Alright, let’s have a rational conversation about the audience perception of Superman. Seriously, we can do this.

Recently, I was swiping through Superman videos on TikTok because the positive hype is real, and it’s all over my algorithm. When I came across actress Nicque Marina’s parody of the “WHERE’S THE DOG” scene from Superman, It’s pretty funny, but it was one of her other videos about Superman that struck a chord with me.

If you’re not on TikTok and don’t know who Nicque Marina, she’s an actor and comedian in New York with 1.8 million TikTok followers, but she admittedly posts heavily about Marvel movies. Her bio features “Avenger of TikTok.” In the past, she’s poked fun at DC movies at times for not being on Marvel’s level, an all too common sentiment we’ve seen and dealt with since 2013.

She admits this fully in her video “This is the Superman movie I’ve been waiting for,” where she gives her honest thoughts about the new film and its departure from the previous tone of DC movies. I still don’t agree with people that call Zack Snyder’s films “edgelord” and “dark” and while I fully accept and admit that some extremely toxic trolls, a few of whom are bigoted and not worth anyone’s time gravitate to those films, the vast majority of Snyder’s fans who support his non-DC work are not like that at all. It’s a tiny group of bad apples that spoil things for the rest of us.

What struck me, though, was what she said about Superman and DC films’ audience perception. Her written description of the new movie says, “It felt like a warm hug,” and she got honest in her video about her thoughts on Superman and DC movies:

“I feel like it’s a movie that reminds us why we fell in love with superheroes to begin with, and for me, why it would be a career dream to play one, cause like for the past few years, my critique of DC has been, where’s the human connection? The slew of movies that were coming out, they were dark and edgy and these heroes felt more like symbols than people to me. They felt like they were positioned as gods, like so unreachable, such a distance between them and the audience.

Listen, don’t get me wrong, there’s a little conflict within me saying this because I don’t wanna live in a reality where we never had The Dark Knight Trilogy. Those types of movies with those moods and feels, like they have their place. They deserve to exist. I’m not just speaking as grown-up Nicque, I’m speaking as like 9, 10-year-old Nicque who grew up homeless, and one of the things I enjoyed doing for free was going to Barnes and Noble to the comic section, and I would read Superman, Batman, and Spider-Man. Those were my main three. I never got to read anything in order, like ever. We couldn’t afford it. All I had was whatever Barnes & Noble had. Superheroes made me feel safe as a girl who was bouncing from, you know, one traumatic environment to one traumatic environment to another traumatic environment.

Superman was definitely one of those heroes that made me feel safe, but over the past few years, he got scary. Like, it was edgelord Superman, which again there’s room for this kind of media, dark side of ultimate power and all that, but I think over time this edgelord persona, like it appealed to the wrong people, and then Superman became this symbol that was co-opted by tiny tiny little men that didn’t get hugged enough in their childhood and don’t get the attention they want from women, and they feel gassed up by the idea of absolute power, and in the spaces when we talk about movies on social media, it’s a symbol that has been co-opted by ain’t shit creators with bigoted takes and 16-year old incels as their audience. Some of them are also people that glaze Homelander, cause again, they never got the point of Superman. That’s why they’re out here looking like idiots, going, Oh, Superman went woke, they ruined it! No, you did.

Superman over time became a symbol that didn’t feel safe anymore, and maybe it’s because of the times that we’re living through right now that we don’t need edgelord material right now. Absolute power corrupts absolutely, yeah, we know, we’re living it right now. Like, what we need is hope. What we need is the red tighty whiteys back. What we need is a Clark Kent who also crashes out over Twitter comments. What we need is COLOR. What we need is for that symbol to return back to portraying a guy who is a protector, yet gentle and corny because, well it’s a superhero movie. It just feels like a guy that you’d wanna hang out with. You need a reminder that strength and privilege and power are things to be shared because you want to, because you have empathy, because if you have more of something than a lot of other people, give of yourself because it’s the right thing to do, not to people please, not for external validation, but because you’re a person too and you hate the idea of another person feeling pain. I think what we needed was for something to give us faith that it is possible for somebody to be powerful and talented and privileged, strong, and still keep their humanity. That’s the Superman we needed, and James Gunn gave it to us, thank God.”

