoon (particularly in Season 1, because there&#8217;s just not a much to say about him in the other seasons due to his minimal appearances &#8211; 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