It turns out that articulating this has only made me think about it more, and appreciate all four mentioned characters more, so I will in fact elaborate.
How Sofia is like Superman:
Sofia is fundamentally ordinary. She spends her early life in a small, lower-class family in a village, trained by her loving parents in their menial jobs (her mother’s tailoring and shoemaking and possibly her late father’s sailing, as she learned how to sail when she was four) and eager to help, grateful for and content with everything they have. This upbringing has made her humble, down-to-earth, sincere, polite and above all, kind.
Suddenly everything changes. She acquires Power. Greatness is thrust upon her and a whole new identity emerges, one with unique supernatural abilities she struggles to understand and the glorious legacy of a family she just became part of to live up to and the weight of a whole people on her shoulders. She’s a symbol, a player on the stage of the world that she’s been a nobody in. Many respect and admire her. Some envy or feel threatened by her Power and scheme to remove or exploit it. Everybody outside her inner circle constantly treats her like she’s above them when she is utterly incapable of seeing herself that way. They expect more from her. They expect the best.
She also moves from her hometown to much grander, more advanced environments, including a castle/fortress emblematic of her Powerful family heritage. She enters a new occupation, makes new friends, and gains new life experience and skills. However, she never forgets her roots and frequently returns to the town.
The core theme of her narrative is what it means to be Powerful, and her conclusion is that those with more Power have a moral imperative to use it for the good of those with less. She's an archetypal paragon of virtue. Doing the right thing for the sake of it is her sole motivation to go out of her way to enhance and protect as many lives as possible. Her faith in herself may waver, but not in her morals. She never enjoys hurting people and will attempt diplomacy first and use aggression or violence as an absolute last resort in conflict resolution. Her selflessness, charisma, compassion and genuine trustworthiness are such that she amasses countless allies. If a villain has the potential to reform, she can convince them to try. If a colder or more cynical character can stand to let more vulnerability, hope and joy into their life, she can open that door. She inspires people to be better, to deserve her belief in them. She shows them the good they are capable of.
Everywhere she goes, she is Different, exceptional in every sense: a commoner among royalty; a royal among commoners; the first girl on the Flying Derby team; the only girl in her class to pass the moral element of the princess test; the only stepdaughter on the Dads and Daughters Day trip; the only bearer of the Amulet of Avalor qualified to free Elena; the first Protector not to have innate magic or be from the Mystic Isles. So she doesn’t quite fit into any one paradigm anywhere. She must make the world fit around her while overcoming deep, chronic insecurities about her worth, wondering if she can ever belong and be all that people want her to be, need her to be. This Differentness, and what it pushes her to accomplish to prove herself, make her even more impressive in turn.
She feels compelled to keep her normal, everyday life with her friends and occupation separate from her heroic adventures. Everyone knows that they live in a fantastical setting (though most aren’t as aware of the lore as she becomes), but her magic and the duties she undertakes related to it are a solemnly guarded secret to all but her closest loved ones, and not even all of them for years. She hides to magically transform. Her headquarters as the Storykeeper is explicitly called the Secret Library. She makes excuses to leave to go on Protector missions. This narrative pattern reinforces her theme of being Different. For as thriving as her social life is and as much as she cares about community, most of the time her responsibilities are shouldered alone.
Her optimism is often mistaken for immature naivety. In fact, she’s very intelligent, perceptive, realistic and practical. It isn’t that she can’t accept the existence of plain evil - she does, and opposes it staunchly and bravely - it’s that she would invariably prefer to do too little damage than too much. And it isn’t that she’s never suffered either…
Roland is her dad. She is his daughter. That’s unquestionable. But she had a dad before him that she lost, and while she was so young that she doesn’t seem to remember him much, the love was nonetheless there and it mattered and it’s gone and that matters. She wouldn’t trade her adoptive family and home for anything, but a mother and father needed to die to let her have them. Love and grief are inextricably intertwined for her.
Despite her formidable, versatile Power, performance of incredible feats and army of loyal connections by the end, she is still ordinary! She behaves like a normal person. An extremely good person, but a normal one. Her strength of character is just human. Kindness is the most powerful force in the universe and utterly unremarkable. We can never do everything Princess Sofia is capable of, but we can all always do what she would do in our situation.
How Elena is like Batman:
Elena is born great, the heir to a long lineage of wealth, influence and benevolent leadership in their community. She’s always had Power. She doesn’t need to come to terms with that the way Sofia does. What she needs to learn is more about doing than being: how best to apply that Power to help the people less fortunate than her. Her warm, wonderful parents are excellent role models. She strives to make them proud. Having only one family and one home, she feels completely secure.
Then in an instant that security is shattered. With two blasts of magic fired from a wand, her parents are murdered before her eyes. Her home, her world, goes from a place where she is safe and loved to an unpredictable, uncontrollable environment full of cruelty, pain and fear. This trauma defines her character.
Afterward, she leaves her country and travels the world for years. When she returns, it’s with an equally defining mission: to purge her community of evil and protect her people, to prevent the wrong that killed her parents and childhood from happening to anyone else.
Like Sofia, she's a beacon of idealism who is kind for the sake of it and brings out the best in a growing supporting cast. Her people rally around her to take a stand against evil. She holds the unshakeable convictions that there is good in everyone and it’s never too late for redemption. She’s a supportive mentor to the younger princesses Sofia and Isabel.