Ok, there’s a lot to unpack here, but put aside whether or not you like or agree with her. Seriously, just table that for a bit and set aside your arguments against her calling Snyder’s films “edgelord” and “dark.” Listen to Marina's perspective here.

For starters, she’s not dismissing darker superhero movies. She’s a fan of The Dark Knight Trilogy and acknowledges the place where more adult superhero content belongs. She is not opposed to those movies at all and believes they should exist.

But when she talks about her own life and what Superman and superheroes meant to her as a child, the safety that they provided her as she went through a turbulent adolescent life, that’s where it gets real and that’s where you can understand why people feel the way they do about Snyder’s films versus Gunn’s Superman film. Are Superman and the Justice League portrayed as gods among humans in Snyder’s movies? Without question. We’ve even said as much when defending those films to others. Many times, we’ve discussed how Marvel movies portray humans in extraordinary positions, while DC movies depict gods on earth.

If you look at it from that angle, then you can see where an audience disconnect with Snyder’s movie can exist. Yes, they still made money, and yes, WB would have been smarter to let the DCEU play out as originally planned instead of making all the mistakes they made. However, from the perspective of an audience member looking for relatability, the DCEU was still a tough sell. Superman is deified in Snyder’s films at times, Batman was an aged Batgod in many ways, and even Wonder Woman showed us her origin as a product of the gods interacting with humanity for the first time in her solo film. To those of us who revere the Trinity as longtime fans, this wasn’t a problem; however, for anyone outside of that looking for a genuine human connection with their heroes, it was tougher to relate to them.

Whether we like it or not, one of the reasons the general audience connected with Marvel films as well as they did was because of the human connections they made with their heroes. Tony Stark fights his demons, Steve Rogers takes on bullies, Thor battles family strife and depression, and as the franchise moves forward, those personal themes only intensify to the point where the power of friendship defeats a Marvel movie villain, and it is emotionally gobsmacking. That’s all I’ll say in case you haven’t seen that movie yet.

James Gunn is well aware of this, having done it himself in an entire trilogy for the MCU, which featured characters dealing with loss, abuse, and abandonment, among other personal and relatable issues. So, of course, he’d want to tell the same emotionally weighted stories in the DCU, with the twist being that he’s enough of a student of the source material to know how to craft those stories within character lore as he so expertly did with Superman.

That human connection, that safety, that relatability, is what people like Nicque Marina are looking for in their superhero movies, especially at a time when the world we live in becomes increasingly more perilous and corrupt with each passing day. Perhaps the worst timing of the DCEU was that its actual birth, the release of Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice, coincided with a radical shift in American presidential leadership that same year, and ever since then, hope has become a more elusive commodity in society. The Covid-19 pandemic, just four years later, marked the beginning of unprecedented times, with worldwide conflict, socioeconomic upheaval, and massive moral ambiguity erupting among us, and it has only worsened as time has gone on.

That’s why they wanted a relatable Superman. That’s why they wanted relatable DC movies. That’s why they’re celebrating James Gunn’s arguably best film to date right now, because maybe more than ever, they needed it, to know that their heroes understand their pain, their suffering, and their daily tribulations, and that those heroes haven’t lost their goodness within all of that.

Plenty of fans will find that corny and disingenuous, just as they have with Marvel movies. Still, the rational ones understand exactly why Gunn went this route and why the DCU had to relate to the general audience first, especially in Superman’s case. WB kept him on the sidelines cinematically for twelve years concerning solo films, which is nothing short of malfeasance on their part, and that’s half of what has led to this visceral reaction against Snyder’s Superman. The last time they saw their hero on the big screen, he appeared larger than life, stoic, stately, and above the fray, because they never got a chance to see him otherwise.

Now they’re seeing a version of their hero that shares the same emotions, struggles, and personal issues they've, and says at one point, “I’ve got to get back to the fray” after healing from a lost battle. As much as we rational Snyder fans enjoyed the godlike portrayal of our favorite heroes, we can still fully understand where those who didn’t want it as much are coming from.