Rossi says at the start of an episode "show me a hero and I will write you a tragedy. from F Scott Fitzgerald." And I thought of Superman. I don’t think it applies to him. Sure his home planet was destroyed when he was a baby and landed on earth, but it didn’t make him Superman. It’s the kindness and heart of his human parents that did.
He’s not a hero with a sad backstory to motivate his hero behavior, it’s love that does
Or maybe I understand the quote wrong.
i think f scott fitzgerald might be approaching the concept of hero in a different way. he’s super old and a little jaded and he died two years after the first superman comic so idk if he would’ve approached superman that way
i also think superman’s whole thing being about love was for him to be someone with all the qualities that we’d admire in a person but have that person be fundamentally good. i don’t know if he’s the first but i know his story was intentional. he has to be a good guy motivated by pure love
unfortunately that gets boring for most people and they have to put superman in situations™️ and a lot of them do have tragic moments. but i think there is a little tragedy in superman even if his thing is love. superman is always going to permanently be affected by the death of his home planet. he got lucky to be raised by kind parents but he will always be an alien and because he’s so good he will always take it upon himself to protect the world from huge threats and i think that takes away from him just getting to be a person. the love is there to sort of combat the tragedy and let us know that it’s not the only thing out there. we can be strong and brave and motivate others if we’re loving and help our neighbors. we can make the world a better place just by being inspired by someone who does it of their own free will regardless if we don’t have powers. but he does have powers and he HAS to use them for good. he learned to be clark kent before superman but he often has to prioritize superman over clark kent and the messiness of that is a little tragic no?
but then think about what superman represents and why he has to be portrayed in the way he is. he represents being an “alien” so someone foreign or outside of america’s norm at the time. he’s a person that fights for anyone and uses his strength to put a huge fist to bigots. he inspires people to love all their neighbors and help out wherever they can. all this good messaging wrapped up in america’s poster boy. white, tall blue eyes. he has to be white or else it wouldn’t be received well. there’s some tragedy in that no? that poor jewish immigrants needed a character that represents refugees and asylum seekers, a hero that represents them and all other discriminated peoples, only to have to make him the perfect white man. and because of that he eventually kind of got assimilated by white supremacy a bit. white people see superman pinching nazis or the kkk and they think it’s out of character and it’s a woke agenda when really it’s always been encoded in his messaging
im not saying you’re wrong because i get what you were saying. like he’s not batman so there wasn’t this tragic/traumatizing moment that led him to be a hero but there’s some tragedy in there. plus tragedy has another meaning in literature. like shakespeares tragedies, (you know macbeth and hamlet etc.) drama that is based on human suffering and usually ends really badly so we can feel some sort of (idk a better word sorry) catharsis.those kind of heroes usually have tragedies that f scott fitzgerald was probably talking about.
even still we sort of treat comic book heroes that way, they just get a happy ending. we sit down we watch them struggle, some kind of struggle that in some way represent human day to day problems we see them suffer for it, we see almost everything slip away and then they end at a point where we’re relieved it’s over but also enjoyed all the suffering.