Terry, I've been so slow to reply, which is because I have had so little time, and your story is so singularly thought-provoking. I do, indeed, feel that your story is challenging me, even provoking me somewhat - but it isn't offending or upsetting me or breaking my heart the way a Lois deathfic would, and that makes a world of difference.
The question your story raises so eloquently - though possibly not answering the way I would most like it to, we'll see about that
- is, of course, how we should judge the hero when he has crossed the line and done the unforgivable, even if it was only on one occasion. There are a million questions that whirl in my head as I contemplate this. For example, can you be a model hero for many years, then cross the line
once and do something horrible, and then go back to being a model hero again? Will people forgive you? Will they trust you again? Will you, the hero, deserve their trust?
Interestingly, when it comes to the big, mythical heroes of our Western canon, the morals of these heroes have often been questionable. Few heroes personify this better than Hercules. Hercules was an ultra-male brawler, fighter and some-time murderer, a man incredibly high on steroids before steroids existed. Hercules is most famous for his twelve great exploits, but few people seem to remember
why he carried them out in the first place - it was something the gods forced him to do to atone for the fact that he had killed his wife and his two young sons. Imagine - he killed, he
murdered his family! And he killed several other more or less innocent people too, by the way. But we tend to remember him as one of the ultimate heroes, and few of us remember him as a killer at all. Did you see the animated Disney film about Hercules? In that one, Hercules was as sweet and cute as could be, and when he fell in love with the woman who would become his wife he was absolutely adorable. Well, if you see that film again, remember that according to the original myth, the innocent youth you see in this movie is the same man who would later murder the woman he seems to be so in love with, along with the two young boys she would bear him.
My point is that we tend to forgive the big strong men's transgressions, because we love the fact that these men are big and strong in the first place. We tend to forget that they used their strength to kill innocent people, because we love to imagine that these heroes would be on our side and wield their strength to protect us from our enemies.
In other words, Terry: yes, I think the public could, and would, forgive Superman for killing Billy Church, especially since Billy Church was certainly no innocent person. On the other hand, Superman is a more extreme hero than Hercules. Hercules was a demigod, a
heros - interestingly,
heros is the Greek word for demigod, so you can see where the English word
hero really comes from. But Hercules was at least half human and born on this Earth. Superman is an
alien, which, in my opinion, is something that might easily spook and scare people.
When I was a kid and got to know Superman through comic books, it was still the Silver Age of Superman, and the Man of Steel was as G-rated as any hero you could imagine. I know for a fact that when I was a kid, I
never wondered what would happen if Superman killed a man. I
knew that that couldn't happen. The idea that Superman would kill someone was so impossible, so irreconcilable with the workings of the universe, that I might have been willing to swear that Superman's powers really wouldn't work if he tried to use them on people in order to kill them. I can't help feeling that the people of Metropolis in LNC might have had such a feeling about Superman, too - yes, he was an alien, and yes, he had amazing abilities that he could use to kill dozens, hundreds, thousands of people if he decided that he wanted to - except it was beyond him to ever want to kill anyone. But it turned out that on one occasion he did want to. Can the public trust the inhumanly strong alien not to kill or hurt other people after he had ripped Billy Church's living, beating heart out of his chest?
I very much approve of Constance Hunter's and her assistant Blair's decision to detail and describe all the good things Superman has done for Metropolis and all of the Earth, to show what a hero Superman really has been over the years. I think that is something that is important to bear in mind, and it is very, very relevant to the case. Superman really, really, really is a hero, and the people of the Earth have benefitted enormously from his presence here. That is why I was offended and shocked by the DA's decision to ask for a life sentence for Superman, a sentence that would lock him up in prison for the rest of his natural life. How much would humanity suffer if Superman was incapacitated like that?
On the other hand, I can't understand how Superman can ever think that he would be found
completely innocent, not just freed on a technicality. How can he believe that it could possibly be legally acceptable to rip a person's heart out of his chest? Yes, there are so many mitigating circumstances, particularly the fact that Billy Church was a most horrible threat to the entire United States when Superman killed him by ripping his heart out. Also, Superman's horrifying killing of Billy Church scared Church's many accomplices into confessing, and that way Intergang was destroyed. Even so, Superman didn't kill Billy Church in self defence, and he wasn't killing him in order to stop him from physically carrying out a murder of somebody else. Superman
could have seized Billy Church and flown him to the nearest police station or to the FBI headquarters or whatever and allowed the legal system to deal with Church. Or if Superman didn't trust the law to stop this suave arch criminal, he could have scared the pants off Billy Church without killing him.
I can't understand how Superman's killing of Billy Church could possibly render him a life sentence, but I can't understand how he could possibly be found not guilty of any crime at all and be exonerated completely in the eyes of the public.
Your story is so, so interesting and thoughtprovoking, and the interplay between Lois and Clark is so beautifully written and so convincingly painful.
Ann