However, due to her personal experience of victimhood, she has a particular investment in Justice and its amoral sibling vengeance. She wants to make sure that she never loses her loved ones again. She never wants to feel that helpless again. Where Sofia simply wants to put good into the world, Elena wants to hurt evil. Not satisfied with being a fair ruler from her comfortable palace, she risks her life to capture criminals and defeat all manner of threats to the kingdom, learning to wield multiple weapons and counter the supernatural. She’s more aggressive toward antagonists and can find catharsis in violent force. Her vengeful rage can motivate incredible heroism, like saving Avalor from Shuriki twice, but also drive her to self-destruction and endangering the very people she’s vowed to defend, like with Esteban. This can make her preaching of second chances hypocritical. Her ultimate test of character is whether she can choose forgiveness, and prioritize keeping people safe, over revenge.
Her series has a stronger emphasis on moral complexity, naturally arising from the theme of Justice. She and her allies judge how lenient and forgiving they should be toward criminals - for example, the sirenas, Esteban, Victor and Carla - and how much their circumstances, sympathetic qualities and repentance matter compared to the pain they've caused, and discuss their different perspectives. How does Elena balance her beliefs in both retribution and redemption? Since the most important things to her are her family and Justice, what does and should she do when her beloved family member turns out to be a nuanced anti-villain with blood on his hands who doesn’t want to be held accountable by the law? At what point does her own desire to harm become just as immoral as the malice of those she’s determined to punish?
Family is another core theme. You might expect Elena, a teenager ruling a kingdom in a series with a darker, more mature overall tone, to be more independent than Sofia. But because Elena’s narrative and themes don’t cast her as so Different and the abnormal elements of her life aren’t secret from her inner circle of family and friends, they frequently accompany her on her adventures and even sometimes take the lead. They also don’t necessarily have conventional nuclear family roles and origins. Since her cousin Esteban and the princesses’ parents died, their grandparents have acted more directly parental to them. Esteban was like a brother to Elena and Isabel before Shuriki’s dictatorship, but having aged during the forty-one years the rest of the family were magically sealed in objects, is now something of a father figure to Isabel. Elena and her best friends are a close enough unit to be considered found family. Romance is present, but not nearly as important as these bonds of family and friendship. Side characters are much more involved in it than Elena. She has multiple potential love interests, who have their own other potential love interests, and none of those pairings are officially committed to.
However, Elena does prefer to do certain things on her own. This is selfless to a significant degree: she feels responsible for everyone else’s welfare and is averse to letting others get hurt when she thinks that she can handle a problem. But it has selfish elements too. Between being unable to separate her inherited Power from her identity and her brutal loss of autonomy, she enjoys control. At the start of her crusade she’s accustomed to feeling alone. She’s highly confident in her abilities and opinions to the point of sometimes being proud, stubborn and self-righteous, and can be irrational in how much she lets her emotions guide her decisions, especially anger. She learns how to be humbler, listen to others’ wisdom and effectively delegate.
Her non-linear mental health journey is a key plot thread. She has PTSD from her parents’ deaths, carries her grief and is greatly affected by the chronic stresses of managing a kingdom throughout the story. She has flashbacks and panic attacks. As for hypervigilance, she obsessively uses surveillance to spy on criminals. She later likewise spies on the preparations for her coronation, despite everyone else having them covered and her friends having dragged her outside for a rest day to curb her workaholism. In one episode, finally putting all the main villains behind bars fills her with such overwhelming relief that she sings a whole song about how she “can barely recognize” the feeling of being “free” and “happy to be alive” after spending “years on alert”; a day later, the villains have escaped, Esteban is an antagonist now and practically dead to her due to his crimes and their clashing trauma responses, and she’s had multiple emotional breakdowns and is afraid of how more of them could hurt her loved ones. Season Three gives her potent magic that responds to her emotions to force her to improve her emotional regulation. She tries to suppress her emotions, but it’s unhealthy and unsustainable. When push comes to shove, she conquers her inner demons, fixes her mistakes and moves forward to do right by her people and family, because she’s a hero.
In light of these parallels, I propose a new characterization test: if Sofia/Elena wouldn’t do an action, under any circumstances, think twice about writing Clark/Bruce doing it. If Sofia/Elena would do it, Clark/Bruce probably would as well. Also…
I was a farmboy in Smallville doing alright
Found out I was an alien overnight
Now I’ve gotta figure out how to do it right
Got a crystal fortress from my space family
But I’m most at home with humanity
My power’s out of this world, so you can count on me
I’m finding out what being super’s all about
Making my way, it’s an adventure every day (Superman)
It’s gonna be my time (Superman)
I’ll show them all that I’m
In a city full of strife (The Dark Knight)
A hero fights to protect life (The Dark Knight)
With his family by his side (The Dark Knight)
It’s a wild and daring ride
The Dark Knight of Gotham
Sin and secrets everywhere (Sin and secrets everywhere)
Noble friends are always there (Noble friends always there)
Courage shines from deep within (Courage shines from within)
Let his caped crusade begin
The Dark Knight, the Dark Knight
The Dark Knight of Gotham
